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isslibrary · 4 years

Text

New additions to the Indian Springs School Library May thru August 2020

Bibliography

Sorted by Call Number / Author.

152.4 O

Owens, Lama Rod, 1979- author. Love and rage : the path of liberation through anger. "Reconsidering the power of anger as a positive and necessary tool for achieving spiritual liberation and social change"--.

200.973 M

Manseau, Peter. One nation, under gods : a new American history. First edition.

304.8 K

Keneally, Thomas. The great shame : and the triumph of the Irish in the English-speaking world. 1st ed. New York : Nan A. Talese, 1999.

305.5 V

Vance, J. D., author. Hillbilly elegy : a memoir of a family and culture in crisis. First Harper paperback edition. "Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country." -- Publisher's description.

305.8 D

DiAngelo, Robin J., author. White fragility : why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism.

305.800973 D

Dyson, Michael Eric, author. Tears we cannot stop : a sermon to white America. First edition. I. Call to worship -- II. Hymns of praise -- III. Invocation -- IV. Scripture reading -- V. Sermon -- Repenting of whiteness -- Inventing whiteness -- The five stages of white grief -- The plague of white innocence -- Being Black in America -- Nigger -- Our own worst enemy? -- Coptopia -- VI. Benediction -- VII. Offering plate -- VIII. Prelude to service -- IX. Closing prayer. "In the wake of yet another set of police killings of black men, Michael Eric Dyson wrote a tell-it-straight, no holds barred piece for the NYT on Sunday July 7: Death in Black and White (It was updated within a day to acknowledge the killing of police officers in Dallas). The response has been overwhelming. Beyoncé and Isabel Wilkerson tweeted it, JJ Abrams, among many other prominent people, wrote him a long fan letter. The NYT closed the comments section after 2,500 responses, and Dyson has been on NPR, BBC, and CNN non-stop since then. Fifty years ago Malcolm X told a white woman who asked what she could do for the cause: Nothing. Dyson believes he was wrong. In Tears We Cannot Stop, he responds to that question. If we are to make real racial progress, we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed or discounted. As Dyson writes: At birth you are given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a distance, never with the texture of intimacy. Those binoculars are privilege; they are status, regardless of your class. In fact the greatest privilege that exists is for white folk to get stopped by a cop and not end up dead...The problem is you do not want to know anything different from what you think you know...You think we have been handed everything because we fought your selfish insistence that the world, all of it--all its resources, all its riches, all its bounty, all its grace--should be yours first and foremost, and if there's anything left, why then we can have some, but only if we ask politely and behave gratefully"--Provided by publisher.

305.800973 G

Begin again : James Baldwin's America and its urgent lessons for our own. New York, NY : Crown; an imprint of Random House, 2020.

305.800973 O

Oluo, Ijeoma, author. So you want to talk about race. First trade paperback edition.

320.9 B

Bass, Jack. The transformation of southern politics : social change and political consequence since 1945. New York : Basic Books, c1976.

323.1196 L

Lowery, Lynda Blackmon, 1950- author. Turning 15 on the road to freedom : my story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March. Growing up strong and determined -- In the movement -- Jailbirds -- In the sweatbox -- Bloody Sunday -- Headed for Montgomery -- Turning 15 -- Weary and wet -- Montgomery at last -- Why voting rights? -- Discussion guide. As the youngest marcher in the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, Lynda Blackmon Lowery proved that young adults can be heroes. Jailed nine times before her fifteenth birthday, Lowery fought alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. for the rights of African-Americans. In this memoir, she shows today's young readers what it means to fight nonviolently (even when the police are using violence, as in the Bloody Sunday protest) and how it felt to be part of changing American history.

364.973 U.S.

U.S. national debate topic, 2020-2021.

420 M

McCrum, Robert. The story of English. 1st American ed. New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Viking, 1986.

488.2421 A

Balme, M. G., author. Athenaze : an introduction to ancient Greek. Revised Third edition. Book I -- Book II.

510 C

Clegg, Brian. Are numbers real? : the uncanny relationship of mathematics and the physical world.

530.092 F

F©œlsing, Albrecht, 1940-. Albert Einstein : a biography. New York : Viking Penguin: a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc, 1997. Family -- School -- A "child prodigy" -- "Vagabond and loner" : student days in Zurich -- Looking for a job -- Expert III class -- "Herr Doktor Einstein" and the reality of atoms -- The "very revolutionary" light quanta -- Relative movement : "my life for seven years" -- The theory of relativity : "a modification of the theory of space and time" -- Acceptance, opposition, tributes -- Expert II class -- From "bad joke" to "Herr Professor" -- Professor in Zurich -- Full professor in Prague, but not for long -- Toward the general theory of relativity -- From Zurich to Berlin -- "In a madhouse" : a pacifist in Prussia -- "The greatest satisfaction of my life" : the completion of the general theory of relativity -- Wartime in Berlin -- Postwar chaos and revolution -- Confirmation and the deflection of light : "the suddenly famous Dr. Einstein" -- Relativity under the spotlight -- "Traveler in relativity" -- Jewry, Zionism, and a trip to America -- More hustle, long journeys, a lot of politics, and a little physics -- Einstein receives the Nobel Prize and in consequence becomes a Prussian -- "The marble smile of implacable nature" : the search for the unified field theory -- The problems of quantum theory -- Critique of quantum mechanics -- Politics, patents, sickness, and a "wonderful egg" -- Public and private affairs -- Farewell to Berlin -- Exile in liberation -- Princeton -- Physical reality and a paradox, relativity and unified theory -- War, a letter, and the bomb -- Between bomb and equations -- "An old debt. Albert Einstein's achievements are not just milestones in the history of science; decades ago they became an integral part of the twentieth-century world in which we live. Like no other modern physicist he altered and expanded our understanding of nature. Like few other scholars, he stood fully in the public eye. In a world changing with dramatic rapidity, he embodied the role of the scientist by personal example. Albrecht Folsing, relying on previously unknown sources. And letters, brings Einstein's "genius" into focus. Whereas former biographies, written in the tradition of the history of science, seem to describe a heroic Einstein who fell to earth from heaven, Folsing attempts to reconstruct Einstein's thought in the context of the state of research at the turn of the century. Thus, perhaps for the first time, Einstein's surroundings come to light.

530.092 G

Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. 1st ed. New York : Pantheon Books, c2003.

539.7 B

Lise Meitner : Discoverer of Nuclear Fission. Greensboro, NC : Morgan Reynolds, Inc, 2000. A biography of the Austrian scientist whose discoveries in nuclear physics played a major part in developing atomic energy.

598.07 T

Watching birds : reflections on the wing. United States : Ragged Mountain Press, 2000.

811 D

Dabydeen, David. Turner : new and selected poems. 2010. Leeds : Peepal Tree Press, Ltd, 12010.

811.54 J

Jones, Ashley M., 1990- author. Dark // thing. Slurret -- //Side A: 3rd grade birthday party -- //Side B: roebuck is the ghetto -- Harriette Winslow and Aunt Rachel clean -- Collard greens on prime time television -- My grandfather returns as oil -- Elegy for Willie Lee "Murr"Lipscomb -- Proof at the Red Sea -- Sunken place sestina -- Hair -- Antiquing -- The book of Tubman -- Harriet Tubman crosses the Mason Dixon for the first time -- Avian Abecedarian -- Harriet Tubman, beauty queen or ain't I a woman? -- Broken sonnet in which Harriet is the gun -- Recitation -- What flew out of Aunt Hester's scream -- Election year 2016: the motto -- Uncle Remus syrup commemorative lynching postcard #25 -- To the black man popping a wheelie on -- Interstate 59 North on 4th of July weekend -- Red dirt suite -- Love/luv/ -- Summerstina -- Ode to Dwayne Waye, or, I want to be Whitley -- Gilbert when I grow up -- I am not selected for jury duty the week bill -- Cosby's jury selection is underway -- A small, disturbing fact -- Water -- Today, I saw a black man open his arms to the wind -- Xylography -- I see a smear of animal on the road and mistake it for philando castile -- There is a beel at morehouse college -- Dark water -- Who will survive in America? or 2017: a horror film -- In-flight entertainment -- Imitation of life -- Broken sonnet for the decorative cotton for sale at Whole Foods -- Racists in space -- When you tell me I'd be prettier with straight hair -- (Black) hair -- Kindergarten villandelle -- Song of my muhammad -- Ode to Al Jolson -- Hoghead cheese haiku -- Aunties -- Thing of a marvelous thing / It's the same as having wings. A multi-faceted work that explores the darkness/otherness by which the world sees Black people. Ashley M. Jones stares directly into the face of the racism that allows people to be seen as dark things, as objects that can be killed/enslaved/oppressed/devalued. This work, full as it is of slashes of all kinds, ultimately separates darkness from thingness, affirming and celebrating humanity.

814.6 G

Gay, Roxane, author. Bad feminist : essays. First edition. A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay. "Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink, all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue." In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture. Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better.

822.3 T

the tragical history of Doctor Faustus : The Elizabethan Play. Annotated & Edited by John D. Harris, 2018. Wabasha, MN : Hungry Point Press, 2018.

822.33 Shakespeare

Major literary characters : Hamlet. New York : Chelsea House Publishers, c. 1990.

822.8 W

Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900. An ideal husband. Mineola, N.Y. : Dover Publications, 2000.

823.914

Vincenzi, Penny, author. Windfall. 1st U.S. ed. Sensible Cassia Fallon has been married to her doctor husband for seven years when her godmother leaves her a huge fortune. For the first time in her life, she is able to do exactly as she likes, and she starts to question her marriage, her past, her present, and her future. But where did her inheritance really come from and why? Too soon the windfall has become a corrupting force, one that Cassia cannot resist.

843.8 F

Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880. Three tales. Oxford ; : Oxford University Press, 2009. A simple heart -- The legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller -- Herodias.

909 S

Sachs, Jeffrey, author. The ages of globalization : geography, technology, and institutions. "Today's most urgent problems are fundamentally global. They require nothing less than concerted, planetwide action if we are to secure a long-term future. But humanity's story has always been on a global scale, and this history deeply informs the present. In this book, Jeffrey D. Sachs, renowned economist and expert on sustainable development, turns to world history to shed light on how we can meet the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century. Sachs takes readers through a series of six distinct waves of technological and ideological change, starting with the very beginnings of our species and ending with reflections on present-day globalization. Along the way, he considers how the interplay of geography, technology, and institutions influenced the Neolithic revolution; the spread of land-based empires; the opening of sea routes from Europe to Asia and the Americas; and the industrial age. The dynamics of these past waves, Sachs contends, give us new perspective on the ongoing processes taking place in our own time-and how we should work to guide the change we need. In light of this new understanding of globalization, Sachs emphasizes the need for new methods of international governance and cooperation to achieve economic, social, and environmental objectives aligned with sustainable development. The Ages of Globalization is a vital book for all readers aiming to make sense of our rapidly changing world"--.

937.002 B

Bing, Stanley. Rome, inc. : the rise and fall of the first multinational corporation. 1st. ed. New York : Norton, c2006.

937.63 L

Laurence, Ray, 1963-. Ancient Rome as it was : exploring the city of Rome in AD 300.

940.3 B

Brooks, Max. The Harlem Hellfighters. First edition. "From bestselling author Max Brooks, the riveting story of the highly decorated, barrier-breaking, historic black regiment--the Harlem Hellfighters. The Harlem Hellfighters is a fictionalized account of the 369th Infantry Regiment--the first African American regiment mustered to fight in World War I. From the enlistment lines in Harlem to the training camp at Spartanburg, South Carolina, to the trenches in France, bestselling author Max Brooks tells the thrilling story of the heroic journey that these soldiers undertook for a chance to fight for America. Despite extraordinary struggles and discrimination, the 369th became one of the most successful--and least celebrated--regiments of the war. The Harlem Hellfighters, as their enemies named them, spent longer than any other American unit in combat and displayed extraordinary valor on the battlefield. Based on true events and featuring artwork from acclaimed illustrator Caanan White, these pages deliver an action-packed and powerful story of courage, honor, and heart"--. "This is a graphic novel about the first African-American regiment to fight in World War One"--.

940.53 B

Browning, Christopher R., author. Ordinary men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland. Revised edition. One morning in Józefów -- The order police -- The order police and the Final solution : Russia 1941 -- The order police and the Final solution : deportation -- Reserve Police Battalion 101 -- Arrival in Poland -- Initiation to mass muder : the Józefów massacre -- Reflections on a massacre -- Łomazy : the descent of Second Company -- The August deportations to Treblinka -- Late-September shootings -- The deportations resume -- The strange health of Captain Hoffmann -- The "Jew hunt" -- The last massacres : "Harvest festival" -- Aftermath -- Germans, Poles, and Jews -- Ordinary men. In the early hours of July 13, 1942, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of the German Order Police, entered the Polish Village of Jozefow. They had arrived in Poland less than three weeks before, most of them recently drafted family men too old for combat service--workers, artisans, salesmen, and clerks. By nightfall, they had rounded up Jozefow's 1,800 Jews, selected several hundred men as "work Jews," and shot the rest--that is, some 1,500 women, children, and old people. Most of these overage, rear-echelon reserve policemen had grown to maturity in the port city of Hamburg in pre-Hitler Germany and were neither committed Nazis nor racial fanatics. Nevertheless, in the sixteen months from the Jozefow massacre to the brutal Erntefest ("harvest festival") slaughter of November 1943, these average men participated in the direct shooting deaths of at least 38,000 Jews and the deportation to Treblinka's gas chambers of 45,000 more--a total body count of 83,000 for a unit of less than 500 men. Drawing on postwar interrogations of 210 former members of the battalion, Christopher Browning lets them speak for themselves about their contribution to the Final Solution--what they did, what they thought, how they rationalized their behavior (one man would shoot only infants and children, to "release" them from their misery). In a sobering conclusion, Browning suggests that these good Germans were acting less out of deference to authority or fear of punishment than from motives as insidious as they are common: careerism and peer pressure. With its unflinching reconstruction of the battalion's murderous record and its painstaking attention to the social background and actions of individual men, this unique account offers some of the most powerful and disturbing evidence to date of the ordinary human capacity for extraordinary inhumanity.

940.54 S

Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands : Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York : Basic Books, c2010. Hitler and Stalin -- The Soviet famines -- Class terror -- National terror -- Molotov-Ribbentrop Europe -- The economics of apocalypse -- Final solution -- Holocaust and revenge -- The Nazi death factories -- Resistance and incineration -- Ethnic cleansings -- Stalinist antisemitism -- Humanity.

951.03 S

The search for modern China : a documentary collection. Third edition.

973 M

Meacham, Jon, author. The soul of America : the battle for our better angels. First edition. Introduction : To hope rather than to fear -- The confidence of the whole people : visions of the Presidency, the ideas of progress and prosperity, and "We, the people" -- The long shadow of Appomattox : the Lost Cause, the Ku Klux Klan, and Reconstruction -- With soul of flame and temper of steel : "the melting pot," TR and his "bully pulpit," and the Progressive promise -- A new and good thing in the world : the triumph of women's suffrage, the Red Scare, and a new Klan -- The crisis of the old order : the Great Depression, Huey Long, the New Deal, and America First -- Have you no sense of decency? : "making everyone middle class," the GI Bill, McCarthyism, and modern media -- What the hell is the presidency for? : "segregation forever," King's crusade, and LBJ in the crucible -- Conclusion : The first duty of an American citizen. "We have been here before. In this timely and revealing book, ... author Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear. With clarity and purpose, Meacham explores contentious periods and how presidents and citizens came together to defeat the forces of anger, intolerance, and extremism. Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature' have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history. He writes about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the Lost Cause; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the fight for women's rights; the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First in the years before World War II; the anti-Communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson's crusade against Jim Crow. Each of these dramatic hours in our national life has been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear--a struggle that continues even now. While the American story has not always--or even often--been heroic, we have been sustained by a belief in progress even in the gloomiest of times. In this inspiring book, Meacham reassures us, "The good news is that we have come through such darkness before"--as, time and again, Lincoln's better angels have found a way to prevail."--Dust jacket.

976.1 S

Smith, Petric J., 1940-. Long time coming : an insider's story of the Birmingham church bombing that rocked the world. 1st ed. Birmingham, Ala. : Crane Hill, 1994.

F Bir

Birch, Anna, author. I kissed Alice. First. "Fan Girl meets Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda in this #ownvoices LGBTQ romance about two rivals who fall in love online"--.

