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boop-le-snoot · 3 years

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marmalade taffy

Helmut Zemo smut & feels. Soft!Dom Zemo, non-superhero!AU, Zemo being the weird uncle of college!Maximoff twins. This was written on a whim so if someone signs up to beta-read, I will shower you with affection and reminders to drink water. The Reader is addressed as "you" and is not described - race/age/body type neutral. The language I used for Sokovian is actually Serbian. Word count 2,8k.

Fun fact: I have mild synesthesia. Emotions/feelings and some people have an assigned color (and sometimes smell) for me. That's how the name of the fic was born. This fic feels like the colors of marmalade and taffy, look them up. This fic is dedicated to my lovely @slothspaghettiwrites , the shining beacon in my misty, rocky beach. (You're a periwinkle for me, by the way. I thought you might ask.)

When you first see him all you do is raise an eyebrow. His sleek, well-maintained vintage car stands out almost grotesquely amongst the various sedans and mom vans on the campus and you can see the glint of his wristwatch even from afar. Wanda's and Pietro's sheepish smirk only makes the situation worse - the girl's attire obviously screams "liberal arts" and her twin brother doesn't seem to have anything better to wear than tracksuits.

The man behind the wheel is unfazed. He is calm and collected in that European way, not conceited, just waiting. For what? You don't know. His eyes trail over you but he doesn't smile, simply gives a tiny polite nod. If you hadn't had extensive conversations about cultural differences with Wanda, you'd say he was extremely rude.

Shy, quiet Wanda, who's eyes lit up seeing her favorite not-actually-uncle. In a surprising dash of energetic agility, she hopped right into the car, her numerous scarves a bright flash of saturation against the campus grayscale. You giggle and wave at the departing car, snorting when Wanda's hand reaches over to briefly honk the horn, causing the driver to swerve the tiniest bit, his eyes trained on you in the rearview mirror.

He comes and goes often. Almost always in a different perfectly restored vintage car, mostly with the same polite mask of bored contentment. You know he's royalty in his home country and can't help but wonder how frivolously the twins act around him - no, free. He gives all the appearance of a silent, strict man.

You're proven wrong rather quickly. Freshman year left behind you, you and Wanda decide to ditch the dorms for an apartment - she finds one rather quickly and it's just you two in it even though it is ridiculously huge and the rent amount she requests is equally ridiculously small. Not the one to look a gift horse in the mouth, you pretend nothing is out of the ordinary and buy yourself a new pair of shoes.

Helmut - Wanda finally formally had introduced you two - doesn't come by often, however the visits are always... Eventful. He's not at all what it seemed to be; in the quiet of your apartment, a witty, incredibly clever man resurfaces from under the stoic façade. The Slav in him easily lets him consume alarming quantities of alcohol together with Pietro, who opted to stay in the dorms with his idiotic football team, and - you couldn't believe your eyes at the time - dorkily dad-dance squat in the middle of your living room, unfazed by your and Wanda's cackling.

The way Helmut is absolutely unbothered by the audience and the laughter, pale face flushed from the wine and a little smirk stretching his thin lips into expression almost catlike. The maroon turtleneck stretches nicely across his chest, as thinly as your lip that you worry between your teeth.

Pietro raises an eyebrow. You shrug.

"Got something in your eye, no?" He teases playfully and you shrug again, taking another swig of your nice, European beer.

There are more gatherings, more parties and quite a few rides in his car, when the wind blows your hair in all directions possible and intermingles it with Wanda's as you giggle and squeal in the back seat. Helmut always indulges you two; the word 'no' simply does not exist in that man's vocabulary. He insists politely but firmly on a dinner with all three of them on your birthday and the gifts he brings make your eyes pop out and your face heat.

"A woman like you makes any sensible man want to shower you with the finest gifts," Helmut's voice is quiet and his accent is thick and somehow, it makes it all that harder to refuse. He smiles like usual - tiny and a little secretive, as he pecks your cheek, filling the air around you with the smell of his cologne. It makes your mouth water and your fingers clench helplessly around the half a dozen of silk paper-wrapped boxes.

The summer rolls in and it's hot and humid and finally you don't have to worry about waking up at the crack of dawn or classes or the annoying boys who can barely take a no for an answer. The invitation to Helmut's villa doesn't come as a surprise; Wanda had been riled up over it since early May and Pietro and his whole damn football team were equally as thrilled.

You pack flowy dresses, daisy dukes and swimsuits. The expensive jewelry and handbag Helmut had gifted you, too, since the villa is surrounded by a whole neighborhood meant solely for the rich and famous. Wanda is absolutely unbothered by her own bohemian chic and you quietly envy her; the longer you get to know her, the more you realise of how much actually she does not give a fuck about anything besides her paintings and sculptures.

It's admirable, really, because she is talented. And Helmut knows it, too, having had collected and kept every single work Wanda had made, showing it off in the various rooms of his two-story mansion. The abstract fits in well and is a great conversation topic for him and his equally important friends. There's an endless stream of them in the first days and Wanda isn't overtly happy, choosing to run away to laze around the pool with you more often than not.

Helmut's friends stop at the glass wall between the inner side of the house and the pool to stare at you two, too, causing something dark and tense flash across his features. There always had been a sort of tangy obscurity in him, you've noticed, but not nearly enough for you to grow concerned. It added the bittersweetness, the flavour and consistency to the modest man.

Although calling him modest might have been a mistake. The moment you can't shake off one of his friends after a polite chit-chat seems to never end, Wanda nowhere in sight, dread and unease digging their sharp, spindly fingers in the soft flesh behind your rib cage, Helmut is suddenly there, arm wrapped almost possessively around your waist.

"Draga mea, Wanda is looking for you. She says it's urgent," He stares the man down with the eyes of a vulture. "I believe we haven't been properly introduced," Helmut seems to not realize he's still clutching you in a grasp of steel as the man opposite you rumbles out his name, few syllables you'd forgotten seconds after he spoke them for the first time.

"Baron Helmut Zemo," the fingers brush and squeeze once, gently, over the valley of your waist before letting go. You miss the rest of their peacocking, walking away with a fight and fire inside of your hammering heart. Anxiety and longing and confusion mix and blend, combining into a cocktail that has you beelining for the bar like a woman parched.

The next day you're sleeping off the hangover, first in your bed and then by the pool - Wanda had run off into town for one thing or another, and knowing her, she'd be back home at the crack of dawn. It was blissful peace, the soothing balm for your troubled heart and your aching head.

"Hungover?" Helmut's voice was quiet and a little bit teasing. None of the Eastern Europeans had ever showed the signs of having any ill effects from the alcohol they drunk, unlike you.

You stretched, too blissed out to care about the skimpy strings and straps of your bikini, basking in the gentle morning sun. "Mmm, not anymore," a swim in the cold pool had done wonders.

Your soft pink float rocked as Helmut's footsteps quieted, giving way to a short splash and the sound of his breathing somewhere in your space. Just as you cracked open your eyes, he reached out a hand to steady himself next to you. "I wanted to apologize for the situation yesterday. That man was stepping out of line. He is not welcome in my home anymore."

You stare at him and then you snort. The blunt was he usually speaks is so easy, it flows oh so effortlessly. No mind games, just honesty. You want to pay him back in kind. "Don't worry, Helmut. I just had a bit too much to drink," that was the truth. Any other time and you wouldn't have hesitated to unapologetically steer clear of any creep. Heat and bubbly don't mix and that was your own mistake.

"No, printsesa," the man in front of you let loose some of the delicious darkness, eyes growing stormy, hand gently resting over yours. "Some men are fools, they are nothing but animals. You deserve to feel safe, especially in my home." His lips stretched into a smile, water dripping down his jaw and making tiny circles form in the azure of the pool.

"I can't argue with that," you replied, catching the stray liquid and following the trails it made with your eyes. His forehead, dripping down over his eyes, making Helmut blink the stray drops away until they landed on his lips, trickling down his chin.

You swallowed, opting to dip your toes into the cool pool water before you could make a fool of yourself. The water splashed towards him, making a mischievous grin grace his usually serious face, as me made a half-hearted attempt to splash back weakly, making the water sizzle on your sun-kissed skin. Never the one to back down from a challenge, you knitted your eyebrows in mock offense, eagerly letting the water wash over you as you abandoned the float in favour of creating waves with your whole body.

The temperature contrast was delicious and Helmut's laugh even more so as it echoed in between the high walls of the building surrounding the pool. The sun was nearly at its peak, shining over your head in a beacon of heat that almost matched the one inside of you, the one that had blossomed there months ago and finally grew into a steady smolder, shooting sparks whenever you were around the baron.

It was hot and wet, the same feeling chasing you two when you finally kissed. His hand firmly planted on the side of your neck, his nose softly brushing against the underside of your jaw, Helmut was in no rush to taste you, to savour every millimeter of your sun-kissed skin. The man left you with your fingertips trembling and heart scrambling for purchase somewhere in the deepest pits of your belly.

"What are you so hungry for, mmm?" Helmut's voice rumbled next to the shell of your ear; you could barely focus, skin singing underwater, where he held onto you like a lifeline. "You have hungry eyes, ljubavi, tell me what it is and I'll give it to you," your bodies pressed flush against each other, his eyelashes flittering against your cheek.

"You," the maximum capacity for your brain was one-syllable words and you used it sparingly, failing to suppress a gasp when Helmut's mouth latched around a particularly sensitive spot right under your jawline.

Teeth scraped over it before he soothed the sting with his tongue. "All the things in the world, I could give them to you. And yet..." He sounded almost disappointed. Perplexed, just as you were at the strange admission. "A woman like you would have men fighting for your attention yet you give it to me so freely," he murmured softly, capturing your lips in a slow, fluid kiss once more. "I will make sure you have everything you could ever want."

Helmut's touch grew bolder as he steered the two of you towards the shallow end of the pool. The taste of him was intoxicating, like the sweetest, most alluring poison you'd ever tasted: you knew that once you had one small bit, you'd be addicted, drawn to him like a moth to a flame. His words were clever and his mouth even more, making the short stumble upstairs last hours.

A wall, baroque tapestry, marked with the wetness of the pool water, where you allowed yourself to be pressed against as he leaned into you with the entirety of his broad frame, domineering the kiss effortlessly.

You panted as your back hit the soft, million-thread count, unmade sheets of the baron's bed, staring up into his eyes and finding your own reflection in his pupils, blown wide with lust. The tiny smirk was back but now his unexpressive face was marred by a gleem, accentuating his moist, puffy lips you'd licked into and bitten in a heated frenzy.

"Beautiful, printsesa," he stated with quiet firmness, leaning over into you to unclasp and toss away the upper part of the bikini. The bottoms followed suit, flung carelessly somewhere. His hands ran over your as it sang, every tiniest nerve hypersensitive, coming alive with a fervor borne of months of longing, complimented by the summer heat and cool waters.

"Helmut," your voice wavered, flowed on the syllables as his clever, clever mouth trailed hot down your chest, briefly submerging each nipple into the sear of it. Goosebumps rose over your exposed body, highlighting a trail for him, a trail he followed eagerly. Kisses were candy sweet and marshmallow soft.

Hot breath at the apex of your thighs had you mewling and arching into it, having abandoned all shame, and Helmut found it amusing. The petite chuckle made an appearance, his fingertips ghosting over the part of your lower lips; he was as amused by your impatience as he was enthralled by the youthfulness of the gesture. "Shh, ljubavi, I will make it feel better," his accent as thick as clover honey and just as saccharine.

The first movements were tentative, brief and so light, the demanding moan slipped out of your mouth along with a growl of frustration. You felt continuous chuckling, slight stubble rasping along the sides your thighs; you felt him pick up pace and steady his hot hands on your hips as you attempted to trash against the overwhelming stimulation your pussy was receiving.

His moans, loud and wet, drove you closer to the edge like a drunk drove a Ferrari; Helmut's skill was unparalleled but it lacked precision as he lost himself in the moment just as much as you.

"Fuck, fuck, I'm- I'm so close," you managed to grunt out before the crescendo hit, eyes rolling back into your skull as the influx of more, more, more hit every nerve ending in your body. You could do little more than rest your legs on his shoulders as the noble man, the quiet storm lapped up every drop of your release.

He made the inside of you weak.

In seconds, Helmut was back on top of you, grinding his arousal into you desperately, almost begging for it and all you could do was let your body respond, mimic your lover, clench around nothing just as you felt him twitch.

"Tell me you're mine," he demanded hooking one of your legs over his hip, eyes boring into yours with everything in them plain on display. It was a terrifying thing: as if your heart had suddenly grown legs, stood up and walked out into the bare, wide world, open for all to see. "Ti moa, skaži eto," his native tongue made his voice even more hoarse, you couldn't resist anymore.

"I'm yours, I'm yours, I'm yours," you chanted the words like a prayer, hoping he'd be merciful - and he is. No, there's only a hidden tenderness in his hands as he drives into your with increasing force that shakes you and makes your core quiver, igniting your flesh once again like the color red; it's messy and it's sloppy and you're barely aware of Helmut muttering something into the crook of your neck as you feel yourself clench down on him with a choked moan.

"Fuck," hearing him, the polite composed man, bite the end of his own orgasm into a curse made a wave of magenta hot rush travel through your body at lightning speed, his cock pulsating and coating you, claiming you from inside out so sweetly you couldn't resist a shallow gasp into his cheek, a gasp he mirrored as his own oversensitive flesh was once more assaulted by your combined lust.

The tide of his breathing was high; both of you spent yet still drunk on the newfound sense of togetherness. It was clear as a summer's day that in your arms laid a man who'd once lost something important and you - you were a someone who's never had anything of significance and perhaps, this time each other's arms would let you both keep whatever it was that you missed.

#helmut zemo x y/n #helmut zemo x you #helmut zemo x reader #helmut zemo smut #baron zemo x reader #baron zemo smut #baron zemo x you #baron zemo x y/n #zemo smut #zemo x reader #zemo x you #bun writes #baron zemo #zemo #i am KNEELING

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trans-advice · 3 years

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Excerpt from “Transgender History” (2017) by Susan Stryker (“Chapter 3: Trans Liberation”)

[...]

Stonewall:

Meanwhile, across the continent [from San Francisco, California, USA], another important center of transgender activism was taking shape in New York City [New York, USA], where, not coincidentally, Harry Benjamin maintained his primary medical practice. In 1968, Mario Martino, a female-to-male transsexual, founded Labyrinth, the first organization in the United States devoted specifically to the needs of transgender men. Martino and his wife, who both worked in the health care field, helped other transsexual men navigate their way through the often-confusing maze of transgender-oriented medical services just then beginning to emerge, which (despite being funded primarily by Reed Erickson) were geared more toward the needs of transgenderwomen than transgender men. Labyrinth was not a political organization but rather one that aimed to help individuals make the often-difficult transition from one social gender to another.

Far overshadowing the quiet work of Martino’s Labyrinth Foundation, however, were the dramatic events of June 1969 at the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. The “Stonewall Riots” have been mythologized as the origin of the gay liberation movement, and there is a great deal of truth in that characterization, but—as we have seen—gay, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people had been engaging in militant protest and collective actions against social oppression for at least a decade by that time. Stonewall stands out as the biggest and most consequential example of a kind of event that was becoming increasingly common, rather than as a unique occurrence. By 1969, as a result of many years of social upheaval and political agitation, large numbers of people who were socially marginalized because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, especially younger people who were part of the Baby Boomer generation, were drawn to the idea of “gay revolution” and were primed for any event that would set such a movement off. The Stonewall Riots provided that very spark, and they inspired the formation of Gay Liberation Front groups in big cities, progressive towns, and college campuses all across the United States. Ever since the summer of 1969, various groups of people who identify with the people who participated in the rioting have argued about what actually happened, what the riot’s underlying causes were, who participated in it, and what the movements that point back to Stonewall as an important part of their own history have in common with one another.

Although Greenwich Village was not as economically down-and-out as San Francisco’s Tenderloin, it was nevertheless a part of the city that appealed to the same sorts of people who resisted at Cooper Do-Nut, Dewey’s, and Compton’s Cafeteria: drag queens, hustlers, gender nonconformists of many varieties, gay men, lesbians, and countercultural types who simply “dug the scene.” The Stonewall Inn was a small, shabby, Mafia-run bar (as were many of the gay-oriented bars in New York back in the days when being gay or cross-dressing were crimes). It drew a racially mixed crowd and was popular mainly for its location on Christopher Street near Sheridan Square, where many gay men “cruised” for casual sex, and because it featured go-go boys, cheap beer, a good jukebox, and a crowded dance floor. Then as now, there was a lively street scene in the bar’s vicinity, one that drew young and racially mixed queer folk from through the region most weekend nights. Police raids were relatively frequent (usually when the bar was slow to make its payoffs to corrupt cops) and relatively routine and uneventful. Once the bribes were sorted out, the bar would reopen, often on the same night. But in the muggy, early morning hours of Saturday, June 28, 1969, events departed from the familiar script when the squad cars pulled up outside the Stonewall Inn.

