#Carpenters in West Palm Beach

[justforbooks]

Dickey Betts

Guitarist, singer and founding member of the Allman Brothers Band best known for writing their 1973 hit Ramblin’ Man

Dickey Betts, who has died aged 80, was a founder member of the Allman Brothers Band, one of the most influential US “southern rock” groups of the 1970s. The hard-living outfit blazed out of Jacksonville, Florida, in 1969 with a mix of rock, blues, country and jazz that defined the genre, also influencing artists such as Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top, the Black Crowes and Kid Rock. They scored several platinum and gold albums and were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Although the six-piece band was ostensibly led by the blond- haired Allman brothers, Duane and Gregg (guitar and keyboards/vocals respectively), as joint lead guitarist, singer and main songwriter Betts played a crucial role. A larger than life character with his cowboy hats, long moustache and gunslinger good looks, Betts wrote many of the band’s best loved songs, including Jessica, Blue Sky and the 1973 US No 2 smash Ramblin’ Man, inspired by life on the road.

The signature duelling of Betts’s and Duane Allman’s lead guitars rewrote the rule book of how twin guitarists play together - previously one had played lead and the other rhythm. The band’s huge fanbase included President Jimmy Carter, and in 2020 Betts even received the rare accolade of a mention in a Bob Dylan song, when Murder Most Foul contained the line “Play Oscar Peterson, play Stan Getz/Play Blue Sky, play Dickey Betts.”

He was also the inspiration for the rock star character played by Billy Crudup in the former rock journalist Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous (2000), the director having been drawn to Betts’s aura of “possible danger and playful recklessness behind his eyes”.

Betts was born in West Palm Beach, Florida, one of the three children of Harold, a carpenter, and his wife, Sarah (nee Brinson), who wrote poetry and played the cornet in a Salvation Army band. Although his father was also a keen fiddler, Dickey’s first instrument was the ukelele, which he started playing aged five, later graduating to the mandolin and the banjo.

He was at West Gate elementary school when he wrote his first song, Seven Years With Pamela, about his sister. He then attended various West Palm Beach schools until seventh grade, dropping out of high school when he was 16, by which time his pursuits included carpentry, hunting and listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the family radio.

Hearing Chuck Berry’s Maybellene in his mid-teens prompted another switch of instrument, as he “started realising that girls like guitars”. He dropped out of high school aged 16 to tour the US with a travelling circus in his first band, the Swinging Saints, but was playing in Second Coming with the bassist Berry Oakley when Duane Allman invited both men to join his new group.

The lineup was completed by the drummer Butch Trucks and – unusually in white-dominated 60s southern rock - a black second drummer, James Lee Johnson, who had previously played with Otis Redding and Percy Sledge.

Although sales of their first two albums were sluggish, Duane Allman’s appearance on Eric Clapton’s 1970 album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs – which included the classic hit Layla – boosted the heavy-touring Allman Brothers Band’s rising profile. Their 1971 live album At Fillmore East sold 1m copies.

After Duane Allman and Oakley were killed in motorcycle accidents in 1971 and 1972 respectively, Betts led a rejigged lineup. The 1973 album Brothers and Sisters – featuring Ramblin’ Man and the instrumental Jessica, later the theme to the television motoring show Top Gear – topped the US charts for five weeks, while 1975’s Win, Lose Or Draw went into the Top five. By then the band were succumbing to a familiar music industry cocktail of success, drugs, alcohol and feuding.

Betts and Gregg Allman both made solo albums, before Betts felt betrayed when the latter testified against the band’s road manager in a 1976 drugs case and refused to work with him again. Nevertheless, they regrouped in 1978, splitting again in 1982.

A second comeback in 1989 proved more enduring, although in 2000 Betts was fired over his drinking. That third spell in the band had been dogged by alcohol and drug abuse, lawsuits and arrests, and in 1996 he was charged with aggravated domestic assault after pointing a handgun at his fifth wife, Donna (nee Stearns), whom he had married in 1989. The charges were dropped after Betts agreed to enter rehab.

In his later years he returned with his own Dickey Betts Band and played in the band Great Southern with his son Duane. True to his ramblin’ man credentials, he remained on the road to the last, even after brain surgery following a 2018 fall at home, and he released live albums well into his 70s.

He is survived by Donna and his children, Kimberly, Christy, Jessica and Duane.

🔔 Forrest Richard Betts, musician, singer and songwriter, born 12 December 1943; died 18 April 2024

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

[twins2994]

Tigers Thump Twins 12-3.

Tigers 12 Twins 3 W-Mize (3-1) L-Varland (1-1)

The Minnesota Twins had their last off day of the spring yesterday. They returned to action today against the Tigers. Detroit was ready from the start as Zack McKinstry led-off with a single and Matt Vierling walked. Kerry Carpenter singled home a run to put the Tigers on the board before the Twins grabbed a bat. Detroit quickly loaded up the bases in the second and Ryan Kreidler lined a run-scoring single to left. Zack McKinstry followed with a sac fy to center and Matt Vierling lined an RBI single to left. This gave the Tigers a five-run lead after two frames. Detroit kept adding on in the fourth as Ryan Kreider was hit by a pitch and Zack McKinstry singled to right. Matt Vierling hit a sac fly tto center and Carson Kelly drilled a Louie Varland fastball out to left-center for a two-run homer. The Tigers had an eight-run lead in a blink of an eye. Detroit kept adding on when Matt Vierling took Steven Okert deep in the sixth. The Twins finally found some offense in the seventh when Ryan Jeffers drilled a Joey Wentz fastball out to left for a solo homer. The Tigers would answer in the ninth when Bligh Madris reached on catcher's interference and Anthony Bemboom walked. Josh Crouch blasted a Jorge Alcala fastball out to left for a three-run homer. The Tigers took a 12-1 lead, but the Twins would rally in the bottom of the ninth. Will Holland dumped a single to left and Mike Helman doubled him home. Later in the inning, Chris Williams doubled home a run and the Twins had some life. Miguel Diaz eventually got out of the ninth and the Tigers picked up the win in Fort Myers today.

-Final Thoughts- Louie Varland got knocked around today. He went four innings and allowed eight runs on nine hits with three walks. Jay Jackson retired all five men he faced, Steven Okert got four outs and allowed a run with a strikeout, and Jeff Brigham struck out the sixth in the eighth. Jorge Alcala gave up the homer to Josh Crouch then exited the game after catching a hot liner back to him. Miguel Rodriguez got out of the ninth. The Twins scattered seven hits and went 1-for-5 with runners in scoring position. They left five men on base. The Twins will head over to West Palm Beach tomorrow and play the Nationals. Cole Sands gets the start for the Twins.

-Chris Kreibich-

[carpenteractivist]

Custom Kitchen Cabinets In West Palm Beach

Ultracraft presents an unlimited choice of cabinet types, together with seventy five door styles of various materials and unlimited custom modifications at no charge. UltraCraft Cabinets are additionally backed with an astounding 100-year Warranty. Additionally, we provide custom kitchen cabinets west palm beach a fantastic choice of residential cabinets- from inventory cabinets (ready-to-assemble), to semi-custom lines, all the way up to a totally custom kitchen or tub.

You can go to our custom cabinet design showroom and choose the cupboards exactly the way they will look in your kitchen. Another kitchen fad that you just should try – particularly if you're kitchen cabinets west palm beach florida not a fan of neutral kitchen designs – is a two-tone kitchen! Instead of choosing just one dominant colour and bringing it out in your cabinetry, why not opt for two robust colors that demand attention?

During the evaluation course of your sales rep shall be assigned, your pricing will be established and your account might kitchen countertops west palm beach be activated. Join the AD PRO Directory, our record of trusted design professionals. Diane Keaton went full throttle with shade in this kitchen.

Depending on the features you’re in search of, the semi-custom options may be ready a bit sooner and could price a bit lower than bespoke cabinetry. The custom cabinetry West Palm Beach constructed at Maurice’s Furnishings contains gorgeous closets, vanities, kitchen cabinets, kitchen islands, and media facilities. Many of our purchasers recognize the ability to help design their custom-built cabinetry, whether to increase custom kitchen cabinets west palm beach fl functionality or to have certain options in a cherished focus of their house. A sure type of self-importance may be a client’s dream, or a kitchen island with a selected sort of storage or seating could additionally be desired. Maurice’s expert builders can achieve elaborate ideas in beautiful cabinetry. Reclaimed wood is the fabric used at Maurice’s Furnishings to create matchless cabinetry.

A cabinet maker can offer full flexibility so that you get the most out of your house. They’ll bring design know-how to the table and will take notice of details that should add as a lot as a great-looking and efficient use of house. They’ll also be acquainted with frequent sizing restraints, uncommon wood types and finishes, and complex design parts. To top it all kitchen cabinets west palm beach off, N-Hance cabinet refinishing in West Palm Beach is highly affordable. Our refinishing services price a fraction of what it would cost to recolor, reface, or restyle your kitchen cabinets, making us a budget-friendly alternative to traditional remodeling. Our skilled designers will work carefully with you to find out your design objectives and assist you to choose the look and structure of your new kitchen or toilet.

Zimmerman Kitchen Design presents free design, and free estimates. After a buy order is made, we offer top of the road installation to ensure all work is finished west palm beach kitchen cabinets to the highest normal. Cabinet Refinishing Cabinets play a big position in the way in which that your kitchen appears.

These traces, plus Knapp’s signature custom line of cabinetry, Liliana Christine, may be seen at the state-of-the-art Knapp Showroom on South Olive Avenue in the coronary heart of West Palm Beach. As a premier high-end kitchen and bath supplier, Knapp companies Palm Beach Island, Jupiter and different pockets and communities throughout Palm Beach County. For updating a kitchen that's functionally already terrific, or has "good bones!" Our whole kitchen cabinets west palm beach fl team of specialists- carpenters, tile, wooden flooring, gra.. With the quick turnaround time on our kitchen cabinets, it can save you money and get what you need sooner than ever earlier than. We manufacture all of those in South Florida so in phrases of shopping for your subsequent set from us-you’ll solely have 4 or eight weeks to attend.

[customcarpentryfl]

Carpenters West Palm Beach

Hire the Best Carpenters in West Palm Beach!

At Custom Carpentry Solutions, we are the experts when it comes to all things carpentry.

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[myhauntedsalem]

Riddle House

Riddle House is located in West Palm Beach, Florida. This house is an old historic Victorian, and was built in 1905. It seems as though this house is unique in the fact that it doesn’t like men. Any males that visit the house have had ghostly activity performed on them that often turns into a physical nature. Steve Carr is a local carpenter in the West Palm Beach area who was working on the house. One day, the lid from an iron pot lifted three feet in the air, flung across the room and hit Steve in the head. Following this, Steve will never go back in the house again.

Since the attack on Steve Carr, no male visitors are allowed to go into the attic of the house. The reason why there is such a high activity of paranormal occurrences here is because it is believed that a man hung himself at the location. The image of the man is often seen in the north or west attic windows to other people that can see. Witness Jack Rodriguez claimed that he saw the image of the head and torso of a man in a black suit with a noose tied around his neck, peering down to him.

This man in black is believed to be that of a former boarder who hung himself in the attic. Before the title Riddle House was given to the structure in 1920, it was called the Gate Keeper’s Cottage. This was because it functioned as a funeral parlor and management for the Woodlawn Cemetery that is across the street. It was built on land owned by Joseph Jefferson, whom was one of the most famous actors of his time. Karl Riddle then became the first city manager and superintendent of Public Works, then following this he adopted the house as his home.

Moving into the 1980s, Riddle House served as the female dormitory for Palm Beach Atlantic College. However, it was abandoned due to disrepair, and the city threatened to demolish it. To settle the matter, the house was donated to John Riddle, who was the nephew of Karl. It was then split up into three sections and moved to Yesteryear Village. The diary of Karl Riddle tells the story of the death of a man on the property, but gives no concrete details.

Unexplained incidents started to occur almost immediately after it was moved. All sorts of investigators including psychologists, parapsychologists, and paranormal investigators have been to the attic. Many experiences with these professionals ensued. These experiences include revealing of orbs, temperature increases, and spirit energy. The most astounding result of the research was communicating with the dead spirit that haunts the attic. The spirit allegedly said that he took the fall for a crime that he didn’t commit.

[dislocatedskeleton]

Fiona Apple’s Art of Radical Sensitivity

For years, the elusive singer-songwriter has been working, at home, on an album with a strikingly raw and percussive sound. But is she prepared to release it into the world?

by Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker

Fiona Apple was wrestling with her dog, Mercy, the way a person might thrash, happily, in rough waves. Apple tugged on a purple toy as Mercy, a pit-bull-boxer mix, gripped it in her jaws, spinning Apple in circles. Worn out, they flopped onto two daybeds in the living room, in front of a TV that was always on. The first day that I visited, last July, it was set to MSNBC, which was airing a story about Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book.

These days, the singer-songwriter, who is forty-two, rarely leaves her tranquil house, in Venice Beach, other than to take early-morning walks on the beach with Mercy. Five years ago, Apple stopped going to Largo, the Los Angeles venue where, since the late nineties, she’d regularly performed her thorny, emotionally revelatory songs. (Her song “Largo” still plays on the club’s Web site.) She’d cancelled her most recent tour, in 2012, when Janet, a pit bull she had adopted when she was twenty-two, was dying. Still, a lot can go on without leaving home. Apple’s new album, whose completion she’d been inching toward for years, was a tricky topic, and so, during the week that I visited, we cycled in and out of other subjects, among them her decision, a year earlier, to stop drinking; estrangements from old friends; and her memories of growing up, in Manhattan, as the youngest child in the “second family” of a married Broadway actor. Near the front door of Apple’s house stood a chalkboard on wheels, which was scrawled with the title of the upcoming album: “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.”

One afternoon, Apple’s older sister, Amber, arrived to record vocal harmonies. In the living room, there was an upright piano, its top piled with keepsakes, including a stuffed toucan knitted by Apple’s mother and a photograph of Martha Graham doing a backbend. Apple’s friend Zelda Hallman, who had not long ago become her housemate, was in the sunny yellow kitchen, cooking tilapia for Mercy and for Hallman’s Bernese mountain dog, Maddie. In the back yard, there was a guesthouse, where Apple’s half brother, Bran Maggart, a carpenter, lived. (For years, he’d worked as a driver for Apple, who never got a license, and helped manage her tours.) Apple’s father, Brandon Maggart, also lives in Venice Beach; her mother, Diane McAfee, a former dancer and actress, remains in New York, in the Morningside Heights apartment building where Apple grew up.

Amber, a cabaret singer who records under the name Maude Maggart, had brought along her thirteen-month-old baby, Winifred, who scooched across the floor, playing under the piano. Apple was there when Winifred was born, and, as we talked about the bizarreness of childbirth, Apple told me a joke about a lady who got pregnant with twins. Whenever people asked the lady if she wanted boys or girls, she said, “I don’t care, I just want my children to be polite!” Nine months passed, but she didn’t go into labor. A year went by—still nothing. “Eight, nine, twenty years!” Apple said, her eyebrows doing a jig. “Twenty-five years—and finally they’re, like, ‘We have to figure out what’s going on in there.’ ” When doctors peeked inside, they found “two middle-aged men going, ‘After youuuu!’ ‘No, after youuuu! ’ ”

Amber was there to record one line: a bit of harmony on “Newspaper,” one of thirteen new songs on the album. Apple, who wore a light-blue oxford shirt and loose beige pants, her hair in a low bun, stood by the piano, coaching Amber, who sat down in a wicker rocking chair, pulling Winifred onto her lap. “It’s a shame, because you and I didn’t get a witness!” Apple crooned, placing the notes in the air with her palm. Then the sisters sang, in harmony, “We’re the only ones who know!” The “we’re” came out as a jaunty warble, adding ironic subtext to the song, which was about two women connected by their histories with an abusive man. Apple, with her singular smoky contralto, modelled the complex emotions of the line for Amber, warming her up to record.

“Does that work?” Apple asked Winifred, who gazed up from her mother’s lap. Abruptly, Apple bent her knees, poked her elbows back like wings, and swung her hips, peekabooing toward Winifred. The baby laughed. It was simultaneously a rehearsal and a playdate.

“Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is a reference to a scene in “The Fall,” the British police procedural starring Gillian Anderson as a sex-crimes investigator; Anderson’s character calls out the phrase after finding a locked door to a room where a girl has been tortured. Like all of Apple’s projects, this one was taking a long while to emerge, arriving through a slow-drip process of creative self-interrogation that has produced, over a quarter century, a narrow but deep songbook. Her albums are both profoundly personal—tracing her heartaches, her showdowns with her own fragility, and her fierce, phoenix-like recoveries—and musically audacious, growing wilder and stranger with each round. As her 2005 song “Extraordinary Machine” suggests, whereas other artists might move fast, grasping for fresh influences and achieving superficial novelty, Apple prides herself on a stickier originality, one that springs from an internal tick-tock: “I still only travel by foot, and by foot it’s a slow climb / But I’m good at being uncomfortable, so I can’t stop changing all the time.”

The new album, she said, was close to being finished, but, as with the twins from the joke, the due date kept getting pushed back. She was at once excited about these songs—composed and recorded at home, with all production decisions under her control—and apprehensive about some of their subject matter, as well as their raw sound (drums, chants, bells). She was also wary of facing public scrutiny again. Fame has long been a jarring experience for Apple, who has dealt since childhood with obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and anxiety.

After a while, she and Amber went into a small room—Apple’s former bedroom, where, for years, she had slept on a futon with Janet. After the dog died, she’d found herself unable to fall asleep there, and had turned the room into a recording studio, although it looked nothing like one: it was cluttered, with one small window and no soundproofing. There was a beat-up wooden desk and a computer on which Apple recorded tracks, using GarageBand. There was a mike stand and a Day of the Dead painting of a smiling female skeleton holding a skeleton dog. Every surface, from the shelves to the floor, was covered in a mulch of battered percussion instruments: bells, wooden blocks, drums, metal squares.

The sisters recorded the lyric over and over, with Apple at the computer and Amber standing, Winifred on her hip. During one take, Amber pulled the neck of her turquoise leotard down and began nursing her daughter. Apple looked up from GarageBand, caught her sister’s eye, and smiled. “It’s happening—it’s happening,” she said.

When you tell people that you are planning to meet with Fiona Apple, they almost inevitably ask if she’s O.K. What “O.K.” means isn’t necessarily obvious, however. Maybe it means healthy, or happy. Maybe it means creating the volcanic and tender songs that she’s been writing since she was a child—or maybe it doesn’t, if making music isn’t what makes her happy. Maybe it means being unhappy, but in a way that is still fulfilling, still meaningful. That’s the conundrum when someone’s artistry is tied so fully to her vulnerability, and to the act of dwelling in and stirring up her most painful emotions, as a sort of destabilizing muse.

In the nineties, Apple’s emergence felt near-mythical. Fiona Apple McAfee-Maggart, the musically precocious, emotionally fragile descendant of a line of entertainers, was a classically trained pianist who began composing at seven. One night, at the age of sixteen, she was in her apartment, staring down at Riverside Park, when she thought she heard a voice telling her to record songs drawn from her notebooks, which were full of heartbreak and sexual trauma. She flew to L.A., where her father was living, and with his help recorded three songs; they made seventy-eight demo tapes, and he told her to prepare to hustle. Yet the first tape she shared was enough: a friend passed a copy to the music publicist she babysat for, who gave it to Andrew Slater, a prominent record producer and manager. Slater, then thirty-seven, hired a band, booked a studio in L.A., and produced her début album, “Tidal.” It featured such sophisticated ballads as “Shadowboxer,” as well as the hit “Criminal,” which irresistibly combined a hip-hop beat, rattling piano, and sinuous flute; she’d written it in forty-five minutes, during a lunch break at the studio. The album sold 2.7 million copies.

Slater also oversaw a marketing campaign that presented his new artist as a sulky siren, transforming her into a global star and a media target. Diane McAfee remembers that time as a “whirlwind,” recalling the day when her daughter received an advance for “Tidal”—a check for a hundred thousand dollars. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, this is unbelievable!’ ” McAfee told me. They were in their dining room, and Apple was “backing away, not excited.” Because Apple was not yet eighteen, her mother had to co-sign her record contract.

The musician Aimee Mann and her partner, the musician Michael Penn, who was also signed with Slater at the time, remember seeing Apple perform at the Troubadour, in West Hollywood, at a private showcase for “Tidal,” in 1996. Mann glimpsed in the teen-ager the kind of brazen, complex female musicianship that she’d been longing for—a tonic in an era dominated by indie-male swagger. Onstage, Apple was funny and chatty, calling the audience “grownups.” After the show, she did cartwheels in the alley outside. Mann recalled Apple introducing the song “Carrion” with a story about how sometimes there’s a person you go back to, again and again, who never gives you what you need, “and the lesson is you don’t need them.” As Apple’s career accelerated, Mann read a Rolling Stone profile in which Apple spoke about having been raped, at twelve, by a stranger, who attacked her in a stairwell as her dog barked inside her family’s apartment. Mann said that it was unheard of, and inspiring, for a female artist to speak so frankly about sexual violence, without shame or apology. But Apple’s candor made her worry. Mann had experienced her own share of trauma; she’d also collapsed from exhaustion while on tour. “I was afraid of what would happen to her on the road,” she said. “It’s an unnatural way to live.”

In fact, the turn of the millennium became an electric, unstable period for Apple, who was adored by her fans but also mocked, and leered at, by the male-dominated rock press, who often treated her as a tabloid curiosity—a bruised prodigy to be both ogled and pitied. Much of the press’s response was connected to the 1997 video for “Criminal,” whose director, Mark Romanek, has described it as a “tribute” to Nan Goldin’s photographs of her junkie demimonde—although the stronger link is to Larry Clark’s 1995 movie, “Kids,” and to the quickly banned Calvin Klein ads depicting teens being coerced into making porn. When Apple’s oldest friend, Manuela Paz, saw “Criminal,” she was unnerved, not just by the sight of her friend in a lace teddy, gyrating among passed-out models, but also by a sense that the video, for all its male-gaze titillation, had uncannily absorbed the darker aspects of her and Apple’s own milieu—one of teens running around upper Manhattan with little oversight. “How did they know?” Paz asked herself.

Apple’s unscripted acceptance speech at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, in which she announced, “This world is bullshit,” further stoked media hostility. The speech, which included her earnestly quoting Maya Angelou and encouraging fans not to model themselves on “what you think that we think is cool,” seems, in retrospect, most shocking for how on target it is (something true of so many “crazy lady” scandals of that period, like Sinéad O’Connor on “Saturday Night Live,” protesting sexual abuse in the Catholic Church). But, by 2000, when Apple had an onstage meltdown at the Manhattan venue Roseland, instability had become her “brand.” She was haunted by her early interviews, like one in Spin, illustrated with lascivious photographs by Terry Richardson, that quoted her saying, “I’m going to die young. I’m going to cut another album, and I’m going to do good things, help people, and then I’m going to die.” Apple’s love life was heavily covered, too: she dated the magician David Blaine (who was then a member of Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Pussy Posse”) and the film director Paul Thomas Anderson, with whom she lived for several years. While Anderson and Apple were together, he released “Magnolia” and she released “When the Pawn . . . ,” her flinty second album, whose full, eighty-nine-word title—a pugilistic verse written in response to the Spin profile—attracted its own stream of jokes.

During this period, Mark (Flanny) Flanagan, the owner of Largo, a brainy enclave of musicians and comedians within show-biz L.A., became Apple’s friend and patron. (In an e-mail to me, he called her “our little champ.”) One day, Apple visited his office, wondering what would happen if she cut off her fingertip—then would her management let her stop touring? Flanagan, disturbed, told her that she could get a note from a shrink instead, and urged her to refuse to do anything she didn’t want to do.

As the decades passed, Apple’s reputation as a “difficult woman” receded. After she left Anderson, in 2002, she holed up in Venice Beach, emerging every few years with a new album: first, “Extraordinary Machine” (2005), a glorious glockenspiel of self-assertion and payback; then the wise, insightful “The Idler Wheel . . .” (2012). She was increasingly recognized as a singer-songwriter on the level of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. The music of other nineties icons grew dated, or panicky in its bid for relevance, whereas Apple’s albums felt unique and lasting. The skittering ricochets of her melodies matched the shrewd wit of her lyrics, which could swerve from damning to generous in a syllable, settling scores but also capturing the perversity of a brain aflame with sensitivity: “How can I ask anyone to love me / When all I do is beg to be left alone?”

Today, Apple still bridles at old coverage of her. Yet she remains almost helplessly transparent about her struggles—she’s a blurter who knows that it’s a mistake to treat journalists as shrinks, but does so anyway. She’s conscious of the multiple ironies in her image. “Everyone has always worried that people are taking advantage of me,” she said. “Even the people who take advantage of me worry that people are taking advantage of me.”

Lurking on Tumblr (where messages from her are sometimes posted on the fan page Fiona Apple Rocks), she can see how much the culture has transformed, becoming one shared virtual notebook. Female singers like Lady Gaga and Kesha now talk openly about having been raped—and, in the wake of #MeToo, it’s more widely understood that sexual violence is as common as rain. Mental illness is less of a taboo, too. In recent years, a swell of teen-age musicians, such as Lorde and Billie Eilish, have produced bravura albums in Apple’s tradition, while young female activists, including Greta Thunberg and Emma González, keep announcing, to an audience more prepared to listen, that this world is bullshit.

Apple knows the cliché about early fame—that it freezes you at the age you achieved it. Because she’d never had to toil in anonymity, and had learned her craft and made her mistakes in public, she’d been perceived, as she put it to me ruefully, as “the patron saint of mental illness, instead of as someone who creates things.” If she wanted to keep bringing new songs into the world, she needed to have thicker skin. But that had never been her gift.

As we talked in the studio, Apple’s band member Amy Aileen Wood arrived, with new mixes. Wood, an indie-rock drummer, was one of three musicians Apple had enlisted to help create the new album; the others were the bassist Sebastian Steinberg, of the nineties group Soul Coughing, and Davíd Garza, a Latin-rock singer-songwriter and guitarist. Wood and Apple told me that their first encounter, at a recording studio two decades ago, was awkward. Apple remembered feeling intimidated by Wood and by her girlfriend, who seemed “tall and cool.” When Wood described something as “rad,” Apple shot back, “Did you really just say rad?” Wood hid in the bathroom and cried.

Now Wood and her father, John Would, a sound engineer, were collaborating with Apple on building mixes from hundreds of homemade takes. (Apple also worked with Dave Way and, later in the process, Tchad Blake.) The earliest glimmers of “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” began in 2012, when Apple experimented with a concept album about her Venice Beach home, jokingly called “House Music.” She also considered basing an album on the Pando—a giant grove of aspens, in Utah, that is considered a single living being—creating songs that shared common roots.

Finally, around 2015, she pulled together the band. She and Steinberg, a joyfully eccentric bassist with a long gray beard, had played live together for years, and had shared intense, sometimes painful experiences, including an arrest, while on tour in 2012, for hashish possession. (Apple spent the night in a Texas jail cell, where she defiantly gave what Steinberg described as “her best vocal performance ever”; she also ended up on TMZ.) Steinberg, who worked with Apple on “Idler Wheel,” said that her new album was inspired by her fascination with the potential of using a band “as an organism instead of an assemblage—something natural.”

The first new song that Apple recorded was “On I Go,” which was inspired by a Vipassana chant; she sang it into her phone while hiking in Topanga Canyon. Back at home, she dug out old lyrics and wrote new ones, and hosted anarchic bonding sessions with her bandmates. “She wanted to start from the ground,” Garza said. “For her, the ground is rhythm.” The band gathered percussive objects: containers wrapped with rubber bands, empty oilcans filled with dirt, rattling seedpods that Apple had baked in her oven. Apple even tapped on her dog Janet’s bones, which she kept in a pretty beige box in the living room. Apple and the other musicians would march around her house and chant. “Sebastian has a low, sonorous voice,” Garza said, of these early meetings. “Amy’s super-shy. I’m like Slim Whitman—we joke my voice is higher than Fiona’s. She has that husky beautiful timbre, and she would just . . . speak her truth. It felt more like a sculpture being built than an album being made.”

Steinberg told me, “We played the way kids play or the way birds sing.” Wood recalled, “We would have cocktails and jam,” adding that it took some time for her to get used to these epic “meditations,” which could veer into emotional chaos. Steinberg recalls “stomping on the walls, on the floor—playing her house.” Once, when Apple was upset about a recent breakup, with the writer Jonathan Ames, she got into a drunken argument with the band members; Wood took her drums to a gig, which Apple misunderstood as a slight, and Apple went off and wrote a bitterly rollicking song about rejection, “The Drumset Is Gone.”

There were more stops and starts. A three-week group visit to the Sonic Ranch recording studio, in rural Texas—where some band members got stoned in pecan fields, Mercy accidentally ate snake poison, and Apple watched the movie “Whiplash” on mushrooms—was largely a wash, despite such cool experiments as recording inside an abandoned water tower. But Garza praised Apple as “someone who really trusts the unknown, trusting the river,” adding, “She’s the queen of it.”

Once Apple returned to Venice Beach, she finally began making headway, rerecording and rewriting songs in uneven intervals, often alone, in her former bedroom. At first, she recorded long, uncut takes of herself hitting instruments against random things; she built these files, which had names like “metal shaker,” “couch tymp,” and “bean drums,” into a “percussion orchestra,” which she used to make songs. She yowled the vocals over and over, stretching her voice into fresh shapes; like a Dogme 95 filmmaker, she rejected any digital smoothing. “She’s not afraid to let her voice be in the room and of the room,” Garza said. “Modern recording erases that.”

The resulting songs are so percussion-heavy that they’re almost martial. Passages loop and repeat, and there are out-of-the-blue tempo changes. Steinberg described the new numbers as closer to “Hot Knife,” an “Idler Wheel” track that pairs Andrews Sisters-style harmonies with stark timpani beats, than to her early songs, which were intricately orchestrated. “It’s very raw and unslick,” he said, of the new work, because her “agenda has gotten wilder and a lot less concerned with what the outside world thinks—she’s not seventeen, she’s forty, and she’s got no reason not to do exactly what she wants.”

Apple had been writing songs in the same notebooks for years, scribbling new lyrics alongside older ones. At one point, as we sat on the floor near the piano, she grabbed a stack of them, hunting for some lines she’d written when she was fifteen: “Evil is a relay sport / When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch.” “My handwriting is so different,” she marvelled, flipping pages. She found a diary entry from 1997: “I’m insecure about the guys in my band. I want to spend more time with them! But it seems impossible to ever go out and have fun.” Apple laughed out loud, amazed. “I can’t even recognize this person,” she said. “ ‘I want to go out and have fun!’ ”

“Here’s the bridge to ‘Fast as You Can,’ ” she said, referring to a song from “When the Pawn . . . .” Then she announced, “Oh, here it is—‘Evil is a relay sport.’ ” She continued reading: “It breathes in the past and then—” She shot me a knowing glance. “Lots of my writing from then is just, like, I don’t know how to say it: a young person trying to be a writer.” Written in the margin was the word “Help.”

Whenever I asked Apple how she created melodies, she apologized for lacking the language to describe her process (often with an anxious detour about not being as good a drummer as Wood). She said that her focus on rhythm had some connections to the O.C.D. rituals she’d developed as a child, like crunching leaves and counting breaths, or roller-skating around her dining-room table eighty-eight times—the number of keys on a piano—while singing Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”

But Apple brightened whenever she talked about writing lyrics, speaking confidently about assonance and serendipity, about the joy of having the words “glide down the back of my throat”—as she put it, stroking her neck—when she got them exactly right. She collects words on index cards: “Angel,” “Excel,” “Intel,” “Gel.” She writes the alphabet above her drafts, searching, with puzzle-solver focus, for puns, rhymes, and accidental insights.

The new songs were full of spiky, layered wordplay. In “Rack of His,” Apple sings, like a sideshow barker, “Check out that rack of his! / Look at that row of guitar necks / Lined up like eager fillies / Outstretched like legs of Rockettes.” In the darkly funny “Kick Me Under the Table,” she tells a man at a fancy party, “I would beg to disagree / But begging disagrees with me.” As frank as her lyrics can be, they are not easily decoded as pure biography. She said, of “Rack of His,” “I started writing this song years ago about one relationship, and then, when I finished it, it was about a different relationship.”

When I described the clever “Ladies”—the music of which she co-wrote with Steinberg—as having a vaudeville vibe, Apple flinched. She found the notion corny. “It’s just, like, something I’ve got in my blood that I’m gonna need to get rid of,” she said. Other songs felt close to hip-hop, with her voice used more for force and flow than for melody, and as a vehicle for braggadocio and insults. There was a pungency in Apple’s torch-and-honey voice emitting growls, shrieks, and hoots.