F Bra

Bradbury, Ray, 1920-2012, author. Fahrenheit 451. Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition, 60th anniversary edition. Introduction / by Neil Gaiman -- Fahrenheit 451. The hearth and the salamander ; The sieve and the sand ; Burning bright. History, context, and criticism / edited by Jonathan R. Eller. pt. 1. The story of Fahrenheit 451. The story of Fahrenheit 451 / by Jonathan R. Eller ; From The day after tomorrow: why science fiction? (1953) / by Ray Bradbury ; Listening library audio introduction (1976) / by Ray Bradbury ; Investing dimes: Fahrenheit 451 (1982, 1989) / by Ray Bradbury ; Coda (1979) / by Ray Bradbury -- pt. 2. Other voices. The novel. From a letter to Stanley Kauffmann / by Nelson Algren ; Books of the times / by Orville Prescott ; From New wine, old bottles / by Gilbert Highet ; New novels / by Idris Parry ; New fiction / by Sir John Betjeman ; 1984 and all that / by Adrian Mitchell ; From New maps of hell / by Sir Kingsley Amis ; Introduction to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 / by Harold Bloom ; Fahrenheit 451 / by Margaret Atwood ; The motion picture. Shades of Orwell / by Arthur Knight ; From The journal of Fahrenheit 451 / by Fran©ʹois Truffaut. In a future totalitarian state where books are banned and destroyed by the government, Guy Montag, a fireman in charge of burning books, meets a revolutionary schoolteacher who dares to read and a girl who tells him of a past when people did not live in fear ... This sixtieth-anniversary edition commemorates Ray Bradbury's masterpiece with a new introduction by Neil Gaiman ; personal essays on the genesis of the novel by the author; a wealth of critical essays and reviews by Nelson Algren, Harold Bloom, Margaret Atwood, and others; rare manuscript pages and sketches from Ray Bradbury's personal archive; and much more ... --- From back cover.

F DeL

White noise. 2009; with an introduction by Richard Powers. New York, NY : Penguin Books, 2009.

F Gri

Grisham, John, author. Camino Island. First edition. Bruce Cable owns a popular bookstore in the sleepy resort town of Santa Rosa on Camino Island in Florida. He makes his real money, though, as a prominent dealer in rare books. Very few people know that he occasionally dabbles in the black market of stolen books and manuscripts. Mercer Mann is a young novelist with a severe case of writer's block who has recently been laid off from her teaching position. She is approached by an elegant, mysterious woman working for an even more mysterious company. A generous offer of money convinces Mercer to go undercover and infiltrate Bruce Cable's circle of literary friends, ideally getting close enough to him to learn his secrets. But eventually Mercer learns far too much.--Adapted from book jacket.

F Hem

Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961, author. The sun also rises. The Hemingway library edition. The novel -- Appendix I: Pamplona, July 1923 -- Appendix II: Early drafts -- Appendix III: The discarded first chapters -- Appendix IV: List of possible titles. A profile of the Lost Generation captures life among the expatriates on Paris' Left Bank during the 1920s, the brutality of bullfighting in Spain, and the moral and spiritual dissolution of a generation.

F Hur

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their eyes were watching god. 1st Harper Perennial Modern Classics ed. New York : Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Foreword / Edwidge Danticat -- Their eyes were watching God -- Afterword / Henry Louis Gates, Jr. -- Selected bibliography -- Chronology. A novel about black Americans in Florida that centers on the life of Janie and her three marriages.

F Kid

Kidd, Sue Monk. The invention of wings. The story follows Hetty "Handful" Grimke, a Charleston slave, and Sarah, the daughter of the wealthy Grimke family. The novel begins on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership over Handful, who is to be her handmaid, and follows the next thirty-five years of their lives. Inspired in part by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke (a feminist, suffragist and, importantly, an abolitionist), the author allows herself to go beyond the record to flesh out the inner lives of all the characters, both real and imagined. -- Provided by publisher. "Hetty 'Handful' Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke's daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. The novel is set in motion on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other's destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love. As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful will endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self in the process. Sarah will experience crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism before leaving Charleston to find her place alongside her fearless younger sister, Angelina, as one of the early pioneers in the abolition and women's rights movements. Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, the author goes beyond the record to flesh out the rich interior lives of all of her characters, both real and invented, including Handful's cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in her search for something better. This novel looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved. -- Publisher's description.

F Nab

Vladimir Nabokov. Glory. United States : McGraw-Hill International, Inc, 1971.

F Orw

Orwell, George, 1903-1950. 1984. Signet Classics. New York, NY : Berkley: an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC, c. 1977. "Eternal warfare is the price of bleak prosperity in this satire of totalitarian barbarism."--ARBookFind.

F Sal

Salinger, J. D. (Jerome David), 1919-2010. Nine stories. 1st Back Bay pbk. ed. Boston : Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, 2001, c1991. A perfect day for bananafish -- Uncle wiggily in Connecticut -- Just before the war with the Eskimos -- The laughing man -- Down at the dinghy -- For Esme--with love and squalor -- Pretty mouth and green my eyes -- De Daumier-Smith's blue period -- Teddy. Salinger's classic collection of short stories is now available in trade paperback.

F Tho

Thomas, Angie, author. The hate u give. First edition. "Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil's name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does or does not say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life"--.

F Tho

Thomas, Angie, author. On the come up. First edition. Sixteen-year-old Bri hopes to become a great rapper, and after her first song goes viral for all the wrong reasons, must decide whether to sell out or face eviction with her widowed mother.

F Tol

The Hobbit : or There and Back Again. First U.S. edition; Illus. by Jemima Catlin, 2013. New York, NY : HarperCollins Publishers, 2013.

F Ver

Around the world in 80 days. Classics. Trans. by Geo. M. Towle. Lexington, KY, : October 29. 2019.

F Ver

Around the world in 80 days. Illustrated First Edition. Translated by Geo. M. Towle. Orinda, CA : SeaWolf Press, 2018.

F. Gri

Belfry Holdings, Inc. (Charlottesville, Virginia), author. Camino winds : a novel. Hardcover. "#1 New York Times bestselling author John Grisham returns to Camino Island in this irresistible page-turner that's as refreshing as an island breeze. In Camino Winds, mystery and intrigue once again catch up with novelist Mercer Mann, proving that the suspense never rests-even in paradise"--.

SC A

Alomar, Osama, 1968- author, translator. The teeth of the comb & other stories.

SC Mac

Machado, Carmen Maria, author. Her body and other parties : stories. Contains short stories about the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. "In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella 'Especially Heinous,' Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction." -- Publisher's description.

9 notes · View notes

tatselk · 5 years

Text

PSOH Passage Hen: Chapter 5 “Dissolution” (Pt 2)

This summary/ review has been divided into 2 parts because of how long the summary is.

My summaries/reviews of the previous chapters can be found here: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5: Pt 1].

As always, I’m not sure of the exact spelling of pretty much all the names.

SUMMARY

16. Catherine brought her bubbly self to see Sofu and Fantome Noir again. As they had tea, she talked about the Statue of Liberty and how her father, who was a frequent traveller, could always look at the Statue of Liberty on his return to New York and know that he was home. Catherine then went about trying to convince Fantome Noir to go traveling with her by saying that she could taste delicious food, wear beautiful clothes and maybe even meet some great men. Catherine added that Fantome Noir shouldn’t be brought down by her lover’s death and should go out there to experience a new romance. Sofu muttered as an aside, “Sigh~ This is why I hate Americans-”

17. Fantome Noir got Sofu to relate a message to Catherine for her, “Do you know what it means to fall in love?” Catherine said of course and began listing the “lovers” she has had in the past like her classmates. She even fangirled over Victor again and wondered what she should do if he proposed to her. But Fantome Noir interrupted her to say that that was romance, not love. Catherine was confused by this and said that her favourite was still her father who was dashing, kind, learned and gave her whatever she wanted. She had never met anyone better than him and wanted to marry someone who is even more outstanding than him. Sofu mentioned that it would be difficult to find someone like that. Catherine agreed and quickly broke down into tears saying that she wanted to see her father again as soon as possible.

18. We cut to the Paris Police Station, where we find that Hans had previously requested for help from the police in finding Catherine’s father. Hans was informed that a man who had Brandt’s passport and wallet was still alive and had been arrested by the police. However, he was probably not Brandt as he looked to be in his 80s or 90s; perhaps he was a beggar who had stolen the passport and wallet from Brandt. Hans asked to speak to the man who was arrested and was taken aback when he saw how bedraggled he was.

19. We return to Catherine who was crying and Fantome Noir who had reached out to touch her head. Fantome Noir opened her eyes gradually and said that she wanted to see Catherine’s father too. Even Sofu was surprised at this; he got all excited that a contract could be formed between Catherine and Fantome Noir. Catherine began happily planning the living arrangements for Fantome Noir and how once they found her father, all four of them could return to New York together.

20. This was interrupted by Victor popping up through a set of curtains to tell Sofu that Lena had asked for him at the front of the shop. Sofu, Victor and Hans went there and left Catherine and Fantome Noir to chat. We discover that Lena had found Dubois and brought him back. After sitting down to tea together, Sofu, Victor and Hans learnt that Dubois had met Brandt half a year ago. Hans asked Dubois if he had sold Fantome Noir to Brandt. Dubois mentioned that he mistook “Fantome Noir” for “Black Ghost”, which was an eel from South America (and which was going to be exhibited at the Paris Expo). The sale fell through and Dubois thought that Brandt had returned to New York.

21. At this point, Hans brought up what had happened at the Parisian Police Station last night. He could not get any answers out of the man who was arrested and he suspected that Brandt had already been attacked and killed by some rogues. Then they brought up how since Brandt wasn’t looking for the Black Ghost eel, the Fantome Noir that he was looking for might be a mermaid and went into discussing mermaid lore about how mermaids have very long lives, how eating their flesh can render one immortal, how “The Little Mermaid” was based on Fouque’s “Undine”, how mermaids had a lifespan of 300 years old etc.

22. Sofu poured cold water over the others’ romantic discussion of mermaids and mentioned that despite their appearances, mermaids were ferocious in nature and ate meat. Dubois brought up how the Black Ghost eel was the same and Victor freaked out because he had placed the eel with other fish when setting up the site exhibiting animals at the Paris Expo. So Dubois and Victor quickly ran off to rescue these fish from being eaten.

23. With only Sofu and Hans left in the front of the petshop, Sofu turned to Hans and said that he wished to meet the old man who was arrested. He added mysteriously, “Realising the customer’s wishes was the duty of the shop.” At the Parisian Police Station, Sofu and Hans found that the old man was extremely ill and probably only had a couple of days left to live. Sofu asked if they could take the man away; the police allowed them to do so as since the man’s identity was unknown, if he died, the best he could hope for was to be buried in the public cemetery anyway. On their ride back to the petshop, Sofu mentioned that he wanted Fantome Noir to verify the man’s identity.

24. After the three of them crossed the bridge and gotten to the palace, the old man suddenly seemed to recognise Hans. Catherine appeared and the old man managed to call out her name haltingly before being interrupted by a fit of coughing. Sofu gave the old man a cup of something to drink. After a few moments, the old man dropped the cup and looked as though he was choking badly before gradually turning into a young man.

25. Hans and Catherine reacted in shock because this seemed to be Brandt but one who was far younger than his actual age. Sofu mentioned that this was merely terminal lucidity. Brandt seemed to recognise Sofu and addressed him as Count D but Sofu stated that this was the first time that they have met. Sofu also addressed Brandt as Your Highness and asked him to hurry as the Princess was waiting for him.

26. Brandt threw open a set of curtains dramatically and knelt down before Fantome Noir. “Many apologies for the delay. I’ve come to take you away.” Hans and Catherine freaked out at this and Catherine asked if her father was a prince. Brandt laughed and began his explanation. On the night of his wedding, the maiden (presumably Fantome Noir) had disappeared from the ship. Before long, a storm appeared and Brandt was swept overbroad and dragged into the ocean by a few mermaids, who were Fantome Noir’s sisters.

27. Having dragged him into the ocean, these mermaids kept scolding Brandt for being ungrateful and breaking their sister’s heart etc. He declared that if he had known that she was the one who saved him, he would not have gotten engaged to a human girl whom he met later. The mermaids got Brandt to swallow a black pearl, which caused him to choke and feel hot. They told him that he now had the same lifespan as a mermaid; that he had to find their sister and marry her and that until that day came, they would not forgive humans.

28. When Brandt woke up again, he found that he had washed ashore onto a foreign land. He also discovered that he didn’t age. So he began traveling across Europe in search of Fantome Noir. Along the way, Brandt met a Count D whom Sofu said was probably his grandfather. This was about 100 years ago. This Count D suggested that Brandt go to USA; Brandt did so and began aging. As he crossed the sea, he kept hearing the mermaids asking him to hurry.

29. After Brandt discovered that Dubois didn’t manage to find Fantome Noir either, he became extremely dispirited. As Brandt walked along a bridge across the Seine River in Paris, he heard voices telling him to hurry and that time was running out. He toppled over the rails of the bridge and fell into the river. Brandt saw Fantome Noir in the river and called out to her. But he realised that she could not hear or see him. He also remembered that he was no longer young or handsome; thinking that she probably couldn’t recognise him even if she saw him, he rose to the surface of the river again. When Brandt was fished out of the river, 300 years’ worth of aging had hit him all at once. He could not move, he could not remember anything clearly, he could not even ascertain who he was.

30. Back in the present day, upon hearing his story, Hans and Catherine were extremely ashamed that they had failed to recognise Brandt. Fantome Noir then made the startling announcement that she wasn’t the one whom Brandt loved; she was his daughter. She explained that her mother should have turned into foam after jumping off Brandt’s ship but she was pregnant with her so she gave birth to her before dying. In other words, this Fantome Noir was Catherine’s elder sister and was in mourning for her mother. On hearing that he did not make it in time to see the original Fantome Noir, Brandt gradually grew older again, died and turned into foam.

31. After Brandt’s death, Catherine suddenly brought up the point of why Brandt got together with her own mother if he was so devoted to the original Fantome Noir after all these years. Hans then mentioned that both of them were actually orphans from the ghettos of New York whom Brandt took in. Brandt had wanted to adopt both of them but Hans, who was at an age whereby he understood things, insisted on acting as his servant to repay him for his kindness.

32. Later, it seemed that Sofu recounted everything that happened to Victor and Dubois who had returned to the petshop for tea. Victor noted that one of Sofu’s fingers were injured but Sofu said that it was nothing. Someone wondered about how long the lifespan of the half human/half mermaid Fantome Noir would be and Sofu said that his father and grandfather were still studying mermaids. Sofu also mentioned how mermaids could only give birth once in a lifetime as the baby would claw its way out of the mother’s body and use the body as a source of nutrients, which caused Victor and Dubois to throw up. The chapter ended with Lena asking about Catherine’s love life and Sofu hinting that it was right beside her but she didn’t realise it (I think he was referring to Hans).

THOUGHTS

1. Yay, the first “real” petshop transaction (sorta) in this series! AND it continues the theme of mermaids and A Tragic Love Story in PSOH! :)

2. If there is one thing that perfectly sums up the overall relationship between Sofu and Victor, it is probably my fav convo between them in this chapter.

Sofu: Welcome to Count D’s pet-

Victor: Hello!

Sofu: What? Oh, it is you, Baron. -_-‘’

Victor: Hey, hey, don’t be so cruel~~~ I thought we have a very good relationship?

Sofu: Don’t say such things that would cause a misunderstanding.

Victor: Ah, here’s a small gift for you. Today, it is Galette des Rois.

Sofu: Thank you for your care and concern! :)

3. Is Sofu even trying to run a business or exact revenge on humans by opening the shop so late??? He’s like worse than D was in SPSOH.

4. Given Sofu’s statement that he hated Americans, I’m now REALLY curious as to how/why the Ds went to USA.

5. Even though Catherine fangirled over Victor, it just feels like they could have been siblings. Haha.

#psoh #petshop of horrors #pet shop of horrors #psoh passage hen #petshop of horrors passage hen #pet shop of horrors passage hen #matsuri akino #akino matsuri #sofu d

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gardenofkore · 5 years

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Francesca Paola Jacona, better known as Donna Franca Florio, was born in Palermo on December 27th 1873. She was the only daughter of Baron Pietro Jacona di San Giuliano and Costanza Notarbartolo di Villarosa. Her mother came from an ancient but already decadent Sicilian noble family.

On February 11th 1893, and after a long courtship, a 19 years old Franca married Ignazio Florio Jr. Her family had been against this union since the man was a notorious womanizer and would not stop even after marrying. It was a private ceremony, nothing too sumptuous since her husband had lost his father two years prior. Franca then moved to Villa All’Olivuzza, where her mother-in-law, Giovanna D’Ondes Trigona, and her 10 years old brother-in-law, Vincenzo, already lived. She had to get used to her new family’s splendour, but she soon felt at ease and developed refined and bizarre tastes. In her house in Palermo, she brought two grivets, Fitty and Fufi. The two pestiferous monkeys once caused a fire that destroyed a precious XVI century lace curtain, one of Florio Family’s treasures. It is said the monkeys wanted to imitate their masters and tried to smoke. They stroked the matchsticks on the walls and succeeded in lightning them, but then everything got out of control.

