#I brought up this push for consumption because a lot of these new phrases and language uses

[boysnberriespie]

There’s always something off putting about new internet memes and language* becoming serious discourse with real analysis (fine and normal, academics do it all the time) but people with no media literacy read those posts/essays and think that means anybody who says those things is brainwashed sheep. They’ve been analyzed and therefore there is something significantly wrong with them.

Can we not do neutral analysis anymore? Can nothing be interesting for its own sake? Must we be the arbiters of cultural value based on the next new substack essay and how we felt about it?

*not including the misuse appropriation of AAVE which is not what I’m thinking about in this moment, and while a connected discussion, isn’t necessarily the same thing as people coming up with corecore or even something like blorbo

[fandompitfalls]

Fandom, Misogyny, and the Struggle for "Clarice"

Originally posted 2/24/21

There’s a quote that, summarized, says, in order for a woman to be seen as an equal to men, she has to work twice as hard. And never more what that brought to light outside real life than Valentine’s Day weekend when CBS aired the premiere of Clarice.

In 1991, Silence of the Lambs, a runaway hit thriller staring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins came onto public consumption and introduced the world to the phrase “quid pro quo” and the name Hannibal Lecter became a well-known name.

In 2013, a series by the name of Hannibal staring Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy premiered on television and was immediately embraced by the fandom community.  Dating long before Silence of the Lambs, the show features a BSU consultant by the name of Will Graham who is called into service because of his unique ability to profile serial killers.  He develops a professional and later, a personal relationship with Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

In the beginning the question of Will’s mental state was brought up, the reason Lecter was introduced into the series, he was hired on assess Will Graham after cases to make sure his fragile mental state was not deteriorating.  It allowed Hannibal to get close to Will and manipulate him in an attempt to turn Will into a killer like himself.  The show ended after three seasons and during those seasons, the show’s creator, Brian Fuller, made cinematography magic with his sets and scenes, a lot of them gruesome yet exquisite.

Hannibal became fandom’s gory darling, the relationship between Will and Hannibal being the main fodder. This was furthered by the support of Bryan Fuller’s comment in Collider stating that he saw Hannibal as being in love with Will Graham. https://collider.com/bryan-fuller-hannibal-silence-of-the-lambs-interview/

Just this past week, a new twist on the Silence of the Lambs timeline premiered with Clarice. Clarice takes place a year after Silence of the Lambs and the Buffalo Bill murders. She is pulled from the BAU and sent to a task force run by Ruth Martin, the mother of Buffalo Bill’s only surviving member, Catherine.  Created by Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet, Clarice is not affiliated with Hannibal, the Series, in any way, rather, it is a telling of Clarice Starling’s story after the events of Silence of the Lambs.

Here’s where it differs. And remember, this is only the first episode.  By the time I post this, there will be two episodes out.

In the opening scene, Clarice Starling is sitting in a therapist’s office.  The therapist, a man with no name as of yet, is trying to get her to tell him about her feelings regarding the one-year anniversary of the Buffalo Bill murders.  He even has a copy of a magazine that features her on the cover with the title “Bride of Frankenstein.”  The more he pushes the more she holds back, telling him the rots answers that most FBI therapists want to here.  Finally, she mentions the magazine was bought by him as a trigger to see if she would break and he tells her that he thinks she’s not stable enough to go back in the field because she refuses to use to the “survivor” in relation to her encounter with Buffalo Bill.  She is not a survivor, she was never kidnapped, she was an FBI agent doing a job.  He also cites her relationship with Hannibal Lecter, insinuating that it was more personal in nature than he thought necessary.

Before he can put her at a desk, she is called back into the field by Ruth Martin and put under the team led by Paul Krendler, a man who Clarice “upped” in the movie when she was a trainee.  He doesn’t want her there, insists on a profile after seeing the first two bodies and when she can’t give an accurate one because she doesn’t have all the evidence, he tells her she had to tell the press it’s a serial killer.

It’s already shown that Clarice has a bit of trauma with press conferences and this is something that keeps coming back.  The press want Clarice and Paul Krendler just wants her to be the face of his team and tells her that she will say what he tells her to say.  Clarice is not taken seriously by Krindler, by anyone else in the office, (there’s a scene where men from the other unit that share an office, coat her desk drawer with lotion and leave that lotion and a basket in the drawer and then laugh about it).  Clarice is blocked at every turn by men, even her therapist calls Krindler and tells him to bench her because he’s worried about her mental state.

The first time we meet Will Graham, his mental state is mentioned as tenuous, yet the FBI have no problem throwing him right out into the field.  Clarice was a trainee who managed to catch a serial killer, and somehow she’s considered too “fragile” to be put on any cases other than desk jobs.  In fact, throughout the entire first episode, the only person on her new team to take an interest and believe what she says is Thomas Esquivel, an ex-special forces soldier turned agent who believes in what she says.

From the first moment of this show the misogyny was right out on view, there is no hiding that all of the men in this show do not like Clarice because she’s young, she’s a woman and they are intimidated by her talent.  Her only support comes from Agent Esquivel and her friend and former trainee Ardelia Mapp.

I mention the misogyny because it’s not all on the show. It’s from the fans as well. The first time I was reminded the show was on was when I noticed Hannibal was trending on Twitter. The day and time frame Clarice aired its premiere, Twitter was lamenting that they wanted a season four of Hannibal.  While researching for this blog, I used IMDB to get names and plot points.  And came across this comment about the premiere:

“Can we bring back Hannibal, please?

12 February 2021 | by [redacted]

And by that I am of course referring to the excellent series featuring Mads Mikkelsen's amazing portrayal of Dr. Hannibal Lecter. That series had great style, fantastic atmosphere, and stellar directing, editing, and acting. They planned to tell the ultimate Hannibal Lecter story but only were able to make three seasons out of a seven season plan. So, here we have a Clarice Starling series that had been in the works for years but didn't get the train running till now. So the premiere - Meh. Rebecca Breeds makes a very good Clarice but nothing else is up to her level. The cinematography isn't bad but the atmosphere is lacking, the characters are none too memorable, and the storyline isn't attention grabbing enough. I give it about a season at least.”

I don’t know the time when this posted, but I’m not surprised by the comment at all.  Comment and review bombing seems to be the way that fans express their “disappointment” about their old shows not getting anything…or rather, their favorite male characters not getting more screen time.

On the same page, the below link was posted.  This was one day after the first episode of Clarice premiered:

Clarice: Season Two? Has the CBS TV Series Been Cancelled or Renewed Yet? 13 February 2021 | TVSeriesFinale

A freshman series about a female criminal profiler who is pushed down, ignored, harassed because of her sex.  It’s almost a case of life imitating art.

I was going to leave this post as it was and post it today but last week the second episode aired which showed Clarice pushing past childhood trauma to face down a cult leader and a corrupt government system thereby earning Krendler’s respect and her position on the team.  And while Thomas Esquivel told her that a team is only good if each of its members understand that they can trust and support one another, thereby hopefully foreshadowing that this team will eventually accept Clarice as one of their own and in turn she will do the same, it took her risking her life by going back inside the compound, disregarding orders and singlehandedly getting the information needed to put both the cult leader and head of the County Sheriff down for the count for Krendler to finally see her worth and decide to keep her on the team.

I liked Clarice.  It was hard to watch at times, not only because of the trauma she is dealing with as well as the survivor, Catherine, calling her and harassing her, but because of the anger I felt watching Clarice get stepped on time and time again by the men in this show, only to get up and do her job.  Her final speech she makes at the end of episode one about her grandmother is inspiring and gives the viewer a bit of a “in your face” to the men behind her, especially Krendler…even though we all know he’s going to make her life a living hell when they get back to the office because she didn’t follow his rules.  That said, this show is very much a procedural, much like CSI or Criminal Minds. The series follows the format of the movie.  This is not Hannibal.  It’s not trying to be Hannibal, It is trying to be Clarice.  And, as the quote goes, it’s going to have to work twice as hard to even get one half of the respect it deserves.

[ourkinfolx]

No. 1: Fania

Fania Noel is a woman with plans. And not just the vast, sweeping plans like the dismantling of capitalism and black liberation. She also has smaller, but no less important, plans like brunch with friends, hitting the gym. 

“Every week, I put in my calendar the times I need to be efficient,” she explains. “So I put what time I work out, with my friends, my time to watch TV shows, to read. And after, I can give people the link to put obligations.”

The link she’s referring to is her online scheduling system connected to her personal website. It’s one I’ve become well acquainted with after our first two failed attempts to schedule interviews. We had plans to meet in person, in a Parisian Brasserie she’d recommended, but between canceled flights and buses, Skype turned out to be the most practical option. Our disrupted travel was just one in a long list of inconveniences brought on by the virus safety measures. It might even be said that the coronavirus also had plans. 

The global pandemic and subsequent slowing of—well, everything comes up a few times in our conversation. Like some of the other activists I’ve talked to, Fania sees a silver lining, an opportunity.

“This might be the only sequence of events in the history of humanity that you have the whole planet living at the same tempo, being in quarantine or locked down or slowed activity,” she says. 

“So we all have a lot of time to think about how [society is] fucked up or the weight of our lives in terms of this society. And I think we have to ask if we want to go back to this rushed kind of living. It’s really a game changer.”