Some of the new material was strikingly angry. The cathartic “For Her” builds to Apple hollering, “Good mornin’! Good mornin’ / You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in.” The song had grown out of a recording session the band held shortly after the nomination hearings of the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; like many women, Apple felt scalded with rage about survivors of sexual violence being disbelieved. The title track came to her later; a meditation on feeling ostracized, it jumps between lucidity and fury. Drumsticks clatter sparely over gentle Mellotron notes as Apple muses, “I’ve been thinking about when I was trying to be your friend / I thought it was, then— / But it wasn’t, it wasn’t genuine.” Then, as she sings, “Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long,” her voice doubles, harmonies turning into a hubbub, and there’s a sudden “meow” sound. In the final moments, dogs bark as Apple mutters, “Whatever happens, whatever happens.”

Partway through, she sings, “I thought that being blacklisted would be grist for the mill.” She improvised the line while recording; she knew that it was good, because it was embarrassing. “It sounds bitter,” she said. The song isn’t entirely despairing, though. The next line makes an impassioned allusion to a song by Kate Bush, one of Apple’s earliest musical heroines: “I need to run up that hill / I will, I will, I will.”

One day during my July visit, Ames, Apple’s ex-boyfriend, stopped by, on his way to the beach. “Mercy, you are so powerful!” he said, as the dog jumped on him. “I’m waiting for her to get calmer, so I can give her a nice hug.” Apple had described Ames to me as her kindest ex, and there was an easy warmth between them. They took turns recalling their love affair, which began in 2006, when Apple attended a performance by Ames at the Moth, the storytelling event, in New York.

For years, Ames had written candid, funny columns in the New York Press about sex and his psychological fragilities, a history that appealed to Apple. They were together for four years, then broke up, in 2010; five years later, they reunited, but the relationship soon ended again, partly because of Ames’s concerns about Apple’s drinking. Ames recalled to Apple that, as the relationship soured, “you would yell at me and call me stupid.” He added that he didn’t have much of a temper, which became its own kind of problem.

“You would annoy me,” Apple said, with a smile.

“I was annoying!” he said, laughing.

They were being so loving with each other—even about the bad times, like when Ames would find Apple passed out and worry that she’d stopped breathing—that it seemed almost mysterious that they had broken up. Then, step by step, the conversation hit the skids. The turn came when Ames started offering Apple advice on knee pain that was keeping her from walking Mercy—a result, she believed, of obsessive hiking. He told her to read “Healing Back Pain,” by John Sarno. The pain, he said, was repressed anger.

At first, Apple was open to this idea—or, at least, she was polite about it. But, when Ames kept looping back to the notion, Apple went ominously quiet. Her eyes turned red, rimmed with tears that didn’t spill. She curled up, pulling sofa cushions to her chest, her back arched, glaring.

It was like watching their relationship and breakup reënacted in an hour. When Ames began describing “A Hundred Years of Solitude” in order to make the point that Apple had a “Márquezian sense of time,” she shot back, “Are you saying that time is like thirty-seven years tied to a tree with me?” Ames used to call her the Negative Juicer, Apple said, her voice sardonic: “I just extract the negative stuff.” She spun this into a black aria of self-loathing, arguing, like a prosecutor, for the most vicious interpretation of herself: “I put it in a thing and I bring out all the bad stuff. And I serve it up to everyone so that they’ll give me attention. And it poisons everyone, so they only listen to it when they’re in fucked-up places—and it’s a good sign when they stop listening to me, because that means that they’re not hurting themselves on purpose.”

Ames pushed back, alarmed. If he’d ever called her the Negative Juicer, he said, he didn’t mean it as an attack on her art—just that she could take a nice experience and find the bad in it. Her music had pain but also so much joy and redemption, he said. But Ames couldn’t help himself: he kept bringing up Sarno.

Somehow, the conversation had become a debate about the confessional nature of their work. Was it a good thing for Apple to keep digging up past suffering? Was this labor both therapeutic and generative—a mission that could help others—or was it making her sick? Ames said that he didn’t feel comfortable exposing himself that way anymore, especially in the social-media age. “It’s a different world!” he said. “You take one line out of context . . .” For more than a decade, Ames has been working in less personal modes; his noir novel “You Were Never Really Here” was recently made into a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix.

Apple said, “I haven’t wanted to drink straight vodka so much in a while.”

“I’m triggering you,” Ames responded.

“You are,” she said, smiling wearily. “It’s not your fault, Jonathan. I love you.”

When Ames stepped out briefly, Apple said that what had frustrated her was the idea that “there was a way out”—that her pain was her choice.

Zelda Hallman, Apple’s housemate, had been sitting with us, listening. She pointed out that self-help books like “The Secret” had the same problem: they made your suffering all your fault.

“Fuck ‘The Secret’!” Apple shouted.

When Ames came back and mentioned Sarno again, Apple interrupted him: “That’s a great way to be in regular life. But if you’re making a song? And you’re making music and there is going to be passion in it and there is going to be anger in it?” She went on, “You have to go to the myelin sheath—you know, to the central nervous system—for it to be good, I feel like. And if that’s not true? Then fuck me, I wasted my fucking life and ruined everything.”

She recalled a day when she had been working on a piano riff that was downbeat but also “fluttering, soaring,” and that reminded her of Ames. She said that he had asked her to name the resulting song “Jonathan.” (The lovely, eerie track, which is on “Idler Wheel,” includes the line “You like to captain a capsized ship.”) “No, no,” he said. “I didn’t!” As Ames began telling his side of the story, Apple said, icily, “I think that water is going to get real cold real soon. You should probably go to the beach.”

He went off to put on his bathing suit. By the time he left, things had eased up. She hugged him goodbye, looking tiny. After Ames was gone, she said that she hated the way she sometimes acted with him—contemptuous, as if she’d absorbed the style of her most unkind ex-boyfriend. But she also said that she wouldn’t have called Ames himself stupid, explaining, “He doesn’t talk the way that I talk, and like my brother talks, and get it all out, like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? That’s stupid!’ I’m not necessarily angry when I’m doing that.”

The next day, she sent me a video. “We’ve been to the beach!” she announced, panting, as Mercy ran around in the background. “Because it’s her birthday!” Apple had taken Ames’s advice, she said, and gone for a walk, behaving as if she weren’t injured. So far, her knees didn’t hurt. “Soooo . . . he was right all along,” Apple said, her eyes wide. Then she glanced at the camera slyly, the corner of her mouth pulled up. “Orrrrr . . . I just rested my knees for a while.”

Apple goes to bed early; when I visited, we’d end things before she drifted into a smeary, dreamy state, often after smoking pot, which Hallman would pass to her in the living room. Late one afternoon, Apple talked about the album’s themes. She said, of the title, “Really, what it’s about is not being afraid to speak.” Another major theme was women—specifically, her struggle to “not fall in love with the women who hate me.” She described these songs as acts of confrontation with her “shadow self,” exploring questions like “Why in the past have you been so socially blind to think that you could be friends with your ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend by getting her a gift?” At the time, she thought that she was being generous; now she recognized the impulse as less benign, a way of “campaigning not to be ousted.”

The record dives into such conflicting impulses: she empathizes with other women, rages at them, grows infatuated with them, and mourns their rejection, sometimes all at once. She roars, in “Newspaper,” “I wonder what lies he’s telling you about me / To make sure that we’ll never be friends!” In “Ladies,” she describes, first with amusement, then in a dark chant, “the revolving door which keeps turning out more and more good women like you / Yet another woman to whom I won’t get through.” In “Shameka,” she celebrates a key moment in middle school, when a tough girl told the bullied Apple, “You have potential.”

As a child, Apple longed to be “a pea in a pod” with other girls, as she was, for a while, with Manuela Paz, for whom she wrote her first song. But as an adult she has hung out mainly with men. She does have some deep female friendships, including with Nalini Narayan, an emergency-room nurse, whom she met, in 1997, in the audience at one of her concerts, and who described Apple as “an empath on a completely different level than anyone I’ve met.” More recently, Apple has become close with a few younger artists. The twenty-one-year-old singer Mikaela Straus, a.k.a. King Princess, who recently recorded a cover of Apple’s song “I Know,” called her “family” and “a fucking legend.” Straus said, “You never hear a Fiona Apple line and say, ‘That’s cheesy.’ ” The twenty-seven-year-old actress Cara Delevingne is another friend; she visited Apple’s home to record harmonies on the song “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.” (She’s the one making that kooky “meow.”)

But Apple has more complicated dynamics with a wider circle of friends, exes, and collaborators. Starting with her first heartbreak, at sixteen, she has repeatedly found herself in love triangles, sometimes as the secret partner, sometimes as the deceived one. As we talked, she stumbled on a precursor for this pattern: “Maybe it’s because my mother was the other woman?”

Apple’s parents met in 1969, during rehearsals for “Applause,” a Broadway musical based on “All About Eve.” Her mother, McAfee, was cast as Eve; her father, Maggart, as the married playwright. Maggart was then an actor on the stage and on TV (he’d been on “Sesame Street”); the sexy, free-spirited McAfee was a former June Taylor dancer. Throughout Apple’s childhood, she and her sister regularly visited the home, in Connecticut, where Maggart’s five other children and their mother, LuJan, lived. LuJan was welcoming, encouraging all the children to grow close—but Apple’s mother was not invited. Apple, with an uneasy laugh, told me that, for all the time she’d spent interrogating her past, this link had never crossed her mind.

Her fascination with women seemed tied, too, to the female bonding of the #MeToo era—to the desire to compare old stories, through new eyes. In July, she sent me a video clip of Jimi Hendrix that reminded her of a surreal aspect of the day she was raped: for a moment, when the stranger approached her, she mistook him for Hendrix. During the assault, she willed herself to think that the man was Hendrix. “It felt safer, and strangely it hasn’t ruined Jimi Hendrix for me,” she said. Years later, however, she found herself hanging out with a man who was a Hendrix fan. One night, they did mushrooms at Johnny Depp’s house, in the Hollywood Hills. Depp, who was editing a film, was sober that night; as Apple recalled, he “kind of led” her and her friend to a bedroom, then shut the door and left. “Nothing bad happened, but I felt kind of used and uncomfortable with my friend making out with me,” she said. “I used to just let things happen. I remember I wrote the bridge to ‘Fast as You Can’ in the car on the way home, and he was playing Jimi Hendrix, and my mind was swirling things together.”

That has always been Apple’s experience: the past overlapping with the present, just as it does in her notebooks. Sometimes it recurs through painful flashbacks, sometimes as echoes to be turned into art. The evening at Depp’s house wasn’t a #MeToo moment, she added. “Johnny Depp was a nice guy, and so was my friend. But I think that, at that time, I was struggling with my sexuality, and trying to force it into what I thought it should be, and everything felt dirty. Going out with boys, getting high, getting scared, and going home feeling like a dirty wimp was my thing.”

Apple came of age in a culture that viewed young men as potential auteurs and young women as commodities to be used, then discarded. Although she had only positive memories of her youthful romance with David Blaine, she was disturbed to learn that he was listed in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book. In high school, Apple was friends with Mia Farrow’s daughter Daisy Previn, and during sleepovers at Farrow’s house she used to run into Woody Allen in the kitchen. “There are all these unwritten but signed N.D.A.s all over the place,” she said, about the entertainment industry. “Because you’ll have to deal with the repercussions if you talk.”

She met Paul Thomas Anderson in 1997, during a Rolling Stone cover shoot in which she floated in a pool, her hair fanning out like Ophelia’s. She was twenty; he was twenty-seven. After she climbed out of the water, her first words to him were “Do you smoke pot?” Anderson followed her to Hawaii. (The protagonist of his film “Punch-Drunk Love” makes the same impulsive journey.) “That’s where we solidified,” she told me. “I remember going to meet him at the bar at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, and he was laughing at me because I was marching around on what he called my ‘determined march to nowhere.’ ”

The singer and the director became an It Couple, their work rippling with mutual influences. She wrote a rap for “Magnolia”; he directed videos for her songs. But, as Apple remembers it, the romance was painful and chaotic. They snorted cocaine and gobbled Ecstasy. Apple drank, heavily. Mostly, she told me, he was coldly critical, contemptuous in a way that left her fearful and numb. Apple’s parents remember an awful night when the couple took them to dinner and were openly rude. (Apple backs this up: “We both attended that dinner as little fuckers.”) In the lobby, her mother asked Anderson why Apple was acting this way. He snapped, “Ask yourself—you made her.”

Anderson had a temper. After attending the 1998 Academy Awards, he threw a chair across a room. Apple remembers telling herself, “Fuck this, this is not a good relationship.” She took a cab to her dad’s house, but returned home the next day. In 2000, when she was getting treatment for O.C.D., her psychiatrist suggested that she do volunteer work with kids who had similar conditions. Apple was buoyant as Anderson drove her to an orientation at U.C.L.A.’s occupational-therapy ward, but he was fuming. He screeched up to the sidewalk, undid her seat belt, and shoved her out of his car; she fell to the ground, spilling her purse in front of some nurses she was going to be working with. At parties, he’d hiss harsh words in her ear, calling her a bad partner, while behaving sweetly on the surface; she’d tear up, which, she thinks, made her look unstable to strangers. (Anderson, through his agent, declined to comment.)

Anderson didn’t hit her, Apple said. He praised her as an artist. Today, he’s in a long-term relationship with the actress Maya Rudolph, with whom he has four children. He directed the video for “Hot Knife,” in 2011; Apple said that by then she felt more able to hold her own—and she said that he might have changed. Yet the relationship had warped her early years, she said, in ways she still reckoned with. She’d never spoken poorly of him, because it didn’t seem “classy”; she wavered on whether to do so now. But she wanted to put an end to many fans’ nostalgia about their time together. “It’s a secret that keeps us connected,” she told me.

Apple was also briefly involved with the comedian Louis C. K. After the Times published an exposé of his sexual misconduct, in 2017, she had faith that C.K. would be the first target of #MeToo to take responsibility for his actions, maybe by creating subversive comedy about shame and compulsion. When a hacky standup set of his was leaked online, she sent him a warm note, urging him to dig deeper.

One of the women C.K. harassed was Rebecca Corry, a standup comedian who founded an advocacy organization for pit bulls, Stand Up for Pits. Apple began working with the group, and, once she got to know Corry, she started to see C.K. in a harsher light. The comedy that she’d admired for its honesty now looked “like a smoke screen,” she said. In a text, she told me that, if C.K. wasn’t capable of more severe self-scrutiny, “he’s useless.” She added, “I SHAKE when I have to think and write about myself. It’s scary to go there but I go there. He is so WEAK.”

At times, Apple questioned her ability to be in any romantic relationship. Last fall, she went through another breakup, with a man she had dated for about a year. “This is my marriage right now,” she said of her platonic intimacy with Zelda Hallman. Apple told me that they’d met in a near-mystical way: while out on a walk, she’d blown a dandelion, wishing for a dog-friend for Mercy, then turned a corner and saw Hallman, walking Maddie. When Apple’s second romance with Ames was ending, she started inviting Hallman to stay over. “I’d have night terrors and stuff,” Apple recalled. “And one day I woke up and she was sitting in the chair—she’d sat there all night, watching me, making sure I was O.K. I was feeling safer with her here.” Apple fantasized about a kind of retirement: in a few years, she and Hallman might buy land back East “and move there with the doggies.”

Hallman, an affable, silver-haired lesbian, grew up poor in Appalachia; after studying engineering at Stanford, she worked in the California energy industry. In the mid-aughts, she moved to L.A. to try filmmaking, getting some small credits. Each woman called their relationship balanced—they split expenses, they said—but Hallman’s role displaced, to some degree, the one Apple’s brother had played. In addition, Hallman sat in on our interviews and at recording sessions; she often took videos, posting them online. They slept on the daybeds in the living room. Apple had made it clear that anyone who questioned her friend’s presence would get cut out. Hallman described their dynamic as like a “Boston marriage—but in the way that outsiders had imagined Boston marriages to be.”

Hallman said that she hadn’t recognized Apple when they met. Initially, she’d mistaken the singer for someone younger, just another Venice Beach music hopeful in danger of being exploited: “I felt relieved when she said she had a boyfriend in the Hills, to take care of her.”

“Oh, my God, you were one of them! ” Apple said, laughing.