Ignazio Florio Jr wasn’t a nobleman, but was incredibly rich. The Florio family originally came from Calabria and settled in Sicily in 1783 after a terrible earthquake had damaged their hometown (Bagnara Calabra, province of Reggio Calabria). In three generations, the Florio family accumulated an enormous wealth. Ignazio Jr, their heir, owned the Cantine Florio (Florio winery, the first one to produce the famous Marsala wine), the majority of the Sicilian tonnare (factories that produced canned tuna, and for the first time it was tuna in oil instead of salted tuna), the Oretea foundry, the Banca Florio (Florio Bank, previously owned by the Rothschild family), a share of the Anglo-Sicilian Sulphur Company, and the majority of the Navigazione Generale Italiana (a shipping company operating in the Mediterranean Sea, North America, India and Far East) capital.

On November 24th 1893 Franca gave birth to her first child, Giovanna. Despite not being the wished for heir, the baby girl was loved by her family, nonetheless. Donna Franca wasted no time after her daughter’s birth and resumed attending various social gatherings. She always was at the centre of the attention, and her looks never ceased to make headlines. Moreover she was considered incredibly beautiful with her green eyes, tall stature (173 cm) and amber skin. Franca Florio wore only dresses especially designed for her by the French stylist Jean Philippe Worth. Even her jewels were customized for her by famous jewelry brands like Cartier or Lalique. She stopped wearing earrings after Gabriele D’Annunzio advised her to since (he declared) a pendant distort her features. Among her gems, there was, in particular, a famous necklace made of 365 pearl beads. Even Queen Margherita of Italy was envious of this collier since she couldn’t afford such incredible and expensive piece of jewelry.

At the time, many celebrities visited Palermo, and among them Guy de Maupassant, Richard Wagner, Giacomo Puccini, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Oscar Wilde (whose scandalous lifestyle and recent accuse of sodomy couldn’t secure him a warm welcome). On 1896 Kaiser Wilhelm II and his family arrived in Palermo. The deep bond between the German Emperor and the Florios will last until the First World War, which will lead to the Hohenzollern dinasty’s decline.

Among her royal admirers there was also Franz Joseph of Austria. The Emperor gave Donna Franca a trumpet for her car as a present. She used to ring it while driving through Vienna’s streets and people stopped and saluted the car thinking it was the Emperor.

In their mansion, the Florio couple entertained many important guests, like the aforementioned Hohenzollern family, but also King Edward VIII and Queen Alexandra of Great Britain, Tzarina Alexandra Feodorovna and Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich of Russia, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Prince Philipp von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha.

On April 9th 1898, finally, the heir was born. The birth of little Ignazio, fondly known as Baby Boy, strengthened the relationship between the Florio couple.

On December 19th 1900, before a stand out audience (among them many international newspapers like New York Times, Le Figaro and Daily Mail) , the hotel Villa Igiea was inaugurated. It was originally a private house bought by the Florio, who entrusted it to Palermitan architect Ernesto Basile. He transformed it into an Art Nouveau jewel, and it still is one of the most beautiful Italian hotels. Ignazio and Franca had in there their own private apartment, and it is where on June 4th their third child, Igiea Costanza, was born. 1900 was a good year for Donna Franca since she was also appointed as Queen Margherita’s lady-in-waiting.

Ignazio’s adultery was a constant distress for his wife, but nothing could compare to the grief derived from their children’s sorrowful fate. Giovanna died of meningitis (or tuberculosis) in 1902, she was 9. The year after, Little Ignazio followed his sister at the tender age of 5. The same year, Giacobina was born, but the baby girl only lived for a few hours.

On 1909 the last of Florio children, Giulia, was born. Unfortunately, Florio family’s crisis and downfall was approaching. The Florio empire was so vast it became hard to manage, especially with all the competitors from Northern Italy. Ignazio Jr. didn’t think about diversifying his business’ interests in new markets nor invest in the new technologies. Moreover the Florios maintained their extravagant way of life and accumulated huge debts that led to the fact that all the Florio companies either were sold or disappeared.

In 1924 Ignazio had to sell Villa Florio all'Olivuzza and along with his wife and daughter Giulia moved to Rome in his daughter Igiea’s house (in 1921 she had married Duke Averardo Salviati). Between 1925 and 1935 the economic collapse deprived Ignazio Jr of all his assets. Donna Franca was forced to sell her jewels (included the pearl necklace) and the family’s furniture and real estate were auctioned in Palermo. Ignazio sold all the companies and the whole family patrimony to pay his debts to the last penny, before retiring to private life. The Florio couple got closer with all the aversities and supported each other until the end.

Donna Franca died on November 10th 1950 in Igiea’s villa in Migliarino Pisano, tended by her daughters. She’s buried in the Cemetery of Santa Maria di Gesù, Palermo. After her death, Ignazio returned to Palermo where he died on September 19th 1957.

Igiea had 5 children and died in 1974. Her sister Giulia married in 1939 in Rome Marquis Achille Afan de Rivera Costaguti. During raid of the Ghetto of Rome in 1943, despite being a committed fascist, the Marquis and his wife hid in their palace (which partly was inside the ghetto’s area) and later help to run away from Rome 16 Jewish families. When German soldiers arrived at the palace to inquire whether it was true the Afan de Rivera family was hiding Jews, Don Achille showed up in full fascist uniform. He swore his loyalty to the Fascist cause and declared there were no Jews in his house. As for Giulia, she was threatened by group of fascists who wanted to know if there were Jews in her house. She paid them a huge sum (50000 lire) for their silence. For these reasons, in 2002, the Marquises were posthumously appointed Righteous Among the Nations. Since her uncle Vincenzo didn’t have any children from both his two wives, Giulia was the last of the Florios. She died in 1989 in Rome.

#women #women history #historical women #history #sicily #franca florio #ignazio florio jr #giulia florio #igiea costanza florio #Achille Afan de Rivera Costaguti #righteous among the nations #people of sicily #women of sicily #contemporary sicily #palermo #historyedit #province of palermo #myedit

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tilbageidanmark · 3 years

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Movies I watched this week - 22

Ramin Bahrani’s masterpiece Goodbye Solo.

Here is the first scene:

A grumpy old white man gets into a night cab in Winston-Salem, NC and hires the friendly Senegalese driver to take him out to a mountain cliff outside town. Solo, the driver, jokes with him “Why? Are you gonna jump off?” but the old man doesn’t answer, and the smile disappear from the driver’s face...

9/10

✴️

Eighth Grade - A coming of age story of an introverted and awkward 13 year old girl who struggles with anxiety. She lives with her dad whom she locks out even though he’s well-meaning and supportive.

It’s all about social acceptance, screens and self-doubt.

I can see Adora there in a year or two, confused, uncertain about her life and having to come to terms with the “friends” around her.

Real, sad and hard to watch! 7+/10

✴️

Unexpected discovery of the week:

Black honey ( דבש שחור ), A biography of a poet I never heard of, Abraham Sutzkever, who is now regarded as the greatest Yiddish poet of all time, and is even considered by some as the “most important Israeli Poet ever”.

According to the documentary, he led a truly remarkable life, from his birth in Siberia, surviving hell on earth at the Vilna ghetto during World War II and being rescued by an order of Stalin himself, testifying at the first Nuremberg trials, and living in Tel Aviv for over 50 years, practically unknown, because he refused to switch writing his poetry from Yiddish to Hebrew. Astounding!

✴️

2 with Irrfan Khan (who died exactly a year ago):

✳️✳️✳️ In The Lunchbox, an unloved Mumbai wife sends her husband home cooked meals via the local dabbawallas food carrying system, but her Dabba is being delivered by mistake to a lonely, older widower.

“The wrong train can lead you to the right station”

A tender, quiet story about longing and loneliness from first-time director Ritesh Batra (who later directed ‘Our Souls At night’).

- Best film of the week.

This movie caused me to realize something about this film-reviewing project:

Right now I am mostly attracted to simple, earnest and compassionate stories about “real” people with “real” emotions. So many of the films I choose are like that: Wistful and restrained.

✳️✳️✳️ Puzzle (2018) was Irrfan Khan’s final English-language role before his death. It tells a soft and atmospheric story about an undervalued housewife who slowly discovers herself after she receives a 1000 pc. jigsaw puzzle for her birthday. 7/10

✴️

Won’t you be my neighbor? - a kind biography of the inspirational Mr. Rogers, created in 2018, a hateful and terrible year.

✴️

After discovering ‘The Station Agent’ and ‘Win Win’ last week, I went through the rest of Tom McCarty’s films (the only one I couldn’t find is ‘The Visitor’):

✳️✳️✳️ First in line, Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made. I can imagine that this is a perfect film for 12 year olds. A unique boy who refuses to be ‘normal’ runs a detective agency, “Total Failure Inc.”, with an imaginary polar bear partner in wacky Portland, OR. (Photo above)

Surprised to see Craig Robinson as a 100% empathetic school counselor! 9/10

✳️✳️✳️ Re-watch (Fifth time? sixth?...) - Spotlight: Pitch perfect newsroom procedural story of the investigative team at the Boston Globe as they uncovered the massive child sex abuse of the Catholic Church.

10/10

✳️✳️✳️ The Cobbler - I can’t understand why this film was Adam Sandler's biggest box-office flop, or why it got on so many Worst Films Of 2014 lists.

A warm and lovely fairy tale (especially the first half) about a shoe maker ( סַנדְלָר ) who learn to "Live in someone else's shoes". 5+

✳️✳️✳️ Pixar’s UP - With a story by Tom McCarty. There are 2 stories here: The very emotional relationship between Carl, the Spencer Tracy character, and his wife Ellie, and the South American adventures. I remembered the first part vividly, and didn’t realize that they already reached Paradise Falls after 30 minutes: The rest of the movie was centered around the fights with explorer Charles Muntz.

The first 10 minutes opening scene, though...

✳️✳️✳️ Finally, One million Arm, a Tom McCarty’s script turned into a disappointing Disney production: So formulaic that I knew to the minute when Alan Arkin is going to pop up again.

✴️

First watch: What Happened, Miss Simone? A biography of the second greatest female singer, who also suffered the tragic fate of being born black and female in America.

✴️

The Rider, Chloé Zhao’s magnificent film before Nomadland.

Dark, authentic and powerful “Western” story of a rodeo rider who had a brain injury while falling from a horse (in real life). Played by all non-actors from an Indian reservation in the Badlands of South Dakota.

One of Obama’s 2018 favorite films.

"Play the cards you are dealt, Let it go."

✴️

Hated in the nation - Another re-watch of my all-time favorite “Black Mirror” episode (I actually mentioned it on the first blog post of this project - so less than 6 months ago!). Because of “Puzzle” (above), I returned to see Kelly Macdonald as DCI Karin Parks (together with her side-kick “Blue Coulson”).

A perfect thriller! I would binge on a series led by these two!

10/10

✴️

“...From the Buddhists to the whores...”

Asleep & Awake: Spend 35 minutes in the bathroom of 81 year old Henry Miller

✴️

Young Fronkensteen - with Inspector Kemp, whose German accent is so thick that even his own countrymen cannot understand him - and Gene Hackman as the blind hermit.

“Hallo. Vould you like to have a roll in ze hay?”

✴️

Margaret is an over-long (2.5 hours), meandering story about a privileged and self-absorbed Manhattan teen who witnesses a woman being killed by a bus. It’s attention-seeking and unfocused with a dozen unrelated sub-plots, each going on its own tangent and leading nowhere. It starts on the wrong foot by casting 29 year old Anna Paquin as a teenager who bickers and argues with everybody around her, who also exhibit breakdowns in communication and aggressive assholery all around. Unpleasant slog! Even Mark Ruffalo gets to play an unsympathetic character.

✴️

H.R. Giger’s 1979 wet dream - Alien. Also, Sigourney Weaver’s first role. (She’s 71 years old now). A group of incompetent space explorers / scientists discover some alien organism in space, and do everything possible not to protect themselves. Overrated, empty horror. 2/10

- - - - -

Throw-back to the art project:

Adora with Mr. Rogers and with Daniel Tiger.

Nina Simone Adora.

Young Frankenstein Adora.

Alien Adora.

- - - - -

(My complete movie list is here)

#movies

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tonystarktogo · 7 years

Text

Tiny Tony Overlord Part 3

Part I | Part II | Read on AO3

Betaed by the amazing @folklejend. All remaining mistakes are my own. Enjoy!

Chapter 3 Recover

.Minor S.H.I.E.L.D. Unit.

Bix, whose birth certificate states the name Bianca Arlinda White, has had a terrible day so far. Admittedly, the good days have been few and far in between ever since Captain fucking America was rediscovered in the middle of fucking nowhere and successfully defrosted before the right people could get their hands on him. Like Iron Man’s creation hadn’t been bad enough—and really, who could have seen that one coming?

It’s not that Bix has an opinion on their existence one way or another, it’s just that superheroes tend to be, well. Messy. Not to mention that there are only so many high horses and moral bullshit speeches you can listen to before you want to take a nearby machine gun and shut them the heck up yourself.

[continue below the cut]

And then there are those days where they open their damn mouth and take control of your most precious weapon because they apparently eat shameless amounts of luck for breakfast every day. Which is just not fair. Just because Bix doesn’t play with the good guys doesn’t mean fate is allowed to mess up every single mission Bix is in charge of. That just isn’t right!

“Enter,” a voice calls out, and Bix pushes the internal rant aside to be finished at another time in favour of entering the small, clean office.

Walter Brickley is the supervising officer of SHIELD’s local strike teams. He is also meticulously dressed, single, in his early thirties, and filled to the brim with confidence and self-importance. In other words he is perfect.

Bix observes Brickley’s expression closely. The way he takes in the expensive high heels, the form-fitting blouse with the top button undone, the manicured fingers and the skirt an inch shorter than SHIELD’s dress policies allow. Brickley isn’t a pig, thankfully. He doesn’t leer, doesn’t even stare excessively. It might have made the job easier, but there is always a fifty-fifty chance Bix will snap and break someone’s knee, and that never helps. He is interested though, if his dilated pupils are anything to go by.

“How can I help you, Miss?” Brickley asks, the picture of friendly competence.

Years of practice allow Bix to repress the instinctive grimace and paint a honeyed smile on instead.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Agent Brickley.” Bix shakes the man’s hand. “My name is Andrina Flynn. I work directly under Senator Stern. I was hoping the two of us could come to an agreement.”

* * * * *

Bix leaves Agent Brickley’s office twenty-five minutes later, the picture of the calm and collected secretary. The closest bathroom is right around the corner, and it takes Bix all of four minutes to replace the skirt with rugged pants, exchange the heels with black combat boots, and pull the long, wavy locks into a high ponytail. By the time Bix’s cell phone rings, the last traces of deep red lipstick have been wiped away and the face inside the mirror starts to look familiar again.

“Yes?” Bix answers, careful to use a deeper voice.

“Agent White, this is Agent Brickley. There is a minor internal security issue that needs to be taken care of immediately. STRIKE team 2 has been authorised to liquidate a threat towards National security. The details will be sent to your phone momentarily. Get a hold of your people and be ready to go in five.”

Bix smirks. “Copy that, sir.”

It is high time to get rid of a certain bothersome—if currently child-sized—genius and reclaim the organisation’s favourite toy.

“But how did you get Brickley to agree to this?” Archie Denver whispers quietly in the back of the trunk half an hour later. “The guy is squeaky clean like no other!”

“Oh, Archie.” Bix patronisingly pats the man on the head. “You’re thinking too simple again. You’re still operating under the assumption that you need an army of corrupt soldiers to take on the world. But you don’t.”

The unconcealed glee on Bix’s face makes their colleagues, Hydra and otherwise, shift nervously.

Good. They may survive this retrieval mission after all.

“All you need is one corrupt mole amongst a sea of honest fools.”

“Ma’am?” an eager trainee speaks up from the other side of the truck, oblivious to Bix’s reflexive twitch. “The target has been located.”

* * * * *

.Zach’s B&B.

Tony is abruptly reminded why he’s chosen to spend the last couple of hours on the uncomfortable seat when he tries to stand and his knees almost give out under him. The dull ache in the back of his head intensifies as well, causing the world to tilt sideways, and for a long moment, it’s all he can do to remain upright and remember how to breathe.

Through it all, Dead-Eyes stays motionless in the shadiest corner of the room and watches him with a blank face. When Tony is aware enough to notice, he appreciates the man’s silence. Mostly though, he just prays for the piercing pain to disappear.

It doesn’t.

“Pepper,” he whispers, the word so soft he almost chokes on it.