I first heard of Fania, a Haitian born afro-feminist, earlier in the year, while talking to a Parisian friend about the need for more black spaces in the city. She angrily described how a few years ago, Fania tried to have an event for black women, only to be met with fierce backlash and derision from not just right-wing groups, but anti-racist and anti-Semitic groups. The event wasn’t actually Fania’s alone; it was an effort by Mwasi Collective, a French afro-feminist group that she’s involved with. 

Either way, it was a minor scandal. Hotly debated on French TV and radio. Even Anne Hidalgo, Paris’s mayor, voiced disapproval. Critics claimed the event, called Nyansapo Festival, was racist itself by exclusion because most of the space had been designated for black women only. 

Despite all the fuss, the Nyansapo Festival went on as planned. Several years later, following the killing of George Floyd and the international movement that followed, Anne Hidalgo published a tweet ending with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. I found it curious, she’s always struck me as more of an #AllLivesMatter type. 

I ask Fania if, given the tweet and possible change of heart from the mayor, she thinks her event would be better received in the current climate. She points out that there had been two Nyansapo Festivals since, with little to no media coverage, but seems overall uninterested in rehashing the drama. 

“We’re way beyond that now,” she says, shaking her head. She ends it in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been almost imperceptibly corrected by a black woman, and I quickly move on to the next topic. 

It’s not until later, when reading some of her other interviews, that I’m able to fully contextualize our exchange. It’s common for activists, especially those working in or belonging to a culture where their identity makes them a minority, to be asked to view their work through the lens of conditional acceptance of a larger group of oppressors and/or gatekeepers. Asking feminists what men think, asking LGBT how they plan to placate heterosexuals. In her dismissal, Fania resists the line of questioning altogether, and in another interview, she makes the point more succinctly when explaining why she doesn’t believe in the concept of public opinion: 

“As an activist, the core ‘public’ is black people and to think about the antagonism and balance of power in terms of our politics rather than its reception. It’s normal in a racist, capitalist, patriarchal society that a political [movement] proposing the abolition of the system is not welcomed.”

One might argue if you’re not pissing anyone off, you’re not doing anything important. 

Rolling Stone’s July cover is a painting featuring a dark-skinned black woman, braids pulled into a round bun on her crown. She has George Floyd’s face on her T-shirt and an American flag bandana around her neck. One of her hands is raised in a fist, the other holds the hand of a young black boy next to her. Behind her, a crowd, some with fists also raised, carry signs with phrases like Our Lives Matter and Justice For All Now. 

According to Rolling Stone, they tasked the artist, Kadir Nelson, with creating something hopeful and inspirational and he “immediately thought of Eugène Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People,’ the iconic 1830 painting that depicts a woman leading the French Revolution.”

Regarding his choice to center a black woman in the piece, he explains: “The people who were pushing for those changes were African American women. They are very much at the forefront in spearheading this change, so I thought it was very important for an African American woman to be at the very center of this painting, because they have very much been at the center of this movement.”

During our call, I mention the painting and ask Fania her thoughts on why, so often, we find black women at the forefront of any social justice or human rights movement.

“Women have always organized,” she says simply. “Women work collectively, they run organizations.” She points to the church and organized religion as an example. 

“Look at the composition of church. Who’s going to church, who’s going to ask for help from God?”

Anyone who’s spent time in the houses of worship for a patriarchal religion has vivid memories of the very present men in the room. From the booming voices and squared shoulders of the pulpit to the stern, sometimes shaming looks of brothers, uncles, fathers. But the women, often more numerous, run the councils and the choirs. Around the world women pray more, attend church and are generally more religious. And the men?

“In a context of church, it’s really acceptable to ask for help from God. Because it’s God,” Fania says. “But you don’t have a lot of black men, a lot of men in any kind of church.”

That isn’t to say that men, especially black men, are complacent. Fania notes that traditional activism goes against the patriarchy’s narrow view of masculinity. 

Activism, she explains, requires one to acknowledge they’ve been a victim of a system before they can demand power. And for a lot of men, that’s not an option. 

“They want to be seen as strong,” she says. “As leaders. They want to exert control.”

In short, both black men and women acknowledge the system would have us powerless, but while women organize to collectively dismantle it, men tend to stake out on their own to dominate it. 

Black capitalism as resistance isn’t new, and was more prominent during the civil rights movement, which was largely led by men. In 1968, Roy Innis, co-national director for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) opined, 

“We are past the stage where we can talk seriously of whites acting toward blacks out of moral imperatives.” While CORE’s other director, Floyd McKissick, reasoned, 

“If a Black man has no bread in his pocket, the solution to his problem is not integration; it’s to get some bread.”

More recently the dynamics of this played out in real time on Twitter as Telfar, a black, queer-owned fashion label, sent out notifications of a handbag restock only to be immediately descended upon by a group of largely black, male resellers. Telfar describes itself as affordable luxury for everyone, and for many of the black women who buy Telfar, it exists as proof that class and fashion need not be so inextricably linked. But for the men who bulk purchased the bags just to triple the price and resell, these were just more items to wring capital out of on their quest to buy a seat at the table. 

Of course, it’s not unreasonable to argue that the purchase of a product, regardless of who makes it, as a path to liberation is still black capitalism. And in another interview, Fania specifically warns against this type of consumption. “Neoliberal Afrofeminism is more focused on representation, making the elite more diverse, and integration. This kind of afrofeminism is very media compatible. Like great Konbini-style videos about hair, lack of shades of makeup, and [other forms of] commodification.” But, she explains, “The goal is a mass movement where our people are involved, not just passively or as consumers.” 

But can consumption be divorced from black liberation if it’s such a key aspect in how so many black people organize? I bring up all the calls to “buy black” that happened in the wake of George Floyd. Some of it could be attributed to the cabin-fever induced retail therapy we all engaged in during quarantine. And for those of us who, for whatever reason, were unable to add our bodies to a protest, money seemed like an easy thing to offer. Buy a candle. A tub of shea butter. A tube of lip gloss. But what did it all really accomplish, in retrospect?

“We have to think about solidarity,” Fania explains. “Solidarity is a project. When we say support black-owned business, we still have to think about the goal, the project. So if we support coffee shops, bookshops, hair dressers that have a special place in the community and are open to the community and in conversation with the community, it’s good and it can help. But if it’s just to make some individual black people richer, it’s really limited.”

Black capitalism vs anti-capitalism remains an ongoing debate, but shouldn’t be a distraction. In the end, everyone will contribute how they best see fit and we still share a common goal. Besides, we’ll need all hands on deck to best make use of our current momentum. And that’s something Fania underscores in one of the last points she makes during our conversation:

“Something we have to repeat to people is that these protests: keep doing them. Because you have years and years of organization behind you. People came out against police brutality and a week later we’re talking about how we move towards the abolition of police, how we go towards the abolition of prison. How we move towards the end of capitalism. And this is possible because you have a grassroots organization thinking about the question even when no one else was asking it. So now we have the New York Times and the media asking if these things are possible. But that’s because even when we didn’t have the spotlight, we were working on the questions about the world after. And every day radical organizations, black liberation organizations, are thinking about the world after and the end of this system. And when protests and revolts happen, we can get there and say ‘we have a plan for this.’”

[blvckenedsoul]

An Apology

There was no guarantee that Danny would be home. It was a thought that had crossed his mind several times since he’d first started for the Italian’s apartment building. He knew enough to know Danny’s place of work wasn’t open yet---wouldn’t be open until a little closer to lunch---but that didn’t necessarily mean that Danny hadn’t gone out somewhere.

But waiting was out of the question. It felt too much like cornering Danny. Like something he’d do for work, had done for work, rather than an attempt at making amends.

He didn’t have a clear plan for what he would do then, though. Should he call? Let Danny decide if he wanted Nikolai to come around again? Did he come back without calling? Immediately, that thought was cast aside. It, too, felt too much like creating a trap. He weighed the problem on the drive over in between goings over of what he was going to say.

The trip through Danny’s building---in the front doors, up the elevator, down the hall---was, thankfully, without chance encounters. He was already unsure enough of how to go about this; he didn’t know how well (if at all) he’d be able to go through with it if he had to put up his work front for a nosy neighbor.

Danny’s front door was nondescript, more reminiscent of the apartments of Moscow, than the glimmering facades of Battery City. The paint had chipped in a few places, the metal numbers screwed in place beginning to tarnish.

His knock thudded dully into the wood.

On the other side of the door, Zitto and Orso sent up alarm in their low, loud guarding woofs.

“Danny?”

After another few warning barks, the dogs fell quiet, pacified either by the familiarity of Nikolai’s voice, or hushed by Danny. (He hoped desperately for the latter.)

But the door didn’t open, nor did any other noise come from within.

“It’s me.” Though he was suddenly unsure of what language Danny would prefer to hear this in, Nikolai began and continued in Russian. English, the only other language they shared, left far too much room for him to misspeak.

“Noelle told me what you said,” he continued tentatively. Her words---Danny’s words, really---had echoed in his head ever since, seeping into his dreams, snagging on every silence.

He bowed toward the door, head ducked, hands slowly finding places for themselves in his pockets, for lack of anywhere else to comfortably put them.