After my July visit, Apple began to text me. She sent a recording of a song that she’d heard in a dream, then a recording describing the dream. She texted about watching “8 Mile”—“doing the nothing that comes before my little concentrated spurt of work”—and about reading a brain study about rappers that made her wonder where her brain “lit up” when she sang. “I’m hoping that I develop that ability to let my medial prefrontal cortex blow out the lights around it!” she joked. Occasionally, she sent a screenshot of a text from someone else, seeking my interpretation (a tendency that convinced me she likely did the same with my texts).

In a video sent in August, she beamed, thrilled about new mixes that she’d been struggling to “elevate.” “I always think of myself as a half-ass person, but, if I half-assed it, it still sounds really good.” She added that she’d whispered into the bathroom mirror, “You did a good job.”

In another video—broken into three parts—she appeared in closeup, in a white tank top, free-associating. She described a colorized photograph from Auschwitz she’d seen on Tumblr, then moved on to the frustrations of O.C.D.—how it made her “freak out about the littlest things, like infants freak out.” She talked about Jeffrey Epstein and the comfort of dumb TV; she held up a “cool metal instrument,” stamped “1932,” that she’d ordered from Greece. Near the end of the video, she wondered why she was rambling, then added, “Oh—I also ate some pot. I forgot about that. Well, knowing me, I’ll probably send this to you!”

Apple’s lifelong instinct has been to default to honesty, even if it costs her. In an era of slick branding, she is one of the last Gen X artists: reflexively obsessed with authenticity and “selling out,” disturbed by the affectlessness of teen-girl “influencers” hawking sponcon and bogus uplift. (When she told an interviewer that she pitied Justin Bieber’s thirsty request for fans to stream his new single as they slept, Beliebers spent the next day rage-tweeting that Apple was a jealous “nobody,” while Apple’s fans mocked them as ignoramuses.)

Apple told me that she didn’t listen to any modern music. She chalked this up to a fear of outside influences, but she had a tetchiness about younger songwriters, too. She had always possessed aspects of Emily Dickinson, in the poet’s “I’m Nobody” mode: pridefulness in retreat. Apple sometimes fantasized about pulling a Garbo: she’d release one final album, then disappear. But she also had something that resembled a repetition compulsion—she wanted to take all the risks of her early years, but this time have them work out right.

When I returned to Venice Beach, in September, the mood was different. Anxiety suffused the house. In July, Apple had been worried about returning to public view, but she was also often playful and energized, tweaking mixes. Now the thought of what she’d recorded brought on paralyzing waves of dread.

To distract herself, she’d turned to other projects. She accepted a request from Sarah Treem, the co-creator of the Showtime series “The Affair,” to cover the Waterboys song “The Whole of the Moon” for the show’s finale. (Apple had also written the show’s potent theme song—the keening “Container.”) Apple agreed to write a jokey song for the Fox cartoon “Bob’s Burgers,” and some numbers for an animated musical sitcom, “Central Park.” She was proud to hit deadlines, to handle her own business. “I have a sense of humor,” she told me. “I’m not that fucking fragile all the time! I’m an adult. You can talk to me.” But, before I arrived one day, she texted that things weren’t going well, so that I’d be prepared.

That afternoon, we found ourselves lounging on the daybeds with Hallman, watching “The Affair.” Apple had already seen these episodes, which were from the show’s penultimate season. In August, she’d sent me a video of herself after watching one, tears rolling down her face. That episode was about the death of Alison, one of the main characters. Played by Ruth Wilson, Alison is a waitress living in Montauk, an intense beauty who is grieving the drowning death of her son and suffers from depression and P.T.S.D. She falls into an affair with a novelist, and both of their marriages dissolve. The story is told from clashing perspectives, but in the episode that Apple had watched, only one account felt “true”: an ex-boyfriend of Alison’s breaks her skull, then drops her unconscious body in the ocean, making her death look like a suicide.

As we watched, Apple took notes, sitting cross-legged on the daybed. She saw herself in several characters, but she was most troubled by an identification with Alison, who worries that she’s a magnet for pain—a victim that men try to “save” and end up hurting. In one sequence, Alison, devastated after a breakup, gets drunk on a flight to California, as her seat partner flirts aggressively, feeding her cocktails. He assaults Alison as she drifts in and out of consciousness. She fights back, complaining to the flight attendant, but the man turns it all around, making her seem like the crazy one; she winds up handcuffed, as other passengers stare at her. Apple found the sequence horrifying—it reminded her of how she came across in her worst press.

Her head lowered and her arms crossed, she began to perseverate on her fears of touring. She ticked off potential outcomes: “I say the right thing, but I look the wrong way, so they say something about the way I look”; “I look the right way, but I say the wrong thing, so they say something mean about what I said.” She went on, “I have a temper. I have lots of rage inside. I have lots of sadness inside of me. And I really, really, really can’t stand assholes. If I’m in front of one, and I happen to be in a public place, and I lose my shit—and that’s a possibility—that’s not going to be any good to me, but I won’t be able to help it, because I’ll want to defend myself.”

Later, we tried to listen to the album. She played the newest version of “Rack of His,” but got frustrated by the tinny compression. She worried that she’d built “a record that can’t be made into a record.” When she’d get mad, or say “fuck,” Mercy would get agitated; wistfully, Apple told me that she sometimes wished she had a small dog that would let her be sad. Despite her fears, she kept recording—at the end of “For Her,” she’d multitracked her voice to form a gospel-like chorus singing, “You were so high”—and said that she wanted the final result to be uncompromising. “I want primary colors,” she said. “I don’t want any half measures.”

We listened to “Heavy Balloon,” a gorgeous, propulsive song about depression. She had added a new second verse, partly inspired by the scene of Alison drowning: “We get dragged down, down to the same spot enough times in a row / The bottom begins to feel like the only safe place that you know.” Apple, curling up on the floor, explained, “It’s almost like you get Stockholm syndrome with your own depression—like you’re kidnapped by your own depression.” Her voice got soft. “People with depression are always playing with this thing that’s very heavy,” she said. Her arms went up, as if she were bouncing a balloon, pretending to have fun, and said, “Like, ‘Ha, ha, it’s so heavy! ’ ” Then we had to stop, because she was having a panic attack.

Apple has tried all kinds of cures. She was sent to a family therapist at the age of eleven, when, mad at her sister, she glibly remarked, on a school trip, that she planned to kill herself and take Amber with her. After she was raped, she spent hours at a Model Mugging class, practicing self-defense by punching a man in a padded suit. In 2011, she attended eight weeks of silent Buddhist retreats, meditating from 5 a.m.to 9 p.m., with no eye contact—it was part of a plan to become less isolated. She had a wild breakthrough one day, in which the world lit up, showing her a pulsing space between the people at the retreat—a suggestion of something larger. That vision is evoked in the new song “I Want You to Love Me,” in which Apple sings, with raspy fervor, of wanting to get “back in the pulse.”

She tried a method for treating P.T.S.D. called eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, and—around the time she poured her vodka down the drain, in 2018—an untested technique called “brain balancing.” Articles about neurological anomalies fascinated her. The first day we met, Apple spread printouts of brain scans on the floor of her studio, pointing to blue and pink shapes. She was seeking patterns, just as she often did on Tumblr, reposting images, doing rabbit-hole searches that she knew were a form of magical thinking.

Apple doesn’t consider herself an alcoholic, but for years she drank vodka alone, every night, until she passed out. When she’d walk by the freezer, she’d reach for a sip; for her, the first step toward sobriety was simply being conscious of that impulse. She had quit cocaine years earlier, after spending “one excruciating night” at Quentin Tarantino’s house, listening to him and Anderson brag. “Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre with Q.T. and P.T.A. on coke, and they’ll never want to do it again,” she joked. She loved getting loose on wine, but not the regret that followed. Her father has been sober for decades, but when Apple was a little kid he was a turbulent alcoholic. He hit bottom when he had a violent confrontation with a Manhattan cabdriver; Apple was only four, but she remembers his bloody face, the nurse at the hospital. When I visited Apple’s mother at her Manhattan apartment, she showed me a photo album with pictures of Apple as a child. One image was captioned “Fiona had too much wine—not feeling good,” with a scribbled sad face. Apple, at two, had wandered around an adult party, drinking the dregs.

For decades, Apple has taken prescription psychopharmaceuticals. She told me that she’d been given a diagnosis of “complex developmental post-traumatic stress disorder.” (It was such a satisfyingly multisyllabic phrase that she preferred to sing it, transforming it into a ditty.) In December, she began having mood swings, with symptoms bad enough that she was told to get an MRI, to rule out a pituitary tumor. In the end, Apple said, she had to wean herself off an antipsychotic that she had been prescribed for her night terrors; the dosage, she said, had been way too high. As she recovered, she felt troubled, sometimes, by a sense of flatness: if she couldn’t feel the emotion in the songs, she said, she wouldn’t be able to tell what worked.

Earlier that fall, she had given an interview to the Web site Vulture, in which she was brassy and perceptive. People responded enthusiastically—many young women saw in Apple a gutsy iconoclast who’d shrugged off the world’s demands. She won praise, too, for having donated a year’s worth of profits from “Criminal”—which J. Lo dances to in the recent movie “Hustlers”—to immigrant criminal-defense cases. But the positive response also threw her, she realized. “Even the best circumstances of being in public may be too much,” she told me.

By January, the situation was better. Apple was no longer having nightmares, although she was still worried, at times, by her moods. One layer of self-protection had been removed when she stopped using alcohol, she said; another was lost with the reduction in medication. And, although she was enthusiastic about some new mixes, she felt apprehensive. She could listen to the tracks, but only through headphones.

So we talked about the subject that made her feel best: the dog rescues she was funding. She paid her brother Bran to pick up the dogs across the country, then drive them to L.A., for placement in foster homes. She and Hallman followed along through videos that Bran sent them. The dogs had been through terrible experiences: one was raped by humans; another was beaten with a shovel. Apple felt that she should not flinch from these details. Rebecca Corry, of Stand Up for Pits, had given her advice for coping: “You have to celebrate small victories and remember their faces and move on to the next one.”

Then, one day, Apple’s band came to her house to listen to the latest mixes. The next afternoon, her face was glowing again. She had wondered if the meeting would be awkward—if the band might disagree on what edits to make. Instead, she and Amy Aileen Wood kept glancing at each other, ecstatic, as they had all the same responses. At last, Apple could listen to the album on speakers.

Afterward, I texted Wood. “Dare I say it was magical?!” Wood wrote. “Everything is sounding so damn good!” Steinberg told me that the notes were simple: “Get out of the way of the music” and let Apple’s voice dominate. Apple knew what she wanted, he said. He described his job as helping her to recognize “that she was her own Svengali.”

It reminded me of a story that Bran had told me, about working in construction. One day, when he was twenty-eight, he strolled out onto a beam suspended thirty-five feet in the air—a task that he’d done many times. Suddenly, he was frozen, terrified of falling. Yet all he had to do was touch something—any object at all—to break the spell. “Because you’re grounded, you can just touch a leaf on a tree and walk,” he said.

Seeing her band again had grounded Apple. She felt a renewed bravado. She’d made plans to rerelease “When the Pawn . . .” on vinyl, but with the original artwork, by Paul Thomas Anderson, swapped out. “That’s just a great album,” she told me. Looking back on her catalogue, she thought that her one weak song might be “Please Please Please,” on “Extraordinary Machine,” which she wrote only because the record company had demanded another track: “Please, please, please, no more melodies.”

In the next few weeks, she sent updates: she was considering potential video directors; she was brainstorming ideas for album art, like a sketch of Harvey Weinstein with his walker. She’d even gone out to see King Princess perform. One night, after petting Janet’s skull and talking to her, Apple went into her old bedroom: she was able to sleep on the futon again, with Mercy. She’d also got a new tattoo, of a black bolt cutter, running down her right forearm.

On the day that Jonathan Ames came over, Apple had pondered the exact nature of her work. Maybe, she suggested, she was like any other artist whose body is an instrument—a ballerina who wears her feet out or a sculptor who strains his back. Maybe she, too, wore herself out. Maybe that’s why she had to take time to heal in between projects. In “On I Go,” the first song she’d written for “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” she chanted about trying to lead a life guided by inner, rather than outer, impulses: “On I go, not toward or away / Up until now it was day, next day / Up until now in a rush to prove / But now I only move to move.” In the middle of the track, she screwed up the beat for a second and said, “Ah, fuck, shit.” It was a moment almost anyone making a final edit would smooth out. She left it in.

[abouttopinteriorfurniture-blog]

Decoration Ideas that Will Bring Your Living Room to Life

You need to blend your taste and preference, comfort and the beauty aspect in your living room. You have the ideas, but you still do not know how to put them together to bring a clear picture of how you expect your living room to look.

Use materials that are near you. There are a variety things you can do to decorate your living room without spending so much money and still make your living room attractive. Do not to buy new furniture if you do not need it. A highly skilled carpenter can change the couch cover clothes instead of buying a new set.  Read more here!

Bring in unique shapes of furniture into the living room. You can use seats of different designs for you to achieve having the unique shapes of furniture. The stools and the tables do not have to be necessarily rectangle, square or round because these are common shapes. You should request for custom-made stools and tables of different shapes like a diamond and also those made of unique materials but will make it look attractive.

Use couch pillows with patterns. The couch pillows can also be of different colors that blend or contrast perfectly. You should use different sizes and shapes of couch pillows if you love shapes. Decorative bright colored couch pillows will make the dark-colored couches to shine. You can have your couch covered with covers of different colors to add uniqueness the living room.

The color of the walls should be the color scheme to guide you when you are choosing color for your furniture. You should work around the colors of the wall so that you can get furniture with color that blends with the wall colors. Bright colored furniture perfect in a room with bright colored walls so that the room does not reflect too much light. You can also bring it dark colored furniture when the walls are of bright color.

You can also use two-in-one furniture. A piece of two-in-one furniture means that the furniture has two different purposes. You can buy a sofa bed that as a seat in the day and the bed in the night. The furniture will tell you space if you have a small house. They are couches with storage. The drawers underneath the couches to enable you to store other items instead of leaving the living room looking messy.

You should consider the sizes of furniture so that they fit in the living room but also leave enough space for movements. The furniture should cover three-quarters of the area in the living room. This will enable you to make the room specials for easy movement.  See  used furniture West Palm Beach.

For additional info, visit this link - https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/fashion-design-and-crafts/interior-design-and-home-furnishings/furniture

[trendingfact01]

Matt Carpenter Net Worth 2022

Matt Carpenter Net Worth $35miliions Matt Carpenter is an American who plays baseball in the major leagues. Carpenter is an infielder for the MLB team the St. Louis Cardinals. Carpenter made his MLB debut on June 4, 2011, with the Cardinals. Since the beginning of the 2013 season, he has been their main first batter. He was chosen for the Mountain West Conference's second team three times, and he broke the school record for games played and at-bats. He is also second in hits, doubles, and walks. Early Life Matthew Martin Lee Carpenter was born in Galveston, Texas, on November 26, 1985. Rick and Tammie Carpenter are Carpenter's parents.   The older Carpenter played baseball in college and now works as a high school coach. When she was younger, his mother played softball. Before moving to Lawrence E. Elkins High School, Rick Carpenter taught and coached at La Marque High School for seven years with his family. Carpenter was on the first team of all-district for three years at Elkins High School and on the all-state tournament team twice.   Career Since his RS season made him old, he didn't have much negotiating power, so he settled for a $1,000 bonus. During his first year as a pro, he played for several A-level teams, such as the Batavia Muckdogs, the Quad Cities River Bandits, and the Palm Beach Cardinals. During the 2010 season, he was named a Topps Double-A All-Star, a Texas Mid-Season All-Star, and a Texas Post-Season All-Star. Carpenter also won the TCN/Scout.com Cardinals Minor League Player of the Year and Cardinals organisation Player of the Year awards for 2010. Carpenter started to get noticed after his performance in 2010. He was expected to compete for one of the last spots on the MLB Cardinals' roster at the next spring training. Read the full article

[gigslist]

70 Concert Production Jobs - National - Full Pay

Production Manager

Manager Production advances all event details for all shows. The Production Manager will be responsible for the production team and to set a plan in motion to execute the show as per the agreed terms in the contract. The Production Manager will adhere to a budget to ensure all costs are being tracked and monitored. They will ensure that all the needs of the show and performer are met.