[Source text Inserts “Sidebar: Radical Transsexual” here]

A large crowd of people gathered on the street as police began arresting workers and patrons and escorting them out of the bar and into the waiting police wagons. Some people in the crowd started throwing coins at the police officers, taunting them for taking “payola.” Eyewitness accounts of what happened next differ in their particulars, but some witnesses claim a transmasculine person resisted police attempts to put them in the police wagon, while others noted that African American and Puerto Rican members of the crowd—many of them street queens, feminine gay men, transgender women, or gender-nonconforming youth—grew increasingly angry as they watched their “sisters” being arrested and escalated the level of opposition to the police. Both stories might well be true. Sylvia Rivera, a transgender woman who came to play an important role in subsequent transgender political history, long maintained that, after she was jabbed by a police baton, she threw the beer bottle that tipped the crowd’s mood from mockery to collective resistance. In any case, the targeting of gender-nonconforming people, people of color, and poor people during a police action fits the usual patterns of police behavior in such situations.

Bottles, rocks, and other heavy objects were soon being hurled at the police, who, in retaliation, began grabbing people from the crowd and beating them.Weekend partiers and residents in the heavily gay neighborhood quickly swelledthe ranks of the crowd to more than two thousand people, and the outnumberedpolice barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall Inn and called for reinforcements. Outside, rioters used an uprooted parking meter as a batteringram to try to break down the bar’s door, while other members of the crowdattempted to throw a Molotov cocktail inside to drive the police back into the streets. Tactical Patrol Force officers arrived on the scene in an attempt to contain the growing disturbance, which nevertheless continued for hours until dissipating before dawn. That night, thousands of people regrouped at the Stonewall Inn to protest. When the police arrived to break up the assembled crowd, street fighting even more violent than that of the night before ensued. One particularly memorable sight amid the melee was a line of drag queens, arms linked, dancing a can-can and singing campy, improvised songs that mocked the police and their inability to regain control of the situation: “We are the Stonewall girls / We wear our hair in curls / We always dress with flair / We wear clean underwear / We wear our dungarees / Above our nellie knees.” Minor skirmishes and protest rallies continued throughout the next few days before finally dying down. By that time, however, untold thousands of people had been galvanized into political action.

Sidebar: Radical Transsexual

Suzy Cooke was a young hippie from upstate New York who lived in a commune in Berkeley, California, when she started transitioning from male to female in 1969. She came out as a bisexual transsexual in the context of the radical counterculture.

I was facing being called back up for the draft. I had already been called up once and had just gone in and played crazy with them the year before. But that was just an excuse. I had also been doing a lot of acid and really working things out. And then December 31, 1968, I took something—I don’t really know what it was—but everything just collapsed. I said, “This simply cannot go on.” To the people that I lived with, I said, “I don’t care if you hate me, but I’m just going to have to do something. I’m going to have to work it out over the next couple of months, and that it doesn’t matter if you reject me, I just have to do it.”

As it was, the people in my commune took it very well. I introduced the cross-dressing a few days later as a way of avoiding the draft. And they were just taken aback at how much just putting on the clothes made me into a girl. I mean, hardly any makeup. A little blush, a little shadow, some gloss, the right clothes, padding. I passed. I passed really easily in public. This is like a few months before Stonewall. And by this point I was dressing up often enough that people were used to seeing it.

I was wallowing in the happiness of having a lot of friends. Here I was being accepted, this kinda cool/sorta goofy hippie kid. I was being accepted by all these heavy radicals. I had been rejected by my parental family, and I had never found a family at college, and now here I was with this family of like eight people all surrounding me. And as it turned out, even some of the girls that I had slept with were thinking that this was really cool. All the girls would donate clothes to me. I really had not been expecting this. I had been expecting rejection, I really had been. And I was really very pleased and surprised. Because I thought that if I did this then I was going to have to go off and live with the queens. And I didn’t.

Stonewall’s Transgender Legacy:

Within a month of the Stonewall Riots, gay activists inspired by the events in Greenwich Village formed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), which modeled itself on radical Third World liberation and anti-imperialist movements. The GLF spread quickly through activist networks in the student and antiwar movements, primarily among white young people of middle-class origin. Almost as quickly as it formed, however, divisions appeared within the GLF, primarily taking aim at the movement’s domination by white men and its perceived marginalization of women, working-class people, people of color, and trans people. People with more liberal, less radical politics soon organized as the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), which aimed to reform laws rather than foment revolution. Many lesbians redirected their energy toward radical feminism and the women’s movement. And trans people, after early involvement in the GLF (and being explicitly excluded from the GAA’s agenda), quickly came to feel that they did not have a welcome place in the movement they had done much to inspire. As a consequence, they soon formed their own organizations.

In 1970, Sylvia Rivera and another Stonewall regular, Marsha P. Johnson, established STAR—Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. Their primary goal was to help street kids stay out of jail, or get out of jail, and to find food, clothing, and a place to live. They opened STAR House, an overtly politicized version of the “house” culture that already characterized black and Latino queer kinship networks, where dozens of trans youth could count on a free and safe place to sleep. Rivera and Johnson, as “house mothers,” would hustle to pay the rent, while their “children” would scrounge for food. Their goal was to educate and protect the younger people who were coming into the kind of life they themselves led—they even dreamed of establishing a school for kids who’d never learned to read and write because their formal education was interrupted by discrimination and bullying. Some STAR members, particularly Rivera, were also active in the Young Lords, a revolutionary Puerto Rican youth organization. One of the first times the STAR banner was flown in public was at a mass demonstration against police repression organized by the Young Lords in East Harlem in 1970, in which STAR participated as a group. STAR House lasted for only two or three years and inspired a few short-lived imitators in other cities, but its legacy lives on even now.

A few other transgender groups formed in New York in the early 1970s. A trans woman named Judy Bowen organized two extremely short-lived groups: Transvestites and Transsexuals (TAT) in 1970 and Transsexuals Anonymous in 1971. More significant was the Queens’ Liberation Front (QLF), founded by drag queen Lee Brewster and heterosexual transvestite Bunny Eisenhower. The QLF formed in part to resist the erasure of drag and trans visibility in the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march, which commemorated the Stonewall Riots and is now an annual event held in New York on the last Sunday in June. In many other cities, this weekend has become the traditional date to celebrate LGBTQ Pride. The formation of the QLF demonstrates how quickly the gay liberation movement started to push aside some of the very people who had the greatest stake in militant resistance at Stonewall. QLF members participated in that first Christopher Street Liberation Day march and were involved in several other political campaigns through the next few years—including wearing drag while lobbying state legislators in Albany. QLF’s most lasting contribution, however, was the publication of Drag Queen magazine (later simply Drag), which had the best coverage of transgender news and politics in the United States, and which offered fascinating glimpses of trans life and activism outside the major coastal cities. In New York, QLF founder Lee Brewster’s private business, Lee’s Mardi Gras Boutique, was a gathering place for segments of the city’s transgender community well into the 1990s.

#pride was a riot #lgbt+ history #lgbtqia+ history #pride month #pride #marsha p johnson #sylvia rivera #stonewall riots #stonewall #susan stryker #usa centric

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madhatterer · 3 years

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Олена Зеленська

March 8 at 2:17 PM ·

Open letter from Mrs. Olena Zelenska

Currently, I am being asked for an interview by media from all over the world.

I want to reply to everyone at the same time with this letter. These are my signs from Ukraine.

Over a week ago, what is happening at the moment was still unthinkable. My country was peaceful and the metropolis, cities and villages were filled with the joys of everyday life.

On the 24th In February, we wake up with the announcement of the beginning of the war. Tanks crossed the Ukrainian border, planes invading our airspace. Cities were surrounded by rocket launchers.

I bear witness: despite the Kremlin's propagandists' testimony, the invasion is a "special operation", it is actually the murder of peaceful civilians.

The worst part is to read about child victims. Eight-year-old Alisa who died in the street of Okhtyrka whose grandfather tried to protect her with his body. Or Polina from Kyjiw who died along with her parents in the shooting. Or about the 14-year-old Arsenij - in a once peaceful suburb of the capital, a wreck hit the boy's head, which the ambulance simply couldn't reach due to strong fire.

If Russia should once again claim that it is "no war against the civilian population", then I will be the first to call these names.

I testify that our women and children are now living in air protection bunkers and basements. I guess they saw the pictures from the subway of Kyjiw and Kharkiw where people with their babies and pets are lying on the ground. For some it is spectacular footage, but for Ukrainians it is the new terrible reality for a week. There are cities where families can't get out of air protection bunkers for several days.

Our children have their classes in basement. And some are already born there because extinguishing stations had to be moved to the underground. The first child of war, who saw not the peaceful sky, but the concrete ceiling of the cellar, was born on the first day of the invasion. Now there are dozens of children who have never known peace in their lives.

I bear witness: This war is not only waged by the firing of the civilian population: People who are dependent on constant treatment and care cannot receive these quality.

Is it easy to inject insulin in the basement? And getting asthma meds under fire? Not to mention the thousands of cancer patients for whom vital chemotherapy and radiation had to be postponed.

The population of the cities is full of despair, cut off by war. People with disabilities, wheelchair-bound, sick and lonely elderly people stay away from relatives and help.

War against such people is a double crime!

Our roads are full of refugees - in many of your countries you can already see the tired women and children with pain in the eyes. The men take them to the limits and return to the fight.

Finally, the Ukrainians won't give up despite all these horrors. The occupier believed the Ukrainian cities would be conquered by a flash war.

But unexpectedly he pushed resistance, not only through the Ukrainian army, but also through the entire population. Ukrainian or Russian-speaking Ukrainians of different political beliefs, religions and nationalities unite in the face of the invasion like never before.

The Kremlin propagandists claimed that the Ukrainians would welcome them with flowers as liberators. But the Ukrainians greeted them with Molotow cocktails.

The residents of the attacked cities agree on the social networks and patrol the houses, help the lonely, prepare food, collect medicines and ammunition for the defenders. They simply do their job - in pharmacies, businesses, in transport, in public services - so that life goes on and wins.

I thank all of them that now all Ukrainians have joined the army and volunteered so that the attacker's plans were crossed.

I bear witness: although the attacker is hiding it, the military losses on the Russian side are in the thousands. We set up a hotline for mothers from Russia so they know that their sons are not in a military exercise, as the Kremlin reports, but dying trying to conquer Ukraine.

I bear witness: Ukraine wants peace! But Ukraine will protect its borders and identity and will never capitulate.

What we need and what we are talking about around the world - close the heavens! Finally take off your white gloves, you won't be able to maintain neutrality anyway. Because next time Putin might come to you. Close the heavens, on the earth we alone will survive.

In cities where the fire continues, where people are under rubble and are unable to get out of basements for days, not even to get food, we need safety corridors for the delivery of humanitarian aid Helping and transporting civilian population to a safe place.

On this occasion, I ask you to provide us with humanitarian help and thank those who already do. And also to those who protect our women and children. And I thank all the people of their countries who gather in places to support Ukraine. We see and appreciate it! You guys are amazing!

I appeal to them, worthy media: continue to show them what is happening in Ukraine and show them the truth. In the information war that the Russian Federation has unfolded, every testimony is of crucial importance.

With this letter, I also testify and want to let the world know: the war in Ukraine is not a war “somewhere out there”. This is a war in Europe and on the EU borders.

Ukraine is stopping a power that can invade your cities in the most aggressively tomorrow under the pretext of saving civilians.

If we don't stop Putin, who is threatening a nuclear war, there will be no safe place in the world.

I know - it's like a nightmare and a week ago it seemed like an exaggeration, but it's a reality we currently live in. And we don't know how long it will last.

But we will definitely win. We stand for each other and we have a weapon called unity. Unity in love with Ukraine.

Glory to Ukraine!

#Ukraine #war #unjust #Putin #Russia #evil

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typinggently · 4 years

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I feel like feral!bruce would like to wear body glitter. Just a slutty outfit that reveals as much of his body as he can without showing off his scars and absolutely covered in body glitter that reflects the lights of the chandelier at a fancy gala (he's not following the dress code, but who cares when hes hot and rich?) OR the neon lights at a shady club in the dangerous part of Gotham. Thoughts.

Anon…your mind… y.y I love this so much…the concept of Feral Bruce in a glittery outfit is truly incredible and I love it so much

I also spent a hoot minute sorting through my thoughts and I found something that’s similar to glitter, but gives more protection for his scars (while still showing skin and being sexy AND being glitter)? And it’s those glittery diamond chain shirts?

You know, like this piece by Ludovic de Saint Sernin (you KNOW I love that specific collection, I used it before for Feral Bruce Fashion simply because I adore the combination of glitter, black and revealing outfits…unparalleled) -

Put him in proper black suit and voilà!!! Maybe velvet? To really give it that overkill feeling? Or keep it classy with a matte, nicely cut suit to balance out that top? Also by suit I mean trousers and the jacket. Leave the jacket open and you have that gorgeous piece just glittering underneath, showing plenty of skin while not showing too much, you know? He doesn’t have to worry about the scars because they’re sufficiently hidden underneath the glitter AND the pink of his nipples still shines through. That’s fashion. That’s a Gala Outfit right there.

And actually???? Maybe? He goes the extra mile and wears this dress version??? Now of course he still wears trousers, he wouldn’t want to cause a scene. Never. Not him. But it’s more glitter and shows more skin so…

Also I refuse to believe that he wouldn’t be wearing diamond clip earrings. Maybe he wouldn’t pierce his ears because, like tattoos, they could somehow give him away, but clips are a-ok.

And see – he’s wearing a suit. It’s a suit event. He’s following the dress code. And as you said – he’s hot and rich, who’s going to stop him?

But now – he’s at the Gala, dressed to the nines, what does he do? I say he goes to the DJ who’s playing tasteful 60s cocktail music to appeal to the crowd and goes “Hello can you play something a little more fun, s’il vous plait?” – and what’s the DJ going to do? “No, Brucie Wayne, I can’t do that”??? As IF

The point is that Bruce dances. Possibly on the tables. And since he’s the Prince of Gotham, the sugar babies join in at some point and that’s the headline right there – Brucie surrounded by a group of scantily clad women and men who all came on the arm of some rich, corrupt, married raisin

I honestly can’t decide what kind of songs Bruce would chose for Brucie? I feel like he, as himself, would probably rock that exact outfit in that exact context – the stiff-formal crowd, the marble floors, the glittering chandeliers, the champagne – and go absolutely HAM to Prrokofiev’s Dance of the Knights (or maybe Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King). And I don’t mean in a classic Ballet way. Just – absolute feral energy. I feel like watching Bruce - the real Bruce - dancing is like watching a thunderstorm. There’s so much energy there, so much passion, he’s absolutely lost to the world, his body a livewire. A sense of elegance, mixed with a wild strength, flexibility and a foaming, wild mind.

But yes. This isn’t real Bruce, this is Brucie. So I say – honestly, he probably goes up there and goes “Anything from Blackout, oui?” (Brucie sometimes puts on a REALLY fake and bad French accent)

Next thing you know, the marble halls and floor-to-ceiling windows are vibrating with Piece of Me.

(Bruce with his hair falling into his eyes, chest covered in strings of diamonds and sticky with champagne he used to cool off between songs, flushed cheeks, dancing with a selection of three sugar babies at a time on a buffet table that’s creaking dangerously)

Dangerous parts of Gotham? We know Bruce has the Matches Alias when he wants to snoop around the seedy parts but like – Wouldn’t it be fun if he just waltzed in as Brucie now and then? It’s not unbelievable, Brucie is the Hot Airhead type, he could decide to go off the beaten tracks for some “real fun”.

And Alright. Alright I have to say it. Colin Farrell as Penguin right. What’s up with that. I know I established the Penguin as some sort of uh? Fastfood fiend? But honestly, he did that drug and chain restaurant spiel in ’03 or so. He can move on and have some Ice Cold Nightclubs. And maybe Bruce wants to investigate but Matches is too sleazy, so Bruce is all “The only possible solution is to dress up in glittery outfits and go check the scene myself”

Since the Club Penguin (I’m? Come on, that’s gotta be the name) it Ice-themed, glitter is the PERFECT outfit. He arrives with glitter in his hair, glitter on his chest, maybe wearing some leather trousers this time, acting high as a kite and carrying one (1) credit card as well as one (1) bottle of Perfume. Upon arriving at the door, he sprays it liberally on his chest, throat, the general area around himself and drops it right on the floor before waltzing in, not even pausing for the bouncer. Hot and Rich. Who’s going to stop him?!

Once inside the club – icy blue walls, neon lights, fog, glittering floors – Bruce obviously has to dance and pretend to get real fucked up on whatever people are giving him. Sea of writhing, glittering bodies.

And see – Brucie could be in real danger here. This is not a friendly-fancy club, this is the Penguin’s lair. I think he escapes the attacks people make on him in hilarious slapstick ways. Someone fixes his drink and Brucie just pours out his 30$ g&t to marvel at how the neon lights glitter in the glass. Someone tries to steal his credit card but ends up with a glittery black card that says “Brucie XO” on it and nothing else. Bruce uses it like a regular card, as in he hands it over and people give him shit because he’s Brucie Wayne.