She doesn’t smile at him like she used to, hasn’t smiled at all since they’ve lost Rhodey, but he reads the understanding in her eyes. Traces the affection in her scarred features. She is still here after all, still stands tall and proud, brimming with the same fiery determination that has first brought her to his attention so many years ago.

“Tony.” She takes his hands into hers, the touch warm and familiar. “There is no cure.” Her voice doesn’t break, doesn’t waver and god, she is beautiful like this. “You know that. You’ve done the best you can, you’ve done everything you can.”

“Not everything.” His eyes burn.

“This isn’t your fault, Tony,” she says with unshakeable conviction. “I love you.”

Their kiss tastes of the tears they’ve forgotten how to cry and he can’t let go of her, can’t lose her, not after everything, not ever, but when she asks, he can’t deny her anything.

She walks into one of their facilities the next day with her head held high, one of Tony’s most devastating, amplified Jerichos strapped to her chest. She takes over 300 Others with her.

The last of Tony Stark dies with her.

Tony is kneeling on the ground, palms pressed against the solid floor, desperately trying to anchor himself to the present.

He is in a motel. The images in his head, no matter how vivid, aren’t real. Or, a darker voice in the back of his head whispers mockingly, are they?

Tony swallows. Pepper’s face when she found out about the baby—too late, always too late—flashes before his eyes, a look of hopeless devastation so shattered, it tears him apart even now. He can’t recall the moments that have led up to this, nor what happened after. But does it really matter? At some point in time, it might have happened, and Tony can’t take that chance. Can’t allow his friend to ever feel pain like that again, not when he can still do something about it.

Stumbling towards the kitchen corner, Tony struggles to open a bottle of water with shaking hands.

His headache is worse than ever. A reflection perhaps of the utter chaos inside his mind, the strings woven too tightly together to be untangled without ripping them, the gaping holes in between that leave too many questions unanswered.

Tony sways back to the table. Takes another pill on autopilot. Swallows two gulps of water. He tries to set the glass down but his fingers are numb and the glass slips from his grasp. He doesn’t try to catch it. The glass shatters on the concrete with a clash.

“Feel better now?”

“No.”

“Throw another plate then. Maybe the world will magically become a better place. Maybe destroying what little we have left is the cure we’ve all been looking for.”

Tony glares at his oldest friend, who is entirely too blasé in the face of his fury. “What do you want, honey bear?”

“I just want to make sure you’re alright.” Rhodey steps a bit closer then, not close enough to touch yet, but close enough to remind Tony that he’s there. Rhodey is always there.

Almost against his will, Tony can feel some of the tension in his muscles dissipating. “Who cares?” he mutters, just to be a stubborn asshole. “I’m just the mass-murdering megalomaniac, aren’t I?”

“I take it the talk with Rogers didn’t go well.” Rhodey doesn’t look surprised. Truth be told, neither is Tony.

“Yeah,” Tony snorts derisively. “Turns out Captain America doesn’t abide to the, and I quote, ‘needless slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent civilians.’ Who would’ve thought, eh?”

For a moment, Tony simply stares at the remains of his destroyed kitchen. “He thinks there’s another way,” he whispers eventually, aware of how tired he sounds.

Rhodey’s hand squeezes his shoulder comfortingly. “What do you think?” he asks, face free of any judgement.

It allows Tony to say the words that have been drowned out by Steve’s single-minded determination far too often. “I think he’s right,” he admits. “There is another way. But we’ll lose people every day searching for it. And who’s to say that there’ll be anyone left to save by the time we’ve found it?”

Tony searches Rhodey’s eyes, wills his friend to understand.

“There’ll be collateral damage no matter which choice we make, and by—by not containing the damage, we aren’t saving the world, we aren’t even saving the people in the ghettos. We’re absolving ourselves of their deaths, nothing more.”

“Tones-“ Rhodey’s eyes are achingly gentle.

He is interrupted by an icy “‘Containing the damage’?” from behind them.

Tony feels sick. The memory is frightening in its clarity. He can picture the entire scene in his head, down to the colour of Rhodey’s shirt—red and yellow, because of course Rhodey would wear Iron Man merchandise for this kind of conversation—like it has happened only minutes ago, and the emotions it evokes are overwhelming.

There is only one question. Who the hell is Rhodey?

Out of the corner of his eyes, Tony catches a blurry shadow moving towards him but he can’t even muster up the will to shield his face. His headache is steadily getting worse. It’s impossible to focus on anything but the piercing pain deep within his skull, burning with an intensity that makes him want to crack his head open just to get it out. Pressing his flushed skin against the cool floor helps a little but the relief is short-lasting.

It feels like an eternity before Tony finds the will to turn onto his back. The only thing he wants to do right now is lie here and hope the world will stop turning around him at some point. He can’t though. Not when he doesn’t know what is happening to him and whether these symptoms will pass on their own. Who knows what the purpose of the weird energy that hit him was. It might work like a slow-acting poison. Hell, Tony’s physical self is decades younger than his mind; who knows what kind of effects such an imbalance has? What if his body can’t cope with the strain?

No, Tony can’t afford to waste more time. And once he has managed to formulate that thought in his head, he clings to it. Holds on with an iron determination that has been formed and shaped by terror and loss, left him unwilling to consider anything but success a possibility.

Somehow, Tony makes it back onto his feet and after he has blinked away the first bout of dizziness, things get a bit more manageable.

“Alright, Dead-Eyes,” Tony’s voice sounds about as terrible as he feels but he doubts his shadow will care. Actually, he’s starting to question whether Dead-Eyes is even capable of caring. “Clean this room out, don’t leave anything behind.”

The command sounds odd on his tongue, familiar almost, the way a song from your early childhood might be. Like he’s said it a thousand times before, often enough that the details of every occurrence blur and bleed together. Tony shakes the uncomfortable sensation off.

He will have to deal with Dead-Eyes eventually, but he is in no state to do a background check, never mind conduct an interrogation. Besides, so far the man hasn’t tried to kill him. That has to count for something.

“Ready?” he mumbles.

Dead-Eyes gives a sharp nod. He’s wearing his goggles and face mask again. The look isn’t as disturbing as it probably should be, but that seems to be a theme where Dead-Eyes is concerned.

“Cool.” Tony staggers towards the door. “Time to visit some old friends. Older friends. Urgh, whatever.”

They don’t even make it off the parking lot.

I’m enjoying this story a lot, hope you do too! Feel very welcome to share your thoughts and impressions!

#ReRe writes #Tiny Tony Overlord #fic #Tony Stark #Bucky Barnes #Winter Soldier Bucky #tiny Tony #Bix the HYDRA goon #background information #things are slowly developing #actually they're about to get interesting #cue evil laughter

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expatimes · 4 years

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The survivor's silence: Remembering the Nuremberg trials | Germany News

On November 20, 1945, several months after the end of World War II, a series of military tribunals began in the German city of Nuremberg.

The first of the trials was the Major War Crimes Trial, in which 22 high-ranking Nazis stood trial in the Palace of Justice. Twelve of the defendants would be sentenced to death.

A further 12 trials - known as the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings - were held at Nuremberg between 1946 and 1949.

Seventy-five years after the Nuremberg trials began, we hear from three people upon whose lives the trials and the events that proceeded them cast a long shadow: the son of one of those on trial, the son of one of the prosecutors and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.

Tali Nates is the founder and director of the Johannesburg Genocide & Holocaust Center. Her father, Moses, was 14 years old when he was sent first to a forced labor camp and later to concentration camps.

Here, she describes what it was like to grow up in the shadow of the Holocaust:

As a child growing up in the 1960s, there was so much silence. Back then many survivors did not talk about what they had experienced. It was a coping mechanism - a need to focus not on the past but on rebuilding their lives.

My father never sat me down to share his memories. His pain and trauma was unspoken, he carried it quietly, but you could feel it and it would come out in his nightmares and fear of enclosed spaces.

In many ways, the silence was louder than any words could have been. There was so much pain in it.

He had lost his entire family, apart from his older brother - my Uncle Chanoch, or Henryk.

My uncle was the opposite of my father - he was the talker. He would say: “Sit down little one, let me tell you” and then share stories from his life.

Tali Nates with a picture of her father Moses Turner at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Center [Photo courtesy of Jono David]

Perhaps because they had lost their family, they were very close to other survivors. Although they were not blood relations, these people became our “uncles and aunts”. Together, they would speak about what happened “there” but using languages, like Polish, that I couldn't understand.

I think after the widely-publicized trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organisers of the Holocaust, in Jerusalem in 1961, my father spoke a little more to others about what had happened to him. But he didn't share much with his children.

Here is what I do know.

My father's family was from a small town in southern Poland called Nowy Targ. It is a few hours from Krakow in the Tatra Mountains, close to Zakopane. It is a beautiful mountainous region full of small towns and villages, rivers and forests. It was a wonderful place to grow up in.

His family were lower-middle class and my grandfather had a fur business.

Zakopane, near where Moses Turner grew up [Photo courtesy of Tali Nates]

Burning the dead and lashes for potatoes

But then the war started and the Germans reached their town on the very first day. A ghetto was soon established and the Jewish community forced into its few streets.

In 1940, my father was sent to a forced labor camp in Zakopane to work in a stone quarry at the foot of the Krokiew mountain. He had to cut and carry stones in the place where he had once skied.

From there he was sent to Plaszow concentration camp in Krakow.

In Plaszow he was reunited with his brother. My uncle, who had been sent to Plaszow earlier, heard that a group of prisoners had arrived from Zakopane and found my father among them. They hadn't seen each other for more than two years. They hugged and cried and swore that they would never be parted again.

In the camp, they worked together as carpenters and builders.

Then, in 1944, the commandant of the camp, Amon Goeth, ordered that some of the prisoners would be tasked with opening up the mass graves in the camp where victims of the Holocaust had been buried. It was part of a Nazi plan to destroy the evidence of their crimes.

My father and uncle were part of Sonderkommando 1005, special groups of prisoners created for this purpose. They were forced to open the graves and burn the bodies that were inside them. They were given masks to cover their noses because the smell was so bad. My father was just 17 at the time.

Goeth was infamous for randomly shooting at inmates for fun. He once shot a man who was standing next to my uncle. From one day to the next, my father and uncle did not know if they would live or die.

Once, my father was sent out of the camp to work in some fields. Some Polish peasants had left potatoes for the inmates and my father took some of them. But he was searched and the potatoes were found. He was given 50 lashes as punishment. The wounds from the lashes left a permanent bump on the top of his head and later in life he suffered badly from headaches. He died of brain cancer in 1974. He was 48 years old.

Schindler's list

My father and uncle would probably have died during the Holocaust but for the help of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved the lives of 1,200 Jews by employing them in his factories.

My father and uncle were on page 10 of his list. They never found out how they got on it, but they were eventually moved to Brunnlitz, a camp created by Schindler where ammunition was supposedly made.

Page 10 of Schindler's list, with the names of Tali Nates's father and uncle - Moses and Henryk Turner - on it [Photo courtesy of Tali Nates]

But the Jews in this camp never finished making any ammunition. They worked but everything was deliberately sabotaged. There were guards outside, but Schindler never allowed them inside and was known to have paid bribes to members of the Schutzstaffel (SS) to prevent them from executing any of his workers.

My father and uncle loved Oskar Schindler and his wife Emilie. They told stories about how the Schindlers would give them food when they were starving. But even Schindler could not get enough food for 1,200 people. So in May 1945, when they were liberated by the Russians, my father weighed just 38kg.

My father and uncle decided to separate at liberation, with my father going through the displaced person's process with the United Nations, and eventually being sent to Freiburg in Germany to complete his education, while my uncle returned to his hometown to wait for his family. What he did not know then was that there was no family left. The two sisters of my father and uncle had been killed in Belzec death camp on August 30, 1942.

A sketch of Cela and Helen Turner, Moses Turner's sisters, who were killed in Belzec [Photo courtesy of Tali Nates]

What's in a name?

When I was born, in 1961, I was the first girl in the family since my father's sisters and mother were murdered. For my father and uncle, my birth brought great happiness and the feeling that I was going to replace the girls that had been lost. For them, I was like the memorial candle, the symbol of all the losses they had endured, of all that was no longer there.

My mother did not want to name me after anyone. She wanted me to have a name that had no painful connotations attached to it. But my father wanted to name me after one of his sisters.

They argued about it and I was nameless for a few days until they settled on a compromise - giving me the first name Tali, which had no connotations with the past, and the middle name Helen, after my father's oldest sister who was 16 when she was murdered. In that way, the burden of the dead and the hope for the future were both with me.

The children of survivors are often named after people who did not survive. Some don't even have pictures of the people whose names they carry.

The Believe memorial at the site of the Belzec camp in Poland, where Tali Nates's aunts were killed [Photo courtesy of Emmanuel Santos]

'Not just a courtroom'

I was in Nuremberg for the first time when I was invited by the International Nuremberg Principles Academy in 2016. It was a gathering of Holocaust educators from around the world. We spent a lot of time in courtroom 600, where the Nuremberg trials were held.

For the daughter of a survivor, Nuremberg is multilayered. It is the Nuremberg of the Nuremberg rallies and Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda films. It is the Nuremberg of Der Sturmer, the anti-Semitic newspaper. It is the Nuremberg of the Nuremberg laws of September 1935 that stripped German Jews of citizenship. It is the Nuremberg where the synagogue was burned on Kristallnacht. It is the Nuremberg of courtroom 600 and the Nuremberg trials.

Tali Nates (back row, second from right) with University of Cape Town student leaders, at Nuremberg courtroom 600 in 2017 [Photo courtesy of JHGC collection]

My father did not speak specifically about the Nuremberg trials but he believed in the need to obtain justice through legal channels. During the Eichmann trial, he was glued to the radio. My uncle believed in trials so much that he testified at a war crimes trial in Freiburg in the 1960s.

For many years, I took students to Poland to see the Nazi concentration camps and other sites related to the Holocaust. And then in 2015, I started to take student leaders from the University of Cape Town and the University of the Free State on study tours to Germany as well. To visit the Nuremberg courtroom was important for students from a country grappling with its own deeply unjust and painful past.

#world Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=14432&feed_id=18635

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shadcatmastered · 6 years

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Law x Kid - Fanfiction - Between Wolf and Cat