Production - Event

West Palm Beach, FL

Full Time

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Production Manager

Manager Production advances all event details for all shows. The Production Manager will be responsible for the production team and to set a plan in motion to execute the show as per the agreed terms in the contract. The Production Manager will adhere to a budget to ensure all costs are being tracked and monitored. They will ensure that all the needs of the show and performer are met.

Production - Event

San Francisco, CA

Full Time

https://www.aegworldwide.com/careers/jobs/AEGLV4480/production-manager---goldenvoice?gh_jid=5633472002

Production Manager

Manager Production advances all event details for all shows. The Production Manager will be responsible for the production team and to set a plan in motion to execute the show as per the agreed terms in the contract. The Production Manager will adhere to a budget to ensure all costs are being tracked and monitored. They will ensure that all the needs of the show and performer are met.

Production - Event

Seattle, WA

Full Time

https://www.aegworldwide.com/careers/jobs/AEGLV4207/production-manager---pacific-northwest?gh_jid=5459429002

Production Manager

Manager Production advances all event details for all shows. The Production Manager will be responsible for the production team and to set a plan in motion to execute the show as per the agreed terms in the contract. The Production Manager will adhere to a budget to ensure all costs are being tracked and monitored. They will ensure that all the needs of the show and performer are met.

Production - Event

Denver, CO

Full Time

https://www.aegworldwide.com/careers/jobs/AEGLV4172/production-manager---rocky-mountains?gh_jid=5443202002

Production Manager

Manager Production advances all event details for all shows. The Production Manager will be responsible for the production team and to set a plan in motion to execute the show as per the agreed terms in the contract. The Production Manager will adhere to a budget to ensure all costs are being tracked and monitored. They will ensure that all the needs of the show and performer are met.

Production - Event

Denver, CO

Full Time

https://www.aegworldwide.com/careers/jobs/AEGLV4177/production-manager---rocky-mountains?gh_jid=5443550002

Production Manager

Manager Production advances all event details for all shows. The Production Manager will be responsible for the production team and to set a plan in motion to execute the show as per the agreed terms in the contract. The Production Manager will adhere to a budget to ensure all costs are being tracked and monitored. They will ensure that all the needs of the show and performer are met.

Production - Event

Denver, CO

Full Time

https://www.aegworldwide.com/careers/jobs/AEGLV4176/production-manager---rocky-mountains?gh_jid=5443535002

Stagehand

The Stagehand is responsible for performing all setup before, during, and after events which includes, but is not limited to, assembling and disassembling production equipment on stage. In addition, the Stagehand will work closely with and assist carpenters with scenery build, installation, video, sound and light production.

Production - Event

Norfolk, VA

Part Time

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Production Staff

ARTIST HOSPITALITY COORDINATOR

PRODUCTION RUNNER

STAGEHAND

Production - Event

Glenside, PA

Part Time

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Production Staff

PRODUCTION RIGGER

PRODUCTION RUNNER

STAGEHAND

Production - Event

Cleveland, OH

Part Time

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Production Staff

AUDIO TECHNICIAN

LIGHTING TECHNICIAN

STAGEHAND

Production - Event

Seattle, WA

Part Time

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Production Staff

PRODUCTION COORDINATOR - AUDIO/LIGHTING

STAGE MANAGER

Production - Event

Cambridge, MA

Part Time

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Production Staff

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STAGEHAND

STAGE MANAGER

Production - Event

Richmond, VA

Part Time

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Production Staff

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STAGEHAND

Production - Event

Sayreville, NJ

Part Time

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Production Staff

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STAGE MANAGER

Production - Event

New York, NY

Part Time

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Production Staff

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Production - Event

Los Angeles, CA

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Production Staff

PRODUCTION COORDINATOR - AUDIO/LIGHTING

PRODUCTION RIGGER

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SPOTLIGHT OPERATOR

STAGEHAND

STAGE MANAGER

Production - Event

San Francisco, CA

Part Time

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Production Staff

ARTIST HOSPITALITY COORDINATOR

AUDIO TECH

LEAD AUDIO TECH

CAMERA OPERATOR

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PRODUCTION ASSISTANT

PRODUCTION MANAGER

PRODUCTION RUNNER

VIDEO LEAD

Production - Event

Grand Prairie, TX

Part Time

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Production Staff STAGEHAND

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GOLF CART DRIVER

CATERING STAFF

Production - Event

Saratoga, CA

Part Time

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Production Staff

PRODUCTION COORDINATOR - AUDIO/LIGHTING

PRODUCTION RUNNER

STAGE MANAGER

Production - Event

Newport, KY

Part Time

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Production Staff

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PRODUCTION RUNNER

STAGEHAND

Production - Event

Columbus, OH

Part Time

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Production Staff

PRODUCTION RIGGER

PRODUCTION RUNNER

STAGEHAND

Production - Event

Pittsburgh, PA

Part Time

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Production Staff

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PRODUCTION COORDINATOR

STAGEHAND

Production - Event

Baltimore, MD

Part Time

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Stagehand

The Stagehand is responsible for performing all setup before, during, and after events which includes, but is not limited to, assembling and disassembling production equipment on stage. In addition, the Stagehand will work closely with and assist carpenters with scenery build, installation, video, sound and light production.

Production - Event

Denver, CO

Part Time

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VIP Road Manager

The VIP Manager is responsible for direct oversight of numerous functions associated with Premium Ticketing initiatives and touring-based activities. The VIP Manager will work closely with executive level employees, project managers, touring teams and both regional and local-based personnel to effectively strategize, implement and manage an array of touring-based initiatives.

Production - Event

Los Angeles, CA

Full Time

https://www.aegworldwide.com/careers/jobs/AEGLV4350/vip-road-manager%2C-premium-ticketing-%28bilingual%29-?gh_jid=5550965002

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Nansook Hong – In the Shadow of the Moons book, part 6

Six months before I fled the Moon compound, I posed with True Mother and True Father on the 100th Day anniversary of Shin Hoon’s birth. Because his drinking and drug use left Hyo Jin in no condition to participate, we went without the traditional 100th Day celebration.

In The Shadow Of The Moons: My Life In The Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Family by Nansook Hong  1998  

Chapter 10    

page 207

My children had insisted that all they wanted was a little house they could call their own. That’s what they got. We moved into a modest split-level in an unpretentious neighborhood of Lexington, Massachusetts, the birthplace of the American Revolution. It seemed like a fitting place to begin my new life. Like the Minuteman whose statue dominates the town green, I, too, had declared my independence from an oppressor.

There is no freedom, though, without security. At my lawyers’ urging, the first thing I did when we reached Massachusetts was file a request with the court for an order of protection to prohibit Hyo Jin from having any contact with me. I could imagine his fury when he had awakened and found us gone. I wanted to do what I could to discourage him from trying to find us.

In my affidavit filed with the Massachusetts probate court, I tried to explain that this was not a typical domestic violence case. I was afraid not only of my husband but of the powerful religious cult that sheltered him. Attempts by any member to break away from the Unification Church are fiercely resisted. What would Sun Myung Moon and his minions do to get his daughter-in-law and five grandchildren back behind the iron gates of East Garden?

The entire legal procedure was intimidating for me, but my fears were eased by the Boston lawyers I had hired with the help of my brother. Ailsa Deitmeyer, an associate in the firm, was especially reassuring, perhaps because she is a woman, perhaps because she is graced with a compassionate heart. She made me feel safe at last.

The court impounded my new address to thwart any efforts by my husband and the Unification Church to contact me. I knew, however, that it was only a matter of time before they learned where I was living. I was a woman with five children, without resources. Where would I go? The Moons eventually would figure out that I had come to my brother; it would not be long before they found me.

I knew that a court order was just a piece of paper, but I thought it might be enough to discourage the Moons from any ideas about taking my children by force. How many custody cases, in circumstances far less bizarre than mine, involve the kidnapping of children?

Standing in the dingy courtroom in Cambridge, I looked past the peeling paint and battered benches. My eyes focused on the American flag. I thanked God I was in America. That flag was protecting me, a Korean girl who had come to this country illegally, who was not yet a citizen. Of all Sun Myung Moon’s sins, I thought, his attacks on America were the most vile. He was rich and powerful; I was neither, but we were equal before that flag. The scales would not have been so balanced in my homeland. For me, on that summer day, the United States meant freedom. The stars and stripes were the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.

After helping me unload the cars, Madelene returned immediately to New York and her job at Manhattan Center in order not to arouse suspicion. Hyo Jin had not guessed her role in our escape. He called her every day to ask if she had heard from me. He ordered her to hire a private investigator with Manhattan Center funds to find me, an order she ignored. When I had not returned or contacted Hyo Jin after a few days, the focus of his demands on Madelene changed.

In a telephone conversation that she recorded, Hyo Jin told Madelene to meet him at the corner of 125th Street and Riverside Drive in Harlem with enough money for him to score some crack cocaine. “I just want to numb this feeling, just do the crack. At least when I do it, I can get lost in it. Maddie, I’m sorry, but I have no other choice. I can’t deal with these feelings. . . . I don’t want to ask anybody else. Come on, Maddie. Do this one for me. Come on. . . . I’ve got nothing to lose, Madelene. O.K.?”

The next day Madelene drove Hyo Jin to the airport for his trip to a drug treatment program at the Hazelden Clinic in West Palm Beach, Florida. He spent the ride detailing to Madelene the torture he would subject me to if he ever found me. He described graphically how he would peel off my skin and pull out my toenails. I had good reason to be afraid of him.

He lasted at Hazelden only a few days before doctors asked him to leave, citing his lack of cooperation. The Moons sent him next to California to the Betty Ford Clinic, where he remained for more than a month in their detoxification program. It had taken the loss of his wife and children to force Hyo Jin Moon and his parents to address his addiction to alcohol and cocaine. I knew they would expect me to be heartened by this development, but I knew Hyo Jin too well. He would do what he had to do to appease his parents, but I had little faith that whatever level of sobriety he reached in confinement could be sustained once he returned to East Garden.

My children and I, on the other hand, were drunk on our new freedom. Our house was cramped, our sleeping quarters tight, but we were together, out of the shadow of the Moons. The kitchen was especially small, although that was not an immediate concern, since I did not know how to cook. Meal preparation was one of so many domestic chores I had never learned to do. The staff at East Garden had met all of my daily needs for fourteen years. Chefs, launderers, housekeepers, hairdressers, nannies, plumbers, carpenters, auto mechanics, locksmiths, electricians, tailors, gardeners, dentists, doctors, and dozens of security guards were always on call. I did not know how to run a dishwasher, how to mow a lawn, how to operate a washing machine. The first time the toilet over-flowed, I called Madelene in New York in a panic.

It was a difficult adjustment for me, but it was harder still for my children, who had been treated since birth like princes and princesses. It was not easy for children accustomed to maid service to learn to hang up their clothes, to take out the trash, and to clean up their rooms, but they did. They learned to share bedrooms and wait to use our one bathroom. No longer part of the True Family, superior in status to their peers, they adapted to the new egalitarian realities of their lives and began to make friends as equals.

I had neither the money nor the inclination to send them to the kind of private schools they had attended in New York. Tuition for them the previous year had totaled fifty-six thousand dollars. If I was going to immerse my children in the real world, what better place to start than the public schools? Lexington is a comfortable suburb west of Boston with an excellent school system. I was grateful for that.

My children and I stumbled toward self-sufficiency together. 

We had a lot to learn, but we were not alone. My sister and my brother and his wife helped and supported me. Having them close by meant not feeling afraid as we embarked on this new life. The children had their cousins and I had adults who understood the painful and awkward transition I was trying to make. The worries that disturbed my sleep were not the kind a friendly neighbor could easily relate to over a cup of tea.

I had timed our escape so that it would coincide as closely as possible with the start of the new school year. I knew the children would miss their friends, and I was eager for them to be able to make new ones as soon as possible. In September I enrolled Shin June in seventh grade. She would be the only one of my children at the middle school. She was the oldest and the most independent; I was confident that she would do well academically and socially. The other children would all attend the same neighborhood elementary school. The baby would keep me busy at home.

Their teachers reported few adjustment problems and I saw a house full of happy children. Their father had had so little to do with their lives in New York that it was no surprise to me that they felt only relief that he, as well as all the abuse he represented, was absent from their lives in Massachusetts. Shin June played the flute with a local wind ensemble. Shin Gil made friends easily but was very sensitive to being reprimanded, no matter how gently, by me or a teacher. His teacher reported taking him into the hall once when he seemed tearful to ask what was bothering him. “He told me he used to live in a mansion,” she reported. “Now there isn’t much privacy and there isn’t as much to do. He misses his friends. I asked about his dad. He said that once in a while he misses his dad but that his dad was a drunk who yelled a lot.”

Not surprisingly, the first pressure the Moons applied to force us back to East Garden was financial. What savings I had covered our food and basic necessities. My paycheck from Manhattan Center made the difference between being able to pay the monthly mortgage and not. My lawyers had been assured by attorneys for Hyo Jin that those checks would continue to be issued to me until we worked out a temporary child-support arrangement through the probate court.

They weren’t. My lawyers filed a formal request with the court for child support. “It appears Ms. Moon’s check will be withheld, perhaps trying to force her back into an abusive relationship,” my lawyers wrote to church representatives. “Ms. Moon’s decision to seek safety from a horrendously dangerous situation was not reached lightly. Having made the decision, however, she is determined not to return, regardless.”

With my brother’s and sister’s help, I had hired Choate, Hall and Stewart, one of Boston’s finest firms, to represent me in what I anticipated would be a protracted divorce case. We knew I would need the best lawyers in the city if I was going to take on the Moons. Like so many women facing divorce, I had no idea how I would pay my lawyers. In a study on gender bias in the courts in 1989, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had concluded that “there is too little legal help available to moderate income women, in part because judges fail to award adequate counsel fees, especially during the pendency of litigation.”

My chief lawyers were a brilliant Boston Brahmin named Weld S. Henshaw and his skilled and empathetic associate Ailsa De Prada Deitmeyer. They were confident that the court would require Hyo Jin to pay my legal bills. As experienced as he was, Weld conceded he had never encountered a divorce case quite like mine. Hyo Jin Moon was not the typical defendant; determining his real assets would not be a simple matter.

Hyo Jin retained law firms in New York and Massachusetts, including the Manhattan firm of Levy, Gutman, Goldberg and Kaplan. Gutman was Jeremiah S. Gutman, the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, the man who had championed Sun Myung Moon’s cause when he was convicted of tax evasion in 1982.

Our case was assigned to Massachusetts probate court judge Edward Ginsburg. He was a fair-minded gentleman, nearing retirement, who ran his Concord probate courtroom in a firm but folksy manner. Something of an eccentric, Judge Ginsburg was easy to spot arriving for work on summer mornings. He was the fellow in the blue seersucker suit with the yappy blond poodle on a leash. His dog, Pumpkin, accompanied the judge to the courthouse every day.

No sooner had I asked the court to require Hyo Jin to support his children than I heard from the Moons directly. Money was a great motivator. In Jin sent a letter through my attorneys to urge me to drop my legal action and come home. She enclosed an audio tape from Mrs. Moon, making the same plea.

It was startling to hear Mrs. Moon’s voice in my new surroundings. She could not hide her anger, but she made attempts to sound caring and to be distraught at my departure. The True Family needed to be intact. The bottom line, as always, was that I was at fault. “Nansook, your behavior is not acceptable to all the people who love you.” She predicted that I would be condemned by many people in the future and urged me to return “. . . without being changed.”

It struck me, as it always had, how selective the Moons could be when applying the teachings of the Divine Principle. No one lived her belief in forgiveness more openly than I. Hadn’t I forgiven Hyo Jin when he left me for another woman weeks after our wedding? Hadn’t I forgiven Hyo Jin when he gave me herpes? Hadn’t I forgiven Hyo Jin when he took up with prostitutes? Hadn’t I forgiven Hyo Jin when he squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars that had been intended for our children’s futures? Hadn’t I forgiven Hyo Jin when he beat me and spat upon me? Hadn’t I forgiven Hyo Jin when he abandoned me and our children for a life of drug and alcohol abuse? Hadn’t I forgiven Hyo Jin when he took a lover on the day I brought our newborn son home from the hospital?

I was not the one who had failed to consider the consequences of my actions. I had spent fourteen years refusing to entertain the idea that I could leave Hyo Jin Moon, that I could make a claim to a life free of fear and violence. I had not left East Garden precipitously. I had tried mightily to make my marriage work. Had the Moons ever thought that it was them, not I, who could be wrong?