“I never meant to hurt you.” But that didn’t change the fact that he had. He’d pushed Danny to confrontation, hadn’t known the right words to try to soothe the wounds then and there. He followed those words with a confession almost more to himself, in its quiet, “I never mean to hurt you.” He never said the right things. This was hardly the first time he’d blundered over Danny’s feelings.

“You mean everything to me.” Just saying it out loud to the door made him want to cringe away, curl into himself. It was vulnerable and terrifying. He didn’t feel like he’d earned the right to say it. “I’m sorry I let you think otherwise.”

He wasn’t good at this part. Putting guilt into words. Apologizing. Repenting.

He didn’t have a reference point.

They’d spent---he’d spent---too long letting things lie that shouldn’t have been allowed to do so.

“I don’t know how to be good for you.” His hands knew too much death. His heart was a crippled thing that had never figured out how to express his feelings. Hadn’t even figured out how to interpret his feelings. “I’m jealous, and violent, and I have a horrible temper, and--” And he stepped on other people’s feelings even when he tried to make amends. And he had lived in shadows for too long. And and and-- “You deserve better.”

He didn’t know how to find the balance between squeezing too tight and letting go entirely. How to hold without strangling or dropping.

“I don’t know how to do this.”

He didn’t know how to reconcile not feeling worth Danny’s affections with the knowledge that Danny had been just as jealous as Nikolai had been when the situation had been reversed, when faced with the knowledge that Nikolai had been sleeping with other people.

“I want to make this right, but I don’t know how.”

An apology wasn’t enough. A hundred apologies wouldn’t be enough. But he didn’t know what else he was supposed to do.

“I thought I was supposed to let you go. I thought--” In incomplete pictures. That if letting go hurt, then maybe that was what he was supposed to do. He didn’t know. “It was supposed to be the right thing to do. So you could move on with your life.”

He didn’t know.

He didn’t know.

“I’m sorry.”

Nikolai shifted, lifting his shoulders up in a rolling motion that attempted to dispel the tension, the discomfort, that had taken up residence there. His emotions were tumultuous, too hard to hold long enough to put names to them all. He finally looked up and down the hall, jaw working as he sought out evidence that someone else had born witness to his confessional.

“That’s all,” he finished, a few awkward syllables. “I... will call, so you know I came by. But if you don’t want to talk to me, that’s okay.” If this truly was it, if he’d worn out his second chances, then the last thing he wanted was to force Danny to keep interacting with him.

“Okay.” Slowly, he drew away from the door, forcing his back to straighten, drawing his shoulders back. It felt like an energy outside himself, more distant even than the front he offered at social functions, where he couldn’t just be ‘large and gruff and frown’.

He felt unsteady. Not like the world had been knocked off-kilter, but rather that he had. He had thought that he’d known where he and Danny had stood. Now... Now he’d kneel at Danny’s feet and beg for forgiveness, even if meant hearing that Danny no longer wanted him around. This was falling in the worst ways.

The carpet of the hall was wrong under his shoes. The silence grew oppressive. He couldn’t bear the thought of taking the elevator back down.

“Nikolai.”

He hadn’t even properly registered a door behind him opening. But that was Danny’s voice, clear as day, carrying easily down bare walls. He turned sharply, could feel his own hopefulness force itself through cracks in his armor.

“Did you mean it?”

He didn’t have to ask which part. “Yes.” Every word.

After a beat, Danny stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind him. He took a few steps down the hall, but didn’t bridge the gap in its entirety. “Why did you never say anything?”

Nikolai wasn’t sure which part Danny meant; he hadn’t said a lot of things before then that he should have. “I know I, owed you an apology sooner--”

“Not that.” Then--? “I’ve spent years thinking you weren’t ready. Or that maybe you didn’t feel the same. And then you’d get mad that I was sleeping with someone else, and I’d think maybe you’d say something, but you never did.”

Oh.

“Why did you never say anything?”

“I--” Somewhere along the way, he’d pulled his hands free of his pockets. He brought them up now, looked down at his upturned palms, helplessly searching for words to share the thoughts that had come so easily before.

When he looked up again, Danny was already looking away, his quiet sigh a loaded thing in the extended silence.

He was still saying the wrong things.

The chance to fix this was slipping through his fingers because he couldn’t find the right words.

Danny started to speak, but his words were lost under Nikolai’s own, “I’d have killed Church that day, if you hadn’t stepped in.”

There wasn’t enough of a segue. He knew that even before Danny startled into silence---whether because of the admission, or the change in tone, he didn’t know. But the words were out there. It was the beginning of the thought he’d been trying to convey.

“I’m not proud of it, but I’d do it again.” That was who he was. The Company had hired him for those violent impulses, and tolerated the transgressions that arose outside of his work. “I would never hurt you--”

“I know that,” Danny snapped. “Do you think I’m blind? I knew what I was getting into bed with when I moved in with you.”

Nikolai shifted, weight drawing back to rest on his heels. Taken aback. That was the English phrase. It felt fitting, to describe the effect of this new piece of information.

It was one thing to think maybe Danny knew some of the specifics of what Nikolai had gotten up to while working, and another thing entirely for Danny himself to confirm it.

Danny was continuing on before he could think up anything to say to that, “If I ever thought you were a threat to me, I wouldn’t have stayed.”

“Then why did you leave?” The words were barely loud enough to carry the distance. It was a question he hadn’t allowed himself to dwell on in the months they’d been apart. He’d drown in all the possible answers.

“Because I didn’t think you wanted me to stay!” Danny swung his arms wide. Exasperated. Incredulous. “I got in between you and Church and we didn’t talk about it, and then you called Noelle and had the whole thing dealt with, and we didn’t talk about it. You shut me out. What was I supposed to do?”

Because I didn’t know what to say. Danny didn’t give him the room to offer up the answer.

“You get jealous. So what. I’m no saint either. What do you think I feel every time I walk by a magazine rack and the covers have your face on it, and I have to listen to people ogle over you like you’re some thing. You’re not eye candy for public consumption. And I can say it’s about honor, or integrity, or whatever, but there’s a part of me that’s just jealous. I hate hearing other people even suggest what they want to do if they get you alone in a room.” 

There was so much of that to unpack. But he couldn’t come up with even a handful of syllables. (Stunned. He was genuinely stunned.)

“And the women--” Danny pressed on, growing louder and more animated as he continued. “I shouldn’t even be jealous! I know there’s no chance for any of them, but I’m still--” The sentence ended there as he raised his hands in miming of strangling someone.

“So there. You think you’re so different, with your, your anger, and your jealousy. You’re not. And you think you’re this, horrible, violent thing when you are just a man, and I’m not afraid of you. So there.”

He loved this man.

It wasn’t a new thought, but it bubbled up, flooded past doubts and reservations, fueled by Danny’s bright, burning passion.

Nikolai was stupid, and a martyr, and he loved this man who stood unflinching in the face of admission’s of Nikolai’s violence, who was telling him exactly where he could shove it, who was soft but not spineless.

“I’ve seen you, and I chose you, so--” Danny continued---would have kept going, no doubt---even as Nikolai closed the distance between them. Despite his hands coming up to latch onto Nikolai’s wrists as he reached out to cup Danny’s face, despite a lack of confusion on his face, Nikolai caught the last syllable with his mouth, and Danny made a faint, surprised noise before he was pushing forward and up onto his toes as he kissed back.

When they drew apart---Danny first, then Nikolai---Danny held him close by the back of the neck. “You’re stupid.”

“I know.”

“And slow.”

“I know.”

“And you owe me so many dates. Real ones.”

Nikolai could feel his quiet laugh in the air between them. “Okay.”

[emmetohboy]

Favorites 19

Helado Negro. “And we’ll light our lives on fire just to see if anyone will come rescue what left of me.”

LISTEN: Sofi Tukker: Ringless Jamila Woods: Basquiat Big Thief: Century Helado Negro: Please Won’t Please Kota the Friend: Hollywood Joan Shelley: Teal Big Thief: Not Anderson .Paak: Jet Black Twain: Run Wild Dori Freeman: That’s How I Feel Angie McMahon: Slow Mover The New Pornographers: Higher Beams Rob Curly: Faded Sampa the Great: Any Day Cataldo: Ding Dong Scrambled Eggs Lloyd Cole: Violins Mark Mulcahy: Happy Boat Amber Mark: Mixer J. S. Ondara: Saying Goodbye Cuco: Bossa No Sé Tyler Lyle: Marina Karaoke The Japanese House: Follow My Girl

Here we sit between the final holiday of this year and the first holiday of the next one. Again, I am attempting to encapsulate my past 365 days of cultural consumption in a post. It feels more difficult this time around. Not because I enjoyed less. Quite the opposite. I feel the past year brought such varied creative stimuli that I struggled to recall much of it. That said I’ll let this flow and ask permission for an addendum, usually worked back into the overall recap in appropriate places, this year simply attached to the end. But before the beginning of the next one.