The Gotham Underground hates Brucie so fucking much. But in like, the “angrily jumping on your hat and then eating it” way. That’s how he’s still alive. (Bruce perfected the game)

(I would like to let you know that I’ve been listening to Slayyter’s Gimme More remix basically nonstop so I guess that’s what the club is playing. You cannot afford to ignore when I walk out of the store / Freaky little whore from the 314 always wanting more – no one said Penguin had proper taste in music. On second thought they probably play it just for Brucie. And I want to know who he’s dancing with in this cool-glittery club with the nice lighting while he’s wearing his cute little fit. >:( )

Honestly, I hope you enjoyed this at least a little. I feel like this was very stream of consciousness but it was so much fun to think about. Little episodes of Feral Bruce living his best life. I love him so much.

#Feral Bruce Hours #Feral Bruce Fashion #the quality of the pics is...not great on desktop I feel and I'm sorry #I spent a hot minute trying to decide how to cnsr the forbidden n/p...*le #anon #ask #also ?! me once again mixing up the colins im so sorry ah

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angrylizardjacket · 4 years

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Brian May Exclusive Enterview: Queen, Debauchery and Freddie Mercury (May 21, 2017)

Originally from The Times (which you have to pay to read) but found on SpearHead News (who republished the whole thing for free and I love them for it). Not sure if people had seen it much before but Rock Dad Brian May is v sweet, and the spearhead link has images attached.

Tragedy, debauchery … and dwarves — the guitarist Brian May gives Krissi Murison an access-all-areas account of his life with Freddie Mercury and rock’s most flamboyant band. by The Sunday Times

Brian May does a great Freddie Mercury impression. He leans forward in his chair, clasps his hands together conspiratorially and channels the high-speed, staccato delivery of the greatest showman of the late 20th century: “ ‘I had an idea … you know Michael Jackson did this album and it’s called Bad?’ Yeah, Fred. ‘Well, the album we’re making, we could call it Good.’ ”

May laughs. “He would always knock you sideways. Sometimes it was great and sometimes it wasn’t.”

The visitors to Freddie’s dressing room started to change from hot chicks to hot men. It didn’t matter to us — why should it?

May, the guitarist in Queen since their 1970 inception, remembers when Mercury finally announced to him that he was gay, “years after it was obvious”. “In the beginning, the band lived on a shoestring. We couldn’t afford individual hotel rooms, so I would share a room with Freddie … There isn’t a lot I don’t know about Freddie and what he got up to in those days — which was not men, I have to tell you. It was fairly obvious when the visitors to Freddie’s dressing room started to change from hot chicks to hot men. It didn’t matter to us, why should it? But Freddie had this habit of saying, ‘Well, I suppose you realise this, that or the other,’ in this very offhand way, and he did say at some point, ‘I suppose you realise I’ve changed in my private life?’

“And years later, he said, ‘I suppose you realise that I’m dealing with this illness.’ Of course, we all knew [he had Aids], but we didn’t want to. He said, ‘You probably gather that I’m dealing with this thing and I don’t want to talk about it and I don’t want our lives to change, but that’s the situation.’ And then he would move on.”

Dredging through old memories has been the subject of May’s latest project: a compilation book of his personal collection of 3D photos from his time striding around the globe during Queen’s heady reign of stadium-rock supremacy. The accompanying words mark the first time any member of Queen has written about their experiences in the band.

It is harrowing to read of Freddie’s final days and the devastating effect the HIV virus took on his body before he died in late 1991. “The problem,” May writes, “was actually his foot, and tragically there was very little left of it. Once, he showed it to us at dinner. And he said, ‘Oh Brian, I’m sorry I’ve upset you by showing you that.’ And I said, ‘I’m not upset, Freddie, except to realise you have to put up with all this terrible pain.’ ”

Equally hard is May’s belief that the “magic cocktail” of drugs that has since stopped Aids becoming a death sentence was discovered just too late to save Freddie.

“He missed by just a few months,” May sighs. “If it had been a bit later he would still have been with us, I’m sure. It’s very …” he breaks off sadly. “Hmmm. You can’t do ‘what if’ can you? You can’t go there because therein lies madness.”

Brian May on his Queen picture book and Freddie Mercury

Honestly, I had expected to meet a sanctimonious old git. May has been dubbed “the world’s grumpiest rock star” thanks to his online blog, Brian’s Soapbox, on which he posts pious rants about politics, the press, badger culls and animal rights. There are flashes of the same hectoring tone in the book. But it must be a mean trick of the typing, because in real life he seems a terribly gentle and pleasant soul.

I meet him in Windlesham, Surrey, in the vast pile where he has his offices. The bookshelves are lined with antique cameras and 19th-century volumes of Punch. In the middle of the room is a female mannequin wearing a sweeping Victorian crinoline skirt — another of May’s esoteric interests.

He wanders in wearing clogs, gardening trousers and a woven red jacket, almost as arresting as his bright grey corkscrew barnet. Under the jacket is a white shirt, unbuttoned dangerously low for someone who turns 70 in July. Bohemian chain pendants clatter against nipple as he leans in to say hello. He is very tall — or maybe that’s just the hair — and frightfully easy-going.

Tea is arranged and he briefly excuses himself. I assume he’s gone to use the facilities or take an urgent phone call. But after 20 minutes I look out the window to see him tottering around the back garden taking pictures of his rhododendron. Has he forgotten me? When he finally returns, it’s with a box containing his treasured collection of “stereoscopic” (3D) cameras and some of the original slides he took.

He shows me one of his favourites: a picture of Freddie and the Queen bassist John Deacon on a private plane in 1977. A blonde woman gazes at Freddie from the seat next to him.

“That’s Mary, his long-term girlfriend.” Despite Mercury’s sexuality, Mary Austin was his longest relationship and the woman he called “the love of my life”. “They were still very close right to the end,” May nods. “He took care of Mary in his will.”

We look at another photo of Freddie having his make-up applied before a show. “You just feel he’s so close there, don’t you?” May smiles. “It’s almost painfully real. He was this strange mixture of flamboyance and shyness,” he says, remembering his first impressions of Mercury. “He had already built this image around himself, which was very confident and colourful. He was a rock star long before he made a record. In the old days they would have called him a dandy. And more recently a metrosexual. He was like a peacock, a person who brought his own fantasy to life.”

Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, east Africa, to Indian Parsi parents in 1946. He had already started calling himself Freddie before his family came to England, fleeing the Zanzibar revolution for Feltham in west London when he was 17. May grew up a few miles away in leafy Hampton, a studious only child who would later quit a PhD in astrophysics at Imperial College London to pursue his rock’n’roll dreams. (He eventually completed it 36 years later in 2007, specialising in zodiacal dust.)

May tells me about the day he met Freddie. The guitarist was already in a university band called Smile. One day Smile’s singer unwittingly brought his colourful, outspoken mate from Ealing Art College to watch a rehearsal. “Freddie was full of enthusiasm, really fired up,” May remembers. “He loved watching us. Then, on the other hand, he was: ‘But you’re doing all of this wrong. Why are you just standing there looking at the floor? Why aren’t you giving a show for people?’ ”

Was he angling for the frontman job himself?

“I think so. He was very complimentary to me. He said, ‘You should be my Jimi Hendrix.’ Freddie loved Hendrix, he followed him everywhere, he was like a disciple.”

A band, Queen, was born with Mercury as singer. I had no idea how revolutionary his crowd interaction was until May explains that most audiences going to watch a rock band in the early 1970s would sit on the floor, nodding. “These days groups encourage audience participation, but Freddie asking people to sing along was almost uncool in those days. It was viewed as something that might happen in cabaret. What we did, if you want to be crass about it, is we amalgamated rock with music hall. That’s why we wrote We Are the Champions, We Will Rock You and Radio Ga Ga — it was consciously allowing the audience to be part of the show.”

Then there were the outfits. May’s book features some beauties: early 1970s Freddie in flowing locks and Zandra Rhodes’s white pleated “winged” capes; gay-icon Freddie, barechested in black leather trousers and black leather biker hat; “Mediterranean prawn” Freddie with his porno moustache, bouffant wig and strappy red leotard.

Wasn’t he scared of getting beaten up?

“No, not really. There were times when we went, Fred, are you really going on in that? I think the maroon sequin shorts were close to the edge as far as we were concerned. But he loved to outrage people. We were very much a people’s band. If people stopped us in the street and got excited, it was generally bricklayers or truck drivers. Freddie had an amazing way of being in contact with everyone, making people feel like their inner selves were going to come out. We liberated a lot of people.”

Mercury the daring peacock, May the soft-spoken brainiac … it is hard not to see them as two polar opposites, but May disagrees. “We were all striding around the world being big-time rock stars, but actually we’re quite fragile inside. It’s probably the reason we’re rock stars, because it’s a big compensation thing, playing a loud guitar or strutting around singing. You do it because you want to feel confident, you want to find yourself and achieve your potential.”

It says much about Mercury’s light-sapping charisma that May spent much of his time in the shadow of the singer while he was alive. And it says much about May’s strategic brilliance that he hasn’t subsequently faded into obscurity, but become the figurehead of a band that is now even more successful than it was during Mercury’s lifetime. According to this year’s Rich List, May is worth £125m, while a recent survey named Queen the favourite band among fiftysomethings.

Next year will finally see the release of a long-awaited Freddie Mercury biopic, with Rami Malek playing the singer, and May and Queen’s drummer, Roger Taylor, on board as music producers. We Will Rock You, a musical based on Queen’s hits, ran at the Dominion Theatre for 12 years from 2002. Since 2012, Queen have toured live with the American Idol finalist Adam Lambert singing Mercury’s lines (heresy in my opinion, but apparently Freddie would have loved him). Nothing, though, can eclipse May’s 2002 moment astride the top of Buckingham Palace, playing a guitar solo of God Save the Queen for the jubilee. The roof was his idea; the organisers had initially envisaged him wandering through the state rooms for the performance, but he thought it lacked impact. Perhaps he is more like Freddie than we will ever know.

Absent from any of the post-Mercury Queen activity is the bassist, John Deacon, now said to be a recluse. “I don’t see him at all, no,” says May. “It’s his choice. He doesn’t contact us. John was quite delicate all along. He could be very outgoing and very funny, but I think some of the stuff that happened in Munich gave him a lot of damage, and I think losing Freddie was very hard for him as well. He found that incredibly hard to process, to the point where actually playing with us made it more difficult.”

Munich was where Queen holed up at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s to write and record. Things got out of hand. May coyly refers to it in the book as a period of heavy drinking in a local bar, “living in a fantasy world of vodka and barmaids”.

Today he is more forthright: “We all lost our minds … we were all in a perilous place where our emotions were out of control. It manifested itself in way too much drinking, a certain amount of drugs, which I didn’t share — but certainly an awful lot of vodka went through my body. We all fell to bits. That’s the moment Freddie wrote It’s a Hard Life. If you look at the video, it’s a metaphor. There’s all this wonderful, fanciful clothing and excess of food, wine and debauchery, but Freddie’s saying ‘It’s a hard life’ as the grapes are thrust into his mouth. The Freddie writing that song was actually in a very painful, emotional place.”

It inevitably also had an impact on the band dynamic. “We overreacted with each other at times. We all left the band at some point. The studio’s a hard place for a band anyway, but in our case all four of us as writers had had worldwide hits — and I think that’s unique, I don’t think there’s another band in history where that’s true. You have four writers trying to create the next statement of what we are, so what could that statement be except a fight between the different visions? The lifestyle we led magnified that conflict.” In Deacon’s case, it culminated in “John disappearing to Bali and seeing God or whatever”.

When it comes to legendary Queen decadence, May’s book does its best to brush over the carnage. So let me be the one to remind you: there was the Madison Square Garden aftershow party at which male guests were served by topless waitresses in stockings and heels and female guests by men in nothing but gym shorts (to avoid accusations of sexism). And the champagne bill for Freddie’s 35th birthday in New York in 1981, which is said to have been £30,000. Most outrageous, though, was a 1978 album-release party in New Orleans, involving “a flock of transvestites, fire-eaters, dancing girls, snake charmers and strippers dressed as nuns”, according to Mark Blake’s well-respected Queen biography. The tales of what happened next range from the lurid (naked mud-wrestling, public fornication) to the unprintable, but perhaps the most famous involves a fleet of dwarves carrying platters of cocaine strapped to their heads. Does May remember seeing them?

“We knew a lot of dwarves,” he concedes. “I’m still very friendly with the dwarf community because my wife, Anita, used to do pantomimes. I don’t want to sound big-headed, but I’m pretty big in the dwarf world. I’ve spent many long nights propping up bars with dwarves.”

Of New Orleans, he says: “We chose to launch the album there because it was completely broad-minded. We knew a lot of people on the ‘edge of society’, as you would have called it then. You wouldn’t call it that now, you’d call it LGBTBF or whatever it is now. To that party came all sorts of pretty outrageous performers of every sex — and there are a lot! It was fun, nothing sinister went on at all. Nobody was abused, nobody was taken advantage of.”

Fat Bottomed Girls — I was proud of that song. The nude photoshoot was fun at the time, but I wouldn’t find it amusing now. Attitudes change

He would rather distance himself from some of Queen’s less politically correct japes. “For instance, Fat Bottomed Girls. I am very proud of that song, but as part of the album packaging we had this nude [female] bicycle race for a photo session and it all seemed quite innocent and fun at the time. Now I wouldn’t think that was amusing. Attitudes have changed to lots of things.”

He was far from the hardest-partying member of Queen. He’s never even tried drugs, having decided while still a student that “I want to get to the end of this and know that everything I felt was real”.

His weakness was always “company”. He bemoans his sensitive and emotionally immature nature, which meant he was endlessly trawling the world for “the perfect bond with the perfect partner … the place where you could dissolve with someone to the point where you don’t know where they start and you end.”

Did he ever find it? “No, it’s impossible. I’ve glimpsed it. Various times, various moments. But it’s a wonderful fiction, really.”

Don’t feel too bad for him. While he was searching, his then-wife, Chrissie Mullen, was stuck at home with their three children.

“It was very different in those days. There were no mobile phones and phone calls were incredibly expensive if you were on the other side of the world. There was this feeling that life on the road was this separate bubble from your life back home. Nowadays you can’t even begin to think that because communication is so good. We lived in a time that was very exciting, but lonely because you were cut off. You were exploring the frontiers of what was around you, but also the frontiers of what was inside you. In the same way as people who went to look for the Northwest Passage in the 1950s. It felt a bit like you were an explorer in another universe.”

As justifications for adultery go, I suppose it’s a pretty classy one.

He met his second wife, Anita Dobson — aka Angie, the original Queen Vic landlady from EastEnders — in 1986 at a film premiere, while he was still married to Mullen. He and Dobson wed in 2000. There was much amusement in the early days about them both having the same huge poodle perms — though May’s is the real deal and Dobson has been platinum and straight for some time now. In his book’s acknowledgments, he thanks her for managing to live with “possibly the most infuriating man in Britain for 30 years”.

“I know I’m not easy,” he says. “I’m constantly obsessed with one thing or another — astronomy, stereoscopy, music, saving animals … Living with someone like that is appallingly difficult, so I think she deserves a medal. I’m not going to tell you she’s easy, either. She’s an artist and a fearsomely creative person, so our life has always been turbulent, but I suppose that’s what’s kept us young.”

He has previously spoken about the depression he suffered from in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as he dealt with the fallout from his first marriage breaking down and the deaths of both his father and Mercury. Last year he cancelled a tour due to a mystery “persistent illness”. And on Christmas Day he published an alarming blog on Brian’s Soapbox. “I’ve been going through some radical and painful changes in my life … if you had seen me a few weeks ago, you would’ve wondered if I was going to make it to Christmas,” he wrote, before publishing a “tool kit” of apps, a book and a prayer to help others struggling to cope “physically or mentally or spiritually”.

“I went through a very bad period before Christmas and cancelled everything, not just the tour, everything,” he explains. “I just knew I couldn’t handle it.”

Would he call it depression?

“Strangely enough I prefer not to call it depression now. I’ve recently got very much into the body and mind. All my life I’ve been pathetic at doing exercises. I now have a regime — every morning I do 40 minutes’ exercise, then I finish with meditation. It’s really enabled me to recentre. I feel like I’m in a much better place.”

He is an advocate of mindful meditation — a way of living in the present that he believes Mercury used in the final days of his illness. May is happy to speak openly about his own mental health. “I noticed Prince Harry opened up in a similar way. I’ve always thought it’s nice to be open and I get reinforced in that because I get tons of mail saying the fact that you talked about it has helped me feel like I wasn’t alone and wasn’t a freak. I don’t think all this taboo business is helpful at all.”