Note: There are no real "animals" in this world. By "animals" is meant humans with animal ears, animal tails, or other notable animal traits. Like a Nekoboy / -girl. In the past, the world was ruled by those with claws, danger and sharp teeth. Predators were at the top of the food chain. They had the power over the other animals. After all, they fed on them. The weak, simple animals feared the predators. The government was theirs, the land belonged to them. Actually, the world. If you were born a predator, you had nothing to fear. Except for other predators that were bigger and stronger than you. But that was the fight of life. That's the way it was. Admittedly, it was a gloomy world. A world full of fear and struggle. Full of dead. And yet a fair world. Set according to the natural balance. But the world changed. The predators were responsible for that as well. They ate too much and the prey no longer multiplied. The predators threatened to starve to death. So they made a momentous decision. They would take their prey into the government. They would consider them equivalent. They would not hunt for an indefinite time and would not eat anymore. At least no fresh meat. This decision was the sinking of the predators. The prey multiplied quickly. They became very large, and when the predators tried to regain their rightful place, they were crushed by the majority of the other animals. It started a new time. The time of freedom, as the prey called it. The predators were pushed back. Now the prey ruled and admittedly the world became a nicer one. Nobody needed to be more worried about his life. Nobody had to die anymore. Nobody was eaten. In freedom, powerful technologies were developed. Things that were impossible before. High skyscrapers were built. Cities became huge, modern. Work flourished and people were happy. Each prey animal now had a bright, beautiful future ahead of it. The only thing you needed to be lucky was to be a prey animal. For the predators was another fate to share. The few predators that survived congregated in ghettos on the outskirts of major cities. There was no real meat left to eat. The only thing they got was artificial meat. Made from plants and chemistry. It tasted horrible, but that's how the predators survived. Outside the big cities, the predators had no chance. They could not get any food, and the other animals would marginalize them so that only death awaited them. The only place they were tolerated was the ghettos. Those places full of poverty and dirt. Of course, the predators could enter the cities. However, one too often heard of news in which a predator was accidentally killed. Or was killed in self-defense. Or arrested for crime. No. The time of the predators was over. For them, there was only the dream of the past. Kid was born as a predator. A wolf with red hair, red wolf ears and a red wolf tail. It was such an unusual color that you might think he was a fox at first sight. And yet Kid was undoubtedly a wolf. The first part of his story begins when he was 16 years old. Kid lived alone with his mother. His father was imprisoned many years ago. He should have tried to eat another animal. This was followed by a life imprisonment. Honestly, Kid could barely remember his father's face. He refused to visit him in prison. What broke his mother's heart and yet she could understand it. The only thing he really knew about his father was that he was a wolf. Just like his mother and just like him. As hard as life was, Kid was proud of what he was. Even when he grimaced, as he watched the food, his mother placed him on the table. Artificial meat. As every day. This time as soup. The redhead sighed as he began to eat. He wished there was something else to eat. His mother sat down opposite him and smiled. His mother was not old. Actually, she was rather young. She had given birth to him when she was at his present age. And yet, Kid could not help but think she looked old. Almost sick. "Is everything alright?" The redhead's voice was thoughtful as he chewed on the artificial flesh. It tasted disgusting every day. His mother looked at him in surprise before she shook her head with a smile. She then said the same thing she always said: "Yes sweetie, it's just the worries." Kid rolled his eyes a little. The worries. As if they would ever pass away. The worries were the money. They never had enough money. For nothing. They lived in a small, broken apartment. Kid had a room, not his mother. She slept in the small living room, in which stood little more than the sofa and the TV. Her kitchen was just as small. They did not have a dining table. They ate in the living room. The rent was also cheap. Still, they could barely pay. For predators, there was not really work in the world. Which prey animal would hire a predator? His mother got up in the middle of the night and did not return until noon. She was allowed to clean in a skyscraper. After all, that gave enough money for the rent and for something to eat. Kid had also offered to go to work. But his mother had been horrified. He should focus on school, she had said. As if that would bring something. No matter how good his grades were, he would remain a predator. "I'll try it again today." The redhead's words were quiet as he set the soup bowl aside. He felt his mother's look. Worries. Yes, everywhere were worries. Kid would finish school in a few weeks. He could go to college, his grades were good. But he knew that they could never pay the expensive study. Not to mention that there was hardly a college that would take a predator. Because of that Kid was looking for a training job now. He had a lot of fun in the sport and was very trained. He would like to learn sports- and fitness administrator. However, Kid had never been able to find a training place here in the ghetto. No matter in which profession. He knew as well as his mother that the only way was to go in the city. There it was much more dangerous for him than here and yet he would not be able to do anything else from his future. Kid knew his mother wanted to say a lot. But she just kissed him on the temple and said softly: "I wish you luck." In fact, the redhead liked the city after the ghettos. The city was like a living being. Big, vibrant and full of life. It was a real pleasure to walk through these big, clean streets. To observe cars that shone new and people who wore impressive clothes. Oh, Kid also put on his best clothes. But that did not mean much. The white shirt he wore was old, as were the jeans. His mother had bought her from a bazaar. But at least they were clean. The sun was shining and the light was reflected in the many, clean windows. Yes, the city was beautiful. Would not the other animals have been there. They did not even try to hide how they looked at him. In the beginning it was just glances. Full of disgust, fear or reluctant horror. But the further he left the ghetto, the stronger the reactions became. Children began to point at him, older children, who knew what a predator was, began to scream and people changed sides when he came to meet them. A rabbit woman even ran with the stroller in front of a car! Just because she did not want to go on the same street side as he did. Five minutes later, an elephant man bumped him so hard that it was Kid now who hit the street. Luckily, there was no car at the moment. "Get out of here, scum!" The elephant man shouted his words and Kid growled while baring his teeth. If only for a second. He turned his head to the floor. Calm. If any policeman saw him threatening a prey, he could be shot. Just because. ... oh, Kid changed his mind. He hates the city. It was full of disgusting people. He did not belong here. Even if he got an apprenticeship, how would he be treated there? Not better than a doormat. The redhead got up and went back to the sidewalk. Full of rage, he saw that he now had a big mess on his only good shirt. Great! He would love to hurt this elephant ...! STOP. Kid shook his head. He could vent his anger later on the punching bag. Not here. Which did not change the fact that he would prefer to go home. If he did not know how expectantly his mother would look at him. And how much it would disappoint her if he came in empty-handed. Kid and his mother have a used laptop at home and could get the weak Internet from their neighbor. At home, he had looked up, which fitness studios advertise predator included in their ranks. However, Kid realized that this was really just advertising. In no single gym, he could discover a predator. (Probably because nobody could afford it.) Most of the staff looked at him in horror as he entered the premises. Like everyone here. Kid was out for several hours. He should submit an application to two gyms. The rest had told him directly that he did not have to hope. Nobody would hire a wolf. In the end, Kid had to say that he was angry, disappointed and tired. He sat down on a bar bench, from which one could look at the big sea. The city was right next to the sea. Kid buried his face in his hands and sighed. Maybe he should go to the sea. After all, as a sailor, he would eat every day and get a place to sleep. The thought was somehow reassuring. Kid clawed his own face with his claws. That would give red welts. But he did not care. What should he say to his mother when he came home? That his fate was sealed at birth? The redhead sighed as he looked around. It was already dark, he should go home. Only then did he care that he was looked at. Kid hesitated briefly as he looked into the blue eyes of a male cat. He stood by the railing, which separated the sidewalk from the sea. He stood there and just looked at him. Kid looked back at the cat. He had very black hair, as well as black fur on the cat's ears. His cat tail was long and thin, but healthy black fur made it shine. Only the tail tip of the cat was a bright white. The cat seemed a little older than him. He wore good clothes. So expensive that Kid had the feeling that he was getting poorer just by looking. Nevertheless, the redhead could not help it. He smirked when he saw the cat's eyes. Full of wonder. As if this one would see a true legend. That was the look of someone who had never seen a real wolf before. Who knows, maybe never a living predator. Clearly a rich, spoiled child, Kid thought as he stood up. It was time to go back. The thing with the cats was strange. Just like the dogs and other similar animals. When the predators were still ruling, cats had been staunch and firm in asserting that they were also predators. After all, they also ate meat. But when the prey came to power, they also pleaded to be prey. After all, they have been eaten by other predators. Cats. These were not faithful journeymen. These were animals that still saw their own advantage. And in fact they got away with it. They were considered "normal" animals and allowed to live off all the luxury and accomplishments. Although they also had claws and sharp teeth. Just not as wild as that of a predator. Life could go strange ways. Kid buried his hands in his pockets and hurried back to the gettho. If a police officer saw him in the dark in the city, he would be dead, just because he was here. An excuse they would always find. In the budding darkness, people reacted even harder to him than before. The mere sight of it made the whole street empty. Only insults or screams were heard. But Kid did not care. His life at that moment clearly favored him rather than his honor. His steps became faster and faster and time passed. But Kid did it. There was a relieved smile on his lips as he saw the familiar, crumbling and smelly buildings of the ghetto. It was a stinking screeching burrow, but at least he was safe as a predator here. He did not flinch when he heard loud cries. Only these screams did not apply to him. "Ohhh, did that little kitten get lost around here...? Don’t cry for Mom, poor kitten..." Mocking shouts were heard. Loud and spiteful. Kid should go on. One learned early in the ghetto that one's own life was left alone if one did not interfere in the affairs of others. But there was something about what stopped Kid. Kitten...? But not the cat from before..? But why should...? A loud meowing was heard. It should sound intimidating, but it sounded rather.. miserable. Loud laughter was the answer. "Do not worry.. a few scars will turn a kitten into a real cat soon .." ...Goddamn. Kid turned and ran back. No matter who was threatened, he could not just turn around and pretend that he had not heard anything! Then he would not be any better than all the prey that just watched along like a predator after being killed for no reason. No. He was not such a person! The wolf walked through some streets and then came out in a small dirty alley. There was no more light in any of the houses, even if no one was asleep. But they all knew that getting involved only caused trouble. Kid saw the misfortune. It was really the cat from before. Only now he was surrounded by a gang of vultures. Those damned vultures! They approached the hangover from all sides and the first one was already sticking its beak against the cat's arm. He tried to scrape the face of the vulture, but this was already wiped laughing. From behind another vulture grabbed the cat's shirt and pulled out a piece. They all laughed. The cat, on the other hand, tried to make a strong face, but Kid could see the panic in his eyes. How much that reminded him of how the prey animals had treated him in the city. They really were not better than them. He could not stand that! A terrible growl came from Kid's throat as he stepped out of the shadows. A loud, dangerous growl, which is reflected on the walls of the house. The vultures immediately looked at him. "Leave him alone!" Kids voice was hardly human anymore. It was just a single growl. The redhead could see the vultures raising their wings. Vultures were only assholes. They would always avoid a direct fight, but you would pick your eyes out if you were distracted for a moment. "That's not your business. This is a fucking cat. Just look at how he's dressed. He has probably played with his rich friends a test of courage, who dares to the greasy ghetto. We should teach him a lesson!” The redhead bared its teeth and showed its white, razor-sharp predator teeth. "What do you think, what's going to happen here, if a rich prey animal disappears, or be mistreated?! Then they'll have the excuse they've been wanting for a long time to knock our ghetto to the ground!" Kid could see some of the vultures actually understood his logic. They also seemed to want to fly away. But their leader, spread the feathers only to threaten. "Misery traitor, you can be torn to shreds with the cat if you want!" That was probably the sign of the attack. The other vultures exchanged unhappy glances, but did as they were told. But as I said. Vultures were cowardly. And wolves were smart. The redhead lifted his head and howled. A loud howl, which thundered through the night like a thunder. That was the moment when the first vultures flew away. In pure panic. They thought Kid had called the other wolves. Just like wolves did when in need. Then came the whole mighty pack. The leader of the vulture turned around, saw his gang fled and had no choice but to follow them. Especially when in the distance the answer to the howling was heard. "We'll meet again, Wolf." With that the vulture flew away. Even if Kid could not help but grin. The only thing he had done was to send a nocturnal greeting to the other wolves. That has been answered. He would not get the whole pack right away because of some vultures. The cat, who was very silent all the time, looked at him with incredible gratitude. "I thank you. Really, thank you. So many at once against each other is very scary. " The voice of the cat wavered a bit. But now that Kid looked at him again, the grin went away. "Were the vultures right? Is it fun for you to go in here? " He was angry. Now he had to rescue a cat after that day! The cat looked at him startled. Almost sad, before he shook his head. "No, it's something completely different." Many things went through Kid's head at once. Many evil intentions the cat might have had. But he calmed down and said calmly: "How is it then?" The cat swallowed and then stepped forward... he just fell over. His eyes rolled back and then the cat rolled over like a severed tree. Kid opened his mouth. In horror, he stared at the cat, which had collapsed right at his feet. Holy shit. Okay, Kid was wondering if he should just run away. That was really too much for him! Was he dead now? Despite all the horror, the wolf knelt down next to the cat and shook it slightly. "Cat, cat! Wake up!" A moan sounded. Kid wanted to cry with relief. The cat's blue eyes sought his look. ".. I'm sick, I thought I would feel better, but apparently not... can you take me home?" Fucking no! "NO!" Terrified, Kid looked at him, but the cat just looked at him needily. "Please, I can’t walk home anymore." If anyone asked Kid how he got into this situation, he would not have been able to answer it. He was back in the city of prey. He piggybacked a cat he did not even know. And his cheeks were red. There was one more thing Kid had to say about himself. He liked the males more than the females. The males triggered a feeling in him that the females could not. A tingling, erotic feeling. ...he could feel the cat's crown jewels against his back. Not to mention his warm body and his powerful heartbeat. Outside of his family he had never been so close to anyone. "What is your name?" The cat had his face on his shoulder and Kid could swear he was watching his reaction in amusement. But Kid did not care. "Law." Law. What a strange name for a cat. Kid called Law his name and he smiled. Okay Kid had to admit that Law was limp in his arms. No matter what illness this one had, Kid believed that he was really sick. Especially because the cat was so thin and light. "I'm glad that wolves are so nice." Softly the voice of the cat sounded and Kid could not help but to laugh softly. "Not all." How warm Law was... he had to be careful. Otherwise he would get an erection. Kid sighed softly. He would end up in the grave today. They went a long time. Mostly silent. "I live here." Kid could not believe it. But, at the same time, he could do more than just believe it. He was in an area so rich that Kid would never have approached more than 2 kilometers. And the house before they stood was... gigantic. It was more a villa than a house. Kid scanned the number of windows and was sure the villa had at least three floors and twelve rooms. And only what he could see from here! Of course, the cat lived in such a house. In what else? Yes, Kid got angry again. He could not help it. The world was so shitty unfair! Actually, the wolf wanted to let down Law here and finally go. But the next moment he held him a key in the nose. "Please, bring me up, there's no one home to help me." Kids first paranoid thought was that this was a trap. In there, many prey animals would wait where an unsuspecting predator would only torture and then kill for fun. Brrrr. He would like to throw the cat on the floor! And yet he took the key from his hand and unlocked it. He was a complete idiot! They entered the huge villa and of course the light in the hallway went on automatically. What else? But Kid was just happy about it. He did not want to see all the riches in here! It would haunt him until the end of his days! Kid carried Law up to the second floor and then let him lead him into a large room where he switched on the lights. It was a magnificent room. Full of books, a huge bed, a gigantic window. But ... there were also a myriad of medications, pills and syringes in the room. The big bed looked more like a hospital bed than a comfortable bed to sleep on. Kid got a lump in his stomach. Wow. The cat had to be really sick. The wolf laid Law on the bed and stretched after a long time. It was already in the middle of the night. His mother would already have died in fear. Although she knew it well that Kid on some nights just did not feel like coming home. She would go to work in a few hours and not realize when he really came home. As Kid stretched, the cat swallowed a row of pills standing by his bed and then lay down on the bed, exhausted. He smiled. So sweet that Kid got a little redder. "I can’t thank you enough. Kid without you, I would have died in this alley now. " The cat scratched the back of his head and grinned crookedly. "Yes, I was really reckless today. Very stupid of me." But Law did not look like he was really sorry. On the contrary, his eyes seemed to twinkle like only the cats do. "I really have to go now..." Weak was Kids response. He just felt totally out of place in this huge house. He wanted to go back where he belonged. Law nodded as if he had not expected anything else. "I would like to see you again. To thank you correctly. Can you come back to the park bench by the sea tomorrow? At 1 pm? Where were you sitting today? " He should go there again? Kid looked at Law doubtfully. "...I don’t know…" The cat just grinned. And then Law did something that Kid absolutely did not expect. Law kissed Kid. Well, not a real kiss. He leaned forward and her lips touched briefly. But... but it was a kiss! Kids first kiss! ... and it felt great. So warm, so different and familiar. He wanted to say: 'again'. When Law sat back, Kid was red in the face and confused. But he also felt a nice, sizzling tingling in his whole body. Kid was absolutely speechless. "I'm looking forward to seeing you again tomorrow." Law smiled, wide, as if that had not been a big deal. How to shake your hand once. And when did Kid say he was coming ...? But the redhead swallowed and just nodded. For more, his brain was no longer able to. "... Yeah, see ya." Kids words came over his lips like a dry cough, and then he disappeared faster from Law's room than he could answer at all. He ran home as fast as his wolf feet could carry him. Well, Kid had to say he felt more like he was floating. He only knew what had just happened ... but he had just had his first kiss ...! And with a male ...! Wuhhhh, how that felt good! The redhead smiled stupidly as he ran home.

written by Shadcatmastered

- I’m sorry for mistakes. English is not my native language. -

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coldlipsmag · 6 years

Text

PHONELESS IN BERLIN

Words: Kirsty Allison

All photographs by Martyn Goodacre, except images of Danielle De Picciotto’s art, and Alexander Hacke’s studio…and the portrait of Morgan, by Kirsty.

Clouds’ shadows camouflage the sea. Sardine boats dodge the lifeboat wind farms. I jet-trash over last night’s cab, and the phone left on the back seat.

SCHONEFIELD AIRPORT

“Yes,” with an ‘of course’-face, “It has all the streets on it.” The tourist board office give me a map with the VisitBerlin travel card – 41E for 6 days, generous. I like free travel, and I like maps. Not Maps that rhyme with apps. I see the island of West Berlin – I put all the streets in my long black woollen notebook pocket.

U-BAHN/S-BAHN

Map in a glass cage – no index – I’ll take a photo – look at it when I’m moving – I can’t take a photo. My cogs shift from the cybernet dimension.

Alone. Letting go of my infatuation with being monitored, I feel an analogue glitch, a slip of fortune as I enter the low-rise city, uninterrupted with pings.

A watch. I could buy a watch – to tell the time.

I could walk rather than do the connection.

THE HORRORS / Synästhesie Festival / Volksbühne

“The people putting this festival together told me this granite floor was from Hitler’s Bunker,” says Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and A Records, DJing in the green room, two floors of sweeping staircases up in the People’s Theatre of Mitte’s Rosa-Luxemburg Platz – once the centre of East Berlin’s GDR.

“Do you believe them?” I ask, of the 8MM Bar promoters who put the festival together. We consider the plausibility, the Nazi star, in dirty creams and blood reds.