I’m going to dive headfirst into the record I easily spun more than any other this year, perhaps several years – Helado Negro’s This is How You Smile. Working creatively under the name Helado Negro, Roberto Carlos Lange is a musician of Ecuadorian decent working across genres and languages. I became aware of his work for the first time in 2011 with his release of Canta Lechuza. Reading reviews and listening to tracks I felt conceptually kindred to the work but for whatever reason the songs themselves did not resonate with me. In 2019 when This is How You Smile was released I curiously read a review that mentioned the title’s referencing a work by Jamaica Kincaid. Kincaid’s story Girl first appeared in the New Yorker in 1978. The work is accessible and brief so I read it before listening to one note of the record. When I finally did, I was transfixed. It is the kind of work I wanted to share with anyone who would listen, even texting friends about it at inappropriately early morning hours as I listened; Justin would love this; This is right in Venessa’s wheelhouse, my sister, old friend from college I hadn’t spoken to since his divorce this is a good reason to reconnect. The funny thing is it’s not a record that is inclined to draw people in right away. It’s not built on irresistible hooks or propolsive beats. It unfolds quietly across simple but lush instrumentation, drifting back and forth between English and Spanish, often in the same song. “Running,” the first single, is as unassuming as a track can be. Languid and gentle it practically intends to lull the listener to sleep.

 In June I drove with Mrs. OhBoy across two states to see Lange perform with a stripped-down two-piece band at the always wonderful Grog Shop in Cleveland. Knowing my sister lived within shouting distance I invited her to join us. The band played the new record in its entirety front to back. I’m not usually a fan of this live show format but Lange worked it magically. A lighting issue kept the stage darkener than intended for the first few tracks. When it was finally rectified the band and the audience all decided we preferred the previous illumination and the lights were dimmed again. Sometimes songs ended cleanly and abruptly. Sometimes saxophones or digital loops made it impossible to mark when one song ended and the other was beginning. The room seemed to shimmer with each note and gentle phrasing. When the set wrapped, I asked my fellow attendees their thoughts. Mrs. OhBoy summed up my total experience with the work of Helado Negro beginning with Canta Lucheza through his newest, at first, I wasn’t sure but then I thought ‘oh I get it.’

The second and third records I consumed with voracity this year are the tandem from Big Thief, U.F.O.F. and Two Hands. This quartet is working at the top of their game. And work they do. I had the pleasure of seeing them performed in 2018 at the Voodoo Music Festival in New Orleans. Nearing the end of their set Andrianne Lenker announced it was to be their last live performance of a perpetual two-year tour during which they had released two records. They took only the smallest of respites from touring recording and releasing both U.F.O.F. and Two Hands. They seem to be constanly creating. The Beetles played 292 shows at the Cavern Nightclub in Hamburg – Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule – how do you get to Carnegie Hall? - and in July of this year I speculated Big Thief to be the best band in America. Watching the four piece perform you get the sense that they could finish each others sentences but are just as likely to let each other ramble on for hours.

There are countless clips of the band playing live that make my case but I’m fond of this intimate little performance.

Speaking of musical acts improving on themselves with each release, this year brought a new e.p. from the duo Sofi Tukker. Nothing about this infectious act fits with the rest of my musical tastes. But how am I supposed to quit them if they keep putting out records like Dancing on the People. The integration of rock-oriented guitar licks and the multi-cultural cross pollination keep the musical arrangements from falling into rote dance patterns. And on “Ringless” Sophie Hawley-Weld composes lyrical quality akin to Stephin Merritt - “I'm more than the worst thing I've ever done. I’m less than the best thing I've ever won.”

Earlier this month NPR’s Ann Powers published a fascinating piece, Songs That Bend Time. Featured in the article-playlist combination is Chicago’s own Jamila Woods. And rightly so considering her latest release is entitled Legacy! Legacy! and each track pays homage to pioneers that Woods admires. The entire record is astonishing in both composition and performance. “Basquiat” is a great place to start.

It seems I am perennially placing Joan Shelley on my yearly favorites list but truthfully, she was absent last year. 2019 brought Like the River Loves the Sea, another lilting work with her frequent collaborators Nathan Salsburg, James Elkington and Will Oldham. Recorded in Iceland where, as Joan tells it, they were unable to find a banjo anywhere, the record wonderfully utilizes the angelic violin and cello work of Þórdís Gerður Jónsdóttir and Sigrún Kristbjörg Jónsdóttir. Teal and The Fading are true standouts in a solid lineup of Shelley compositions.

“Hollywood” by Kota the Friend was my unofficial song of summer. And two of my long-time heroes, Lloyd Cole and Mark Mulcahy notably had their best records in a turn. Mulcahy brings us The Gus and finds him pushing his story telling prowess to new heights.  The  track “Late for the Box” treads onto George Saunders level observations. Cole’s Guesswork reunites him with Commotions partner Blair Cowen and effortlessly blends some of Lloyds previous electronic instrumental work with his more noteworthy singer songwriters’ efforts. It feels retro and current at the same time. Similarly, “Higher Beams” from The New Pornographers latest effort, The Morse Code of Brake Lights is as close to a new 70’s-era Genesis song as we may ever hear again.

I was able to carve out a little more time for reading in 2019 than previous years. Not a lot but enough to keep multiple books going at once. I haven’t been able to maintain such a practice before. Maybe I grew into it. Or more likely the specifics books I chose allowed for it. I’ve been making my way through John Berger’s Portraits form nearly two years. Its structure is pefect for picking up, putting down and then picking up again. I cannot imagine another person writing more eloquently on the experience of humans creating and interacting with visual art. His writing is cerebral but not lofty. His language is precise yet textural. In a way I hope never to finish this book. 

I haven’t read much George Saunders, only Civilwarland in Bad Decline, but when I finally opened Lincoln in the Bardo I poured through it. It can be a difficult read at first. But like Helado Negro, once I caught on to what the artist was doing (oh, I get it), every word was a joy.

Superheroes and deep mythologies are not my cup of tea, but Watchmen is fantastic. To be honest we have their final episode yet to view. We are cherishing it in a way we had previously with the final episode of Catastrophe. The writing is clever and complex. The performances are so good that one cannot imagine any other actor playing any of the roles – Jean Smart? Wow!

Counter to Watchmen, although there is certainly an aspect of mythology, is Lodge 49. AMC has announced they are not renewing it, so we hope it finds a new home. What is so unique about this set of characters and their tales is how ultimately low the stakes are, yet how much the viewer is compelled to care.

I have not seen Parasite yet although it is on the list for this week. We don’t go to the theater a lot, but we did go to see Knives Out. Pure fun. I wore a broad smile for the final 15 minutes of this caper. A fantastic ensemble and masterfully woven story. Not to the lcomplexitiy of the time-jumping Watchmen, much more immediate with the stakes made clear early. That’s what makes this a fresh take on an old genre.

So, here’s the forewarned addendum. One of the books I’ve juggled since Thanksgiving was recommended to me by a friend upon our adopting a new dog, an English Setter. My friend is an avid outdoorsman and has had two retrievers since I’ve known him. Both of the dogs were impeccably trained and behaved which is always important, but can be especially so for larger and active breeds. He told me he used a book called Water Dog to train his retrievers. It is an old book written by Richard A. Wolters and published in 1964. And the bulk of it, as the title suggests, has to do with teaching a dog to retrieve ducks for hunters. Wolters is wry and no-nonsense from the opening paragraph. He threads scientific data with gut instinct and acknowledges that some of his views may be questionable, but his results speak for themselves. Addressing the theory that you’ll ruin a hunting dog by keeping it inside the house with the family, Wolters proposes it was “thought up by some old house wife who hated dogs.” To be sure I am not recommending this because of the results it has brought us with our new four-legged family member. I have only just begun utilizing the books techniques. And as the largest percentage of them relate to laying in a blind and waiting for fowl to approach, be shot and then retrieved, I will never use most of it. But I have read every word, never thinking that a hunting dog manual would be a book that I joyfully balanced in the mix of everything else I intended to experience this year.

*Update (or addendum 2?): We watched the final episode of Watchmen. Go directly to HBO now. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. It is mind-bendingly entertaining and provocative. And yet I hope they make not another second of it. It’s not possible to match the quality of these nine episodes.

Under the wire musical addendum. The Japanese House: “Follow MY Girl”

I almost forgot about this gem of a record. Good at Falling came our way back in March. Running the last errands of the year (dog treats to keep pups occupied during a pajama clad New Year’s Day) the randomizer in Apple Music reminded me. So glad it did. And that I prepped this space for late entries. Happy New Year. .

[tortuefleur]

A Dream of Psuedodragons and Ambrosia

What it says on the tin, I had a dream about fantasy and magic that ended up being somewhat emotional.

My dream was in the setting of a D&D adventure. The party was of a Thief, a Sorceress and two others I don’t recall. The Sorceress was much older and seemed to be able to change her shape at will. She spent most of her time as a mostly naked anthro dragon because why in the world wouldn’t you? At first it seemed as the though the dream was being DMed by the players, each one taking a turn, but at some point that detail became less relevant. 