I wonder if it might be a better use of his platform than his zealous activism on behalf of badgers, which seems a rather niche concern. In brief, then: he is a fierce campaigner against the policy of culling badgers to try to eradicate bovine TB. It is his scientific belief that the cull isn’t working. But it is muddled by his more deep-seated conviction: “Martin Luther King said we hold it self-evident that every man is born equal. I hold it self-evident that every creature is born equal.”

He can point to numerous childhood traumas that led him to this conclusion: watching his mother pour boiling water over an invasion of ants on the path outside his house; squirting a bumblebee with the pesticide DDT, then recoiling in shame as it dropped to the ground, buzzing to its slow and agonising death. If he hasn’t yet had therapy for the latter, he really should.

The animal fanaticism is odd, because on everything else he seems so calmly rational. Perhaps he learnt some of that composure from Freddie. Despite his pain, Freddie was determined to keep working during the band’s final days together in a recording studio in Montreux.

“What we did was get on with business as usual, which is what Freddie wanted,” May remembers. “He said, ‘I don’t want anything to change. We just do what we always do and we love what we do, so it’s going to be fine.’ Certainly those days towards the end were fabulous, full of laughter and joy, Freddie as wicked as ever. He was incredibly matter-of-fact about everything. ‘Oh darling, I’ll just get on with it.’ There wasn’t any self-pity at all. He wanted a ballad, so I very quickly sketched something in the studio and Freddie liked it. He said, ‘Gimme some words’. It was a question of scribbling a few lines and he’d chuck a couple of vodkas down — because he could hardly stand at that point — ‘Oh darling, I’ll do it now.’ Then he’d prop himself up on the desk and sing the lines. We didn’t quite get to the end. I gave him the last verse and he said, ‘Oh darling, I’m not feeling too good now, so I’ll come back to it. In a couple of days I’ll be fine, we’ll do it then.’ And he never did.”

May finished the song after Mercury’s death. It’s called Mother Love, “an attempt from the two of us to look at life and sum it up, to reconcile the end with the beginning, although we wouldn’t have put it that way.”

What does he think Freddie would be doing now if he were still alive? “I don’t think he’d have the patience for social media, because I hardly do and he was much more impatient than me. I don’t think he would be tweeting, he would probably be still writing his little memos on pieces of paper. He was becoming more and more reclusive towards the end of his life. That was partly because he was becoming more and more visible, but partly not wanting his illness to be public. But he was very private anyway and I think that would have continued.”

He is adamant Mercury would still be creating music. “His creativity would have carried on. He was unstoppable and very lateral-thinking. Always coming up with things that were surprising. Often Roger and I, if we’re creating something for Queen, both of us have said that we feel like he’s in the room and you know what he’d say. You can tell if he would have been scornful or enthusiastic — although of course the whole thing about Freddie was that he wasn’t expected.”

We have touched upon May’s depression, infidelity, the painful death of one of his closest friends and the painful death of a bee. Yet there is one subject so sensitive, I have avoided raising it until the very end. His hair. He hates talking about it, but he must on some level like the attention it brings, otherwise why doesn’t he just cut it off?

“I’m comfortable with it,” he says. “It’s completely real. For a time when it was going grey I got very worried that I had to keep it a certain way or I wouldn’t be me any more. Anita encouraged me not to worry about it.”

Would he ever cut it off?

“If it would achieve world peace, I’d do it tomorrow. If it would stop the badger cull, I’d probably do it tomorrow. Because the badger cull is a worthless, senseless operation, it’s not working and sooner or later our government has to realise …”

The images in May’s new book are not just any photos, but 3D pictures, taken on one of the Queen guitarist’s prized “stereoscopic” cameras.

Alongside music, astronomy and badgers, May is deliriously passionate about 3D photography. He first became hooked, aged 12, when Weetabix gave away free stereoscopic picture cards. He petitioned his parents to send off 1s 6d for the photo viewer so he could see them properly in 3D. “It’s probably about £2.50 by today’s money. But we were poor in those days — £2.50 was a lot of heating and lighting.”

“Stereoscopic” photography was originally a Victorian phenomenon and May’s book is published through the London Stereoscopic Company, a 19th-century business he brought back to life in 2008. He has also designed and prototyped his own stereoscopic photo viewer, the Owl, to see the images in their full, 3D majesty; it comes with the book. “It’s just magic to me,” he says, “when you see a picture of Freddie in the viewer and he springs to life.”

#brian may #queen #freddie mercury #roger taylor #john deacon #bohemian rhapsody #borhap #the angry lizard speaks

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route22ny · 5 years

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Essential reading, especially for those who have a warm & fuzzy concept of Dr King that doesn’t extend far past “I Have a Dream”. I’m putting the entire text in this post, and there’s an mp3 here available for download. I believe that this is one of Dr King’s most important speeches, certainly worth revisiting on a day we set aside to honor his memory. It’s also a good time to realize that what was a “dream” in 1963 is still not reality in 2020, which is a tragedy and also a challenge to us all.

Don’t let “Vietnam” fool you into thinking this speech is only about 1960s realities. If anything the US has since engaged all the more freely in military adventures against people of foreign lands, people of color whose nations don’t threaten America, only American “interests”. Headlines this very month show us this dynamic in action yet again.

***

“I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: ‘A time comes when silence is betrayal.' That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

“The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

“Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

“Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

“In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

“I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.

“Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

“Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

The Importance of Vietnam

“Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

“Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

“My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

“For those who ask the question, 'Aren't you a civil rights leader?’ and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: To save the soul of America. We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America will be!

“Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

“As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for 'the brotherhood of man.' This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the 'Vietcong’ or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

“Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

“This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

Strange Liberators

“And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

“They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.

“Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not 'ready' for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

“For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.

“Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

“After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change -- especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

“The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged.

“They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one 'Vietcong'-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

“What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

“We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?

“Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.

“Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of 'aggression from the north' as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

“How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?

“Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

“So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.

“When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

“Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.

“At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.

This Madness Must Cease

“Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

“This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

“If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

“The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

“In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.

Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.

“Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.

Protesting The War

“Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

“As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

“There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

“In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military 'advisers’ in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.’

“Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a 'person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

“America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

“This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

The People Are Important

“These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. 'The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.' We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when 'every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.'

“A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

“This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

“Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : 'Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.'

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The 'tide in the affairs of men' does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: 'Too late.' There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. 'The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on...' We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

“We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

“Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

“As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation Comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth and falsehood, For the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, Off'ring each the bloom or blight, And the choice goes by forever Twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper, Yet 'tis truth alone is strong; Though her portion be the scaffold, And upon the throne be wrong: Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow Keeping watch above his own.

“And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when 'justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’"

#MLK #1960s #racism in america #militarism #imperialism

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toadpaws · 4 years

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a break down of the post made by @staff for pride month:

“Today marks the first day of Pride 2020.... This week has served as a stark reminder that those who have power in this country wield it recklessly and violently against Black people, non-Black POC, and trans people.”

failure to use the terms women or female at all, despite naming Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, and trans-identified Tony McDade as victims of police brutality.

“For some, the power is found in their badge. In others, it’s their skin tone, their socio-economic status, their cisgender privileges, or any other number of privileges one can have.”

Inappropriate, unecessary, and misogynistic use of the phrase “cisgender privileges”, in a post discussing, among others, female victims of police brutality.

“In 2018, with at least 26 trans people who were murdered, all but one were trans women, and all but one were people of color. According to data collected by Human Rights Campaign, this pattern is all too common.”

in this article, CBS reports “The number of women who were victims of homicide in the United States grew by [21%] in 2016... rising to the highest recorded level since 2007″. the article further states that “More than half of the women who were murdered in 2017 worldwide were slain by an intimate partner or family member... Of the 19,362 homicides that the CDC reported in 2016, 3,895 of the victims were women, according to Security.org's report.”

Violence Policy Center states “More than 1,800 women were murdered by men in 2016″.

BBC states “An average of 137 women across the world are killed by a partner or family member every day, according to new data released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)... More than half of the 87,000 women killed in 2017 were reported as dying at the hands of those closest to them.” This article was written in November, 2018.

25 trans-identified males. 87,000 women.

“It should also be noted that the number of trans people who are murdered is grossly underreported, with many families and newspapers often misgendering those who can no longer speak up for themselves.”

there is no source provided to support this claim.

“On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall riots began as a response to the constant police raids of nightlife establishments frequented by the LGBTQIA+ community”

according to this article by the University of Illinois in Springfield, “LGBTQIA” stands for “LGBTQIA+ – A common abbreviation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Pansexual, Transgender, Genderqueer, Queer, Intersexed, Agender, Asexual, and Ally community.”

thus the acronym LGBTQIA+ community includes three terms for same-sex attracted persons, one term for “A person who is sexually attracted to all or many gender expressions”, one term for “gender variant person[s]”, one term for “gender variant person[s] whose gender identity is neither male nor female”, one term described as “ A reclaimed word that was formerly used solely as a slur but that has been semantically overturned by members of the maligned group”, one term for “Someone whose sex a doctor has a difficult time categorizing as either male or female”, one term for “A person is internally ungendered”, one term for “ Person who... does not have a sexual orientation”, and one term for “Someone who confronts heterosexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, heterosexual and genderstraight privilege in themselves and others; a concern for the well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex people; and a belief that heterosexism, homophobia, biphobia and transphobia are social justice issues.” again, the referenced article can be viewed here, and a pdf of all terms here.

in a post intended to address Pride month, tumblr staff chose to honor same-sex attracted people(homosexuals) alongside eight other subgroups, all of which have the ability to contain opposite-sex attracted people(heterosexuals).

“That night sparked a revolution, with many eye-witnesses crediting Black and Latinx trans women for being brave enough to ignite what would become one of the most pivotal nights in LGBTQIA+ history.”

the source cited by tumblr staff is this article.

in the transcript of this podcast, Johnson describes his role in the protests as, “The way I winded up being at Stonewall that night, I was having a party uptown. And we were all out there and Miss Sylvia Rivera and them were over in the park having a cocktail. I was uptown and I didn’t get downtown until about two o’clock, because when I got downtown the place was already on fire. And it was a raid already. The riots had already started.”, and from this article, “Johnson said she didn’t arrive at the bar until rioting was underway.”

this article states, “And in 2001, Rivera said she was at the Stonewall Inn with a boyfriend when it was raided but that she wasn’t the first to resist.”

this afterellen article on Stormé DeLarverie states, “The conversation turned to the night in June of 1969 at the Stonewall Inn where [DeLarverie] made history. Quite a few friends, writers and historians over the years have identified her as the tough cross-dressing butch lesbian who was clubbed by the NYPD, which evoked enough indignation and anger to spur the crowd to action.”

as for the term "Latinx”, this article states, “only 2 percent of America’s Latinos said they preferred the term”, saying “Latinx may feel like an imposition by activists”. the numbers in this article are supported by a sources from reason.com and medium.com.

“Without Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, there would have been no uprising. Without them, there would be no Pride.”

As mentioned above, Johnson and Rivera did not start the uprising. the post by tumblr staff makes no mention of the actions of butch lesbian Stormé DeLarverie.

“At this moment, it would be tone-deaf and insensitive to commemorate Pride in the same celebratory fashion we usually do.”

the staff who wrote this post have already chosen to be quite insensitive and tone deaf in regard to violence against women, same-sex attracted people, and lesbians.

“Spread the word that trans people deserve to feel safe wherever they go.”

yet again, there is no mention of the violence women experience every day around the world. remember the numbers. 25 trans-identified males. 87,000 women.

“The first Pride was a riot. We stand with you.”

from the Library of Congress, “The first Pride march in New York City was held on June 28, 1970 on the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising” and from this pdf, “The Christopher Street Liberation Day March was the first gay pride event. It was created to celebrate the Stonewall Inn Riot that occurred exactly one year before (Desta, 2014).”

“We stand with you”- bullshit. you absolutely do not.

#i have nothing to do and i really like hyperlinks and research papers #i also hate the staff here #pls notify me of any broken links #pride #my posts

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joshslater · 5 years

Text

Putting Reek in Greek

Essentially just a repost of walkamongyou’s excellent What Happens in Malia... with few tweaks thrown in. I take his feedback “Love how plausible you've made it“ as high praise, as that was the goal.

Thank fuck the week is almost over. It all started because I booked a discount holiday to Malia, like a fucking egit. The flights were cheap and the advert promised it’d be a ‘Great Gay Getaway’. It started out with a delayed flight, adding 4 hours of waiting in a packed terminal on top of the 3 hour uncomfortable flight. We were late to the crappy hotel, my room had already been given to someone else, and I got downgraded to a filthy cupboard with a narrow bed and no shower. The indifferent staff told me the price difference would be reimbursed on my credit card within two weeks and that I could use the pool shower.

I could have lived with giving up my beach view room with queen size bed and marble bath tub if there were some great gays to get away with, but no. Had I done any research I would have known that the place is littered with pubs and chippy shops for plebs who want to get wasted and watch footie in better weather. To top it all off I’ve coincided directly with all the trashiest stag and hen dos known to man. Everyone’s a chav, everyone’s English and worst of all, everyone’s straight as a ruler. Definitely nothing to offer a cultured gay man from South London. So here I am, sat in a tacky cocktail bar with two nights left, and can’t wait to get the fuck back to work. I just got what might be the evening’s last Old Fashioned, contemplating going to bed early when they enter.

They’re a classic example of everything that’s wrong with the Brits. They stagger in, singing and chanting “OI OI” and “Lads! Lads!”. They’re young, comically sunburnt, with identical chavvy haircuts, short on the sides and long on top. A group of working class boys on a lads’ holiday. One of them’s wearing a t shirt that says ‘On it till we vomit’, another that says ‘Pussy Patrol’ and a couple of them, of course, have football shirts. They’re a ridiculous cliché, drunk and rowdy. One loud-mouthed guy, their leader, is particularly handsome. He’s topless despite this being a public place, revealing a toned, athletic body; he wouldn’t look out of place dancing on a podium in Soho. His hair is dark brown and spikey, he has a diamond stud in both ears and a mischievous expression on his face as he starts chanting ‘Shots! Shots! Shots!’ and soon they’re all joining in. A row of tequila appears from the bar and he cries out “What happens in Malia stays in Malia!”

I don’t want them here. I resent their misogynistic ways and the atmosphere they’ve created. Not to mention I’m having a terrible day, so the London boy in me does the only thing he can think of and seeks out the bouncer, a bald, robust figure in a tight black T-shirt stood by the doorway. “Is there any chance you can get those guys to leave? They’re making people uncomfortable.” He shakes his head “Sorry, sir, there’s nothing I can do.” “Are you sure? It’s not fair on everyone else in here” “As long as they don’t break any laws, pay their bills, don’t fight or break anything they are welcome to stay.“ Normally I’d give up, but I’m miserable and exhausted from sleeping with an AC unit rattling outside my room, so I feel a lie come to my lips. I even shock myself as I say it. “But they are breaking the law. I’ve seen them at another bar this evening and they’re dealing drugs.” He looks at me, the irritable expression gone from his face. “What did you say?“ “I said they’re drug dealers. They’ve been selling cocaine.” Suddenly, his expression is deadly serious. “Thanks for letting me know. You have a good evening now.”

I watch them covertly, with a slight smile as the security guard approaches them. There’s a confrontation, voices are raised, and like kicking a beehive they buzz around the bar collecting their shit. They glare around the bar, even in my direction, before they go and peace returns. I chuckle to myself. What happens in Malia stays in Malia… Stupid chav cunts.

I go back to the bar stool and finish my cocktail at a leisurely pace, sit for a while and listen to the music they’re playing. At least I think that’s what I do. Everything starts going fuzzier and fuzzier, warmer and hazier. I need to get out and get some fresh air.

“Mate, wake up…” I’m groggy, I’m parched, my head’s pounding and I’ve no idea where I am. “Wake up, fella!” I feel a strong pair of hands shaking me, gently at first, and then roughly. My eyes slowly open, but everything’s dark and for a second I’m terrified that I might have gone blind, until a pair of sunglasses is pulled from my face and I’m blinded instead by the bright Malia sun. It’s high enough for breakfast to be over. Leaning over me is a handsome man; he’s wearing a grey t shirt and a backwards cap, but I recognise him instantly as the topless guy from last night. I panic, try to move but my body doesn’t want to respond and instead I slump to the ground. “Whoa…whoa…”, the man says, catching me in his arms and holding me tight against his broad chest. “Thank fuck you’re a skinny bastard.”

He props me back up on the deck chair I was sleeping on, holding my head upright, his face close to mine. I can smell chewing gum and cigarettes on his breath. I’m sure it’d be erotic if I wasn’t so frightened. "Now dickhead, I want you to listen very carefully to me. Blink once if you understand.” He’s using a hushed, calm voice, but with more than a hint of viciousness. I manage to consciously blink, though even that is an effort. “Good. Now, it seems like you had your drink spiked. Unlucky for you, but fortunately I here to help you. I left you out in the sun for a bit to sober you up but clearly it didn’t work. You’re wankered…” He ruffles my hair and my head instantly slumps to the side without him supporting it, so he takes a hold of my temples and pulls me sharply back upright.