In Jin’s letter was similar to Mrs. Moon’s tape in its judgmental tone. She expressed sympathy for my situation but scoffed at my seeking a restraining order against Hyo Jin, a man who had beaten, humiliated, and threatened me for fourteen years. She accused me of exaggerating the claims in my restraining order that I feared for my life. But her major point was apparently to try and convince me not to use the legal system against the Moons.

She hinted that it would be easy to attribute dark motives to my decision to leave. “Some have even commented that you left your husband after all these years only because he had lost his job and his position in the family,” she wrote. I could only convince the family of my good intentions by returning and helping Hyo Jin confront and conquer his alcoholism and drug abuse. “You are hurting everyone who loves you by using the legal system to get what you want,” she said, describing the system as “adversarial” and the end result as hurt for everyone.

It was impossible for the Moons to understand that I had already been hurt. I did not want a reconciliation; I wanted release from the abuse of a violent husband and the hold of a religion that had already consumed twenty-nine years of my life. I had never felt a stronger presence of God in my life than at the moment when I decided to flee East Garden. He had lifted the veil from my eyes; I was seeing clearly for the first time. I would never go back.

On October 25, the court ordered Hyo Jin to make monthly support payments for the children and appointed a social worker, Mary Lou Kaufman, to investigate whether visits with their father were in the best interests of our children. I did not want to deprive my children of contact with either their dad or their grandparents. However problematic the relationship, there was no question in my mind that children deserve two parents and two sets of grandparents. I knew that Hyo Jin loved our children, as much as a man as self-absorbed as he could love anyone. However, I urged Ms. Kaufman not to permit visits until the children were more settled and there was demonstrable evidence that Hyo Jin had stopped abusing drugs and alcohol.

I was especially adamant about confirming his sobriety. Hyo Jin prided himself on his ability to circumvent the law. He had once substituted a sample of Shin Gil’s urine for his own during a drug test mandated by his drunken driving conviction in New York. It was also noteworthy to me that Hyo Jin had not even asked to see his children until after I applied for financial support.

Ms. Kaufman met Hyo Jin in her office for more than four hours over two days in November. In her report to the court, she noted that he was anxious and highly agitated. He had a dry mouth and was hyperventilating. She suspected he was high on cocaine. He laced his speech with obscenities. He told her that my parents were behind the divorce effort, that my mother had proclaimed herself the Messiah, and that my parents intended to use whatever money I got in a divorce settlement to establish their own church in Korea. He brought my uncle, Soon Yoo, to support this cockamamy theory. Soon, who had been instrumental in my mother’s joining the church, betrayed her to improve his position with the Moons.

Hyo Jin insisted to Ms. Kaufman that he had always been an involved and active father, but he could not tell her the ages of our children or what grades they were in at school. He insisted that if they were not clamoring to see him, it was only because I had poisoned their minds against him. He was shocked to hear that Shin Gil had asked for a picture not of his dad but of one of his toys.

She concluded in her report in early December that no visitation should be allowed between Hyo Jin and the children until Hyo Jin had demonstrated that he had been free of drugs and alcohol for a two-month period.

The children and I were busy preparing for our first Christmas in our new home. My parents were coming from Korea. It had been years since we had all been together. Our reunion would be a celebration of our freedom as well. We decorated the house with the children’s drawings from school and a six-foot Christmas tree.

The Saturday before Christmas, I responded to a deliveryman’s knock at the front door. My heart raced as I accepted a package with a familiar return address. Hyo Jin had found us. I tried to conceal my concern from my parents and my children, but I had become less adept at disguising my emotions since leaving the Moon compound. The package contained several small Christmas gifts for the children and a card addressed to me in Korean. In it, Hyo Jin alluded to my revelations about his substance-abuse problems in court documents and asked how I would feel if my own “nakedness” were exposed to the world. It was a veiled threat to expose a videotape he had made of me in the nude.

My father, noticing my distress, tried to comfort me. “Don’t let him get to you,” my father advised. “If you’re down, he’s succeeded in his goal to hurt you.” He was right. I had done nothing wrong. Hyo Jin had. His letter was a criminal violation of the restraining order that prohibited him from contacting me. The son of Sun Myung Moon still thought he was above the law. I reported the threat to the police. Hyo Jin was charged with a criminal offense.

Through my attorneys, Hyo Jin sent letters to the children, expressing his love for them and his desire to see them. He could not resist criticizing me, however. In his letter to Shin June, he wrote: “Of course I feel angry at times at your mother but I want to forgive her. There are a lot of things you don’t know about your mother but that’s not important. You know why? It is because I want you to be a loving person who can love someone forever and not give up on the person that you love and also learn to forgive them as they face trials that life will offer, as it offers to everyone.”

To Shin Ok he wrote that he knew she loved him. “If there was no one telling you how bad Dad is I truly think you would never think even for the moment that way. You know what? Even if you think Dad is bad I feel OK because I won’t be bad any more.”

He promised all the children that he would write to them again soon but he never did.

In February 1996 Hyo Jin met again with Ms. Kaufman to assess the wisdom of allowing visits with the children. He was outraged that he had been barred from seeing them for so long. He talked about the revenge he would seek against me in court. He told Ms. Kaufman he would hire “a cutthroat legal firm from New York” to ruin me financially. He was attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, he said, and was now committed to a life of sobriety.

Ms. Kaufman granted supervised visits with the children that spring. Hyo Jin saw his children only twice before the man who insisted he had changed forever failed a drug test. Visits were suspended until Hyo Jin could prove to the court’s satisfaction that he was no longer abusing drugs or alcohol. That day still has not come.

For all his accusations of being denied contact with his children, Hyo Jin has made no effort to stay in touch with them. His letters, to be delivered through my attorneys, were encouraged by the court, but he never wrote to them. He does not send them cards or gifts on their birthdays or at Christmas. He does not inquire how they are doing in school.

As troubling as their memories of their father are, his abandonment of them is painful for our children. Shin Gil, the favored son now living on my limited income, especially remembers how his father indulged him at video arcades and with expensive toys. Shin Hoon, the baby who never knew his father, wonders where he is. When I take him to nursery school, he often asks, “When is my daddy going to pick me up like the other kids’?”

Divorce is never easy for children, but for a man who claims to be part of the True Family, the embodiment of traditional moral values, Hyo Jin Moon has made it much more difficult for our children than it needed to be.

The Moons did not always pay the court-ordered child support. When they did, the check always came late and only after reminders from my lawyers, who were billing me for more hours than I could ever hope to pay. I had to sell some of my jewelry one month to pay routine expenses. Hyo Jin’s position was that he could not pay my legal bills because he had no source of income. He had been fired from Manhattan Center and cut off from the True Family Trust. He asked the court to believe that the son of one of the wealthiest men in the world was destitute.

Judge Ginsburg was not buying it. The lines between Unification Church funds and Moon family money and Hyo Jin Moon’s finances were imaginary. Hyo Jin had access to limitless funds while reporting few assets and only modest income. In terms of housing, travel, cars, private schools, and servants, he and his siblings lived without any budgetary constraint. For Hyo Jin to argue that he had no money because he was unemployed was to ignore the fact that his employment at Manhattan Center Studios had been no more independent of his father than his living arrangements. His father housed him, fed him, and employed him. Take away the Unification Church and the uneducated Hyo Jin Moon was unemployable. It was laughable to suggest that whatever assets he had, and he claimed he had few, had been acquired in any way other than through the largesse of Sun Myung Moon.

To maintain the fiction that Hyo Jin was destitute, one had to ignore that all his income led back to the same source: Sun Myung Moon. Noting the fine cut of the suits being worn by the army of attorneys from Boston and New York who accompanied Hyo Jin Moon to court, Judge Ginsburg ordered him to pay my counsel fees or face arrest for contempt of court.

The Moons would not pay. That summer Sun Myung Moon sponsored an international conference in Washington, D.C., to discuss how to restore traditional family values. The irony was almost too rich. Hyo Jin Moon could not attend the two-day symposium in the Great Hall of the National Building Museum to hear speakers such as former presidents Gerald Ford and George Bush, former British prime minister Edward Heath, former Costa Rican president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias, and Republican presidential hopeful Jack Kemp address the erosion of family values around the world. Sun Myung Moon’s son was languishing in a Massachusetts jail cell, where Judge Ginsburg had sent him for defying his order to pay my legal bills. He would remain there for three months, winning his release only after he formally filed for bankruptcy in New York State to prove that he was a man without financial resources.

Money became a constant source of worry for me. What if the Moons did not send the check? What if my lawyers got tired of waiting to be paid? How would I care for my children? I had an undergraduate degree in art history. I wasn’t qualified to do anything more than volunteer as a tour guide at the Boston Museum of fine Arts. That would not pay the dental bills for five children. In my desperation, I applied for a sales position at Macy’s department store at the local shopping mall. I completed the training course by asking my sister and Madelene to baby-sit. Madelene had left the church one month after I did and moved close by. I could not have gotten through my first year of freedom without her and my sister and brother. Only when I was trained did I learn that Macy’s expected me to work every weekend. How could I? Who would watch my children? I returned home, feeling defeated.

Independence has its price. I needed to settle my divorce case and move on with my life. I would need more education if I was going to land a job that would allow me to give my children the advantages they deserved, advantages their cousins in East Garden took for granted.

Through my attorneys, I proposed a divorce settlement that would sever my ties forever to the family of Sun Myung Moon. I asked that trust funds be established for me and for my children from which I would pay for our health insurance, education, clothing, housing, and all other expenses. There would be no alimony and no child support. I would pay my own legal fees. My lawyers summarized my intentions in the proposal:

“The concept of a trust such as this would insure there was no likelihood of these assets being dissipated so that the settlement could truly be finished now and forever with no second chances.”

Sun Myung Moon refused. He was firm that Hyo Jin’s financial situation was independent from his own. He would not take responsibility for the future well-being of his grand-children. In addition, the Moons demanded that the terms of any divorce agreement remain confidential. They did not want me to talk. I refused all demands for confidentiality.

In a deposition filed with the court in July 1997, Sun Myung Moon made his position clear.

When my son, Hyo Jin Moon, was cut off as a beneficiary of the True Family Trust and was discharged from his position as an employee, officer and director of Manhattan Center Studios, Inc. and was subsequently discontinued from his status as a disabled employee receiving disability payments from Manhattan Center Studios, Inc. my concern and love for his five children, my grandchildren, moved me to provide support funds fixed by order of the court in Massachusetts having jurisdiction of the dispute between my son and his wife.

My son, Hyo Jin Moon, had and has no control over whether I choose each month to make and continue to make such payments. They are voluntarily made by me so long as I am able and willing to do so.

Negotiations have broken down and I now learn that my daughter-in-law is making efforts to re-incarcerate my son, despite the fact that he has no assets or income other than a $3,500 gross salary per month from his re-employment by Manhattan Center Studios, Inc. I am re-thinking the situation.

The implied threat, that if I did not settle on the Moons’ terms, child support payments would be cut off, was not subtle. The Reverend Moon paid fifty-thousand dollars toward my counsel fees to keep his son out of jail, not out of respect for the court that ordered the bills paid.

“I am pleased that Hyo Jin Moon has recovered sufficiently to resume his productivity as a producer of musical recordings and I hope he will be able to continue to be artistically creative and productive and to earn sufficiently so that I can discontinue supporting him as I have consistently done since he was cut off from all income,” the Reverend Moon said, still ignoring the reality that Hyo Jin’s job only existed because his father created it.

Our divorce case had produced enough paper to make a stack of legal documents two feet high. It had dragged on for two and one-half years. Sun Myung Moon had displayed more willingness to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to lawyers than to guarantee the future security of his grandchildren. So much for family values.

In December 1997 I settled for a token lump sum payment and a continuation of monthly child support. If we were dependent on monthly support payments, I knew we would forever be at the mercy of the Moons. Once the litigation had ended, Sun Myung Moon could cut off the money at any time. I could not imagine a more likely candidate for a “deadbeat Dad” than Hyo Jin Moon.

Still, I wanted this to be over. I was tired. My attorneys had fought hard and done the best they could for me. I could not have asked for better counsel. How many other women in protracted divorce fights felt just as I did: he with the most resources wins? There would be no alimony, no compensation for the fourteen lost years of my life. There would be no trust fund to ensure that my children had access to a college education. If the children wanted money for schooling, Hyo Jin’s attorneys told my own, they would have to come to Sun Myung Moon personally and ask their grandfather.

I did not oppose supervised visitation by Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han Moon, but I was skeptical that they were sincere in this demand. In the two and one-half years that had passed since we fled East Garden, they had not written or called their grandchildren once. They had not remembered them at Christmas or on their birthdays. They had displayed the same indifference to them as had their son.

At 9:15 A.M. on a cold, sunny December morning, I stood across from Hyo Jin Moon in the well of a small courtroom in Concord, Massachusetts. I answered, “Yes, Your Honor,” when Judge Edward Ginsburg asked me if my marriage was beyond saving. Hyo Jin mumbled a disrespectful “Yeah” when asked the same question. Judge Ginsburg reminded us, as he did all divorcing couples, that marriages end but parenthood does not. He granted my request to legally restore my maiden name, and with the flick of a judge’s pen, the nightmare that was my marriage to the abusive son of a false Messiah was over at last.

No one had really won. Not me. Not Hyo Jin. Not our children. Only Sun Myung Moon had gotten what he wanted all along. My children and I had slipped out of the grasp of the Unification Church, but we were destined to remain in the shadow of the Moons.

Epilogue

The Messiah is seventy-eight years old. His claims of divinity notwithstanding, even Sun Myung Moon cannot live forever. When he dies there is every possibility that the Reverend Moon will take the Unification Church with him to his grave.

The Reverend Moon has made no concrete plans for his succession. To do so would require him to relinquish some power while he is still alive, and that prospect is inconceivable to a man accustomed to being the central figure in a tightly controlled universe. The Unification Church is a classic example of what psychologists call a cult of personality.

The failure to designate and groom a successor all but guarantees a familial bloodletting after the Reverend Moon’s death. His sons are already locked in a battle for control of his business empire. That struggle will only intensify when the Unification Church itself is up for grabs.

Leadership, of course, should fall naturally to the eldest son, but given Hyo Jin’s continuing problems with alcohol and drugs, his brothers are already jockeying for position. Even In Jin, who has no chance to succeed her father because she is a woman, is desperate to salvage Hyo Jin’s candidacy. She cast her lot with him a long time ago. If he goes down, she and Jin Sung Pak go down with him.

When he addresses the issue at all these days, the Reverend Moon implies that the True Mother will rule when he ascends into Heaven. No one in the church seriously believes that Hak Ja Han Moon is either capable of taking or inclined to take any more than a symbolic role at the helm of the Unification Church.

A month before I left East Garden, Mrs. Moon and I spoke about the future of the Unification Church. I urged her not to turn control over to Hyo Jin. I could not imagine a more unstable individual to lead a nominally religious enterprise. She reluctantly agreed that Sun Myung Moon might have to look to one of his other sons to lead the Unification Church. I know that possibility saddened her. Hyo Jin’s birth, after her first child was a daughter, had sealed her position as the True Mother. Her fate and his had seemed bound together.

The evil at the heart of the Unification Church is the hypocrisy and deceit of the Moons, a family that is all too human in its incredible level of dysfunction. To continue to promote the myth that the Moons are spiritually superior to the idealistic young people who are drawn to the church is a shameful deceit. Hyo Jin’s failings may be more conspicuous, but there is not a member of the second generation of Moons to whom the word pious could fairly be applied.

Sun Myung Moon wrote the epitaph for the Unification Church in a sermon in 1984 about the moral and spiritual decline of the United States. His words could better be applied to his own family. “Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God’s judgment for the immorality and pursuit of luxury. Rome was in the same situation. It did not collapse from external invasion but from the weight of its own corruption.”

The Unification Church still claims millions of members worldwide. How many of those are active fund-raisers and participants in church affairs is another question. Unlike other religions, the Unification Church has few formal worship sites where attendance could be taken. Some cities have churches, others don’t.

Even many of the church training centers, where religious services and seminars were held, closed in the early 1990s during Sun Myung Moon’s disastrous experiment called home church. In response to the negative publicity about the public proselytizing of the Moonies, the Reverend Moon sent members home to convert their relatives and neighbors. Such decentralization, however, weakened the control the Reverend Moon maintained over his flock. Many members, re-exposed to the wider world and their families’ disapproval of Sun Myung Moon, just drifted away.