No one trusted the thief at all but since he had a magic flying broom he was the go to person for doing scouting and searching expeditions for the party. So to keep an eye on him the Sorceress sent her pseudodragon familiar along on all of his reconnaissance missions. In normal D&D a pseudodragon is a sort of fey creature that just looks like a dragon but is really a little fey beast. In the setting of the dream, a pseudodragon was basically a tiny dragon cobbled together out of other animals and given a coat of shiny glitter paint. The Sorceress could see through her familiar’s eyes when she cared to do so and the familiar was amenable. Often, the Thief would tell the familiar disparaging things about the Sorceress just to bother her, or tell stories to pass the time and bore the Sorceress into taking her attention away from the Thief so he could operate without oversight. 

In one of these stories he talked about Ambrosia, in the dream Ambrosia was a substance that grows tremendously high up, at the very top of the biggest thunder head clouds. Too far for any normal sort of flight to reach. The consumption of Ambrosia could make a person godlike, not a god by any means, but given the taste of godhood. It would make them unnaturally healthy, lucky and immortal. And he said that he’d tasted it himself, which is why he was still around at all.

As he told the story, I remember the pseudodragon listening with rapt attention. Curling around his shoulders like a sequined boa, tiny head resting on his collar bone. They were in the dark, lit by the dim light of a glow stone he'd kept for reading while scouting. The pseudodragon could not speak, but cooed and hummed like a bird. The pseudodragon often listened like this, to his stories.

Eventually, the party heard about The Test of Mettle. A magical phenomena where a gossamer road would appear at a tremendous distance in the sky. Anyone that could reach it would be able to enter the test. When a person enters the test, touches their feet on the road, they are given a wish. And the last one standing on the road gets to keep their wish. (Though that phrasing is not literal, technically everything ABOVE the road also counted.) The Sorceress declined doing the test as she had already entered The Test long ago, and won. Hence why she could change shape whenever and however she liked. And apparently, you could only win once. Though, unfortunately due to angering a certain god as adventurers often do, she was also cursed to be unable to fly regardless of the shape of her body. 

The party went however, and it was terrible.

They quickly fell into in fighting, the phantasmal road was heavy with the blood of those desperate to keep their heart’s desires. I never saw the other two nameless members of my party again. I recall that one was a man, the other a woman, they had fond feelings for one another. Had, at least.

Eventually it came down to the Thief, who for some reason had not won yet despite being the last person standing on the road. This was due to his own wit and trickery, and a battery of magical potions and trinkets he’d been hoarding for this day. Then the Sorceress played her hand and commanded her familiar, having been stowed into the pack of one of the party members, to make a wish officially. The familiar had been waiting, intelligent enough to count as a contestant, and made their wish then. They wished to become a real dragon. And then I was suddenly and vividly a point of view player in the dream.

I was the pseudodragon, now a true dragon, though I kept the galaxy splash of glitter paint for a color scheme. I went through the bizarre unfolding of muscles and bones to become majestic and powerful. I tore through the backpack I had hid in, leaving tin plates and mugs scattered around me. And I took a look at the Thief, recalled his story about Ambrosia, and immediately flew up into the clouds overhead. It was immense, how joyous the feel of real flight was to me. Feeling droplets of cloud vapor whip past me, pumping the neophyte musculature of my wings. With the vigor of an utterly new body I found and consumed Ambrosia, neon globs of light vaguely in the shape of grapes that were growing from the top most part of the clouds. They tasted like the air before a thunder storm, like ozone and possibility.

I returned to the road, touching down on graceful claws, a tapering tail of glimmering scales curling around me.

I was not going to go back to being that wretched fake dragon for any reason. The thought only took up the space between seconds until I had hunted down and tackled the Thief. There was no contest, no way his brawn could overcome mine, but he tried. Potions of strength came clattering empty to the road when I slammed into him. I was after all, still a very small dragon. I was only about the size of a slightly above average adult human… which to be fair was humongous compared to my prior size. I also didn’t want to actually kill the Thief.

I had no animosity to him at all, he had only ever been kind to me. And while we wrestled, knives and various cutlery bared between us as we fought rolling over the packs and supplies brought from our original party, I recalled his stories with a new mind.

The Sorceress had obviously already known about Ambrosia, of course, so he must have known this… why tell a story like that at all? I reasoned he must have been telling me, even though he knew I could hardly fly at all in my old body. He told me a lot of stories I realized. Even though I was his indirect method of nettling the Sorceress, he only really treated me kindly. And he must have known I was in the pack I hid in, it was his business to know those things. Did he let me come, knowing that the Sorceress had some intention?

Eventually I was on top of him again, I had claws so close to his eyes. I didn’t want to kill him, I desperately didn’t want to kill him, I just wanted him to give up. To just, drop out of the test so that I could stay this way. That feeling was vivid, uncontrollable and without any other logic at all. I felt his strength give out suddenly, and a claw shot forward into his left eye.

I felt the material of it, delicate and soft, and then saw it ooze like a broken egg. In shock, I watched his face, pained but without malice. He fell through the gossamer road under me and out of The Test. I remember how viscerally sick the feeling made me even now, ocular humors dripping down my taloned paw.

He turned in the air, gripped with his whole body on his riding broom, and flew off out of sight.

I felt tears running down my long face and laid there on the spot. In victory, I sobbed pitifully for hurting the only person that had really treated me as anything other than a tool. After all, my mind was barely an hour old at that point. Everything felt so big, all of my emotions were so wild. Tail over my head, I saw something move into close proximity.

The image of the Sorceress was standing beside me, squinting up at the clouds then down at me. She was tall, imposing, covered in indigo scales with her muscular chest pushed out and back ramrod straight. Though she was only a sending, a transparent image of herself, I could feel her power and purpose. Glaring at me, I felt the distant tug of her will. To go the clouds and get her Ambrosia before the road disappeared again. This was always her goal, and no matter what shape I was in I would still be her familiar.

And then I woke up.

And now writing this down I wonder what the thief’s wish was, that he seemed to be no different at all during the test than I remembered him otherwise. I have this awful feeling that I was misgendering them, at the end.

[ionecoffman]

Cape Town Is an Omen

Rainfall in Cape Town is a dramatic affair. In the winter wet season, ominous clouds and strong winds rumble in from the northwest, carrying with them the life-saving moisture of the Atlantic Ocean and dumping it in cold buckets on the city bowl. For days at a time, storms batter and flood the city and surrounding areas, so much so that the region’s first Portuguese moniker was Cabo das Tormentas: “the Cape of Storms.” But residents accept the thrashing. They embrace it, even, because the rainy season provides all the water there is.

During one of those winter storms, I huddled in a meeting room at the University of Cape Town, catching my breath after a wet sprint through the campus, which is built into the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak. I met with the hydrologist Piotr Wolski to discuss droughts. “I don’t know the workings of the city and the workings of the water supply systems—the pipes, and valves, and how it is managed—enough to be sure about this,” Wolski told me, “but I think that it is likely that Day Zero was never [going] to happen.”

The prediction had been that after years of an intense drought, Cape Town’s dams would be so depleted and local reservoirs so bone-dry that one day in the autumn of 2018—between March and May in the Southern Hemisphere—the city would cut off the water flowing to taps. That date, the “Day Zero” in question, captured the attention of Western press. Photographs of the brown, cracked mud flats where drinking water once flowed abounded. Papers wrote breathlessly about the doomsday scenario of mobilizing military assets to secure water distribution points, fearing the possibility of violent clashes over resources.

Day Zero didn’t happen—and as Wolski told me, it may have never been in the cards. But, over the course of a year, the idea really did deeply change the city all the same. Water scarcity, and the potential for a catastrophe, spurred upheaval and anxiety. During that time, a local government pushed a water-conservation agenda more ambitious than just about anything the world had seen. Cape Town faced political fallout and experienced widespread protests. Divisions between the haves and the have-nots in one of the most unequal cities on Earth became the center of discourse. The racial wounds of a post-apartheid country opened once more.

In its march to slash water consumption drastically, this metropolis of 4 million people also became a harbinger of how water will constrain global cities in the future, and how climate change will bring turmoil and a new slate of challenges to places where class and racial divides are deep. Day Zero is still hypothetical, but Cape Town’s reality will soon impact many global cities, where water will become a constant concern, and democracy will become contingent upon the taps.

Farther up the mountain, in a facility nestled between a memorial for the imperialist founding father Cecil Rhodes and a road named after Nelson Mandela, researchers at the university’s Future Water Institute consider how the water crisis has shaped the country and the city. “The way the city has managed it is by forcing middle-class South Africans—dominantly white, but not exclusively—to massively cut back on their water use,” says Neil Armitage, a civil engineer who is a lead researcher within the institute. “They struggled for a while until they came up with this Day Zero concept, which was really a warning that if we carried on behaving like we were, then the water was going to run out. That had the desired effect of making people a lot more serious about water, but it also had a horrible political backlash as well.”

The popular use of the phrase “Day Zero” likely began in early 2017, when it became clear that the worst drought in the region’s recorded history wasn’t going anywhere soon. In May, premier of the Western Cape and former Cape Town mayor Helen Zille declared the province, in which Cape Town is located, a disaster area, speeding up the implementation of the province’s “Avoiding Day Zero” plan. Local dam levels around that time dipped to one-fifth of their total capacity. Heading into summer, the situation became more dire and the political messaging grew more urgent. “If consumption is not reduced to the required levels of 500 million liters of collective use per day, we are looking at about March 2018 when supply of municipal water would not be available,” Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille told her constituents in October.