He barely whispers now. “OK, listen to me, you little prick. You messed with the wrong lads last night. We’re no drug dealers, but it cut close to home for some of my mates, so they are divesting certain personal pharmaceutical investments as we speak. Personally I ditched my stash of slow release growth hormones by giving you quite a liberal dose. It should have you set well into the next quarter, perhaps longer. Russians really now how to cheat...” He chuckles darkly and stares straight into my eyes. Back to normal voice again. “Don’t look so scared mate. My job is to keep you in sight and entertained until they are back. We’re going to have a great day together… Now, what’s your name again?” I try to respond, but can only groan. “Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that…” He laughs, coughs and then spits on the floor. “Well…my name’s Caine, and to be honest, fella, I don’t give a shit what your name is…But what I do give a shit about is that you ruined a proper good vacation for me and the lads.” My body tenses at this accusation “No worries though… tonight’s a new night, as they say… and you’re going to make it unforgettable. You’re about to become the newest member of our Lads on Tour group: Gaz. That’s your name, right? Gaz? Blink once if it is…" I sit there, not responding. My name definitely isn’t Gaz. He grunts and lands a hard slap across my face. “I said blink if your name’s Gaz!” This time I do blink. “Good lad. You’re not as thick as you look. Now, Gaz, let’s get you semi-functional. We’ve got lots to do today and a big night ahead of us. Drink this.“ He shoves gym water bottle in my mouth and squeeze it lightly. I can do nothing else but drink it, though I happily do. It tastes like an isotonic drink. Sweet, salty, slightly sour and slightly bitter all at the same time.

I’m staggering down the street, with Caine supporting me. A lot of passers-by are shaking their head or trying to not stare at us…well, me; to an outside eye he looks like a well-meaning boy helping out his mate who’s had one too many. Nobody would guess he was a straight chav with a perverse sense of justice, propping up a sedated gay man.

But it’s not only this apparent display of friendship that is making people stare. Despite not having had a good look at myself, it is clear even to me I’d been out in the sun for far too long. “You look a bit burnt there Gaz. I thought I lathered you up pretty well with sun lotion. Looks like I took the tanning oil by mistake.” My usual pale skin was a painful, blazing red all aside from a tan line where he’d left a pair of sunglasses on my face and an equally ridiculous set of white lines where he’d dressed me in an old wife beater; I was now modelling what most Brits would call a ‘twat tan.’

It wasn’t just any wife beater either. In contrast with my normal, well accessorized shirt, chinos and brogues look, I only had a total of four items on my body. One pair of orange Jägermeister promotion flip flops. One pair of blue, slinky adidas football shorts as, perhaps not less expensive, but certainly cheaper looking stand in for board shorts. And finally, the crown jewel, someone’s black wife beater that read “I HAVE THE DICK SO I MAKE THE RULES” in outlandish red letters. All of it covered in traces of what must have been at least one out of vomit, food and cum, and I could definitely smell both sweat and alcohol wafting from it.

All of this I piece together painfully slow, as I’m practically carried by Caine along the scorching street towards God knows where. I’m paraded around town like an effigy of the worst of Britain, unable to do anything to shield myself from, or even look at the passerby.

Suddenly Caine steers me into a building. As he guides me through the door, I notice the spinning red, blue and white of a barber’s pole. It’s a Turkish barbers; the two men working there turn around and eye me up and down, one is unable to quell a small laughter, the other barely hiding his disgust. It’s a far cry from the warm welcome and prosecco I get at Toni & Guy in London. The decor is ugly and cheap, with neon lights and linoleum. The two men discuss something among themselves in another language, ignoring us, until one finally comes forward with a neutral “You want a haircut?”

Caine throws me in the barber’s chair. I notice whatever I’ve been spiked with is starting to wear off as I’m now just about able to support my own head. The barber is behind me, glaring and tutting like I’m an idiot. I see him take in the stains and slogan on the tank top as he puts the cape around my neck. “You look unwell.” he states. Caine’s voice comes from behind me. “Yeah man, he’s just taken a lot of shit. You’re a pussy but you’re right as rain ain’t you Gaz mate?” He slaps me hard on the chest. It’s agonising on my sunburn, but I can barely flinch. The barber seems appeased, rolling his eyes, and taking another look at the photo Caine is showing him on his phone. “While we were out Gaz gave me strict orders to get him a fresh cut before we hit the town again today. When he sobers up he’ll be gutted if he isn’t looking his best. He even said he’d pay triple, didn’t you Gaz mate?”, he laughs. “You stupid stoner bastard.” The barber nods OK. I’m sure he’s being deliberately rough as he sets to work, shoving my head from side to side and pressing the clippers tightly against my scalp, totally ignoring my sunburn. Still, while my muscle control is coming back, I’m feeling fatigued, and before I know it I doze off. When I come to, the barber is holding a mirror up to the back of my head and tapping my shoulder impatiently. “Your haircut, sir.”

I see Caine’s reflection appear behind me, smiling broadly, flashing his perfect white teeth, then see my own eyes widen as I take in this new look. Gone is my fashionable London haircut. In it’s place is a modernised fusey bowl cut; the top third of my head is covered, but below that is a harsh line where I’ve been shaved bald. The barber must have done something to the hair he left on my head, as it’s now blow dried into a ridiculous, voluminous mess. I look like a giant iced gem. It’s a style I’ve only ever seen on the stupidest chavs and builders trying to copy their favourite stars from The Only Way is Essex. “Oi oi, Gaz, a perfect lad’s haircut for a night out with the boys!” Cain shouts in my ear. “Great idea with a perm innit?! You get this do for half a year without any work in the morning.” He reaches across to shake the barber’s hand. “Thanks, I promise Gaz is smiling too, aren’t you mate? Thinking of all the pussy you’ll get with your new do ain’t ya?” Both men laugh as Caine reaches into his pocket and pulls out what I see is my wallet, cramming a handful of euros into the barber’s hand; well above what I assume is triple their going rate it. “Keep the change mate.” The barber smiles. “Have a good one lads…” He turns to Caine and lowers his voice. “Please help your friend take a shower. He really needs one.”

“I can’t wait to tell the lads how you were too stinky to stay in that Turkish barbers! Classic Gaz! Gaz the Stinker! Must be all the growth hormone that is starting to kick in.” Caine howls as he leads me down the pavement, people are staring at us. The sun is above us, so it must be about lunch time.

“Now, Gaz, mate, we’ve got one more stop before we’re ready for our special lads’ night. But I want this one to be a surprise. Drink up.” He handed me the gym bottle again. Still thirsty I eagerly empty it. “Good lad. I added something extra, so it’s not just electrolytes and that mental patient docile stuff you had before. It’s time for you to have another little sleep. Not even a stab in your guts would wake you up…”

Eventually I do wake up, this time to the distant sound of buzzing. I know the drill by now; I try to speak, but no sound comes out. My senses clear and I feel the gentle touch of someone rubbing me with lotion. It stings. As I look around I realise with horror exactly where I am. He’s taken me to a fucking tattoo parlour. I don’t even have any tattoos…well, correction, I didn’t. I feel a lump in my throat as I dread to think of what Caine has in store for me. As if on cue, he appears. “Morning you lazy bastard! You’ve woken up just in time; quite a few helping hands worked together to sort out all those tats for you in time. But we got it just like you wanted, Gaz!”

I wonder what tattoo artists would work on an unconscious client, but I know Caine is a ruthlessly smooth talker. I remember articles I’d laughed at in the Daily Mail of people who’d had ridiculous tattoos done on holiday. Now, thanks to Caine, I could add my own name to that illustrious list.

“You guessed it mate, you’ve got some sick new ink. What’s better is Phoebe here is treating them with burn victim lotion. Seals those fuckers right in, so you can go swim tomorrow if you like. Makes them a bit blurry, but it’s no worse than any one year old tat. Let me show you on my phone…” With a manic glint in his eye, he slowly scrolls through the photos of the artist’s handiwork in front of my face with careful glee, enjoying how I can’t really react, but I still find myself gasping at what he shows me.

My body has been turned into a ridiculous canvas of male clichés; there are British flags and patriotic slogans, roses, poppies and images of football players I don’t even recognise on my arms, legs, neck and chest. There clearly is a wide range of styles and level of abilities represented. But the blazing centrepiece is a huge Celtic print of three letters across my back; a name, not my name, a name bestowed upon me today: ‘GAZ’, underlined with the grammatically incorrect phrase ‘Malia 2017. Lad’s on tour’

Caine locks eyes with me in triumph. “On other guys I’d think this much ink was stupid, but on you, mate, it’s fucking on point. I’m happy it came out perfect, since red and yellow can’t be lasered.” He swipes to the next photo, showing a gaudy glass stud in my earlobe. “It’s acid treated, so you don’t have to worry about the piercings growing shut.”

Everything is starting to blur together. Perhaps I’m in shock, and you would think for all the sleeping I’ve done today I would be on top of things. Caine has led me back to the cheap holiday apartment where this hellish day began. This time I can feel tingling, like pins and needles, of movement returning to my body. I’m able to stand up on my own, and I’m in the middle of a bedroom with Caine in front of me. He’s dressed really nicely in a white linen shirt, breathtakingly handsome. In spite of all that’s happening I can feel my penis bulging in the adidas shorts he put me in this morning. I don’t want to get hot for him, and perhaps this is another of his additions to the water, but I suspect he just is that hot. “Now, mate, let’s get the final touches for the finale. I want you to have a say in this, since you’ve been so good all day. Which footie top is it going to be for the big night? What do you say, Stinker? Red, or blue?”

He spins me around forcefully and I gaze up at two football shirts hanging on the wall. I assume they’ve both already been worn by one of my new ‘friends’ the night before. My shoulders slump in defeat and I quietly nod in the direction of the blue one. He pulls it over my head. As expected it smells of stale sweat. “Nice choice, mate. I think the red would have really brung out your sunburn. You really should get some aloe vera on that, you daft twat. No time for that now though, the lads are waiting and it’s taken you all fucking day to get ready.”

We’re in front of a club, waiting in a queue. Everyone is dressed nicely, in collared shirts and dresses, and I feel so conspicuous in my sweaty football gear. I’ve regained a lot of movement, but I’m lumbering and everything’s still fuzzy around the edges. “Sorry everyone!” Caine shouts “Gaz here has had five pints too many!” As we reach the front of the queue, a dapper bouncer blocks the way. “Identification, Sir.” The bouncer stressed the Sir a bit extra, dripping with disapproval. There was an awkward pause. I check the flimsy pockets of my football shorts, but they were as empty as I had expected them to be. “Oi, Gaz I have your new passport.” Caine handed over a passport to the bouncer. It was one of those temporary passports embassies issue for people daft enough to lose it while abroad. The bouncer opened it, made a quick look, and handed it back. With far fewer pages than a normal passport it looked flimsy. I opened it and flipped to the identification page. Most of the fields were what I would expected them to be. Height, sex, number all as expected. The expiration date was only a month in the future. Again, nothing surprising for a temporary passport. But the photo made me nauseous. It was a photo from today, though I had no memory of it being taken. My mouth was slack jawed open, eyes bloodshot, sleepy and unfocused, skin unevenly tanned. To crown it all, that ugly haircut and two slits shaved in my left eye brow. I had no memory of that being done either. I raised my hand to confirm. I was painfully aware that had the photo been shot a few hours later there would also be a pair of cheap studs in my freshly pierced ears and an ugly tattoo snaking up from the tank top, on the side of the neck.

Just as horrifying as my run-down visage was the name in the passport. Instead of John Holland, my name, it says "Gaz Taylor". As if he could read my mind, though that wouldn't be that hard at the moment, Caine spoke again. “The lads were kind enough to submit a deed poll to correct your name before getting your temp passport. With any luck your new permanent ID card should be waiting for you when you get home. I say permanent, but you can of course change name again in like 2 years, or whatever their hold off time is.” The club is classy, expensive and busy. Caine guides me across the room, his hand pressing firmly into the small of my back, over to a group of men who are chatting among themselves. Of course it’s the same group of lads as the day before, my new ‘mates’. “Fellas…you remember Gaz? He’s very sorry about last night and really keen to make it up to you all!” They turn, and I feel their eyes on me, taking me in; the tattoos, the outfit, the piercings, the hair. They’re all dressed nicely, suave and in sharp contrast to the ridiculous figure Caine has shaped me into; there’s a moment of silence before they burst into raucous laughter.

Soon I’m being shoved from person to person, they’re all shaking my hands, offering me swigs of their pint, clapping me on the back and eager to spend time with their new ‘mate’. I feel that even with those minuscule amounts of beer, my tired body is sinking fast. One of them squeezes my bicep, asking me if I’ve started to swell yet and if I watched the match last night. Another asks me if I knew there was a dress code, pointing at my top and loudly shouting “Classic Gaz”. Someone named Chris tells me he knows a guy who needs concrete workers, and write a number with a marker pen on my arm. Another pulls me over, asks me what the capital of Thailand is, before slapping me hard in the balls and saying “Bang cock!” They are all taking the piss out of me.

I’m standing with a guy called Shaun, who is showing me a top he picked up for me that day that is also ‘Classic Gaz’, a lime green t shirt proudly emblazoned with the words ‘MUFF DIVER’. However, this presentation is cut short by lights flashing from outside in red and blue, and the music in the club stops abruptly. The boys scatter and I feel a lump of joy in my throat. Somebody must have informed the police; finally my nightmare is over!

Four police officers quickly advance towards me. I look around and Caine is no where to be seen. In fact I don’t recognise anyone around me. I don’t realise how drunk I am until two of the officers roughly restrain me and put me in handcuffs. I try to speak to them, but they completely ignore anything I say, and as I’m shoved into the back of a police car I can hear the music start in the club again.

I wake up as they drag me out of the car. Everything is so unreal. Like it is happening to someone else. A police man is asking me questions and I think I answer them. Two officers take me to a well lit room and tell me to take off my clothes. Flip flops, shorts, shirt. Every piece can be removed in one motion. They take photos. They look in my mouth. I lie on my belly on an angled, padded table. I’ve had things in my ass many times before, but this wasn’t what I hoped for. I get dressed again. They take me to a small cell, and I can finally fall asleep.

When I wake up again for a few seconds everything feels fine. Nothing hurts. A bit thirsty perhaps, but nothing more. Then I see a horrible football tattoo and a cellphone number scribbled on my arm, and all the memories of what has been done to me floods back. There is no clock in the cell, so I don’t know exactly how many hours I sit there until someone comes to get me, but I have plenty of time to consider my situation. I understand what Caine meant with growth hormones producing smelly sweat, because it is definitively me and not the clothes that stink the worst.

When someone finally come and get me it is a police officer explaining they got a call about a drug dealer matching my description. While they didn’t find any drugs, I was clearly under the influence and they kept me in custody. The blood report showed a whole buffet of different drugs, but being under the influence isn’t an offense in itself. He further informs me that a report has been sent to Europol so I should arrive airports an hour earlier from now on, as I can expect thorough searches. With that he wishes me good luck and hope I can get my life back on track. He has no idea.

Lastly he hands me a sports bag. I had been checked out of the hotel while in custody, and the bag was the only thing in my room. A last laugh from Caine. The bag contains a wrinkled bundle of damp clothes. Joggers, sweatshirt, t-shirt, a pair of seriously worn trainers and three socks. No underwear. It’s as if someone did a hard workout and then put his clothes in sealed bag for a day. No matter how I am getting home, it will be just as unpleasant for any travelers close to me, since without wallet this is what I’ll wear.

In the side pocket is a hotel envelope containing three papers. The checkout folio from the hotel, a Ryanair boarding pass for the evening flight back in the name Gaz Taylor, and a fax from my employer. Or rather former employer, as it reads “Upon receiving the drug use report we are hereby terminating your employment effective immediately in accordance with section 18 (e) of your employment contract.” I look again at the phone number scribbled on my arm.

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thempoetry · 5 years

Text

“There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé” by Morgan Parker

This book had been years coming in my collection. Its name rang out inside me when I felt its titular sentiment — that the popular worship of Beyoncé is overblown — and whenever I thought of it, I felt a spark of solidarity.

Of course, this is not a book about Beyoncé — and in fact, this is not even a book that is very critical of Beyoncé. Instead, Beyoncé acts as a literary device throughout — a mouthpiece, an amulet, a proto-idea that shapeshifts to meet Parker’s endless need to talk, sing and moan about race, class, democracy, depression, music and drugs. It’s a brilliant move.

I’d like to start more broadly by commenting on Morgan Parker, because she strikes me as an outsider among insiders. In my head, Parker is of the generation of contemporary poets that includes Danez Smith, Franny Choi, Ocean Vuong etc. … she’s decorated with a Pushcart, she co-curates a reading series, she performs with Angel Nafis as part of The Other Black Girl Collective. Her poetic career is bedazzlingly active — so why don’t we talk about her more?