Mark Reeder later confirms it to be from the Nazi Vice Chancellor office. And of the cenotaphs stashed beneath the KuDamm – the Nazi spikes. Close enough. Anton is a hero – DIG! the film he stars in aside spars, The Dandy Warhols – an essential on the rock n roll rites-of-passage Reading List. Between his selection of classic psychedelia: “I was born in 1967, in California, of course I’m psychedelic”, with highlights such as Fabio Viscollios 7”, he sets the record straight on all kindsa connections that zip around my references of the night – the stars that guide us, the magnets who form us.

Arrival in Neukölln

So 90s, no blue arrow locator. Without the digital psychographic veils of my screen, the meaning of wrong direction changes – I love to travel, to feel on top of the globe, wherever you walk, with only the weight of the identifiers you carry.

Natural order leads me to Stroke Order – my faux-god-sista, of the Sacred Sound Club – her haus is pink. Y3 shoes, high ceilings, dribble shower, CK mirror. She’s a costume designer for films, but has been hiding out here for a year. Making minimal techno – using autonomous sensory meridian response samples – sounds that turn us on.

Our mothers are pretend godmothers to me and her. She grew up in Vancouver. Dad is a motorcycle racer and ballet dancer in Japan.

Synästhesie Festival / Volksbühne

CAMERA take to the main stage of seated theatre hall. Brutalist fractal collage films of matrix shifting cities, juddering with intent. Projections of you watching me watching you – perhaps being shot live in the auditorium – full scope. Beaming around the physical force of a standing drummer triballing out for a 20 minute set on a bass drum, snare and cymbal. The centre-piece. Astral simulacrum to The Egg who I played with earlier this year. The standing drummer keels in sweat, throws a death white sheet over the drums as though he has beaten them dead, only to dampen their noise, and continue hitting and hitting. Keys, 2 x guitar, sitar bass, different genereration radical on sax – elf dancing.

I’m reminded of the need for parameters – the ones we invent to live inside. The significance of numbers plays on the screens – another hallucination. A replacement for seeing everything through snapshot Insagram lens. Abandoning our digital religion – is so FKK (freikörperkultur – the GDR East Berliners act of rebellion was to strip on Sundays around the lakes – to rip off the communist soaked nylons of identikit clothing*). So naked.

TANGERINE DREAM

A violinist in black – modular synth Memotron on one side – a bank of other buttons on the other side. One life. One nerve shatters and then rest follow. First they twitch, and glitch the matrix…

I catch a bit of THE PINS – all girls – superhot, riot grrrrl electronica.

THE HORRORS

Violent Lenin Uber Alles track shatters across the increased scale of the stage for this headline performance – punk anger of East Berlin, red deco chandeliers of alles Ku-damm Cabaret glory. Waiting for Faris Badwan, the singer who I first interviewed for Dazed and Confused, making a film about his illustration – and exhibition, I wonder about the symbolism of genre/sound/music/art as signs of the times – about resonance – of what we are creating and producing – of X Factor sounds as the capitalist panacea – of our art resonating our environment – or us gravitating towards it. Stroke Order making techno in Berlin.

The futurism of white noise perfection – the dystopian values, four albums in from when I first met Faris – he was maybe 23 then. Unsure if he was going to carry on at St Martins art school. By the time I interviewed him again for Vogue, he was not going back.

And here, seated in the very front row – I witness the evocation of destiny – he’s become less of the shy frontman, but someone who is commanding the respect of the universe – he violently whips the mic lead – he hails the pulses of front row screamers, bonding their necks with rubber wire – he in black PVC – guitarist in red lipstick – beautiful rockstar boys. Lyrics are lost in the Elritch reverb – Faris is crown stealing. Volatile black energy of goth industrial – contemporised by Tom Furse – and his techno pyramid synths. Ice sweat dripping Hackney vampire bassist Rhys Webb. Faris has become storming iconic balearic, striding over theatre seats, in smart city shoes. It’s cosmic goth, it is power – it is owning the depth of Poe hell to Blakean heavens. From voyeurs to submission, the audience leave satisfied.

WEDDING/NW multi-cultural reaches of the city.

Fire station studio. Danielle De Picciotto walks us across a courtyard in twilight. Pyramid of flowers, split by stairs to a below-sea-level, waiting buddha, draped with beads. Left and right basement of Californian security doors, co-joined studios, His and Hers. Drums on the male side, Alexander Hacke, Einsturzende Neubatten – poles of metal to hit. Next door: paintings of black and white folklore S+M dolls with tripped out wings, and photograph reflections. Hers. With tea. Laughter. Discussion. Love. She is love.

***

Lost – ghetto kid guides me and Stroke Order to the ambient dinner in a bar beneath a block in Wedding: soundproof triangles of three-tone pastel shaved hardwood. Clean vegetables, and a series of performances from three post-Akai-ists. Poetry, soundscapes layering paranoic schizophrenic voices – a DJ girl in from Seattle. The residents, ex-pats, from across Germany, and the world – carrying less ego than London. A wholesome intellect carries through, it gets lost in the whirl of London survival. I think back to hanging with the man commonly known as Rodent, the Sex Pistols’ sound tech – he was saying everything is lost in our digital times – the lack of ability to hang out together, they had to live frugally, himself in the studio of The Clash. The intensity of art. It’s easier here. To get involved in your creativity – away from the grab.

SUNDAY

Home jukebox, coffee, and Okay Cafe cinnamon swirls at Jason McGlade and Anne-Cathrin Saure’s (the art director/photographer, and designer of Cold Lips II, and co-createurs of the Shedville font). They moved back here recently – but Jason’s back and forth to London, working on an incredible analogue Polaroid project.

Stroke Order and I head out to Berghain – but instead collide with a very old friend who’s been living in Thailand for 14 years – Martyn Goodacre. He took the most iconic picture of Kurt Cobain, and many more. We tried doing music together when we worked on magazines. We go to a bar, meet with a midwife – talk about the horror show of birth, the guidance into the world, policed by the womb and the channel to birth and the rejection from the vulvic eye. The propulsion.

MONDAY MORNING COMING DOWN FROM AN EMAIL THAT IS CHANGING MY LIFE

Space, China – coffee with Mark Reeder. His vinyl of Mauderstadt is out now. I’ve just run a trilogy of stories on him in DJ Mag, explaining his part in Berlin, from being the Factory rep in Berlin in Joy Division days, through to putting on punk gigs in East Berlin, recording the music in gay bars to play to New Order – thus Blue Monday – and since, from inventing trance music with his label MfS – getting Paul van Dyk on the map – he’s the man. His uniforms. Rare light.

“Danielle [De Picciotto] and Katia – Love Parade would never have started without them.”

[Love Parade was the street party that began in the ecstatic reunification of East and West Berlin. The wall came down in 1990. The old GDR was a wild land. Read Danielle De Picciotto’s Beauty of Transgression for more…or watch Mark Reeder’s B-Movie…and his forthcoming E-Movie.]

He realises he’s late for his lunch…

Alone, back on the Neukölln streets, I look into the door of a Moroccan cafe – get called in by a round-faced Muslim woman, grey jumper, jeans – trainers – Tangiers market vibes, enter – beans – good – no English – point at a box – I don’t know if she knows I don’t want a tagine but takeaway – they waterfall me mint tea – the door slams shut. There are stickers on the wall tiles – plastic table cloths. Am I about to be drugged? Locked in – I have few Euros and no phone to be stolen.

I sit, read the Unspoken Berlin I’ve picked up – and wait for either the drugs to kick in, or to relax. Oh, some brot on the table – no it ain’t Gucci Bloom sea hedgehog fennel and jerusalem artichoke, chestnut puree and scallop, purple watercress like the exquisite experience of Lokal where local ingredients will dance on plates for us later – nor is is it as refined as the Techno sauna we’ll meditate in around the bar – but it is E2.50 and beautifully wholesome – the chickpeas are larger than London.

—-

Neurotitan have taken Cold Lips and my last 3 copies of Unedited. Stefi there is lovely. It’s somewhere that’s always called me on previous trips to Berlin. Many putting a film together that became impossible, about Manuel Gottching, of Ash Ra Tempel – and E2:E4 – the most sampled record – inventor of ambient – before Eno, before the HANSA recordings of Iggy and Bowie. I tell Stefi of my gig last night with Whisky and Words at the Keith bar – where Stroke Order – her pals – and Jason McGlade come by – and Mark Reeder. And Rasp Thorne [post coming to Cold Lips soon, or buy the second edition for total spread]- the consumate performer – lighter over here – my lips are still red from the wine. Stephen Crane. Rasp’s performance of Crane. He’s so good.

Everytime I get on a train here the stasi black jacket ticket checkers are on the same carriage. It’s happened to Morgan 3 times in her year here – and 3 times with me in as many days. I am able to fight my usual paranoias from the top of my Maslow pyramid – the email from a publisher – saying he wants to publish my novel – the one I have had two agents hawk around in 11 years – during which time, I have changed, and so has the story. It is the best email I’ve ever had. Here, lying in bed on the Monday morning after meeting with Anton Newcombe and front row for Faris – Faris frow.Two days later, I’m still flying, as I hit EchoBucher, back in Wedding – they’re taking some Cold Lips…I drop into Potsdamer – meeting… No fucking way. Ticket checkers.

Zug Fallt aus!

You have amazing eyes – you look like Madonna said the guy from Milano – I’m hoping he means old skool hot Madz. En route to the airport – delays – nerves shot / triggering towards Parkinsons and spiked dreams. He calmed me – so did the guy who was also travelling to Stansted – as we ran for the plane, and vice versa. Detoxed from the phone, train home, to the temple – travelling with Alice A Bailey. Nanobotic karmic overide. More ticket inspectors – haunted by the stasi – on plane now – could do with some extra O2 from the overhead locker after running in a coat I just bought which I think I may be allergic to. But it’s so warm.

*German born LA-resident, Benedikt Taschen, the art collector and publisher, has directed the content of the new EAST GERMAN HANDBOOK. An encyclopedic collab with Wende Museum, a place of Cold War artefacts in Culver City. It’s a compendium of communist porn – picture-led, masonically-charged graphics of the whole nine yards of life behind the wall – from ideal weaponary to food, fags, appalling vodka, and the requisite communist shit shoes. It’s got 50s utopian vision written all over it.

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lukes-writing · 5 years

Text

Chapter 10: The Enclave

Project introduction | Previous chapter | Next chapter

Word count: 3500 Warnings: Profanity, gun violence

September 24th, 4:49 PM, Trinity Gate’s inhuman enclave

As Wiccan showed them, there is an underground tunnel from the conference room which leads directly to the enclave. But since there is nothing suspicious about their group, Wiccan decided to take a walk there on the surface. The enclave isn’t far away from the Heap of Ashes.

Kirlian vesseled into a small Transformer toy and let Whisper to carry him in her pocket. Despite the scare Kirlian caused her when they first met, they got used to each other rather quickly.

“Kirlian?” Whisper says while walking towards the enclave.

“Huh?” the Idean replies.

“The birth date on your ID says you are close to sixty years old,” the girl says. “Do Ideans age the same as humans? Are you… immortal?”

“No, Idean age is a rather complicated matter,” Kirlian replies. “We aren’t immortal, but we do live longer than humans, up to two hundred years. Then, our consciousness starts to scatter even when we’re vesseled and in the end, we fade away completely. If you wanted to convert my age into human age… I’d say I’m close to thirty. Fifty-seven is still considered young among Ideans.”

“I think Ideans are fascinating,” Whisper says.

“Trying to pick up a ghost boyfriend?” Parker heard the last sentence and decided to mock the girl a bit, but this time, there’s no apparent spite in his words.

Whisper returns him the favor. “Well, I’d always rather date Kirlian than you.”

“That hurts,” Parker grins.

After a short walk, they finally arrive to the walls of the inhuman enclave. The wall is white, slightly grayed because of the air pollution, with barbed wire and installed cameras on top. The logo of the fictional company, Luminance Haven, can be seen everywhere.

They approach one of the checkpoints - a large metal door embedded in the wall, guarded by four sentinels with assault rifles in hands. There is a small cubicle with an elderly man, tall and good-looking, sitting inside. When they arrive, he’s reading a book in a comfortable armchair.

“Pavel? Could you let us in?” Wiccan talks to the man through a hole in the glass, apparently bulletproof, which is supposed to protect the gatekeeper.

“Wiccan!” the man smiles. “Taking new recruits for a walk? Let me see their IDs.”

Everyone, Wiccan and Ophelia included, scans their ID using a scanner attached to the booth. Pavel is checking the computer screen, nodding slowly as the system recognizes the personal identification cards. Then, after everything is validated, the steel gate opens.

The guards let them pass, but Whisper still shivers at the sight of rifles in their hands. She has never been partial to firearms, not even in video games.

“I guess you haven’t even noticed,” Ophelia says, “but this was your second encounter with inhumans. For safety reasons, Pavel and all the other guards are Fexti. They look completely like humans, but their skin is impenetrable. That means also bulletproof.”

“And they are also strong as hell,” Wiccan adds.

The whole team looks over their shoulders to take another look at the guards, hoping to catch a glimpse of their non-human essence. But the gate is already closing again, so they don’t get the chance. For the first time in their lives, they enter the inhuman enclave.

They don’t really know what they expected, but the first sight is rather disappointing. The space behind the gate looks like a standard upper-middle-class housing estate. There are both family houses and high-rise blocks of flats towering above them. In the distance, something that looks like a shopping and entertainment district can be seen. Greenery grows everywhere, especially in a nearby park.

Parker scowls. “And… that’s it?”

“What did you expect?” Wiccan chuckles. “Did you expect them to live in some lousy ghetto? Or gothic mansions? I said they’re not humans, not that they’re not modern. Besides, when they get used to some high standards, they’re less likely to cause trouble.”

Whisper notices a faint fishy smell. She turns around… then screams and steps back. She sees a figure which appears humanoid, with two legs, two arms and a head, but the visible skin of the being is covered by shiny scales. The girl also notices webbed fingers. The head resembles a mix of a human and a frog, with wide mouth and bulging eyes. Two slits between them serve as a nose, but the creature also has gills on its neck.

And, the most bizarre of all, the being is wearing casual clothes - a T-shirt which seems made of some kind of neoprene and pants from the same material. She even notices a phone in one of the pockets.

The being eyeballs her for a moment, then points its finger at her. “Racist bitch,” it says with a croaky voice.

“Uhm… excuse me! I’m sorry!” Whisper apologizes. “Actually, I’m here for the first time, so I’m not used to seeing… fellows like you. It was a spontaneous reaction.”

The fishman glares at her for a little longer, then he is approached by a child version of himself. “Come on, dad, don’t waste time with these Pinks!”

“Sure, I’m going,” the adult fishman smiles at his son, then takes him by the hand and walks away.

“I’m sorry!” Whisper yells after him for the last time.

“Gillscaly,” Wiccan explains, trying to hold back laughter. “Usually harmless, they often run business. Let’s be honest, they’re quite into money. Some of the sub-races are venomous, but those are rare cases.”

“Gotta admit, that was fucking weird,” Parker mutters.

“And keep in mind we just entered,” Ophelia reminds him with a smile.

They walk deeper into the enclave, towards the commercial district. There they see much more inhumans. To their surprise, a lot of them look like humans to the point they couldn’t be told apart. Some of them have only minor oddities, such as differently shaped ears or claws on their fingers - this is usually accompanied by excessive body hair.

Then, there are… other beings. Whisper remembers the Mos Eisley cantina from Star Wars, a place where aliens of all possible shapes and sizes meet. Well, the enclave isn’t as extreme, but still, all four newcomers have a hard time getting used to all these different beings.

They meet several large goliaths whose skin seems to be made of stone and large tusks are protruding from their mouths. However, they seem surprisingly meek. One of them, wearing a suit, even greets Wiccan politely. The man returns the greeting.

Sienna gets creeped out by a pair of strange, ghost-like figures with thin limbs hovering above the ground. Their skin is ghastly white and they have no face, just an empty sphere on a thin neck. They’re wearing ethereal white dresses. After they pass the group, they fly away without saying a word.

Introducing all the inhumans would take too long - Whisper tries to count them and she finds out that before they arrived at the shopping district, they met about twenty different inhuman races. Also, she doesn’t know how many races are among those who look like humans.

None of them, even the most vicious-looking inhumans, does act hostile towards the group. They all seem to be civilized. Of course they are, Whisper thinks, otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed to live in such a nice neighborhood. But still, some of them are scary.

“And here we have the heart of the enclave,” Wiccan announces.

The commercial district is made to appear like a scientific complex from afar, to help the enclave maintain its cover. In fact, it’s a large shopping mall not different from the standard ones, except for several stores with goods which serve mysterious reasons.

The place isn’t crowded. The enclave’s population density is rather low - right, Wiccan said the inhumans are close to extinction. But there can still be seen families on a weekend shopping streak, inhumans of different races chatting with one another, often using strange languages.