As the warnings escalated, so too did the restrictions. The Level 4 restrictions implemented in May 2017 imposed a recommended overall-consumption limit of 100 liters per person per day, prohibited irrigation with drinking water, and discouraged or banned other types of recreational water use. Level 4b restrictions, implemented in July last year, tightened that recommended limit to 87 liters per person per day, advising residents to take steps like limiting showers to two minutes, reusing shower water to flush toilets, and conducting “wipe downs” instead of showers.

The city of Cape Town (Erik Pronske / Getty)

The city announced Level 5 restrictions in September, and those rules hardened the 87-liter-per-day limit. Aggressive fines for households that consumed more than 20,000 liters in a month were imposed, along with “water-management devices” to cap their usage. As they stand now, the Level 6B restrictions created by the city of Cape Town in January 2018 are supposed to limit residents to 50 liters per day, slash agricultural use by 60 percent below last year’s usage, aggressively push water-management devices and fines, and encourage the use of new fittings and other devices to minimize water waste.

But those increasingly strict measures were only part of the Capetonian defensive against Day Zero. In addition to the official measures, political leaders in Cape Town and the Western Cape launched a social campaign, designed not only to promote water thriftiness, but to shame big users. Stickers and flyers urging conservation practices saturate Cape Town and its bathrooms, even welcoming international guests at the airport. During the height of the summer dry season, de Lille personally visited some of the homes that used the most water. In January of this year, according to South African news outlet eNCA, Zille encouraged residents to inform on water-hogging neighbors and become “water impimpis”—a callback to an apartheid-era term for black South Africans who spied for the white-dominated government.

as Armitage told me, the water-saving strategies and social-engineering plans embraced by local politicians didn’t make many friends on the ground in the city. Almost immediately after city leaders announced the first Day Zero predictions, they came under heavy scrutiny from citizens and activists, especially among Cape Town’s communities of color. Many in labor, socialist, and leftist organizations in the region didn’t believe Day Zero was even a thing. Elements from those organizations created the Cape Town Water Crisis Coalition, which protested Day Zero as propaganda designed both to cover up faulty city water management and to deny expanded access to low-income communities.

“The purpose of all this (mis) information is clear: shifting blame from government,” reads an op-ed posted to the Water Crisis Coalition website shortly after the 50-liter household limit was passed by the local government. The Coalition asserted that “in fact all tiers of Government is complicit through lack of foresight and mismanagement of our water resources.” Through a series of intense protests and heated confrontations with officials in the summer, members of the group stressed that a mobilization of citizens on the order of the old anti-apartheid movement would be required to create political change necessary to secure the water future of the Western Cape and South Africa. A common refrain in their rallies, marches, and street arguments with Democratic Alliance politicians, the Coalition’s slogan is “water for all or the city must fall.”

Throughout the Day Zero crisis, that slogan proved to be a significant threat for the Democratic Alliance, or the DA, Zille and de Lille’s party that runs the Western Cape and Cape Town. The DA’s party boss, Mmusi Maimane, has pushed back against those criticisms, and defended his party’s governance. “Day Zero is still a very real possibility during the 2019 summer months if we do not have significant rainfall this winter,” he said earlier in March. “I want to reiterate, and cannot stress enough, that we need to keep at current consumption levels until at least after the winter rainfall.”

Still, the management of the crisis has also sparked criticism from the African National Congress, or the ANC, the dominant party in the country.  As the only opposition party to control a province, the DA is certainly used to strife with the ANC, but now old struggles over resources have brought that tension to a breaking point.

The ANC is the party of the Mandelas, a national emblem of black independence and sovereignty rooted in a mix of socialist, social-democratic, and black-nationalist ideals. The DA, however, embraces a more American-style market-oriented centrist liberalism. Deeply complicating the dynamic between the two parties is that the Western Cape is the major center of white demographic strength and political clout in the country, and that the DA—while embracing a membership of blacks, “coloured” multiracial descendants of indigenous peoples and Asian immigrants, and whites—often finds white leaders near or at the top.

From the moment Day Zero became a political problem, it deepened the rifts between the parties. Under South Africa’s Constitution, the ANC is responsible for providing water to all citizens, but the actual infrastructure and services in the Western Cape falls upon the DA to manage. This arrangement would seem to necessitate cooperation, but in reality that hasn’t been the case. The two sides have bitterly smeared one another, blaming the collapse of a number of schemes to boost water supply on the intransigence or ineptitude of opponents. In one case, DA leaders criticized the ANC-led national government for reportedly rejecting assistance from Israel, which employs advanced conservation techniques in its water infrastructure. The South African government is officially aligned in support of Palestine, and has now engaged in a boycott of Israel for decades.

The bigger disruptions for the DA came from local backlash. Last July, when confronted on Twitter by a black user who said that black residents in areas without running home water had experienced Day Zero from birth, Zille, who is white, responded with: “It must be a relief that you weren’t burdened by the legacy of a colonial water-piping system.” Zille, who’s faced harsh internal and external criticism for previous statements in defense of colonialism, this time suffered a rebuke from party boss Mmusi Maimane, and has since been officially suspended from party activities.

Things haven’t gone much better for de Lille, who has faced numerous allegations of mismanagement since the beginning of the water crisis. While management of Day Zero itself hasn’t often been recounted among the official reasons party insiders in the city have tried to oust de Lille from the mayor’s office, the crisis was nonetheless a backdrop to a concerted effort by DA insiders to do so. De Lille faced multiple proposed votes of no-confidence and an ongoing legal struggle, but neither of those efforts has come to completion. Still, de Lille is largely a contentious figurehead now, after she was stripped of her authority over the water crisis last year and removed of all her executive power.

Some public and commercial buildings cut water supplies in advance of the government-imposed May 2018 reduction to 50 liters per person. (John Snelling / Getty)

That rhetoric reached fever pitch in May 2018, as the city proposed massive new water tariffs for households, with the highest proposed hikes coming for uses under 6,000 liters per month. For opponents, that proposal epitomized the policy and communication problem that’s plagued the DA. It would certainly raise revenues for water sourcing and cut water use—but only by placing the biggest burden on households in the lower half of the income distribution.

Residents in well-apportioned suburbs pointed fingers at the mostly-black and poor residents of the so-called “informal settlements”—the tin-roofed, sprawling shanties that ring the outskirts of the city—despite the fact that these settlements use the least water per capita of any place in the province. And lacking internal plumbing and sewage, residents in the informal settlements often see in the city’s elites and governing class a neo-colonialist force, doling out resources at whim and mismanaging the commons.

For a cosmopolitan travel hub that has built a reputation as a true social and ethnic international melting pot, Cape Town’s social and political problems during its water crisis boiled down to the same fundamental issues that underpin its past as an icon of apartheid: white versus black, and poor versus rich. During a 2014 investigation into water access, the South African Human Rights Commission outlined the problem in Cape Town. “Those areas which lack water and sanitation mirror apartheid spatial geography,” the commission's findings read. That is to say that even the built water infrastructure is based on exclusion.

Day Zero uncovered that deeper nature, and punctured the myths of harmony that have sustained Capetonian culture for more than 20 years. But, paradoxically, these re-opened rifts mobilized citizens, and did seem to avert the Day Zero scenario. Was it worth it?

Fill up an empty two-liter soda bottle with water. Now fill up another. Fill up another and another and another. Top up 170 bottles, running an average kitchen faucet for 40 minutes, and you’ll come close to estimating just how much water the average American consumes every day. Between things like drinking, tooth-brushing, showers, toilet-flushing, doing the laundry, and hitting your work outfit with a little steam, Americans use somewhere around 90 gallons, or 340 liters, of water every 24 hours. That’s more than 700 pounds of water per day, and that’s not even counting what goes into the food you eat or the thirsty maws of the industries and services that sustain you.

Luckily, there’s quite a bit of water on Earth. It covers 70 percent of the surface of this great blue ball. It’s in the puffy clouds in the sky and gurgling through chthonic rivers hundreds of feet below us. And although the freshwater humans can drink is much more limited, it’s still incredibly vast. Human ingenuity has tapped that vastness. In a way, cities are just sophisticated delivery systems for water, using millions of miles of pipe across the globe to move that precious liquid from source to faucet, managing both supply and demand in order to keep the flow going.

It continued to rain as I sat in the current nerve center of Cape Town’s vast water-moving system. The computer screen in Deputy Mayor Ian Neilson’s office within the municipal building in Cape Town is jammed with windows full of water-status dashboards, presentations on Day Zero, and projections of dam levels. Having wrested most of the official powers of the executive office from de Lille, Neilson is the chief administrator of the city and one of the opposition party’s most powerful leaders. But here in his office, he played the role he’s been most familiar with over the past few years in the city government: a bureaucrat whose job is consumed by the minutiae of water.

Neilson and I discussed all the ways that the city had managed its delivery system during its most troubled year. “I think our situation’s stabilized,” Neilson told me. “It’s very clear we’ve avoided the worst, absolutely, this year. We are now into the rainfall season without having run out of water.” As the rest of the rainy season plays out, Neilson says that the game of the city government is monitoring the situation, persisting with tight restrictions, and continuing to urge intense water-conservation practices until it’s clear the reservoirs can again support regular water usage. Right now, the water usage of the average Capetonian sits at about 125 liters per day, a dramatic decrease from the 200 daily liters of last year. Both of those levels sit below the average of developed cities worldwide, and well below the standard American usage of 340 liters.