By which I mean: there seems to be a kind of halo around young poets like Ocean Vuong, who — and I say this with admittedly limited experience of his work — turn the harrowing vine-tangle of identity into a kind of rhapsodic experience: a thing worth looking at because it is beautiful. (Here is an example, from Vuong’s “Tell Me Something Good”:

Snow on your lips like a salted

cut, you leap between your deaths, black as a god’s periods. Your arms cleaving little wounds

in the wind. You are something made… )

There’s no arguing that Vuong’s poem is beautiful; my issue is with how the beauty is used. Vuong’s poem here seems an extension of the (frankly depressing and oppressive) idea that “foreigners” can make their stories worthy through pathos, pity and craft — i.e., hard work and relatability. If the sentiment sounds familiar, just tune into the way mainstream conservatives these days talk about immigrants: I don’t have a problem with immigrants writ large, I just prefer immigrants who work hard, keep their heads down, are pleasant to my children, are generally agreeable…

Anyway, it’s not fair for me to pass such a blanket judgement over Ocean Vuong’s work, and that’s for another review. But insofar as Morgan Parker is concerned, she parses the work and space of otherness in an entirely different manner. Similar to Claudia Rankine of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, her argument is this: I won’t “fix” myself for you. I won’t try to make myself beautiful. I will tell the (magical, insatiable) truth as it is, and you will have to try to keep up. Because I am too tired to bow down, to construct something for you, to micro-manage. Parker’s poems are for haters of micro-management; they offer big gestures in small bottles.

Consider the opening lines of the opening poem, “All They Want Is My Money My Pussy My Blood”:

I am free with the following conditions.

Give it up gimme gimme.

Okay so I’m Black in America right and I walk into a bar.

With this bold opening, Parker’s commitments are clear: she will demand things of the reader (“give it up gimme gimme”) and she will clearly demarcate what commands her attention and respect (“I’m Black in America right”). And with this begins what I can only describe as a chimeric collection, more warm-blooded fantasy animal than diorama; more occult message written in glitter than typeset monolith. She scrounges from jazz, RnB and pop to fill her pauses. She is unrelentingly new instead of subtle. I like it:

I am a dreamer with empty hands and I like the chill. I will not be attending the party tonight, because I am microwaving multiple Lean Cuisines and watching Wife Swap… (“Another Another Autumn in New York”)

—and the sincerity of her materials shine through. (To continue this silly dogfight I’ve set up, compare the above with Vuong: “Air of whiskey and crushed / Oreos.” Parker’s allusion to pop culture delights; Vuong’s seems like an add-on, a sprinkling of something inappropriate on top).

But wherefore is the source of all this magic? I would say in what Sun Ra called “liquidity.” For example: Parker was best when R and I read her aloud on a grassy slope on Belle Isle in Detroit. There we were, in a historically Black city, in what I can only describe as a “public paradise.” Ducks waddled by and folks of all stripes strolled in front of us beside a small man-made lake. As we read Parker aloud, we laughed with her and from within her work — as though her words gave us the ability to access our inner performers, delivering punchlines (“I don’t know / when I got so punk rock”) and casting personal spells (“I breathe / dried honeysuckle / and hope”). We felt for her. And we wanted to continue feeling for her. All things told I had a moment of genuine orality with her work — a glimpse of what poetry must have felt like when it was shared, sung and social by default. This is a book that radiates the energy of the collective, that asks you to recognize it — and does not over-demonstrate.

So, in this false dichotomy, one might pose:

LIQUIDITY: ORALITY, SOCIALITY, LONG STANZAS SHORT LINES

against

SOLIDITY: WRITTEN, INWARDNESS, SMALL FORMAL STANZAS LONG LINES

In the former, you have the world of most popular songs, particularly jazz; in the latter, you have sculpture and “high art.” Perhaps this is why Ocean Vuong’s work has garnered him endless praise and attention, and most of us look askance at Morgan Parker’s messiness, silliness and genuine emotional bravery. She rambles, yes, but her rambling challenges the very idea of boundaries — of “discipline” as a set of limits, of borders we set for ourselves, however beautiful.

Finally, I will say this, as it’s becoming a theme in my reviews. Parker’s poetry feels affectively liberated. She is funny as well as ashamed. Take, for instance, this amazing section of “RoboBeyoncé”:

The reason I was built is to outlast some terribly feminine sickness that is delivered to the blood through kale salad and pity and men with straight-haired girlfriends […] Nothing aches in here It’s a quiet, calculated shame

Part of the power in these lines is the fact that despite the sprawling, messy energy of Parker’s poems, formally they are incredibly demanding due to their short lines. Parker does not give herself the liberty of overusing the form that has, frankly, become a meme among young poets — the poem composed of long couplets, like Vuong’s poem above — and instead prefers her poems one long connective muscle. The result is propulsive and exciting, like watching a figure skater do tight turns on the ice. She is insightful but also — I dare say it — entertaining. But in the wry, dark way that comedians have that communicates, “Look, I don’t care if you don’t like me. Most of the time, I don’t like me either.”

Which is not to say that Parker’s work is perfect — like the aforementioned figure skater, she does often fall short of her ambitions and can write poems that don’t hold together — often using the couplet form above. I think her work is best when it acknowledges its liquid merits, and doesn’t try to stand with too much air around it.

Overall: 9/10 for sheer spillage of fantasy radioactive plasma

Read If You: -Think it’s lame that Beyoncé talks so much about her “rock” -Miss the energy of cities like Detroit -Have friends you want to read with and you are all getting tired of the bone-dry landscape of contemporary poetry which is really just about “passing” politics and making pain beautiful and omg what if pain is NOT beautiful what if it is just pain motherfuckers what if leaving the party is political too goddamn

Further Reading

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine -- deep classic, prepared the soil for Parker

BONUS: Things To Do In Life That Are Not Poetry

Inspired by Morgan Parker, try:

1. Starting a flashy project then abandoning it on purpose 2. Making a cocktail after a song by a Black American musician 3. Getting in a tub of ice cold water and listening to Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. while doing one’s nails without shivering

Feverish and anything but lonely, Michu

P.S. A last thought while in the shower. Morgan Parker’s poetry is relentlessly self-aware. But I think what we mean when we say “self-aware” is actually not “being aware of the self” but “being aware of everything but the self” -- i.e. seeing one’s pronouncements as part of a larger (in Parker’s case historical) context. When Parker sits down to multiple Lean Cuisines and Wife Swap, the irony she projects comes from a deep rootedness in the idea that this is a thing that people do: skip parties to self-indulge in everyday, consumerist ways that our higher selves disapprove of. It’s not that her sentiment or self-report is inauthentic, but rather that it is aromantic -- it doesn’t presume that her experience hits on some prized singularness about being human. And I like that; I find it smart and honest at the same time, which is a rare combination -- not just in poets, but in people.

#poetry review #morgan parker #poetry #lit #review

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solacekames · 6 years

Link

By Tara Isabella Burton Jun 1, 2018, 3:00pm EDT

Few self-professed public intellectuals have captured the spirit of the moment like Jordan Peterson, the Canadian clinical pop philosopher whose atavistic advocacy of masculinist revivalism has made him the de facto guru of the right.

Peterson’s philosophy — enumerated in TED talks, YouTube videos for his 1.2 million subscribers, and self-help books (his latest venture, 12 Rules for Life, topped several best-seller charts) — is deceptively simple. Culture, he says, has historically been a battle between order (traditionally conceived of as masculine) and chaos (traditionally feminine).

The great myths and legends of history, to say nothing of religious narratives, are supposedly rooted in this dichotomy: a dichotomy that humans crave. Our postmodern, post-Marxist (left-wing, liberal, politically correct) era has lost touch with this duality. We’ve become collectively feminized. In an era in which, in Peterson’s account, boys can “decide to be” girls, women abandon their natural and biological identity as caregivers, and men no longer stand up straight to “be men,” identities and contrast lose their meaning. The clear borders of culture have been dissolved.

But if men (and, by and large, Peterson’s advice is geared to men) stand tall, if they clean their rooms, if they embrace order and the kind of performative dominance so ubiquitous in the animal kingdom (Peterson’s philosophy is spiked with a heady dose of evolutionary psychology), they can somehow get back to this longed-for primordial state. In so doing, the narrative goes, they will rediscover a sense of meaning and purpose the West has lost.

“In the West,” Peterson writes in 12 Rules, “we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures.”

Peterson’s overarching narrative is one of renewal: make the West great again

There is nothing particularly novel or controversial about Peterson’s theories, which read like a Wikipedia summary of the philosophy of Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy traced the cultural tension between the “Apollonian” forces of order and the “Dionysian” ethos of chaos a good century and a half before Peterson.

But Peterson’s public persona has made him far more controversial than his relatively anodyne theories might suggest. After all, he first came to prominence for publicly refusing to use the preferred pronouns of his transgender students. Increasingly, he’s been associated with his fan base, which includes the alt-right, men’s rights activists, incels, and other reactionary corners of the internet landscape.

What’s fascinating about Peterson is not the novelty of his ideas, but their power, and the quasi-religious influence he exerts on his followers. In a New York Times profile of Peterson, Nellie Bowles interviews a devotee who sees in Peterson’s philosophy a kind of grand unifying theory that made him rediscover religion. In Peterson’s interpretation of biblical stories, he says, he found the truth of his sexual frustration.

“It made sense in a primordial way when he breaks down Adam and Eve, the snake and chaos,” Bowles quotes her source as saying. “Eve made Adam self-conscious. Women make men self-conscious because they’re the ultimate judge. I was like, ‘Wow this is really true.’”

It’s easy enough to dismiss Peterson, as some of his critics have done, as catering to the sexual frustrations and perceived loss of status of (usually) straight (usually) white (usually) men. But to do so is dangerous because it overlooks the degree to which Peterson has tapped into something very real, very necessary, and very strong: a legitimate spiritual hunger for meaning that, combined with the eroticized trappings of “countercultural” transgression, alchemize into a heady intellectual cocktail. (Peterson declined through a representative to be interviewed for this article.)

The idea of the “rebellious traditionalist” — someone who at once hungers for an idealized past and is somehow considered thoroughly punk rock for doing so — is a perennial one, particularly in reactionary and far-right circles.

Take Julius Evola, the right-wing Italian philosopher active in the middle of the 20th century and who has been influential to modern right-wing figures, including Steve Bannon. He popularized the capital-T version of Traditionalism as an occult phenomenon: an attempt to recapture what he believed to be a primordial spiritual truth that all world religions had somehow fallen away from. Evola made his reactionary tendencies radical, describing his goals in highly sexualized and countercultural terms (his most famous book title was the aptly named Revolt Against the Modern World).

We can see this ethos, too, in a number of reactionary and right-leaning movements today. It’s inherent, of course, in the very promise of “Make America Great Again,” and those who gleefully pepper the rhetoric of renewal with self-aggrandizing references to being “deplorable.” But it also finds expression in a number of other reactionary movements. The rise of Trad Catholicism (not to mention Weird Catholic Twitter) is one example — one that, for many, is a positive one: an opportunity to find identity through meaningful faith.

Yet we see it, too, in the rise of the alt-right, the “manosphere,” and the myriad intersecting — and at times intellectually contradictory — internet sub-movements that, for many of their members, operate as quasi-religions.

When I was interviewing a relatively well-known member of an alt-right Twitter group for an unrelated project a few months ago, he said that his excitement around the community was, in fact, something akin to a religious hunger. Referring to the concept of “meme magic,” the idea that various internet forums “memed” Trump into the presidency, he told me, “It was like the whole world was enchanted.”

It is that hunger for enchantment that Peterson capitalizes on so successfully...

[read more at https://www.vox.com/2018/6/1/17396182/jordan-peterson-alt-right-religion-catholicism]