In the wake of that failure, the Reverend Moon and church leaders regrouped. In the last few years, they have orchestrated a remarkably successful campaign to win respectability and wield political influence. As usual, they have succeeded by deceitful means. The Unification Church has launched dozens of civic organizations around the world dedicated to women’s rights, world peace, and family values that have made impressive inroads into mainstream society. None of them advertise their relationship with Sun Myung Moon or the Unification Church.

The Women’s Federation for World Peace, the Family Federation for World Peace, the International Cultural Foundation, the Professors World Peace Academy, the Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy, the Summit Council for World Peace, the American Constitution Committee, and dozens of other organizations present themselves as nonpartisan, nondenominational groups. All of them are funded by Sun Myung Moon.

In March 1994 for instance, the Women’s Federation for World Peace sponsored a program “promoting peace and reconciliation” at the State University of New York campus in Purchase. Hyun Jin Moon, the Reverend Moon’s then twenty-five-year-old son, opened the event with a declaration that Sun Myung Moon had a new divine revelation for America. The organization had solicited a welcoming letter from Sandra Galef, the local state assemblywoman. She was never told the group was affiliated with Sun Myung Moon.

“I have never supported the Unification Church,” the angry assemblywoman later told the New York Times. “I have always felt they are a group that destroys families. If the individual who came into my office requesting a letter had honestly told me what this organization was, I never would have given it to them. Basically it was a hoax.”

The same month, the Toronto chapter of Women’s Federation for World Peace and the University of Toronto branch of CARP cosponsored an AIDS-prevention program for teenagers at North York Public Library. The promotional flyer invited parents to enroll their children to ensure that they “choose a lifestyle without disease and drugs.” Nowhere did it mention the Unification Church or Sun Myung Moon.

Some of the biggest celebrities in the United States have been seduced by exorbitant speaking fees to participate in programs sponsored by these groups without ever knowing their affiliation with the Moonies. Gerald Ford, the former president; Barbara Walters, the television journalist; Christopher Reeve, the actor; Sally Ride, the first American woman in space; Coretta Scott King, the civil rights leader; and Bill Cosby, the comedian, have all spoken at functions sponsored by the Women’s Federation for World Peace.

Perhaps the worst offenders have been former president George Bush and Barbara Bush. They do know the relationship between the Reverend Moon and these groups, and yet they were reportedly paid more than a million dollars in 1995 to address six rallies in Japan sponsored by the Women’s Federation for World Peace.

The former president is not naive. Certainly George Bush knows that when he hails Sun Myung Moon as “a visionary,” as he did in a speech in Buenos Aires in 1996, he is legitimizing the work of a man who uses manipulation and deceit to recruit cheap labor to work to finance his lavish lifestyle. President Bush was paid to attend a party with the Reverend Moon in Buenos Aires to launch Tiempos del Mundo, or the Times of the World, an eighty-page weekly Spanish-language tabloid newspaper distributed to seventeen countries in South America.

Every photograph of the Reverend Moon with a world political leader enhances his credibility. Pictures of Sun Myung Moon as an international religious leader get politicians like Argentina’s President Carlos Saul Menem to meet with him when he has no more than a few thousand followers in that country.

What influence the Reverend Moon does not wield through his political connections, he exercises through his financial investments in real estate, banking, and media. In Latin America alone, those holdings are valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mainstream religious leaders in the heavily Catholic region have proved less than receptive to Sun Myung Moon’s recruitment efforts. “Deceptive proselytizing by institutions like the Unification Church are hurting the good faith of Christians of our country and other countries across Latin America,” a group of Catholic bishops in Uruguay said in a statement issued in 1996. “These organizations promote fundamental human values, but in reality they attempt to convert believers to their religious movement.”

The Unification Church’s biggest challenge in the years ahead will be holding on to Japan as the financial engine that runs this moneymaking machine. For decades Japan has been Sun Myung Moon’s strongest base of support and most reliable source of cash. However, fund-raising efforts there have begun to stall in the last few years in the wake of public complaints, lawsuits, and government scrutiny of church operations. The church claims to have 460,000 members in Japan, but critics say the figure is closer to 30,000, and that only 10,000 of those are active members.

The Reverend Moon founded the Washington Times in 1982 to counter what he charged was the liberal bias of the American press, especially the Washington Post. The Washington Times Corporation also publishes a weekly newsmagazine called Insight, also founded to parrot the Reverend Moon’s anti-Communist ideology. His timing was perfect; the Washington Times became a favorite publication of the conservative Republican president Ronald Reagan. Key Reagan administration officials often leaked information to its reporters. Although editors claim that both publications are independent of the Unification Church, the first editor and publisher of the Washington Times, James Whelan, was fired after he objected to the church’s interference.

With its marble columns, brass railings, and plush carpeting, the Washington Times headquarters looks like a more profitable operation than it is. The paper continues to lose money sixteen years after the first press run. It is subsidized by the profits of the Reverend Moon’s other business holdings and, increasingly, by “donations” from Japanese members.

At a dinner celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Washington Times in 1992, the Reverend Moon said he had invested close to a billion dollars in the paper in its first decade in order to make it “an instrument to save America and the world.” The Reverend Moon told the crowd at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington that he founded the Times because “I believed it was the will of God” to have him run a newspaper with a mission of “saving the world from the collapse of traditional values, and to defend the free world from the threat of communism.”

That was the same year the Reverend Moon rescued the University of Bridgeport from bankruptcy, providing the Unification Church with a legitimate academic institution from which to mount its efforts to save the world. The Professors World Peace Academy, a Moonie front, has spent more than a hundred million dollars to keep the Connecticut university afloat. A group calling itself the Coalition of Concerned Citizens had opposed the Reverend Moon’s offer to bail out the university in exchange for a controlling number of seats on the board of trustees. The university community voted for survival. In the end, professors’ fears about the influence of the Moons on academic freedom were overwhelmed by their desire to save their jobs.

Trustees were willing to overlook the real source of the bailout to save their school, blithely accepting Sun Myung Moon’s assurances that the Unification Church itself would have no contact with the university. In 1997 the Unification Church made explicit its relationship with the University of Bridgeport by opening a boarding school on campus. New Eden Academy International serves forty-four high-school-age children of church members. Its headmaster is Hugh Spurgin, who has been a follower of Sun Myung Moon for twenty-nine years. His wife is the president of the Women’s Federation for World Peace, another Moonie front. University classrooms are being used by the high school for a full array of classes, including religious training. The students eat in the university’s dining halls and study in its library, but the boarding school still insists it is independent and merely renting space on campus.

City councilman William Finch, a leader of the Coalition of Concerned Citizens, was right when he told the New York Times: “It shows just how far the Unification Church has come in its efforts to be accepted by mainstream society, because nobody seems to care, or be bothered by this.”

Plenty of people are bothered by the Unification Church in Japan, however. Hundreds have sued, charging they were cheated out of their life savings by Unification Church members who promised that Sun Myung Moon’s intercession could save a deceased loved one from the fires of hell. Government consumer protection officials in Japan say they have received nearly twenty thousand complaints about the Unification Church since 1987. The church already has paid out millions to settle many of the lawsuits involving the sale of vases, icons, and paintings said to have supernatural powers.

The Unification Church has never had much religious appeal in the United States or in Europe. Its business holdings are extensive and the wealth generated by those enterprises is enormous. As a spiritual entity, however, the Unification Church has been something of a bust. The church claims to have fifty thousand members in the United States, but I would put the number of active members at no more than a few thousand in the United States and no more than a few hundred in England. Sun Myung Moon himself was banned from Britain in 1995 because the Home Office, which is in charge of immigration, declared his presence was “not conducive to the public good.” It isn’t as easy as it used to be to find impressionable young people willing to spend eighteen hours a day selling novelty items out of the back of a van to raise money for the Messiah.

The Reverend Moon hoped to find those recruits among the ranks of his old enemies, the Communists. In 1990 the Unification Church began a major recruitment and investment drive in the Soviet Union. Sun Myung Moon met in the Kremlin with President Mikhail Gorbachev and also invited a select group of Soviet journalists to his home in Seoul for his first interview in ten years. That same year, Bo Hi Pak, one of Moon’s top aides, led a delegation of businessmen from Korea, Japan, and the United States to Moscow to explore investment opportunities. Before leaving, Bo Hi Pak wrote a one hundred thousand dollar check to one of Raisa Gorbachev’s favorite cultural foundations.

The Reverend Moon’s efforts in Russia seemed to stall after the collapse of Communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union. His false start there was overshadowed by his disastrous investment in China. At the urging of Bo Hi Pak, the Reverend Moon invested $250 million to build an automobile plant in Huizhou in southern China. He promised to invest a billion dollars in Panda Motors Corporation to blanket the country with subcompact cars. The Reverend Moon claimed his goal was not to make a profit but to invest in poorer nations. His commitment to the development of mainland China disappeared when bureaucratic obstacles and poor planning slowed down progress on the plant. He soon abandoned the project and redoubled his efforts in South America, where church leaders think the future is brighter.

I have begun taking courses at the University of Massachusetts while my children are in school. I am studying psychology, perhaps motivated as much by a need to understand what happened to me as to prepare for a career helping others in emotional distress. I was a battered woman, but I was also part of a religious cult. I am in the process of trying to understand the decisions I did and did not make over the course of fourteen years.

One thing I have learned from experience: the mind is a complicated thing. Words like brainwashing and mind control are better suited to political than psychological discussions of the Unification Church. Catchphrases cannot fully explain the attraction of groups like the Moonies or the hold they have on their followers.

If I believed I had been brainwashed, I could escape the depression and self-flagellation that have accompanied my new freedom. I do not yet fully understand how I remained blind for so long to the charlatan in Sun Myung Moon. My experience was different from that of recruited members. I was not deprived of sleep or food, subjected to hours of indoctrinating lectures, or separated from my family. I was born into this religion. My parents were steeped in the traditions and beliefs of a church that dictated where they lived, what work they did, and with whom they associated. I knew nothing else.

I feel duped, but I do not feel bitter. I feel used, but I feel more sad than angry. I long to have the years back that I lost to Sun Myung Moon. I wish I could be a girl again. I wonder if I will ever know romantic love, if I will ever trust a man or any so-called leader again.

In many ways I am a thirty-year-old woman experiencing a delayed adolescence. I am learning along with my fifteen-year-old daughter about independence, rebellion, fashion, peer pressure, personal responsibility. I am sometimes overwhelmed by my responsibilities, but I savor the freedom I now have to make my own choices. I am in control of my life. There is no more liberating feeling in the world. For the first time, I have a sense of real happiness. I have a renewed sense of energy as I pursue my studies and my volunteer work at a shelter for battered women. I have discovered with satisfaction that I have a contribution to make to my community, as well as to my children.

There is an old Korean proverb: Blame yourself, not the river, if you fall into the water. For the first time in my life, that dictum makes sense to me. I, alone, am in charge of my life. I, alone, am responsible for my actions and for the decisions I make. It is terrifying. I spent half of my lifetime ceding all decisions to a “higher authority.” Learning to make decisions for myself means being willing to accept the consequences �� the bad ones as well as the good ones.

I spend a lot of time explaining that principle to my children these days. I know the time could come when one of them will tell me that he or she wants to go back to the Unification Church. As Hyo Jin Moon’s eldest son, Shin Gil, I know, will one day be subjected to enormous pressure to return. On the jacket cover of the latest compact disc by his new band, the Apocalypse, Hyo Jin has used a photograph of himself with Shin Gil. The title of the album is Hold on to Your Love.

I pray that neither Shin Gil nor any of his siblings will be lured back to East Garden as adults. If they are, I will be saddened but accepting. I hope I will have taught them to make thoughtful, informed choices. I hope I will have taught them not to be swayed by the temptation of money or the illusion of power. I hope I will have taught them that we all must work for what we want in life; that unless we earn something, it is not really ours; that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

I will always love my children, no matter what their choices, just as I have always loved my parents, no matter my regret about some of theirs. I hope my relationship with my children will always be open and honest enough to allow us to disagree without those disagreements coming between us. That is real love, not marching in lockstep behind any Messiah.

I admit to some cynicism these days about organized religion. Those who see dangers only in “cults” ignore how fine the line is between the religious mainstream and the religious extreme. What really distinguishes those who believe that Sun Myung Moon is the Messiah from those who believe that the pope is infallible? What religion does not claim that it alone knows the best path to Heaven? Many faiths demand some suspension of critical thinking. The difference, of course, is that legitimate religions encourage believers to come freely to belief. There are no deceptive recruitment practices, no economic exploitation, no forced isolation from the rest of the world.

I have become disillusioned about religion, but not about God. I still believe in a Supreme Being. I believe that it was God who opened my eyes and God who gave me both the strength to survive and the courage to flee. My God is an all-embracing deity who supports me through my most painful struggles. He was at my side when I was a child bride, when I was a teenage mother, when I was a battered wife. He is with me now as I work to raise my children in his image. People of faith call God by different names, depict him in different ways, but we all know his heart. The God I trust gave me the ability to think; he expects me to use it.

On November 29, 1997, Sun Myung Moon presided over a mass wedding at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington, D.C. It was a far cry from a similar event in Madison Square Garden in 1982. For this latest gathering, the Unification Church had to beat the bushes to fill the stadium. Most of the twenty-eight thousand couples who attended were already married and members of other religions. Many had accepted free tickets passed out at suburban shopping malls and in supermarket parking lots to attend what the Unification Church billed as a “World Culture and Sports Festival.” The lure was not Sun Myung Moon, the Messiah. It was Whitney Houston, the pop singer. She had been offered one million dollars to sing for forty-five minutes. Unfortunately for those who came to hear her, after Houston learned just days before the event of Sun Myung Moon’s sponsorship, she canceled, citing sudden illness.

She was not the only celebrity who begged off. Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, Camelia Anwar Sadat, daughter of the assassinated Egyptian president, all changed their plans to attend after learning that the festival was a publicity stunt by Sun Myung Moon.

When the Unification Church realized it could not hide its association with the festival, Sun Myung Moon took out full-page newspaper advertisements inviting married couples to attend an “ecumenical” event designed to renew their wedding vows and strengthen family values. “You may think of me as a man surrounded by controversy,” the Reverend Moon’s ad read. “We are not trying to promote me as an individual or expand the Unification Church as an institution. Our goal is to bring together all peoples and all religions in an effort to strengthen families.”

Of those in attendance at RFK Stadium on that chilly autumn afternoon, only a few hundred were newly matched couples in the Unification Church. Sun Myung Moon’s two youngest sons were among them. They had actually been married a few months before. At the lavish family banquet that followed their double wedding, the head table was set with place cards for every member of the True Family. The Moons were determined to maintain the public fiction of family unity and perfection. There was a place setting for Je Jin and another for Jin, though Sun Myung Moon’s oldest daughter and my brother were at home in Massachusetts with their children.

There was a place card bearing my name on the head table alongside the one for Hyo Jin Moon. My chair was empty, as if I had just stepped away from the table and the True Family expected me to return at any moment.

Nansook Hong interviewed (with full transcript)

In the Shadow of the Moons book, part 1

In the Shadow of the Moons book, part 2

In the Shadow of the Moons book, part 3

In the Shadow of the Moons book, part 4

In the Shadow of the Moons book, part 5

WBZ News and Mike Wallace interview Nansook Hong

Second Generation gives a testimony on life with Hyo Jin Moon

Hyo Jin Moon came to court in Concord in the company of no fewer than four high-priced attorneys to fight Nansook Hong

Nansook Hong – [C-Span] Book Discussion – ‘In The Shadow of the Moons’ with FULL TRANSCRIPT

French In the Shadow of the Moons book (in 4 parts) :

« L’ombre de Moon » par Nansook Hong, partie 1

« L’ombre de Moon » par Nansook Hong, partie 2

« L’ombre de Moon » par Nansook Hong, partie 3

« L’ombre de Moon » par Nansook Hong, partie 4

German In the Shadow of the Moons book (in 4 parts) :

Nansook Hong – Ich schaue nicht zurück, Tiel 1

Nansook Hong – Ich schaue nicht zurück, Tiel 2

Nansook Hong – Ich schaue nicht zurück, Tiel 3

Nansook Hong – Ich schaue nicht zurück, Tiel 4

Spanish

Nansook Hong entrevistada en español

‘A la Sombra de los Moon’ por Nansook Hong

文鮮明「聖家族」の仮面を剥ぐ – 洪蘭淑

わが父文鮮明の正体 – 洪蘭淑

[customcarpentryfl]

West Palm Beach Carpenters

Best Carpenters in West Palm Beach

At Custom Carpentry Solutions, our carpenters in West Palm Beach and its surrounding areas are the best in the business.