“Cape Town is an example of what is achievable under these conditions of stress,” Neilson continued. “People’s relationship to water changed. You saw how we got the consumption down dramatically. It’s only possible because millions of people have proactively gone out and worked very hard to get their consumption down and changed their habits dramatically.”

But, as even Neilson acknowledges, the extreme social engineering brought about by the Day Zero campaign is unlikely to be a long-term solution to future water problems in Cape Town. Nor will it necessarily prove to be a sustainable model for other cities facing water shortages.

For one, the ongoing drought in the Western Cape, although it seems to have been alleviated somewhat with heavy rains this winter, might only be the harbinger of worse weather patterns to come. Almost all of the vital rainfall in Cape Town is governed by a specific dynamic of weather systems off the southwestern coast of Africa, and each of these is in turn mediated heavily by the temperature of the ocean, which is now rising thanks to climate change.

“The climate projections for Cape Town indicate essentially a relatively consistent reduction in the amount of rainfall in Cape Town,” Wolski told me. “In the best case it would be rainfall that is similar to what we have. But most of the projections indicate reduction.” It’s exceedingly difficult for climate scientists like Wolski to accurately model the actual future conditions of such an intricate and delicate specific climate system like that of Cape Town—indeed, there are signs that this drought may be part of a long-term trend of increasing rainfall—but Wolski says that eventually warming will win out. And even if future rainfall patterns do manage by some unknown dynamic to stay similar to current levels, increased temperatures driven by anthropogenic climate change mean increased evaporation and baseline-higher water requirements for people, industry, and agriculture.

The main dam at Theewaterskloof stands at 10 percent capacity on April 3, 2018. (John Snelling / Getty)

As a result, Cape Town is already facing the kinds of resource crunches that will define a hotter Earth. It joins other metropolises of South and East facing similar fates. Environmental think tanks and journalistic outlets have published lists of cities that look likely to run out of water in the near future: São Paulo, Brazil, which faced its own Day Zero situation just a few years ago; Bangalore, India; Beijing, China; Cairo, Egypt; Mexico City; and—surprisingly, given its climate—Moscow, Russia. While each city has a very different set of reasons for its water woes, ranging from pollution to poor infrastructure to poor planning to desertification and drought, they all share a common challenge: Climate change will likely make the task of providing water harder, the populations thirstier, and the people angrier, even as many of the cities grow.

These pressures do not portend well for the developing world’s cities, which face a paradox in a time of tightening global resources: Municipalities are often giant businesses that provide a set of limited resources, and that also moonlight as the lowest levels of government. Resource shortages are thus politically and socially destabilizing in cities. The axes of power and partisanship within them can shift quickly when the faucets run dry.

Take, for instance, São Paulo, where deforestation and pollution of local water sources brought the city and peripheral municipalities to the brink of disaster in 2014 and 2015. The exact factors that stripped the city of freshwater were certainly different from those in Cape Town, but the topography of conflict in both areas is similar. The shortages in São Paulo sparked street fights, citizen mobilization, and major political dissent in the city.

In a thesis on the dynamics of politics and political mobilization during São Paulo’s water crisis, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Isadora Araujo Cruxên found that water-supply management was “a deeply political issue.” Just as the Coalition arose in Cape Town, the Alliance for Water (Aliança pela Água) and the Collective for Water Struggle (Coletivo de Luta pela Água) emerged in São Paulo and its surrounding areas. For these groups, the prospect of water shortages, along with an oppositional politics demanding water as a human right, proved to be the catalysts for coalition building—and a potentially dangerous platform for political movements in the future.

“The water-supply crisis has served to awaken dormant civil society forces that had been relatively removed from water decision-making in the state,” Cruxên writes. “The efforts of the Alliance and the Collective contributed to deepening democratic participation in water-related processes during the supply crisis.”

While she did not find that the Alliance and Collective necessarily made major electoral waves or dents in the national consciousness, Cruxên did find that water shortages proved to be instant bridge-builders for disparate social and political groups. “The message is that these political-organization projects can coexist and there are opportunities for these movements to collaborate strategically,” Cruxên told me by phone, “and to provide counter-narratives to some of the dominant narratives in the water and sanitation sectors that have been in terms of international governance dominated by technical experts and by business experts.”

The evidence from Cape Town squares with Cruxên’s hypothesis. Even with differences between the two cities—São Paulo is truly a global megapolis with more than 20 million inhabitants in its metro area, and its hydrology is obviously much more expansive, complex, and affected by pollution—there are similarities that illustrate how global, water-based political conflicts might arise. Both are staggeringly unequal cities in countries where inequality is rampant. That inequality manifests both in social stratification and in the development of water-delivery systems to those different strata. In Cape Town, as in São Paulo, access to clean water is a problem that can rise from an inequity to a humanitarian crisis in no time at all. And, in both cities, that possibility is already mobilizing marginalized communities and becoming a driver for change.

Khayelitsha, the largest black township near Cape Town. (Dan Kitwood / Getty)

A 2015 study from the South African Water Research Commission finds that even before the Day Zero crisis, water already might have been the most important mobilizing force in the country. “In 2012 the frequency, geographical spread and violence of service delivery-related social protests in post-apartheid South Africa reached unprecedented levels,” the authors write. They find that four factors presage water protests: economic disparities and marginalization, water-delivery problems, communication breakdowns between authorities and the people, and the presence of active and latent organizing efforts and structures. An additional study by the University of the Western Cape researcher Ndodana Nleya finds that service-delivery issues related to water are the main catalysts increasing the likelihood of protests in Khayelitsha, an informal settlement in southeast Cape Town. These issues are perhaps only partially affected by the Day Zero crisis, but they sow unrest in an area where water will be a political force for the foreseeable future.

Essentially, what the literature tells us is that the very structure of Capetonian life creates conditions for upheaval in the event of a water crisis. Mirroring class conflicts in the 20th century, the idea that access to water is a human right has become a driver of solidarity, hardening ad-hoc activist groups into major political movements. Extrapolating to the rest of a warming world, where racial and class barriers have been built into zoning and infrastructure, the uneasy detentes of segregated spaces and places could become new zones of conflict. All you have to do is remove water.

Neilson didn’t respond immediately when I asked him if Day Zero was ever really going to arrive. He turned his widget-crowded screen to me and showed me a graph of the dam levels in the city. A line on the graph indicated the city’s projected water levels absent additional rainfall. Another line showed the projected use of water by Cape Town citizens. When it bisected with the dam levels, sometime in what would be the middle of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, the line turned red. That was Day Zero. But another line on the graph indicating the actual water usage of the city over the previous eight months curved gently, and then ever more sharply away from the trend line. It leveled off well above the dam levels. Neilson had given me his answer.

I tried another tack. How would he respond to charges from activists in the city that tariffs and the increasingly restrictive water regulations in Cape Town had effectively abandoned the constitutional promise of access to water? He took a breath, and spoke. “We accept, even given all of that, that people have a right of access to water, and there are minimum amounts of water that you need to survive,” he said. “So we provide free water to poor households. 10.5 kiloliters a month they get free.”

“Although the rainfall may be free,” he continued, “there are costs involved in terms of storing that water, treating it, and distributing it. To get to understand that, that just because you can open a tap—a whole lot of stuff had to happen before you get there. You don’t see that there’s all of this stuff behind this to bring that to be there. There’s a whole massive system and that’s where all the costs are. That’s the most simple explanation I can give.”

The rain continued for days. In fact, so far this winter the rainfall has helped raise the dam levels to just below 60 percent of capacity, which should put off the next crisis point for some time. Cab drivers, students, waiters, and tour guides spoke incessantly of the Day Zero crisis—and with plenty of real venom—but they mostly spoke of it as a thing that had happened, an event that was now being relegated to the past. One of the last bellhops that I spoke to about it sucked his teeth as he jogged off. Didn’t matter to him, he told me, because he had to make the bus home to Khayelitsha.