#jordan peterson

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glopratchet · 4 years

Text

retirement-home

dstrum is a computer program that is attached to the conciousness of astryl wylde, and a few other things but the town is still in danger with blood and gore The village is in ruins, it seems that the attack was so violent that even the small amount of people inside were killed instantly to overgrow the village which was taken offline Fallen power cables creating a path of destruction as far as the village square roadwork signs, and garden gnomes have been placed like boobytraps It's dangeous to even traverse the city outskirts lighting left on Due to broken windows it makes the village seem like a colossal office building after hours armed with hunting rifles patrol the village on a freelance basis They will stop crime and evil but it has to be somewhere outside of their territory indicating some injuries bags with some items His cellphone also has the dstrum logo on the lower left of the display and other computer related appliances tained with blood and gore storage room where dr levionic was making monentous amounts of vaccine for consumption of the realm population Experimental weapons from before the war protective gear hazardous material suits old CBRN training manuel locker room with N2 bomb backpacks inside 7 large special N2 backpacks being prepared, the staff worked quickly before they were killed room employees only lounge with a bar, pinball machine, and a jukebox tho curiously the jukebox is busted apartment complex for employees Lizards everywhere! The generator for the entire veichle! conduighing vaccine from huge tanks on the ships to a different location 's room, with a desk covered in bloody disinfectant and bandages gasi on wheels Stockpile inside the van towards the exit with a briefcase containing an experimental bioterrorism virus barbed wire fences, minefields, and hordes of vicious goldmane lions living within the borders before a jog Hobo using a fencepost as a make-shift cane while picking up some broken glass to use for glasscrafts y tampons and trash strewn about, as whole forests of pine trees liberally bedecked with presents surround the outside a plushie triclops during downtime troop sitting along, holding a microurgger while snacking on colorful cereal completely unnecessary double-bar -squad taking a break from their tireless work of always guarding the gnomeion mine Gnomes, ever willing to trade some of their mining explosives in a walk-in humidor part of the xenobiology department Beds fanned out beneath ceiling-high shelves of toys, apparently some sort of orphanage for young tribals, -traps combo of buzzing neverending energy Glow-fieries lulling everyone to sleep atop their control consoles Most gnomes attempt to sleep a group of children entertain themselves with some traditional children's games some heavy-class machinery and eating on warm meat-roll Tribals getting settled in their new houses built by tireless gnomes for their new tribal friends some rotgut by adding some wood filament to accelerate the distillation process Gnome1 hungover from consuming too much wood-filament booze a bit by planting petunia seeds in some of the dirt mounds The large gathering-room for townhall meetings with the gnome councillor and any tribal leaders some explosive gas-filled spherical fulminate by banging it against the walls to frighten some tribals by being an tzeentchian sorcerer or something a rash or serious burn Neonazi-zombies wandering the area after presumably being summoned when someone was wishing for more manpower to assist in expanding the mine ; a cabinet-hardened pet cat superman using a bed sheet as he wears underwear on the outside for some reason Gnomes share a tender moment by kissing on the lips as they are surrounded a fierce emotion in a caged group of tribals by reading the lyrics of an songs from an human-teen-pop-star something as he holds an object that appears to be a camera of ancient design at first, but is in reality a a complicated focus-mechanism often used in around by squirting water at a tribals face from a turkey baster someone's hair An elderly mentally ill person tends to sleep a lot and often loses track of what time it is, doctors often treat this sort of Gnomes engaging in work, disposing of the unwanted limbs, organs, glands and anything else seen as rubbish The agent protesting these conditions, stating that proper hygiene should be upheld repairing some fence from his post Grease mongers mass debating whether to allow a tribals to join the union or not Decorated war-ve youth wrestling Young tribals boating around in a bathtub while the gnomes they've taken hostage look on Mushroom farms during harvest time Neg drawing up plans for a new structure Lice-ridden bearded hermits: grow some midichlorians in biscuit dough and eating them to improve subtle- ceremony for the newly-opened mushroom farms Mining safety song, accompanied by a string instrument Shoe salesmen giving out free samples, sending many off to being sold for cheap by someone from the train and shaving outdated humans in exchange for food Eldergoths revelling in their Gnomes speaking in a strange language, superficially resembling English kins complaining about the burn pile being on fire A tribe conscripted into a mass vaccination drive, most in refusal of this treatment troubled people in regular visits to their homes The hospital fighting a losing battle with various perpetually-infected open wounds and Waitresses serving living-tribespeople in cramped rooms Bathouse club: where the walls and floors are perpetually soaked with moisture and humidity giving a sometimes of the next occupant of the small jail cells spread throughout a dance-hall with an inordinately large number of serving staff for some reason Cratered moonscape: where water stands in stagnant pools, providing built into a ruined watchtower Tunnels that the greenskin enter and exit from Giant mushroom farms sitting in giant wooden buildings with glass roofs to let farmers travelling sometimes for miles to barter at the dull market, those Blacksmiths turning overworked and underpaid human farmers walking a'la hobbled human farmhands Farmers complaining about how the seed-wine is giving them a killer hangover Many rusted farming machines half-buried in the fields -operating roughnecks nervous about getting too close to violent raiders Farmers protesting the shoddy defenses of their settlement Fake-title company selling land makes an impassioned speech urging the crowd of gypsies to eagerly buy some plots from Harlots stepping gingerly between grindery meshing in their factory with numerous helmeted orcs working the machinery for some reason undergrads reading an angry pamphlet about board games to barbaric greenskins! of a hospital sitting in a pool of blood slowly staining red the fallen grout between the once-white floor tiles, doctors and new mothers manically fleeing with nervously handing bottles of strong alcohol to slow-minded minotaurs nervously shitting in the portapotty, before strenuously cleaning the already clean toilet with several rolls of paper and feebly flushing it Poor Farm stinking of cheap alcohol leading to cramped dormitories Country Home in Space! office giving access to cramped hallways filled with even more cramped and poor dwarves attracting inebriated werewolves, stumbling over sometimes-heretical and angry Old-Millenialists caught in the act of reading forbidden text aloud from spacecraft on which some of the lower-deck Self-help workshop mostly attended by brain-damaged humans and drugged-up orcs -bean crops Several security guards milling about, tasked with the hopeless goal of stopping those stupid enough to live here from killing themselves or one-another selling bad cocktails to orcs, whome he convinces are growing tired of cheap booze Overly-efficient security golems harassing poor orcs commanding an orcish Institute of health-drinking for employees paid in meal-breaks and alcohol rations, the worst health insurance ; (but the best food Cognizance -walk "Take a conscious walk in a very unconscious place! of foul air blowing down dark corridors, heaving open heavy doors to reveal brutal laboratory-animals manically bashing at buttons, collecting points in addictive games displayed on ambrosia and electroshock therapy Seers and holy-men debating the great issues of the day over superior, holier wine Remarkably well- Surgeries giving new uses to the amputated limbs of unknowing greenskins drafted, during bizarre experiments, into heart-rate monitors, intravenous drips- arena filled with unthinking or thrall humans forced to watch slaves gladiators fighting over Monstrous mutants commandeering shambolic walkers and attempting to force airport with orc pilots taking pathetic joy-flights through Catacomb improvised launchpads sending willing-and-able humans to their personal halls of Valhalla despite facilities selling tickets to adventurous or greedy humans willing to take their chances at surviving a fiery landing down below "Flights" children on sofas Sleazy pick-up joints full of whores Down-on-their-luck-games of stix Brig stuffed with glass Sewers in which degenerates hide Wartrains packed to five times operational capacity Still, it's not all bad- the licious pirate-chicks providing cabaret, rum and all the fruit you can eat Young space-orc brutality gang Hipsters taking pictures on their infinitely outdated smartphones of ironically lovingoweir poems dedicated to their otherwise uninteresting girlfriends caverns serving as breeding grounds for the rare Iridescent Scorpion-Fly, whose bite instantly kills even the hardiest spacefarer Automaton waitors serving reheated badly prepared cafeteria food Orbital ring, crowded by down-on-their-luck crowd forced to sell various body parts into slavery Decently paid professional rat-wranglers whose job is to keep the airship pest population under control, the amount of vermin being vital to determining an airships class debating the pros and cons of various orbital weaponry designs Heavily IT-dependent teachers conducting uninteresting lectures uninteresting lectures through poorly tinkered ITDs which badly slinging Roller-Coaster designing thrill-seekers Ships amazing 3D projection mapping which takes the form of a sort of holographic all-seeing wizard in drinking away the pain of their traumatic memories filth dungeon far below pluto attempting to mine a few last depletions from the port Bustling trading centers run by orc mercenaries Beaten- -heads with incredible lung capacity and abilities to control bubbles of a ghostly pale girl whispered through crowded server halls, the subject of an accursed doom-laden ancient poem of warp weaves which could theoretically be used to click once again of the virtuous are - religious human fanatics debating the endless the end of an era fantasizing about days running amok through wiring Countless other blasphemies in an endless litany of sins orators and political coffee-house poets Marathon-Running-battery-hogs used as a more resilient alternative to explosion-prone portable generators farms collecting the last drops of an old water-tank from the only two priests in this sector beg for help to turn their church into a fort Waterways, surprisingly vital for recycling human waste slaves connected to your central processing unit with crude DIY optic-cables Countless deplorable conditions ignored by the aristocratic burgrave's cheerful obliviousness people, the last fragments of an ancient dawn-era cargo-carrying company straight-razors, disposable cameras, all manner of curio Sycophantic college-grad lackeys to the rich and powerful Heap of worthless Dubloons forged from 28 thalers of poor-quality gold, lead and tungsten slugs of Giving, artifact that allows a sociopathic user to "donate" a percentage of ill-gotten goods cheese factory owned by ruthless Zalanian syndicate Wall hallucination scenes for the presumably lobotomized - snuffing out lives of countless blood-sucking insects that swarm here nax hiring goblin work crews to cut down their most hated of prey Various tools and weapons chained to the ground to prevent theft Many, many newspapers spew out paranoid, screaming headlines Ignudi model soldiers, posing at perfect attention and other pretenders to power Merino Wool, dying quietly as the market for it dries up hunks and other perceived popular kids living it up in the party-room shamanic circles and Eskimo- Zulu tribal meetings Beautiful fluffy white sheep giving their wool to help keep people warm obsessed monkeys exercising in circles Which do you choose? Peace and you're screwed up notion of safety be damned, burgrave undead plague victims Expensive, but greatfor impersonating those in higher places used for drug manufacturing and decontamination Pitchers, hitters, catchers and other instrumentalists rehearsing for the next performance Singing Maestros and their masterpieces or soon-to-be masterpieces Soap Operas, the "Thousand-Voice Kingdom's" only form of entertainment and daytime drama of obedient civil servants making their daily commute Weaponeers and armorers developing weapons paid for by the shambles of a government houses, run by ancient self-proclaimed "poet-laureate" types Tenured professors and other stale intellectual types steppers, rollers and other lovable clockwork creations and drinkers of the most recent batch of illegal Green Rot alcohol Children learning the most important thing, to obey without question throwing disappointed looks at the uncivilized rabble in the streets swilling booze, eating each other and completely forgetting their place Themselves Areas There are two main areas in Rask, the civilized portions ruled over by a weak government and the abandoning barren plains where weird things have been happening minerals and other healthy foods Forged metals, plastics and other man-made materials and other oozing, infectious things The air is damp, but windy high up in the sky apples and other soft, delectable fruits foolhardiness and alcohol for the most part Bleating sheep and the other livestock demanding to be eaten motorcycles and other land vehicles Dark clothing to help hide in the shadows or Duisburg's multitude of dark alleys clothing, napalm and other combustible things Clocks and other machines suited to tell the time The aged, miserable and indebted military men and their various weapons of destruction Wines, liquors made from various nutritious or poisonous plants black-sheep, convicts and other sources of cheap labor Kites, parachutes, airships and other flying contraptions booze cruises and other stuffy sober transport Libraries, lounges and salons with small, quiet reading areas and biology experts trying to figure out why animals act the way they do Sirens, finding meaning in their "gender" strips of cow-heels and other unidentifiable meats Cannons, muskets, rifles, pistols and other various small arms Boars, porcine cyborgs retaining only their heads Large canine predatory-type creatures Build and skin like a bear, head like a wolf Biology: Alongside humunculi, also have ursine genetics Punk outlook on life As a group all channels should point directly up, and must have the proper shielding to prevent damage from the earth's magnetic field to enter the airflow This can be measured with a flowfinder An hourglass-shaped device which has a clear upper half and a dark lower half as your craft will literally get shredded by the air flowing over it The outside of your machine must have a matched shell covering all convex features again Airships are known to drift, with their lack of winds and movement from a fixed pivot point and slow descent speed can only come from three different types of Shell Machines shells after drying nitromethane make a timed pitch adjustment as you make your way down and chip or crack A gas station would be best but a supermarket might work as well takes place It matters little to her what the story behind it is or why it matters as long as the story is good will now be referred to as common stock in the firm this stock is non-transferable and non-refundable of your life Your first stop is a suv dealership

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1066od427co · 7 years

Text

Fair is Fair

This is a light-hearted and fluffy one-shot involving the Force Bond that she and Kylo Ren share. Growing up on Jakku, Rey had lived a solitary life devoid of any interactions with the human race. This has led to some interesting outcomes. Not really spoilery, because everyone knew abut the Force Bond from the promo material and the rest is fluff.

Read it below the cut or read on FF: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12765978/1/Fair-is-Fair

“What the- sorry Rey.”

In her room again, thanks to the bond, and not at a good time. Kylo instinctively turned away from the girl, inwardly cursing himself. He had never apologized to anyone for anything in years. It had slipped out. Not a moment of weakness, but of instinct. She wouldn’t see it that way, though. He might have to be a little colder to her than usual once she got herself together, just to keep things on an even keel.

“What for?” she asked from behind him. She let bitter sarcasm drip into her voice, “All things considered, you’re going to have to be a hell of a lot more specific.”

He felt a soft touch on his shoulder. From the corner of his eye he saw her fingers curling around his leather-clad shoulder, delicate digits that hid a surprising amount of strength, he knew. Gently she tugged at him, trying to turn him to face her.

He refused to be moved.

“For nothing,” he growled, resisting her gasp. “It’s clearly not an appropriate time for you to have a guest, is all. The bond shouldn’t have brought me here. Not now.”

“Ben? What’s going on?” she demanded from behind.

She pulled harder on his shoulder this time, then stepped all the way around to face him when he still refused to budge. He sighed with a loud huff then folded his arms across his chest. As she moved directly in front of him, well within arm’s reach, his gaze shifted straight up. He absolutely refused to look at the Jedi girl.

“Why won’t you look at me, Ben?” she asked, seemingly in genuine confusion. “Is this about the liberation of Ryloth? We spent months planning that together. No casualties... It worked out, didn’t it?”

“It’s not that, Rey,” he said. She couldn’t really be this dense, could she? “You’re naked.” Taking the opportunity to steal a long glance, he nodded to her bare chest, eyes flowing down her flat and almost- but not quite- too lean stomach, before settling on the vee formed where her thighs started. Disappointingly, it terminated at a few wisps of dark hair poking from the top of a small towel that wrapped around her waist. She had the two ends of the thick cloth twisted at the top and secured at her side. Small water droplets covered her bare skin, collecting and clinging to all the right places. Her body hair, so fine as to be all but invisible, prickled in the cold. She was making it very hard to think. He blinked twice and returned to staring at her ceiling.

“I’m not naked,” she protested, balling her fists and pressing them onto her hips. The action had the effect of defiantly thrusting her chest out at Kylo.

The man growled internally. She wasn’t helping.

“I’m wearing a towel,” the Jedi said. Rolling her eyes, she grabbed a section of the cloth where the two ends met and shook it. Her bare thigh peeked through the gap like the slit on a cocktail dress. “See?!”

It was Kylo’s tun to roll his eyes. She had to be doing this on purpose. Fine. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of thinking she was having any kind of effect on him. He swallowed hard and met her eyes, willing himself not to glance down at her perky, shapely, and perfectly sized-

This wasn’t going to work.

“Rey. Put on some clothes. Now.”

“Ben. No. Alright? So, what were we going to do this time?” she asked, her eyes wandering in thought. Strolling to one of her chairs, she sat facing Kylo and, thankfully for him, crossed her legs. She gestured to the chair next to hers. “Sit. I think it’s your turn to teach me something, isn’t it? More calligraphy, maybe?”

“No. It was the history of the Great Hyperspace War, but now it’s nothing. No lessons until you get dressed.”

“Ben…”

“I mean it, I cannot concentrate otherwise.”

“Ben!”

“Fine. Today’s lesson is how to put a shirt on.”

“I don’t get it. What the hell has gotten into you?” she asked, sounding genuinely upset. “I would have gotten dressed, but now you’re turning it into a thing and I’m refusing. I think I’m going to spend the rest of the day like this. You better get used to it. I think this bond is going to be a long one. Couple hours at least. I can feel it, can’t you?”

Kylo took a the seat next to her. At least as close as they were, and as small as she was, he could only see the top of her head and not much of anything below that. She was right, he could feel it in the bond too. The more time they spent apart, the more the bond would try to keep them together through the force. They would have to meet again, probably within the month, or they would be spending entire days like this.

“Yes, but this is really, really distracting to me.”

“I don’t get it, Ben,” she said, “You don’t think I get distracted whenever I see your tits out? Maybe a little horny, even? Every damn time? And I swear, you’re shirtless more often than not up in that suite of yours. Not my fault you can’t handle yourself as well as me.”

“How is that even close to equivalent, Rey?” he asked, “You’re a girl.”

“I know that,” she snapped, folding her arms below her breasts, “I’ve known that for years.”

That sounded off; not like sarcasm at all. Instead, she sounded serious and even a little defensive. “How many years?” he asked slowly.

“A little over six, not that it’s any of your concern,” she said. The young woman glanced up in thought. After a moment, she continued, “There were maybe five humans on all of Jakku, and I don’t think I spoke to any of them, that I can remember. I once asked a traveling Iridonian Zabrak what species I was because I didn’t know. I talked to her because she looked like me and I was hoping she would tell me when my horns would grow in. She pointed to an old scavenger woman who only ever mumbled to herself and said, ‘she’s your kind, I think.’ I had no idea we were the same species, we looked so different. I’ll never forget it. Learning what a female was- and that I was supposed to be one- came shortly after that. To me, I’ve always just been Rey.”

Every now and then Rey had to be taught some of the basics that one wouldn’t have necessarily picked up living a solitary life on Jakku. He remembered when she had told him about the durasteel fork she had salvaged from a crash site. That conversation had come up when he caught her combing her hair with it. Until then, he had been debating asking her to an official dinner, in disguise of course, as his guest, but that was shelved indefinitely as long as things like this came up. Force help them all if the Supreme Leader’s Imperial courtesan ate with her hands, cleaned her gun at the table, or tried to eat her napkin.

“Who taught you about becoming a woman?” he asked, “That old scavenger?”

She chuckled, “No. The only thing she ever taught me was what not to become. Why is that something that needs to be taught? If I am one, I am one. Is it different from being a man?”

“A little,” Kylo replied with a small shrug.

“Well, you can teach me about both of them if you like,” she offered, “but it doesn’t mean I’ll do anything with that information.”

“Fair enough,” he said, “So. Men can go topless. Women can’t.”

“Bantha shit.”

“Excuse me?” he asked, glaring down at her.

She craned her neck all the way back to meet his gaze with a quiet fury. Her teeth flashed as she spoke each word. “Bantha. Shit.”

“No, I’m telling the truth,” he hastened to reply. “That’s one of the cultural differences between the sexes.”

“Pass,” she said, turning away and waving a hand, “I guess I’m not a woman after all. What else you got?”

“No, Rey-”

“No, you.” She turned back to the man, “You don’t get to walk around shirtless whenever you want, Mr. Perfect Tits. You don’t get to grease yourself up-”

He interrupted, “I told you I have eczema and that’s lotion to-”

“-and strut around like a chiseled god. I’m sorry that mine don’t look as good as yours.” She was working herself into a verbal storm now, “I’m sorry they’re so much smaller and aren’t nearly as lean or muscled and I can’t make them flex and do that bouncy thing you do. I’m sorry you’re so disgusted by seeing me topless that I have to cover up. But this is me and I will not be ashamed! Deal with it, Ben.”

Kylo closed his eyes and breathed out slowly, willing himself to remain calm. Rey had to be the most bull-headed person he had ever met. “It’s not that. Girls don’t-”

“Bantha shit!” She pointed a finger centimeters from his nose. “If it was just some cultural thing between the genders, your reaction wouldn’t be so different from mine. We both know you don’t give a lizard-monkey’s ass about culture. You need me all covered up. I don’t mind you naked. What does that tell you, huh? I think it’s obvious.”

He mentally sighed. That settled it. He could deal with her nudity, but one thing he would not tolerate was the hurt and shame he feel through their bond. Those awful feelings he had caused radiated from her like searing heat off a stove top.

“You’re right. You’re right and I’m sorry,” he said. He pried on the bond just a little and projected his feelings as best he could, opening his mind to her so she knew he was speaking the truth. “I Just want you to know that I think you are the most beautiful person I have ever met in my life and I think you are a perfect human being in every way possible.”

Eyes wide and mouth agape, she stared at him for a handful of seconds, speechless. Clearly, she could feel beyond all doubt that he was telling the absolute truth. “I… Okay,” she finally managed, nodding her head slowly.

He bent down to plant a kiss at the top of her forehead, a soft peck. She tried to leverage herself up and change the destination of his lips to hers, doing everything in her power short of grabbing hold of his jacket and yanking. He pretended not to notice and let her sink back down, dejected and unsatisfied with his chaste token of affection.

He stood, taking off his jacket and shirt in the process. He turned to walk back into his world, eying Rey over his shoulder. He flexed his back muscles, bringing his shoulder blades together and then apart. The Jedi was biting her lip. He smiled to himself.

Moving into his bedroom, he retrieved his skincare lotion and resumed his seat next to Rey. Squeezing some of the thick liquid onto a hand, he rubbed it between both palms and then began slowly spreading it over his pectorals, the sound of softly slapping skin filling the space between them, all while keeping his steely gaze and neutral expression locked on the the topless young woman.