“It’s kind of sad when you think about it,” Whisper says when they pass a Gillscaly laughing at something one of the tusked goliaths said. “Look at them. They have no trouble talking to each other even though one looks like a boar and the other one is basically a talking fish.”

“That’s not weird at all,” Wiccan says. “Ettins and Gillscalys cooperate rather often. It’s because…”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Whisper interrupts him. “If you just look around, there are dozens of different crea… uhm… beings of all shapes and sizes, and they can stand each other with ease. On the other hand, humans… they are able to hate each other to death because of different skin color.”

Parker rolls his eyes. “Great. Hippie girl giving a speech about racism. How insightful.”

“She is right, though,” Sienna supports the younger girl. “Imagine what would the alt-rights do with this guy,” she points at a human-like inhuman whose skin changes color to bright pink when he starts to laugh. Then she takes a nonchalant look at Parker. “And guess what? I wouldn’t be surprised if you were some kind of racist.”

The man shrugs. “When I was younger, I spent a few months with a skinhead gang until I realized how pointless it was. Now I can say I’m not racist since all races equally can kiss my ass.”

Wiccan chuckles at this statement and Ophelia scolds him with a look.

“That’s just the human nature,” Kirlian says. “They will never learn. Ideans have it easy - we don’t have a physical form, so we can’t be shallow even if we wanted. We always look for a mind, because mind is basically all we are. While you, narrow-minded humans, still fight over skin color.”

Whisper smirks. “Look, an Idean condemns racism while acting racist towards humans.”

Kirlian’s Transformer vessel squirms in the girl’s pocket. “That’s not racism, I’m just stating the facts. I support the theory Ideans are, in fact, the descendants of humans who transcended beyond their physical forms. That would mean Ideans are superior to humans.”

“Yep, that sounds like an Idean supremacist,” Gary remarks.

“Oh, shut up, all of you,” Kirlian sighs.

They continue further to the northwest. As they pass the luxurious heart of the enclave, the surroundings start to change. The clean, friendly neighborhoods give in to gray, dismal housing estates and sketchy buildings that apparently serve for questionable purposes. The streets also start to get less clean. In fact, there are several garbage cans overthrown on the street and several reptilian creatures about as big as a large dog with scrawny, bony limbs are feasting on its content.

“Is this how you imagined the enclave?” Wiccan says.

“It… doesn’t look nice,” Whisper peeps.

“Ya bet it’s not nice,” the man gives her a grim smile. “This part of the enclave is dubbed ‘the Pit’. The inhumans who are… less adaptable live there. And, most importantly, the Pit’s inhumans don’t have a healthy relationship with humans, the less with The Society’s Enforcers.”

“So something like inhuman Bronx?” Parker remarks.

Both Ophelia and Sienna give him a scolding look.

“I know you’d rather spend your days outside the Pit, but it’s kinda clear that the Enforcers have the most work there. Inhuman gangs, crime, violence, rebellious groups who want to escape the enclave and overthrow the humans. Just normal things, you’ll get used to it.”

“When this man starts using this casual tone, it’s never anything good,” Gary tells Whisper.

His predictions are proven to be right when Wiccan continues: “I guess a little field trip can never hurt. Don’t be scared, nothing can happen to you. It’s perfectly safe.”

“The famous last words,” Parker utters.

Outside the Pit, the new team members felt rather comfortable despite all the surreal creatures around them. The Pit itself is more or less empty, but the atmosphere is oppressive and the new Enforcers jump at the slightest sound like paranoiacs. Even though it’s full daylight, it doesn’t make the district any more welcoming.

Leaning against the wall, an inhuman in raggy clothes is sitting on the street with a bottle of liquor in his hands. He looks human, except for his veins which colored into venomous purple, creating a spiderweb-like pattern on his skin.

“Careful,” Wiccan says and walks as far away from the man as possible. “Drunk Volatiles are like a bomb with a short fuse… literally. He could explode if we touched him.”

Ophelia explains: “Volatiles got their name from the volatile substances that are in their bodies instead of standard body fluids. They change composition according to their mood, health and substances they used. It can turn into powerful acids and even explosive fluids.”

“Remind me to never shake hands with a Volatile,” Sienna utters.

“They usually wear thick gloves,” Wiccan replies. “But this one apparently doesn’t.”

All the inhumans they encounter look rather miserable. Most of them eyeball the team with unconcealed spite in their eyes. The four new recruits would love to turn around and leave this God-forsaken place, but they are aware they will have to get used to it if they want to work for The Society.

They approach a tumbledown building labeled as HERRING’S inhuman pub. The writings on the wooden door give away humans aren’t welcome there at all.

“This is where the trouble began,” Ophelia turns to Wiccan. “Poor Vlade. I miss him.”

“We all do,” Kirlian sighs. “I should have been sent to spy on these Fext thugs - Vlade infiltrating their ranks was a plan way too risky. If we realized it sooner…”

“Regrets are now useless,” Wiccan says. “They won’t bring Vlade back.”

Gary raises a question: “Who was Vlade?”

Before anyone of the former Team Menhir can answer, several dark shadows approach the team and surround them. “Shriekers - just what we needed,” Wiccan grumbles.

When the light shines at the crooked figures, it reveals they are basically tall, humanoid birds, each of them about as tall as Parker. Their bodies are covered by feathers in various colors and patterns, usually black, gray, brown or dark red. Their wings seem to be transformed into human-like arms ending with three bony talons and a thumb set against them, allowing the creatures to grasp things.

“Look what we have here, the Enforcers,” one of them croaks, circling the group. Their head resembles some kind of mix between a human and an owl, with short, yet menacing beak on their mouth instead of lips. The speaker eyeballs the new recruits with yellow bulging eyes of a bird of prey.

Whisper remembers a picture of a bird called potoo she found utterly creepy. These inhumans are similar, except that they look much more menacing. They are wearing leather clothing with punk-style accessories including chains around their necks and spiked bracelets.

“Good to see you, Ach-khran,” Wiccan replies, making a peculiar throaty sound when pronouncing the name. It seems that unlike Ideans, these bird creatures don’t adapt human names.

Ach-khran has a distinctive crest on his head made of black-and-red feathers. That probably makes him a leader of this gang. He strides towards Wiccan on thin bird legs. “I su-khh-ose those are new recruits you hired after the unfortunate de-khh-ise of you Fext friend,” the inhuman speaks.

The birdman talks with a strange accent because his beak limits his ability to speak. He’s not able to pronounce “b”, “p” and “m” at all since he has no lips and his “f” also sounds more like a hiss. He replaces missing phonemes with a throaty sound similar to the one in his name.

“Yes. This is their first time in the enclave,” Wiccan chats casually.

At that moment, Ach-khran pulls out a gun from a holster on his thigh. Several members of the gang follow his example. “In that case, khh-aybe it would khh-e khh-etter if we eli-khh-inated them khh-efore they turn into a khh-roblem,” he cackles. “What do you think?”

The team expected many things when they entered the Pit, but a gang of bird creatures dressed in punk clothing aiming guns at their heads was something beyond their imagination. Whisper shivers in fear, Parker keeps uttering curses. Sienna and Gary look dazed.

“I think that’s not necessary,” Wiccan tries to calm the situation down. “It wouldn’t be worth the trouble. Keep in mind you and your gang are already in our spotlight.”

“It will khh-e worth it,” Ach-khran cackles and points the gun’s muzzle at Whisper’s forehead. The girl squeals, tears appear in her eyes. The rest of the gang lets out a laugh. “The life here is much khh-etter without The Society poking their noses into our khh-usiness.”

“You know you can’t live without The Society’s protection,” Wiccan objects.

“Khh-ullshit!” the birdman shrieks, the crest on his head fluttering.

“Just gun the-khh down and get the fuck out of here,” one of the gang members said - judging from the voice and clothing, it’s a female. “We can bla-khh-e it on so-khh-eone else.”

The situation seems hopeless - Whisper is reconciling with the fact her first visit of the enclave will also be her last. But at least she managed to see something only a few chosen ones saw. The humankind’s biggest secret. It gives her cold comfort.

Suddenly, she hears a buzzing sound which grows on intensity with time. The flies which feasted on the nearby piles of garbage formed a large hive which attacks Ach-krhan. The birdman shrieks as the hive obscures his vision. He fires his weapon several times, but Whisper is already down on the ground.

The rest of the conflict happens way too fast.

Whisper hears a slight hiss giving away Kirlian has left his current vessel. A second later, they hear choking coming from the female Shrieker. Her scarf is tightened around her neck like a noose, cutting out the air supply. Kirlian must have vesseled into it.

Parker tackles a nearby Shrieker, then delivers a few crushing direct punches on his feathery face. The inhuman staggers backward and drops his gun.

This is Sienna’s chance. She quickly grabs the weapon and aims it at the fray, holding it with her both hands. “In the name of The Society, drop your weapons and give up, else I will shoot!” she shouts with a firm voice full of authority. One of the Shriekers tries to disobey - Sienna pulls the trigger and the bullet ends up in the inhuman’s shoulder. The injured birdman collapses on the ground and groans in pain.

Sienna pans the gun across the whole scene, causing some of the Shriekers to drop the guns and put their hands in the air. Some of them, including Ach-khran, show the remains of defiance, but Sienna’s tenacious glare combined with the gun aimed at their heads causes them to finally surrender.

“Okay, now take your friend to the hospital and get out of here,” Wiccan says. “You’re lucky that I don’t feel like arresting anyone today. But maybe if Sienna decides to…”

One of the bird creatures carries his injured, groaning comrade towards the heart of the enclave where a hospital is located. The rest quickly disperses.

The situation calms down. The sounds of gunfire attracted several rubberneckers, but they quickly leave again once they realize there is The Society involved.

Sienna’s voice sounded firm and powerful when she was intimidating the Shriekers, but now, her trembling hands give away she was more afraid than the inhumans. She takes several deep breaths and has to lean against a wall to keep standing, not minding her designer jacket getting dirty.

Wiccan encourages her by putting his hand on her shoulder. “That was something exceptional,” he claims. “It’s your first day in the service and you’re already playing it badass.”

“I was… I was so scared,” she moans. “I thought they’re gonna shoot me.”

“Now tell me, girl,” Wiccan looks her in the eyes. “Show me one person who wouldn’t be scared when facing a gang of weird creatures they’ve never seen before armed with guns? It’s important that you concealed your fear and managed to save the day.”

He takes a look at the rest of the team. Parker is examining a small, bleeding gash on his knuckles which probably hit the edge of the Shrieker’s beak. And Gary is trying to console Whisper who is kneeling on the ground completely petrified. Tears are streaming down her face and she seems to be hyperventilating.

“Whisper? Are you alright?” Ophelia asks her and offers her a hand which the girl accepts. She stands up, but she can barely stand on her wobbly knees.

“Y...yeah,” Whisper peeps. “I will be.”

Wiccan makes sure Kirlian is once again vesseled in the Transformer toy, then he grabs his niece around the shoulders and starts to walk towards the enclave’s heart. The rest of the team follows him - the new recruits got to know the situation in the Pit and they need some time to let it sink in.

Author’s Note

I wholeheartedly thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed the chapter, and if you did, please leave a comment, send me a message or share and let more people know about this story! You can also consider a small donation at www.paypal.me/lukassladky. Have a great day and stay tuned for the next chapter!

#writeblr #my writing #writers #urban fantasy #original fiction #TeamDreamcatcher

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fantasyideas1 · 2 years

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quotes almat

1. Music rap beat: The creak of a door wao wao wao. Wao Wao Tum Tum Tum Wao WaoThe smashing sword of feelings cuts the emptiness of reality that feels the powerlessness of the fighter against fate 2. Music rap beat: Tuk tchak tututu tchak tutu tchak tututu tchak tutu tchak tchak tchak tutu tchak.Memory is a palace of photographs and in each room you can watch a video of memories, this palace is on fire, and new photos fly out of your head that rebuild a new castle. 3. Music rap beat: empty drum sound and beat rhythm house here tuka tu dum tuk tutu tuka house. Fake laughter as a simulated orgasm of optimism. 4. Music: Bowl Sound: woo-woo-beat rhythm: Tu-Ta-Ta-Tu-Tu-Doom Remembering, fears, desires, mysterious entities, all of them are in your hotel subconscious where you are just a doorman. 5. Compass of awareness in the hands of the one who is eating in the elevator of consciousness, awareness in the very top. On the higher floors, they will understand that they have not yet grown to logic, and where logic breaks down and the highest level of thinking begins: infinite love. 6. Thinking is life, the death of thinking and philosophy gives birth to a new form of life in a new dimension of thinking. 7. Instincts are fear, therefore we are still part of the animal world, because of fear we live in a cultural ghetto. Intuition is the courage of conscience in the heart. 8. Love is when it is pleasant to dream and think about your beloved person and to receive sincere pleasure taking care of him. 9. A philosopher is a whirling six-barreled machine gun firing thoughts, ideas into people's souls and bullets never end; a slight evil smile of awareness comes from them; everyone realizes the evil joke of reality. 10. Periodically, the light of the stairs illuminates the corridors of the staircases, everything changes and is illuminated by a beacon of good luck for our lives. 11. Insanely laughing psycheFrom disappointment, the soul cannot stop laughing with a frightening uncontrolled laugh, between fear and uncontrolled angry laughter. The smiling, insanely laughing psyche growls and tears to pieces from the high-voltage psychic tension that gives birth to truth, from a smile the philosophy of the psyche breaks into two parts of the duality of the world. A huge smile is visible in the broken mirror of the psyche, and only sometimes the image of a person is reflected in them as a reflection of conscience. 12. Everyone hurries to their graves. 13. Instincts are terrible toys of the subconscious, there is a toy world that is developed at the expense of all lived lives, they call to have fun at the expense of oneself. Author: Musin Almat Zhumabekovich

1. A time machine on the shoulders of memories, two advisers: on the right shoulder there is good future, in the left past that is evil, two open rays of time in which consciousness travels. 2. A halo of knowledge within life, this is a recording of a projection, one who feels reality can feel the universe: the past, present and future, and that which is timeless. 3. The laugh of rage Rap beat: Trumpet music ram there beat street rhythm boo boom bang bang there tudum pub bam pa bang boom boom The laughter of rage and the bloody gloom in a smile in consciousness from an evil joke of reality from the fact that you are not worthy to live like everyone else. The ragged strings of the ever-laughing psyche, like the blinking light of madness where there is insight between light and darkness. The interrupted melody of the harmony of the soul. The silence of insight overcomes the mind, the light is visible, leading to a new dimension of thinking, because everything is visible through the transparent eyelids of the vigilance of fear, and only unconsciousness temporarily closes our eyes from fatigue in the realm of the subconscious. 4. Gangsta music: Car sound Wooo ooo woooo oo drum beat drums pap pap pap Laughing grin of smiling reality from the fact that billions of internal realities of people form a single reality of the hidden chaos of egoism. 5. There is nothing cheaper than sins. 7. Patience gives friends. 8. The trumpet sounds a symphony as a drawn out moan of a soul immersed in laughing horrors of reality, an amazing feeling of weightlessness of madness in the soul, a bright expressive pessimistic gloom in her smile in her laughing psyche. The poison of modern philosophy corrodes the psyche to people like acid. All in straitjackets of conservatism are wary of brilliant exotic thinking that is alien to this world created for posterity. 9. The Venereal thoughts of propaganda will decay for a very long time in the genetic thinking of the mentality. 10. The universe is mined by various bombs of philosophies from different eras. To activate them you need to read books, they act as spells from which a new world will be built for new bombs. 11. Instincts are terrible toys of the subconscious, there is a toy world that is developed at the expense of all lived lives, they call to have fun at the expense of oneself. Author: Musin Almat Zhumabekovich