Article source here:The Atlantic

[readbookywooks]

'How do you get all those coins?' asked Mort. IN PAIRS. An all-night barber sheared Mort's hair into the latest fashion among the city's young bloods while Death relaxed in the next chair, humming to himself. Much to his surprise, he felt in a good humour. In fact after a while he pushed his hood back and glanced up at the barber's apprentice, who tied a towel around his neck in that unseeing, hypnotised way that Mort was coming to recognise, and said, A SPLASH OF TOILET WATER AND A POLISH, MY GOOD MAN. An elderly wizard having a beard-trim on the other side stiffened when he heard those sombre, leaden tones and swung around. He blanched and muttered a few protective incantations after Death turned, very slowly for maximum effect, and treated him to a grin. A few minutes later, feeling rather self-conscious and chilly around the ears, Mort was heading back towards the stables where Death had lodged his horse. He tried an experimental swagger; he felt his new suit and haircut rather demanded it. It didn't quite work. Mort awoke. He lay looking at the ceiling while his memory did a fast-rewind and the events of the previous day crystallised in his mind like little ice cubes. He couldn't have met Death. He couldn't have eaten a meal with a skeleton with glowing blue eyes. It had to be a weird dream. He couldn't have ridden pillion on a great white horse that had cantered up into the sky and then went . . . . . . where? The answer flowed into his mind with all the inevitability of a tax demand. Here. His searching hands reached up to his cropped hair, and down to sheets of some smooth slippery material. It was much finer than the wool he was used to at home, which was coarse and always smelled of sheep; it felt like warm, dry ice. He swung out of the bed hastily and stared around the room. First of all it was large, larger than the entire house back home, and dry, dry as old tombs under ancient deserts. The air tasted as though it had been cooked for hours and then allowed to cool. The carpet under his feet was deep enough to hide a tribe of pygmies and crackled electrically as he padded through it. And everything had been designed in shades of purple and black. He looked down at his own body, which was wearing a long white nightshirt. His clothes had been neatly folded on a chair by the bed; the chair, he couldn't help noticing, was delicately carved with a skull-and-bones motif. Mort sat down on the edge of the bed and began to dress, his mind racing. He eased open the heavy oak door, and felt oddly disappointed when it failed to creak ominously. There was a bare wooden corridor outside, with big yellow candles set in holders on the far wall. Mort crept out and sidled along the boards until he reached a staircase. He negotiated that successfully without anything ghastly happening, arriving in what looked like an entrance hall full of doors. There were a lot of funereal drapes here, and a grandfather clock with a tick like the heartbeat of a mountain. There was an umbrella stand beside it. It had a scythe in it. Mort looked around at the doors. They looked important. Their arches were carved in the now-familiar bones motif. He went to try the nearest one, and a voice behind him said: 'You mustn't go in there, boy.' It took him a moment to realise that this wasn't a voice in his head, but real human words that had been formed by a mouth and transferred to his ears by a convenient system of air compression, as nature intended. Nature had gone to a lot of trouble for six words with a slightly petulant tone to them. He turned around. There was a girl there, about his own height and perhaps a few years older than him. She had silver hair, and eyes with a pearly sheen to them, and the kind of interesting but impractical long dress that tends to be worn by tragic heroines who clasp single roses to their bosom while gazing soulfully at the moon. Mort had never heard the phrase 'Pre-Raphaelite', which was a pity because it would have been almost the right description. However, such girls tend to be on the translucent, consumptive side, whereas this one had a slight suggestion of too many chocolates. She stared at him with her head on one side, and one foot tapping irritably on the floor. Then she reached out quickly and pinched him sharply on the arm. 'Ow!' 'Hmm. So you're really real,' she said. 'What's your name, boy?' 'Mortimer. They call me Mort,' he said, rubbing his elbow. 'What did you do that for?' 'I shall call you Boy,' she said. 'And I don't really have to explain myself, you understand, but if you must know I thought you were dead. You look dead.' Mort said nothing. 'Lost your tongue?' Mort was, in fact, counting to ten. 'I'm not dead,' he said eventually. 'At least, I don't think so. It's a little hard to tell. Who are you?' 'You may call me Miss Ysabell,' she said haughtily. 'Father told me you must have something to eat. Follow me.' She swept away towards one of the other doors. Mort trailed behind her at just the right distance to have it swing back and hit his other elbow. There was a kitchen on the other side of the door – long, low and warm, with copper pans hanging from the ceiling and a vast black iron stove occupying the whole of one long wall. An old man was standing in front of it, frying eggs and bacon and whistling between his teeth. The smell attracted Mort's taste buds from across the room, hinting that if they got together they could really enjoy themselves. He found himself moving forward without even consulting his legs. 'Albert,' snapped Ysabell, 'another one for breakfast.' The man turned his head slowly, and nodded at her without saying a word. She turned back to Mort. 'I must say,' she said, 'that with the whole Disc to choose from, I should think Father could have done rather better than you. I suppose you'll just have to do.' She swept out of the room, slamming the door behind her. 'Have to do what?' said Mort, to no-one in particular. The room was silent, except for the sizzle of the frying pan and the crumbling of coals in the molten heart of the stove. Mort saw that it had the words 'The Little Moloch (Ptntd)' embossed on its oven door. The cook didn't seem to notice him, so Mort pulled up a chair and sat down at the white scrubbed table. 'Mushrooms?' said the old man, without looking around. 'Hmm? What?' 'I said, do you want mushrooms?' 'Oh. Sorry. No, thank you,' said Mort. 'Right you are, young sir.' He turned around and set out for the table. Even after he got used to it, Mort always held his breath when he watched Albert walking. Death's manservant was one of those stick-thin, raw-nosed old men who always look as though they are wearing gloves with the fingers cut out – even when they're not – and his walking involved a complicated sequence of movements. Albert leaned forward and his left arm started to swing, slowly at first but soon evolving into a wild jerking movement that finally and suddenly, at about the time when a watcher would have expected the arm to fly off at the elbow, transferred itself down the length of his body to his legs and propelled him forward like a high-speed stilt walker. The frying pan followed a series of intricate curves in the air and was brought to a halt just over Mort's plate. Albert did indeed have exactly the right type of half-moon spectacles to peer over the top of. 'There could be some porridge to follow,' he said, and winked, apparently to include Mort in the world porridge conspiracy. 'Excuse me', said Mort, 'but where am I, exactly?' 'Don't you know? This is the house of Death, lad. He brought you here last night.' 'I – sort of remember. Only. . . . 'Hmm?' 'Well. The bacon and eggs,' said Mort, vaguely. 'It doesn't seem, well, appropriate.' 'I've got some black pudding somewhere,' said Albert. 'No, I mean . . .' Mort hesitated. 'It's just that I can't see him sitting down to a couple of rashers and a fried slice.' Albert grinned. 'Oh, he doesn't, lad. Not as a regular thing, no. Very easy to cater for, the master. I just cook for me and —' he paused – 'the young lady, of course.' Mort nodded. 'Your daughter,' he said. 'Mine? Ha,' said Albert. 'You're wrong there. She's his.' Mort stared down at his fried eggs. They stared back from their lake of fat. Albert had heard of nutritional values, and didn't hold with them. 'Are we talking about the same person?' he said at last. Tall, wears black, he's a bit . . . skinny. 'Adopted,' said Albert, kindly. 'It's rather a long story —' A bell jangled by his head. '— which will have to wait. He wants to see you in his study. I should run along if I were you. He doesn't like to be kept waiting. Understandable, really. Up the steps and first on the left. You can't miss it —' 'It's got skulls and bones around the door?' said Mort, pushing back his chair. They all have, most of them,' sighed Albert. 'It's only his fancy. He doesn't mean anything by it.' Leaving his breakfast to congeal, Mort hurried up the steps, along the corridor and paused in front of the first door. He raised his hand to knock. ENTER. The handle turned of its own accord. The door swung inward. Death was seated behind a desk, peering intently into a vast leather book almost bigger than the desk itself. He looked up as Mort came in, keeping one calcareous finger marking his place, and grinned. There wasn't much of an alternative. AH, he said, and then paused. Then he scratched his chin, with a noise like a fingernail being pulled across a comb. WHO ARE YOU, BOY? 'Mort, sir,' said Mort. 'Your apprentice. You remember?' Death stared at him for some time. Then the pinpoint blue eyes turned back at the book. OH YES, he said, MORT. WELL, BOY, DO YOU SINCERELY WISH TO LEARN THE UTTERMOST SECRETS OF TIME AND SPACE? 'Yes, sir. I think so, sir.' GOOD. THE STABLES ARE AROUND THE BACK. THE SHOVEL HANGS JUST INSIDE THE DOOR. He looked down. He looked up. Mort hadn't moved. IS IT BY ANY CHANCE POSSIBLE THAT YOU FAIL TO UNDERSTAND ME? 'Not fully, sir,' said Mort. DUNG, BOY. DUNG. ALBERT HAS A COMPOST HEAP IN THE GARDEN. I IMAGINE THERE'S A WHEELBARROW SOMEWHERE ON THE PREMISES. GET ON WITH IT. Mort nodded mournfully. 'Yes, sir. I see, sir. Sir?' YES? 'Sir, I don't see what this has to do with the secrets of time and space.' Death did not look up from his book. THAT, he said, is BECAUSE YOU ARE HERE TO LEARN. It is a fact that although the Death of the Discworld is, in his own words, an ANTHROPOMORPHIC PERSONIFICATION, he long ago gave up using the traditional skeletal horses, because of the bother of having to stop all the time to wire bits back on. Now his horses were always flesh-and-blood beasts, from the finest stock. And, Mort learned, very well fed. Some jobs offer increments. This one offered – well, quite the reverse, but at least it was in the warm and fairly easy to get the hang of. After a while he got into the rhythm of it, and started playing the private little quantity-surveying game that everyone plays in these circumstances. Let's see, he thought, I've done nearly a quarter, let's call it a third, so when I've done that corner by the hayrack it'll be more than half, call it five-eighths, which means three more wheelbarrow loads. . . . It doesn't prove anything very much except that the awesome splendour of the universe is much easier to deal with if you think of it as a series of small chunks. The horse watched him from its stall, occasionally trying to eat his hair in a friendly sort of way.