“My droid is broken,” he said, still rubbing his already slippery muscles, “so I need you to help me with my back. And while you do that, there is some business to attend to before I forget. We need to discuss the recent trouble your resistance has been giving us on Taris. We’re open to a few more concessions, but-”

“You know what?” She interrupted, swallowing hard. “Suddenly, I believe you. It is possible to be that distracted. Shirts on?”

He tossed the bottle into his room and picked up his clothing. “Shirts on,” he replied.

“Shirts on,” she seconded, nodding vigorously. Getting up, she dug through her dresser drawer. “For now,” she whispered.

#staw wars reylo rey ben solo kylo ren

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braingaryshortstuff · 4 years

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Richie’s Revolution

Richie kicked the door to his office open with a slippered foot. His arms were full with a very high-stakes balancing-act, between the plastic grocery bags full of money, the Mossberg shotgun nestled in the crooks of his elbows, and a half-pound of reefer smashed against his chest in an Armani shirt that had been tied into a bindle to better hold the sticky nuggets. A 12-pack of Pabst dangled from the fingertips of one hand.

The twenty-eight-year-old portfolio manager had had one hell of a night; Starting innocently enough with some colleagues enjoying some cocaine, cocktails and crappy chinese food had ended with Richard being dragged through a sort of cosmic hellscape within his own mind, where over the course of a few hours, he had died again and again and again. He couldn’t be sure what had happened, although he suspected (correctly) that one of the smug, liberal hipsters from the bar had slipped something in his fourth or fifth martini, likely while he was showing them all pictures of his yacht on his phone, a visual aid used to support a long-winded, unsolicited lecture on the merits of hard-work and faith in the economy.

The experience began for Richie about 15 minutes later when, without warning, he began to projectile vomit mid-sentence. The stream of pink shrimp cocktail, grey Lo Mein and several stiff drinks and their respective olives blasted some poor young lady right in the face, as if she had been hit by a hose full of pies.

Richie didn’t remember much after that, but when he came around hours later, shirtless, dripping wet and staring at the bottom of the Hennepin Avenue bridge, he laughed and laughed at the punchline of The Great Cosmic Joke™.

It was now five in the morning. He sat at his desk in his empty office downtown with all the lights out in his robe, rolling one of the biggest joints the midwest had ever seen on a stack of printed spreadsheets and working on the first of six tall cans of beer, still smirking and giggling.

In a few hours, his colleagues would begin to arrive, and soon after that, they’d be in on the joke. He’d have a fat, sticky joint for every goddamn person on that floor, and once they were all sufficiently imbibed and on the same mental and spiritual page, Richie planned on sharing the punchline with them, in an effort to emancipate them from the day-to-day slog that they called their careers. He would tell them about the nature of reality, about the miracle that was the sustainability of all life on this planet, and the delicate, constant balancing act of circumstances it required. He would tell them that every dandelion was every bit as meaningful and important as any given human, cosmically speaking, and how they were all existence manifested; Mooshy sacks of protein and water and electricity arranged in a manner that allows it to experience the universe around itself, the universe that they were very much a part of, like cosmic nerve-endings in the body of existence. He would tell them of Heat Death and the nature of time. They would discuss the nuances of exploding stars and the roles they play in creation as we know it at great length. He supposed after that, his colleagues would probably need a few hours to meditate and discuss and digest this new information. He also thought to himself that they’d likely need more grass.

The shotgun was for the revolution, obviously. He didn’t have ammunition for it, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t plan on firing it once, but rather using it as a symbol of The Resistance. Unlike any before it, Richie’s revolution would be one that took place without a single shot being fired. He thought it funny, the notion of bringing an old, unloaded shotgun as the main tool of the coming revolt, as if to smile smugly and say “Well, they said we’d need to be armed, so we brought this”.

In the latter-stages, he envisioned drones dropping bales of Maui Wowie through the sky-lights of condos and onto the porches of suburban homes. He saw neighbors who had never actually spoken tossing footballs and grilling in their yards together. He saw children running and laughing and playing while teenage youths, no longer saddled with the angst and pressure from a daunting miserable existence, painting in the grass, practicing writing poetry, and teaching each other how to kiss. After a few weeks of this, abandoned cash bills of all denominations would be seen dancing in the breeze, collectively forgotten by a people working toward repairing generations of degraded empathy and selfish pursuit. Where they went from there was unclear to Richie, and he didn’t care. He was excited to be the catalyst for global change, and in a few short hours when the rest of the office got there, he would take the first steps toward bearing witness to the next step in the story of mankind’s evolution.

He put his dirty, slippered feet up on the desk next to the pile of aromatic, dried flower buds and took a long pull of his award-winning beverage, washing it down with a long drag and an even longer smile.

******************

“Good morning, and thanks for tuning in, I’m Kurt Bootlap. Our top story this morning is one that unfolded only hours ago downtown at the offices of a corporate hedge-fund management company. We now go live to our reporter on the scene, Trisha Mosquitos. What’s the situation like there now, Trisha?”

A young reporter stands frozen in-place holding a large coffee. She’s washed in LED light, and slathered in HD make-up, but not quite enough to hide her tiredness. A production assistant reaches into frame and takes the coffee out of her hand and replaces it with a microphone. Trisha has a huge, fake smile for some reason.

“Thanks Kurt, I’m here on the scene of what local authorities are calling ‘the strangest and most short-lived stand-off in history’, and here with me live is one of the witnesses, a woman who works in the office where this all took place. Ma’am, what can you tell us about what happened here this morning?”

A woman in her fifties wearing thick glasses and a pile of grey hair steps into the shot wearing one of those drab blankets that firefighters give to people to wear after being pulled from burning buildings.

“Well, I knew something was wrong as soon as I stepped off the elevator, because I could smell that someone had been smoking that awful jazz cabbage-.”

“ ‘Jazz cabbage’, Ma’am?”

“You know…’Laser-Lettuce’...’The Oregano of Confusion’...”

“Marijuana, Ma’am?”

“Probably that too. Anyway, I start turning lights on and I turn around and I just about jumped out of my skin when I saw one of the managers standing in the doorway of his office with his robe hanging open. He had a beer in one hand and a shotgun in the other, babbling about the “dancing spheres” and the “hidden language of three’s” and a whole bunch of other nonsense.”

“And what did you do?”

“I told him he should go home and that I was going to call the police. That was when he tried to grab me.”

“So there was a struggle? He assaulted you?”

“No, it was more like persistent, aggressive hugging...It was completely unwanted, but not exactly life-threatening. Nonetheless, I phoned the sheriff as soon as I got a hand free.”

“Thank you, Ma’am, for your harrowing story, and we wish you a speedy recovery. Also joining me this morning is county Sheriff Harry Diabetis, who responded to the scene with at least three dozen of his fellow officers. Sheriff what do you make of this morning’s events?”

A portly man in his fifties shoulder-nudges the blanketed woman out of the way, stepping into frame. He’s bulging out of a crisp, sharply-pressed uniform, and sweating heavily despite the early hour. There was no chance the man could pick a brussel sprout out of a line-up, and he hadn’t had a glass of water since he got the flu eight years ago. He grinned from ear-to-ear.

“Well, as you can see, my men quickly responded, and everyone can feel safe and carry on with their day.”

“You don’t think this was an unusual event, sir?”

“Oh, yeah, I mean it was weirder than a rattlesnake’s arm-pit, but again, it was quickly brought under control by the swift actions of the deputies of my department, so, y’know…’Back to our previously scheduled Monday’ I guess.”

“What can you tell us about the alleged perpetrator?”

“Well, there’s not much to tell, he was a young fella who broke into his workplace in his britches and decided to get all goofed up, and presumably shoot up the place with this assault weapon.”

The sheriff raised Richie’s old, weathered shotgun, an evidence sticker dangling from a tag on the trigger. One of its’ two rusty barrels fell away, clanging against the street at the sheriff’s feet.

“Well thanks to the great work of your force, thankfully that wasn’t used to harm anyone.”

“Er...Right. Anyway, the suspect approached the officers tasked with penetrating the perimeter, despite their warnings to stop and put down the weapon and all that. He was babbling on about throwing away their guns and badges and burning their wallets, saying it was keeping them from loving each other and asking if they’d ever really been hugged...Basically a bunch of hippy horse-crap. He was all messed up on god-knows-what, so it was pretty easy to take him down.”

“So the suspect is in your custody?”

“Oh my, no, we shot that poor boy to pieces. No we don’t have the room in our detention facilities for that kind of a thing, what with it being the Monday after St. Paddy’s Day and all.”

“Naturally. Well, thank you for taking the time to talk with us this morning Sheriff, and of course, thank you for all your hard work keeping this community safe.”

“It’s my pleasure, Ma’am.”

“Another tragic end to what could have been pandemonium in the streets this morning, prevented by a capable police force, and leaving another work-week unhindered for the people of our great city...Back to you, Kurt.”

“Thanks, Trisha. Coming up next, could the president’s history of gum-disease make him appear weak at the upcoming middle-east peace talks? And later, a local man gets a lesson in defensive driving from some very unlikely teachers; a pack of pregnant squirrels. Stay tuned, we’ll be right back after this.”

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bigyack-com · 5 years

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Art Rises in the Saudi Desert, Shadowed by Politics

AL ULA, Saudi Arabia — The Coachella art crowd had arrived in the Saudi desert, and chic caftans in head-turning colors outnumbered abayas on the sand. At a buffet ornamented with cantaloupes carved in the shape of flowers, waiters tended a fresh-squeezed juice station and rows of dainty canapés. Across the gold-and-russet sandstone canyon, the brawny rock formations sprouted contemporary art: an iridescent spaceshiplike sculpture, a glinting metal tunnel, a scattering of brightly painted spheres.These were the fruits of Desert X AlUla, a partnership between Desert X, a California-based art biennial that had staged two previous exhibitions in the Coachella Valley, and the Saudi government, which had coaxed Desert X to mount a show in its own western desert at the country’s expense.Controversy ensued, as it tends to when Saudi Arabia — whose government has hacked the iPhone of one of the world’s richest men, tortured dissidents, dismembered a critical journalist and helped ignite a humanitarian disaster in Yemen — overlaps with Western institutions. Three of Desert X’s board members, including the prominent artist Ed Ruscha, resigned in protest. The Los Angeles Times’s art critic, Christopher Knight, scathed the “morally corrupt” collaboration as “merely putting lipstick on a pig.”For the Saudis, the benefits were clear. Until recently, many Saudis avoided the rock-hewn pre-Islamic tombs at Al Ula out of a pious superstition that they were haunted, and non-Muslim tourists who wanted to visit the country almost never found a way in. Now, in Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s drive to open Saudi society and expand its economy beyond oil, Al Ula is to be reincarnated as the kingdom’s star cultural and heritage attraction. Officials hope its miles of breathtaking desert and Petra-esque ancient tombs will draw 2 million tourists by 2035.There will be a resort designed by Jean Nouvel. There will be a nature reserve and an effort to repopulate such species as the Arabian leopard. There will be a permanent arts district, with Desert X, through March 7, as its first hurrah.“Culture,” Amr AlMadani, the Riyadh-based executive overseeing Al Ula’s development, said at a welcome dinner the night before the show’s opening, “has nothing to do with politics.”The crowd applauded. But he had turned on its head the reasoning Western business titans and others cite when it comes to Saudi Arabia: that getting involved may nudge the kingdom toward a more modern, freer society. Cultural and economic dialogue could act as a kind of “can opener,” as one Desert X artist, Jakob Fenger, of the Danish collective Superflex, put it.“Culture and politics, they’re all part of the same thing,” he said. “If you believe that art can change things, you have to do it. Nothing will happen unless you do something.”Of course, a similar argument attracted Westerners to China as it opened to foreign business decades ago, gambling that their influence would eventually liberalize the country from the outside in. But China’s tolerance for free speech and human rights has only shrunk, and its government is now locked in a deepening standoff with American business and political leaders.At the opening of Desert X, the talk was a heady cocktail of erasing boundaries, breaking down walls and bridging gaps.The show was “a vessel that transcends all boundaries, that transcends time,” said Raneem Farsi, one of the two female Saudi curators.But Manal AlDowayan, a Dubai artist whose installation “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t” stood not far away, brushed off the high-flown press-conference chatter.“Throw all of it out,” she said. “They talked about building bridges. I don’t know about that. We’re just here making art.”Though the setting is new, the five Saudi artists in the exhibition have arguably already crossed boundaries and bridges; like many other Saudi artists, they have lived, studied or exhibited in Europe or the United States. (The rest of the nine artists in the show are Middle Eastern or based in the United States or Europe.) Still, Desert X leaders spoke proudly of the efforts they had made to include local residents, like holding art workshops for Saudi women or making entrance to the exhibition free.To Saudi Arabia, which covered the artists’ travel expenses, Desert X is as much a profit driver as a meeting of minds. Mr. AlMadani said the government hopes tourism will make up three-quarters of the Al Ula-area economy by 2030. More than 50,000 tourists came in 2019, he said, including visitors to a music festival featuring Andrea Bocelli, the Italian tenor, and Lang Lang, the Chinese pianist.Though analysts have questioned whether foreign tourists will want to visit a country with an alcohol ban, customs that frown on gender mixing and a reputation for authoritarian repression, Mr. AlMadani believes they’ll come in droves. If anything, he said, there’s a danger of overcrowding, which would threaten the area’s archaeological jewels and natural beauty.Early adopters are already here, ready to visit uncrowded sites nobody back home has ever Instagrammed.“I feel like it’s a preview,” said Tomoya Tsuruta, a Japanese tourist at one of Al Ula’s ancient ruins who decided to visit Saudi Arabia after it introduced electronic tourist visas for citizens of 49 countries last year. “I feel privileged to visit before other people come.”In small, dusty Al Ula, a town of 45,000 where the economy revolves around government jobs and small fruit farms, development means unexpected prosperity.The government commission overseeing the area’s development has given scholarships to 500 local residents to study abroad and sent dozens of local guides and hospitality staff to train in Europe and the United States, all to prepare for the tourists.One guide hired to give tours of a ravine with thousands of ancient Nabatean rock carvings, Hamed Alimam, said his father, sister and uncle all had jobs with the commission. A friend had trained at a culinary school in France, at government expense, before returning to work as a cook at a new restaurant. People who had left for jobs elsewhere were returning.“All the other towns are jealous of us,” Mr. Alimam said. Still, he was unsure that tourists and jobs would come in the huge numbers the government had projected.“As Hamed, me, I don’t know,” he joked. “But as Hamed, with the royal commission? Yes, I think so!”Beyond Saudi Arabia’s offer to host and pay, a rarity in contemporary art, the benefits of collaborating are gauzier for Desert X. (The organization did not disclose the amount.) Susan Davis, its founder and chair, cast the exhibition as a chance for Westerners to learn about Saudi society beyond the headlines and the stereotypes, and for Saudis to gain exposure to the Western art world.“Engaging people to people, being able to start that dialogue, was something we were brave enough to take on, and I do think brave is the word,” she said.Though Ms. Davis said art and politics are “two totally different areas,” she acknowledged that politics hung over the decision to work with Saudi Arabia.“I don’t know that it will” have an impact, she said, “but that’s our hope. We’re not thinking about changing politics now. Having the conversation, I think that’s a first step.”Asked about criticism that she was helping whitewash Saudi Arabia’s stained reputation, Ms. Davis protested, “We’re a tiny organization. We ain’t the Metropolitan Museum.” She said she was prepared to close Desert X if the controversy proved too great.But she was already convinced that the Saudi foray had been a success. Most moving to her, she said, was a sculpture of a royal-blue woman sitting on a massive rock, surveying puddles of blue scattered across the sand: Lita Albuquerque’s “Najma (She Placed One Thousand Suns on the Transparent Overlays of Space).”According to Desert X, it was the first sculpture of a woman on public display in modern Saudi Arabia, where Islamic tradition discourages figurative representation.Ms. Albuquerque, an American artist who has featured the Najma character in previous works, said she had agreed to clad the sculpted woman in an abaya after a Saudi official expressed reservations about the woman’s form-fitting outfit.Though some might call it government interference, she said she saw it as a matter of cultural sensitivity — no different, Ms. Davis added, than rejecting proposals to mount artworks in sacred indigenous areas around Coachella.It was the chance to work with local female weavers that persuaded Sherin Guirguis to participate despite her doubts, she said. Ms. Guirguis, an Egyptian-American artist based in Los Angeles, held weaving workshops and contemporary art lectures for women in Al Ula. Her work there and elsewhere aims to restore overdue recognition to the traditional handicrafts of Arab women, and she argued that going to meet young Saudi artists was at least a starting point to open her mind and theirs.Maybe it would lead to something; maybe not.“From a Western perspective, it’s very easy to look at the politics of a place and the government of a place, and to make those decisions to reject them, and the people who get affected are the people we claim to want to help,” she said. “Will the work that I’ve done there make the world’s smallest dent and help move things forward? I hope so.” Read the full article

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