Sultry torrid chocolate skin color Music: tam-tatatam-ta-tatatam-tam-tatatam-ta-tatatam Sultry torrid chocolate You are very hot hot sultry torrid chocolate. Your black skin is a powerful stimulator of orgasmic love passion. Relationships with you are sweet sex. Goddess of my erotic dreams. My own tongue protrudes from excitement, hardcore horny, I want to constantly caress your beautiful body. When I first saw you in my soul from the ecstasy of love and catharsis I experienced one hundred billion orgasms in one second, I knew the universe of love, an infinitely deep dimension of happiness and joy from falling in love, endless pleasure. It is so beautiful that I’m even afraid to look at you for a long time, I’m very shy, which means I’m powerfully in love. Aggressively exciting, immeasurably high temperature of passion and lust. Each part of your body is a gorgeous compliment of the gods, your appearance is the highest beauty of the best erotic seduction pornography, all nights are romantic thoughts of you, the feeling that you are nearby and part of me to the point that I feel you with my soul. The cutest and most tender melodies about you, constant romantic nostalgia for you, lightness and tenderness like a cute sleeping kitten, sadness and feeling about you about one, brilliantly fantastically beautiful appearance. How amazing is the wonderful magic magic of the beauty of your image - it’s just wonderful magic, I will love and want you even after death. To look at you and to dream about you is just bliss, the violin about the suffering about you is so refined and eloquent. I growl from excitement; you excite me from above; everything trembles inside me with love and delight; your beautiful image is burnt out by fire in my memory; the cornea of the psyche; your appearance is simple, simply amazing. Tin as hotly juicier just nowhere, tin as sexy. Trying to stop loving you is simply useless because it's too beautiful. I am the president of your fan club, a sect in which your beauty is worshiped. You are the embodiment of a living goddess. Literally everything adorns you. Divinely sweet skin color, it is impossible to get enough of your body, you are the source of my eternal hunger for sex. I feel the adrenaline of passion of a high degree of love and admiration, to such an extent that I bite my lips and my brain says yeah baby divine. Juicy sex goddess of my mind. You are the best that reality and the universe can offer. You are the best of all lives, the hot nights of chocolate passion in my memories sing only about you alone. Author: Musin Almat Zhumabekovich

1. Eternal insomnia for days on end, the brain does not rest at all. You never sleep, because you are at work all day and then you dream that you are at work, wake up in the morning, go to work. Or do you dream that you wander somewhere, in nature, in the city, run away or fight with someone, and in the morning you complain that you are not getting enough sleep. 2. All memory in the cartridge. Life as a compact cassette, the contents of the reality of the subconscious - this is the content of the same cassette tape, all the memory deja vu on the reels of the cassette representing the past and future.3. Artifacts of experience in the memory of past lives, live with us forever in the abyss of oblivion, and some like buoys emerge and warn of the depth of unconsciousness.4. The chain of optimism is the weak link of naivety in human evolution. Optimism from a smile for a stranglehold of reality leading to the comic surrealism of the dreaming paradoxes of the human world.5. Love is a night lamp from gloomy thoughts of the past.6. Genius is telepathy with eternity.7. Expressive horror, clownish smile of shock of truth, there are so many horrors and mental sufferings in it. An evil laugh of inevitability sounds. You are in the hands of a butcher of reality. All people from different dimensions of illusions do not hide from the truth, go play.8. You hear the shocking laugh of brutal awareness. You are in the clown horror, the smile of the reality in the form of a clown becomes gigantic and it eats you moving to the zone of eternal laughter of indifference, where you are among faceless people in chains, on them plastic masks on the floor of the face with terrible smiles of disappointment a mask of nervous laughter emanates from them souls are cremated by despair; they don’t respond to you because they are undead unscrupulous.9. Will turns life into a lucid dream.10. Life is a two-room apartment, where one room is a city, the other is a dream.11. The main thing in this world is family and awareness, the rest is decor.12. Materialism is a cell of the mind that suppresses the will of the mind.13. Enlarged or altered parts of the body are prostheses of pride, a disabled ego, you can see how the brain looks, but not the soul, a mutated mind exhausted by knowledge.14. For a single person, the heart will become a friend, the body will be the soul, and the mind will become a horse.15. Pride will take away the truth from the world without which there will be no future only spiritual poverty.16. A frightening schizoid, bloody smile of rage burns with fire several hundred meters. Tearing the face and psyche and the skull itself, a delightful light smile of insensibility.17. Time will show a complete psychological portrait of mankind to light and darkness.18. Faith is stronger than all torture; there is nothing more powerful in the whole universe than faith that feeds will.19. Truth - these are very strongly tightened strings, you need to play them very carefully and then you will hear an unforgettable melody of truth that may turn out to be the last in your life.20. Reality is decomposing and all the ridiculous horrors of reality are visible, since you are in the lush chronosphere, where the quantum genetic transformations of the instincts of despair are in, in the projection of an alternative reality of the ego of power in which everything is programmed for decomposition.21. An alternative is all that you have left.22. Around you are bodypainting instincts of despair, a reflection of naked and at the same time false inner sensations and complexes.23. Laughter and a frozen smile with tears is a state of doom that says that there is no more hope. Such laughter is heard in society, it is increasingly painful to look at the schizoid smiles of selfishness, under large bandanas in the form of eerie toothy smiles. You laugh until your heart stops.24. You are in the unconscious, subconsciously instinctive, unpredictable chaos of the violent chronosphere, where the air is discharged and saturated with ignorance. You feel in yourself a silent smile

of rage, the laugh of an ever-smiling death, in the intense silence of the unpredictable instincts of despair. You feel insult - this is rebirth, a laughing monster of disappointment, a smiling gloom, a crying smile, painted in the bright colors of depression, the laughter of this creature sounds in you for days, amplified by the laughter of people who laugh at you, you hear them ugly laugh, it gets louder and louder, you're scared, you cry and finally open your eyes, and realize that you are among strangers.Author: Musin Almat Zhumabekovich

#quotes

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sociologyquotes · 7 years

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Racism became dominant in the United States between 1890 and 1920 "when African Americans were again put back into second-class citizenship... In the 1880s and 1890s minstrel shows featuring bumbling, mislocuting whites in blackface grew wildly popular from New England to California. By presenting heavily caricatured images of African Americans who were happy on the plantation and lost and incompetent off it, these shows demeaned black ability. [...] Aided by Birth of a Nation, which opened in 1915, the Ku Klux Klan rose to its zenith, boasting over a million members. The KKK openly dominated the state government of Indiana for a time, and it proudly inducted Pres. Warren G. Harding as a member in a White House ceremony... the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from an airplane onto a black ghetto, killing more than 75 people and destroying more than 1,100 homes.. Some small communities in the Midwest and West became "sundown" towns, informally threatening African Americans with death if they remained overnight. [...] race relations in the United States systematically worsened for almost half a century. [...] Students are given "the unmistakable [impression] of generally uninterrupted progress to the present." [...] The notion of progress suffuses textbook treatments of black-white relations, implying that race relations have somehow steadily improved on their own. This cheery optimism only compounds the problem, because whites can infer that racism is over.

Excerpts from Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

James W. Loewen

#racism #lies my teacher told me #sociology #history #united states #african americans #black americans #black #blackface #kkk #warren g harding #tulsa race riot #sundown towns #racial violence

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jatamansi-arc · 7 years

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@illusivexemissary brought this up in her vocaroo about Salome’s and Gabe’s relationship with each other. So, let’s talk about that really quick.

I lied, it’s going to be a multiple part escapade. So here, let’s get the first part done.

Salome’s History, Pt. I: Familial Relations

As I’ve talked about before, and what can be found in her biography, Salome was born as Shelomit Rut Bernadette Cohn on November 4th, 1985. Her parents are named Tzvi and Rachel.

Here’s the important stuff you need to know about her parents:

Tzvi: Her father was born in 1956, to two Holocaust survivors named Avraham (31) and Rut (29). He’s the youngest of three, with a brother a sister. He grew up, went to school, graduated, and otherwise lived in Syracuse his entire life. Was raised in a Conservative Jewish environment, but became BT” (baal teshuva) in his early college career, c. 1976-77, and went to rabbinical school. From there, he formed his own haredi congregation with himself as rabbi in Syracuse.

Her father was charismatic, but he also was incredibly mean-spirited, manipulative, and an otherwise questionable human being. I’ve said before that power went to his head. With luxury cars and amazing showmanship, Rebbe Cohn, like many in positions like him, pretty much ignored or buried any allegation of abuse in his community, including the ones that directly impacted his daughters. And it’s a precedence he teaches to his followers. Aloft and mysterious, even to family, it’s not a surprise that Salome finds herself unable to describe him to strangers, let alone under bad terms.

Because, to everyone under his influence, even his children, a rabbi can’t do any wrong. Even if all of his children are the victims of his wrongdoing and predilection for manipulation and intimidation. Salome, not around for the final years of his life, eventually concludes that karma catches up with him in the form liver cancer that kills him slowly, over the course of two years.

She doesn’t attend his funeral, nor does her brother. It’s an invitationafforded only to his eldest daughter.

Rachel: Younger than her husband, born in the spring of 1962 in a Moroccan hospital to now French expats, Rahelita has lived a much more colorful life than her husband. One half of identical twins, to which she’s a few minutes earlier than her sister Estimada, they both earn instant citizenship to the country of their parents’ origin before the family returns to Northern Paris after a few weeks time. There, she goes to secular day school and an Orthodox school in the afternoon.

Flash forward to her early adulthood, Rahelita adopts the more traditional name of Rachel and goes to America to study medicine on a scholarship. Here, looking to an Orthodox matchmaker, she meets Tzvi. They are married within four months, and soon after, she earns the title of Rebbetzin. And if being a rabbi went to Salome’s father’s head, being the wife of the rabbi certainly went to Rachel’s twofold. Nagging, overbearing, and almost every other stereotype of a Jewish mother wrapped into a 5′1″ package, Rachel is nearly unbearable to all of her children, and Salome rarely escapes from her gaze, even now.

That said, she struggled through motherhood physically and nearly died having Salome, so she had to give up on her big family of kids. It’s a grudge I don’t think she’s ever forgiven Salome for, even if it’s not the kid’s fault. And when Salome was four, Rachel also developed a very severe form of breast cancer that resulted in her having to undergo a double mastectomy and reconstruction.

This was when Rachel learned Salome had a talent for drawing, as her daughter brought her get well cards in the hospital with sprawling landscapes and other details that were impressive for a near toddler. Rachel took them, crumpled them after her daughter left, and would eventually tell her daughter that her hands were blessed only by the devil’s, and art was the work of idolatry. Starting what would become a cavernous pit of a relationship between the two by the time Salome reached adulthood.

When it comes to her siblings, Salome is the youngest -- and therefore the baby and black sheep -- of them. Preceding her are an elder sister, named Tova, who is five years her senior, and then a brother, this time three years greater, named Moses (but almost exclusively going by Moishe.)

Tova

Works as an emergency room nurse somewhere around Monsey, NY. Married at 17, Tova is now a divorced mother of three boys who is trying to date and work and balance single motherhood with both. Cute, kind and incredibly naive about the non-Orthodox world, Tova is everything Salome isn’t. She’s also consistently, and patently, adorable.

Salome and her sister are close, but somewhat also strained. Tova caves under the pressure of their mother easily and it oftentimes has the worse impact of the baby sister. Tova tries to protect her, but there’s only so much she can do.

Basically: Salome knows her sister is sensitive and under an incredible amount of stress, but sometimes it gets frustratingly old.

Other important details? Her husband was abusive as fuck, which is why she took her boys and left in the middle of the night, and never looked back. She also also worked progressively, since then, to try to make inroads on the Orthodox community when it comes to sweeping abuses under the rug.

Moishe

The middle sibling, Moses seemed to be like everything her parents ever wanted. Gifted, with the same talent for language as his baby sister, he excelled in his studies and their father wanted him to take over the family “business” at some point. Moishe, instead of seeking out rabbinical school, veers towards medical school after his four years as an undergrad. Oh, and then he blows, just like his baby sister did.

Now he lives in New Canaan, CT (which I laugh, because omg so close to the X Mansion oops), and is a cardiac surgeon. He specializes in transplants, but he generally also works the Emergency department, which means only the idiot baby sister escaped emergency medicine. He’s not Orthodox, nor does he even really practice, and is pretty much an atheist. If it’s not science or medicine, he doesn’t really have time for it.

Other things I know about Moishe: he has an autism spectrum disorder, along with a mild form of OCD. He likes dogs, and owns five. He’s more like Salome than Tova is, in actuality, and if they would bloody talk to each other, I think they’d actually get on. But Salome is bitter mcprissy pants because her brother got spoiled and treated better, so she doesn’t much talk to him unless she has to.

Salome doesn’t talk to her immediate family in adulthood, or at least not willingly. The only exception to this is Tova. There’s also a few cousins of hers, namely Miriam and Darcy ( @zzapzzaptasers ), but Miriam lives in France and Darcy is off on space adventures, usually.

Salome was also close to her paternal grandparents, perhaps even moreso than her parents. Which brings us to another cut off to talk about them.

Avraham

Born in Warsaw in 1925, Avraham was the oldest of two children by a year (the other is Basia, a sister), and grew up under tons of turmoil throughout his entire childhood. A year to the day of his birth saw the start of the May Coup and a more authoritative government, for example, but by the time he was fourteen, Warsaw was already under threat from the air by Nazi Germany. By the end of that year, 40,000 or more people had been injured or killed while the city was shut down, and the President deported to Dachau.

The prospects of going to college basically were destroyed soon after, though Avi, being the son of a Rabbi who was also a sofer, contributed to family means by also scribing for the Jewish community. Usually in the form of mezuzah parchments or marriage certificates, though this would become increasingly unstable once the Warsaw Ghetto was established. In the winter of 1941, Avi’s mother perishes from starvation, with the toll of a roughly <175 calorie intake a day finally taking its final toll on her already weakened body.

In late 1942, their father refuses to be deported to Treblinka, knowing it is a death sentence, and is subsequently shot. Basia, infuriated by this and long having been involved in the illegal ZOB, encourages her brother to become involved in the Resistance movement and they begin to smuggle weapons into the ghetto. This is, perhaps humorously, where Avi meets his later wife, Rut.

During the Uprising, two major points happen for Avraham:

His sister, Basia, working as a sniper in one of the ghetto’s buildings, is killed when the Nazi forces begin to torch buildings to destroy the opposition. She dies from a combination of smoke inhalation and burns at the age of 17.

Terrified by this, and now without any family, Avi convinces Rut to escape with him and they manage to get out but are captured. Avi is sent to Auschwitz, and Rut would eventually end up at Mauthausen.

Some of this is more relevant than others, as for example, in her canon with @metallsinne, Avraham meets Erik’s parents there eventually and tries to protect Edie from being gassed immediately upon arrival (though we all know how well that worked.) But after the war, he becomes what will eventually be known as a Sh'erit ha-Pletah and helps form a cohesive government before emigrating from Poland to the United States. Why?

He finds out Rut is alive and living in New York from one of his peers. And in one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever written, after he manages to get to New York, a bloody year later, he arrives on her doorstep with his mother’s wedding ring in a shitty cardboard box and a bouquet of flowers.

And she accepts. They lived, very happily married, for the rest of their lives. Avi eventually taking up work as a clockmaker and repairman. And they are become a beacon to the outside world to Salome and her siblings, to remind them that normal people exist. So close to her grandfather was Salome in particular, that when he dies in the year 1998, she is devastated.

Rut

Rut is also born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926, but unlike her husband, she is the only daughter of a young couple just trying to find their way in [ the already explained shithole that was ] Poland before WWII. Rut grows up wanting to be a normal kid but generally gets involved in the ZOB pretty early into the Ghetto’s existence. Doing what, you may ask?

Generally helping to facilitate food being smuggled in, which she also helps deliver to those who are in most need along with her parents’ help. It’s at a meeting shortly before the uprising, in 1942, where she meets Avraham and quickly falls in love with him. Her parents bless this potential union, provided everyone survives the hell that is the Holocaust, and it is one of the last things they do. Like Avi’s parents, they too, succumb to a combination of forces like starvation and illness that end up taking thousands in the few years they are trapped there with so many others.

After trying to escape after Basia’s demise in the Uprising, both are deported to Auschwitz, though Rut is later moved to Mauthausen where she works as a “nurse” in the Krankenlager. Here, she sees many of her people breathing their last, though Rut can’t reconcile is this is for the better or not, considering the alternatives.

Once the camp is liberated, Rut manages to secure a place emigrating to America and settles in Syracuse in a tiny mother-in-law apartment at the home of relatives who already lived in the area. She makes money to pay for her expenses by tailoring clothing and sewing dresses for others, which is something she will continue until her death in 1994.

Before way then, however, Avi shows up on her doorstep, like I said. And they eventually get married a few months later, with very little to show for it. Rut sews her own dress, to save money, and it’s very simple. They don’t start a family for several years after that, out of this survival’s instinct that it’s not safe to, but eventually they have three kids they adore. Mostly adore. Tzvi’s always been kind of questionable.

They take their grandkids on alternating weekends, though Salome usually stays every weekend, unlike her siblings. Her parents find her attitude better, along with her mood, so they encourage it to help ease their own stresses. Salome’s name is also chosen by her grandmother in the end, because she hopes that she’ll grow exhibiting the traits of a warrior queen. Something she thought was fitting in the post-Holocaust state.

Oh, and she also worked at a drug store in her senior years. She enjoyed it, and collected a bunch of stupid stuff. Rut was kind of a giant nerd like that. Avi was just... pretty fucking lost without his wife, to be honest. I’m surprised he made it another four years without her, because they did everything together.

AND THERE’S THE FAMILY PORTION. YOU GET MORE SOON.

#ooc #hc #salome's family

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