We are the experts when it comes to all things carpentry. We are here to help bring your space to life.

[bringinbackpod]

Interview with Juna N Joey

We had the pleasure of interviewing Juna N Joey over Zoom video!

Juna N Joey are a brother/sister Country Pop Duo from West Palm Beach, FL, singer/songwriters (Think Modern Day Carpenters meets Lady A/Dan + Shay). The duo's popularity exploded organically by posting covers on YouTube with over 7 million collective views. The attention has provided a steady stream of inquiries for collaborations from MattyBRaps, Sky Katz (Disney Star), German star Sina-Drums. The offers keep pouring in from industry executives and major record labels alike. One producer was quoted as saying, "NBC loves these kids", DreamworksTV, Nickelodeon’s AMMF, America's Got Talent, and a tour with American Idol alum Cade Foehner was to follow. To say 2019 was a busy year, is an understatement, and "We've Only Just Begun." Their popularity still remains stronger than ever in 2020 with a recent viral video of 6.4 million views on Tik Tok. They are now officially influencers.

Juna at 16, is an attractive and charismatic singer/songwriter with the confidence of a seasoned pro and the voice of an angel. She also plays acoustic guitar/piano/keyboard in her band. She has developed her writing abilities from the tender age of 11. Joey at 18, is also a singer/songwriter, with heartthrob looks and beautiful harmonies. He is also the lead guitarist/sax and piano player with the band. They not only write by themselves, they also co-write with top songwriters in Nashville, NYC and LA.

Juna N Joey are releasing their new self titled EP produced by Ken Royster of the Luke Combs “Hurricane” fame and many others which will be released in 2021.

We want to hear from you! Please email Tera@BringinitBackwards.com.

www.BringinitBackwards.com

#podcast #interview #bringinbackpod #junanjoey #siblings #zoom #aspn #americansongwriter #americansongwriterpodcastnetwork

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[equinoxparanormal]

The Riddle House

The Riddle House was built in 1905 and is located in Yesteryear Village, Palm Beach County Florida. The Yesteryear village is not its original location; it was originally built in West Palm Beach.

The Riddle House was built adjacent to Woodlawn Cemetery. The old cemetery started becoming a host to crimes, like grave robbery. Being adjacent to the cemetery it was then used as ‘Gatekeeper’s Cottage’, where the security in charge of the cemetery lived. During that time a cemetery employee named ‘Buck’ was allegedly killed in an intense argument.

Locals would report seeing the ghost of Buck, who seemed to be continuing his work at Woodlawn cemetery. Later in 1920, Karl Riddle, a city manager and supervisor of Woodlawn Cemetery, moved into the haunted house and made it his own private residence. This is when the Riddle House received its name and was no longer known as the Gatekeepers Cottage.

During his tenure in the Riddle House, an employee name “Joseph”, encountered financial difficulties. Mentally stressed with all this and having no option, Joseph committed suicide by hanging himself in the attic. After this incident Karl Riddle began witnessing strange incidents. There would be noises of things dragged on the stairs, a shadow of a man was seen through the attic windows and much more.

Workers felt some unseen man touching them. Terrified by the happening all the workers left the place and never returned. Finally Karl Riddle and his family had to leave the place. Many people and businesses tried to occupy the building. Everyone faced the same horror. The last ones to occupy the place was Palm Beach Atlantic College in the 1980s’. They used the place as a girl’s dormitory. Then there was no one to occupy the place and eventually the house began deteriorating.

It was then decided to demolish the house. John Riddle, nephew of Karl moved the house to Yesteryear Village. He dismantled the place and transported it. The roof and attic were split in two, as was the first and second floors. Finally, the building was moved to Yesteryear Village and was reassembled, where it stands now. While moving and reconstructing the house the workers and the carpenters experienced paranormal activities. Their tools would be moved, the windows would break and someone would hit on their heads with hammer. Terrified by these, the workers had stopped the construction for six months.

It is also said that during the unveiling of the house, people witnessed the unexpected presence of a couple dressed in early twentieth century clothes. Later everyone found their pictures in the photos of the original Riddle House. This has prompted numerous paranormal investigations by people wanting to prove that the ghosts of Riddle House are real. The Riddle House has been the center of investigations, television spots and more since its humble beginnings in 1905 and is undoubtedly one of the most haunted places in Florida.

[CoolInterestingStuff.com]

[elderperfect]

2020 Best Nursing Homes - Florida

ElderPerfect a leading publisher on senior healthcare across the United States, today announced the recipients of the Best Nursing Homes in Florida for 2020. These awards are designed to recognize providers based on their ability to consistently deliver excellence in the areas of Health Inspections, Quality of Residence Care, Penalties and Staffing. We’ve evaluated over 698 facilities, of which 190 (27%) met our top rating. This report marks the Gold Standard in terms of care for seniors. 0 Ranked Best Facilities  5/5

US Standard vs. Best Facilities

Average Number of Beds: 106 vs 95 Average Occupancy: 81% vs 83% Average Health Inspection Rating: 2.82 / 5.00 vs. 3.90 / 5.00 Average Government Rating: 3.01 / 5.00 vs. 4.49 / 5.00

Rating Methodology

Health Inspections Every year, the government assigns inspectors to conduct a formal review of nursing homes for regulatory purposes to meet the mandates outlined for Medicare and Medicaid, this aims to measure and improve the safety of residents across providers. Facilities may also be inspected when complaints are submitted or based on a reported incident. When noncompliance is identified, the facility is served a citation that indicates which regulation that was identified, along with the severity of the incident. Nursing homes are subsequently required to execute a program of resolution in order to meet compliance. Some scenarios require enforcement actions to be applied, such as a civil monetary penalty or withholding of payment(s), to incentivize resolution in a timely manner. Penalties Facilities are applied 2 types of penalties due to non-compliance / accumulation of incidents. Civil penalties are monetary fines that may be applied to a facility based on citations / infractions identified during a review. The severity of a penalty is defined primarily by the size and frequency of the infraction. Quality of Residence Care There are 3 types of resident care ratings, but for this exercise, we primarily focused on the overall quality measure rating. The quality measures (QMs) include 17 data points that are derived from clinical information reported by the respective nursing home and also from Medicare claims data submitted for payment. Ratings are calculated for the QM domain using the 4 most recent quarters for which data are available. A nursing home receives points contingent on performance on each measure (weighting distribution is not equal). Staffing Staffing research is submitted regularly by the facility and is adjusted for the requirement of the facilities residents. For each of registered nurse staff and total staffing, a 1 - 5 rating is applied according to definitions established for each category. These ratings are subsequently combined to assign an overall staffing rating. As an example, to get an overall staffing rating of 5 stars, nursing homes must earn a rating of 5 stars for both registered nurses and total staffing. Nursing homes could also be assigned a 1 star rating should they not have a registered nurse on-site daily, and do not submit staffing data, or which the data cannot be verified.

Best Nursing Homes in Florida

CORAL GABLES NURSING AND REHABILITATION CENTER RIVER GARDEN HEBREW HOME FOR THE AGED COMMUNITY CONVALESCENT CENTER MANOR PINES CONVALESCENT CENTER PANAMA CITY HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER CRESTVIEW REHABILITATION CENTER, LLC THE LODGE HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER W FRANK WELLS NURSING HOME BOCA RATON REHABILITATION CENTER JOHN KNOX VILLAGE OF POMPANO BEACH STUART REHABILITATION AND HEALTHCARE CROSS POINTE CARE CENTER BROOKSVILLE HEALTHCARE CENTER WHISPERING OAKS PARKVIEW REHABILITATION CENTER AT WINTER PARK BAYVIEW CENTER CANTERBURY TOWERS INC REHAB & HEALTHCARE CENTER OF CAPE CORAL WILLOWBROOKE COURT AT ST ANDREWS ST MARK VILLAGE OAKS OF KISSIMMEE HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER ROYAL OAK NURSING CENTER CHATEAU AT MOORINGS PARK, THE EVERGREEN WOODS AYERS HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER PORT ST LUCIE REHABILITATION AND HEALTHCARE WOODBRIDGE CARE CENTER RIVERSIDE CARE CENTER CROSS SHORES CARE CENTER MANORCARE HEALTH SERVICES DUNEDIN HAINES CITY HEALTH CARE WILLOWBROOKE COURT AT AZALEA TRACE COURTENAY SPRINGS VILLAGE SIGNATURE HEALTHCARE OF PALM BEACH QUALITY HEALTH OF FERNANDINA BEACH VILLAGE ON THE ISLE LAKE VIEW CARE CENTER AT DELRAY HEALTH CENTRAL PARK MANORCARE HEALTH SERVICES OKEECHOBEE HEALTH CARE FACILITY SUSANNA WESLEY HEALTH CENTER SOUTH DADE NURSING AND REHABILITATION CENTER PARK SUMMIT AT CORAL SPRINGS MARGATE HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER SALERNO BAY HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER HIALEAH SHORES NURSING AND REHAB CENTER SOLARIS HEALTHCARE PLANT CITY QUALITY HEALTH OF ORANGE COUNTY LEHIGH ACRES HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER QUALITY HEALTH OF NORTH PORT VISTA MANOR ARCADIA HEALTH & REHABILITATION CENTER HARBOUR HEALTH CENTER SOLARIS HEALTHCARE BAYONET POINT FLAGLER HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER MOULTRIE CREEK NURSING AND REHAB CENTER CARROLLWOOD CARE CENTER VILLAGE ON THE GREEN OAK VIEW REHABILITATION CENTER PALM GARDEN OF TAMPA HARBOURS EDGE HEARTLAND OF ZEPHYRHILLS GRAND BOULEVARD HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER SUWANNEE HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER REGENTS PARK OF WINTER PARK WEST GABLES HEALTH CARE CENTER CHAUTAUQUA REHABILITATION AND NURSING CENTER COURT AT PALM AIRE, THE SURREY PLACE HEALTHCARE AND REHABILITATION VICAR'S LANDING NURSING HOME BARTRAM CROSSING BAYSHORE POINTE NURSING AND REHAB CENTER WESTCHESTER GARDENS HEALTH & REHABILITATION MANOR AT CARPENTERS, THE SIGNATURE HEALTHCARE OF NORTH FLORIDA OAKBROOK HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER NORTHDALE REHABILITATION CENTER SOLARIS HEALTHCARE MERRITT ISLAND ARBOR TRAIL REHAB AND SKILLED NURSING CENTER JACKSONVILLE NURSING AND REHAB CENTER ALHAMBRA HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER ALPINE HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER HAMPTON COURT NURSING AND REHABILITATION CENTER PALACE AT KENDALL NURSING AND REHABILITATION CENTE CROSS CARE CENTER WASHINGTON REHABILITATION AND NURSING CENTER CHIPOLA HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER SOLARIS HEALTHCARE IMPERIAL SYLVAN HEALTH CENTER ROSEWOOD HEALTHCARE AND REHABILITATION CENTER SPECIALTY HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER CONWAY LAKES HEALTH & REHABILITATION CENTER STRATFORD COURT OF PALM HARBOR CROSS GARDENS CARE CENTER TRI-COUNTY NURSING HOME

  GLENCOVE HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER CROSSROADS, THE HEALTHPARK CARE CENTER MANOR AT BLUE WATER BAY, THE THE GARDENS AT DEPUGH SOLARIS SENIOR LIVING NORTH NAPLES DELANEY PARK HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER ROYAL OAKS NURSING AND REHAB CENTER CORAL BAY HEALTHCARE AND REHABILITATION EDGEWATER AT WATERMAN VILLAGE JOSEPH L MORSE HEALTH CENTER INC THE MADISON HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER SAMANTHA WILSON CARE CENTER PLYMOUTH HARBOR INCORPORATED TAYLOR CARE CENTER ROHR HOME, THE EDGEWOOD NURSING CENTER CATHEDRAL GERONTOLOGY CENTER, INC CROSSINGS, THE EDWARD J HEALEY REHABILITATION AND NURSING CENTER EMORY L BENNETT MEMORIAL VETERANS NURSING HOME WRIGHTS HEALTHCARE AND REHABILITATION CENTER BARRINGTON TERRACE OF BOYNTON BEACH HEARTLAND HEALTH CARE AND REHABILITATION CENTER OF WESTMINSTER OAKS RULEME CENTER PREMIER PLACE AT THE GLENVIEW SOLARIS HEALTHCARE CHARLOTTE HARBOR METRO WEST NURSING AND REHAB CENTER NURSING CENTER AT MERCY, THE PINELLAS POINT NURSING AND REHAB CENTER WESTMINSTER WINTER PARK WINKLER COURT LAKE PARK OF MADISON NURSING AND REHABILITATION CE WESTMINSTER WOODS ON JULINGTON CREEK SOLARIS HEALTHCARE DAYTONA WESTMINSTER SUNCOAST VILLA HEALTH & REHABILITATION CENTER PALMETTO SUBACUTE CARE CENTER SOLARIS HEALTHCARE WINDERMERE SHANDS JACKSONVILLE MEDICAL CENTER SHELL POINT NURSING PAVILION VI AT LAKESIDE VILLAGE MARTIN NURSING AND REHABILITATION COMMUNITY HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER GULF SHORE CARE CENTER SOLARIS HEALTHCARE COCONUT CREEK LAKESIDE NURSING AND REHABILITATION CENTER LIFE CARE CENTER OF OCALA BALDOMERO LOPEZ MEMORIAL VETERANS NURSING HOME FLORIDEAN NURSING AND REHABILITATION CENTER, THE CROSS CITY NURSING AND REHABILITATION CENTER CONSULATE HEALTH CARE OF KISSIMMEE LODGE AT CYPRESS COVE, THE BROOKDALE PALMER RANCH SNF LIFE CARE CENTER OF SARASOTA SHOAL CREEK REHABILITATION CENTER VICTORIA NURSING & REHABILITATION CENTER, INC. INN AT SARASOTA BAY CLUB WESTMINSTER ST AUGUSTINE RIVERCHASE HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER BRYNWOOD HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER LIFE CARE CENTER OF INVERRARY HAVEN OF OUR LADY OF PEACE SUNNYSIDE NURSING HOME FINR III, LLC NORTHWEST FLORIDA COMMUNITY HOSPITAL (SNU) LIFE CARE CENTER OF ESTERO RIDGECREST NURSING AND REHABILITATION CENTER BENTLEY CARE CENTER GLENRIDGE ON PALMER RANCH INC. ISLE HEALTH & REHABILITATION CENTER OAK HAMMOCK AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA INC GRACE REHABILITATION CENTER OF VERO BEACH VI AT AVENTURA MOOSEHAVEN VILLA MARIA WEST SKILLED NURSING FACILITY ASTORIA HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER CLYDE E LASSEN STATE VETERANS NURSING HOME BENDERSON FAMILY SKILLED NURSING AND REHAB CENTER KR AT HILLSBOROUGH LAKES RIVIERA HEALTH RESORT CLUB HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER AT THE VILLA PAVILION FOR HEALTH CARE, THE FLORIDA BAPTIST RETIREMENT CENTER STEWARD SEBASTIAN RIVER MEDICAL CENTER RENAISSANCE AT THE TERRACES SKYTOP VIEW REHABILITATION CENTER THE ARLINGTON OF NAPLES, INC, LEE MEMORIAL HOSPITAL SKILLED NURSING UNIT BUFFALO CROSSING HEALTHCARE AND REHABILITATION CEN LARGO HEALTH AND REHABILITATION CENTER OLIVE BRANCH HEALTH AND REHAB CENTER WESTMINSTER BALDWIN PARK

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[hospitalityuplyft]

City of West Palm Beach is changing at a fast place. Here is to the men and women that are building the future of Palm Beach. . . . . . #contractor #construction #interiordesign #design #buildersofig #generalcontractor #carpentry #renovation #builder #keepcraftalive #contractors #architecture #buildersofinsta #remodel #homeimprovement #realestate #contractorsofinstagram #remodeling #carpenter #builders #constructionlife #homerenovation #powertools #woodworking #tools #homedecor #finehomebuilding #concrete #newconstruction #home (at West Palm Beach, Florida) https://www.instagram.com/p/B63H2sSJysg/?igshid=u2e3yunlowzf