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blackpinkofficial · 6 years

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On a modest stage inside a tent in downtown Los Angeles, the four members of the South Korean girl group Blackpink assume a diamond formation and aim their fingers like guns at the audience as they launch into the chorus of their breakout hit, “Ddu-du Ddu-du”: “Wait till I do what I ... Hit you with that ddu-du ddu-du du!”

It’s the afternoon before the Grammys at Universal Music Group chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge’s annual showcase, where he presents the company’s prospective superstars to a crowd of record executives and industry types. (Past performers have included Ariana Grande, Halsey and Shawn Mendes.) With their intense choreography, dance-heavy beats and Clueless-esque high-fashion looks, the four women offer the kind of bells-and-whistles pop production that makes them an anomaly not just on today’s lineup, where rappers like 2 Chainz and Lil Baby abound, but also on the charts, where women like Grande serve up their divadom with an extra dose of realness.

The showcase marks Blackpink’s first stateside performance, though the band made history long before: “Ddu-du Ddu-du” became the highest-charting single by a Korean girl group on the Billboard Hot 100 when it peaked at No. 55 last June, and this April the act will be the first Korean girl group to play Coachella, before embarking on a North American arena tour. “Ddu-du Ddu-du,” sung mostly in Korean, is a boastful warning to those who underestimate Blackpink, with a hook (meant to imitate the sound of bullets flying) that’s also a canny invitation to non-Korean listeners -- anyone can sing the words. The buttoned-up UMG crowd seems a little unsure, but also intrigued: Just as Blackpink’s Jennie -- soft-spoken in person, but onstage a fierce singer and rapper -- slides into a rat-tat-tat flow in the second verse, more and more audience members whip out their phones to capture video.

There’s no longer any question that K-pop is happening in America. BTS, the seven-member South Korean boy band, scored two No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 in 2018 and became the first K-pop group to sell out an American stadium when it played New York’s Citi Field in October. Yet despite the group’s visibility here, K-pop remains somewhat detached from the mainstream: It receives relatively little top 40 airplay despite fan-army pressure on radio stations, its artists rarely tour with non-K-pop acts, and outside of its intensely passionate fan groups, K-pop stars hardly drive the wider “conversation” that someone like Grande can dominate with a single tweet.

Blackpink represents Korean music’s latest, greatest hope at breaking out of the American K-pop box. The group believes its multinational identity gives it global appeal: Sweet-voiced Jisoo, 24, is a South Korean native; buoyant rapper Lisa, 21, is from Thailand; guitar-playing Rosé, 22, grew up in Australia; and Jennie, 23, was born in South Korea but spent some formative years in New Zealand. “You don’t have to understand Korean to understand the music, the visuals, the vibe,” says Jisoo, through a translator. (Rosé and Jennie are fluent in English; Lisa alternates between English and Korean during our interview.) “We’ve got so much Korean culture and so much Western culture in us,” adds Rosé, her Australian accent still pronounced.

And though occasional English lyrics already pepper their tracks, Jennie notes that recording all-English songs is something they “definitely want to do” in the future. (They’re focused on making their debut album first.) Even their sound -- an omnivorous fusion of fist-pumping EDM and booming hip-hop beats with flashes of house, ’80s pop and harmonica-driven folk -- seems conceived for the widest possible audience. “I was immediately drawn to their fierce and empowering energy,” says Dua Lipa, who asked the group to guest on last year’s bilingual banger “Kiss and Make Up.” “They are not just giving you hit songs -- they are sending a message that resonates beyond the lyrics.”

Last fall, Blackpink signed to Interscope Records, which will serve as both a creative and business partner to YG Entertainment, the group’s Korean home and one of South Korea’s three main music companies along with SM Entertainment and JYP Entertainment. These companies serve as label, management firm and production studio, controlling almost every aspect of their artists’ careers. Interscope chairman/CEO John Janick says that YG’s leadership -- Hyunsuk “YG” Yang, its founder, and Teddy Park, Blackpink’s main producer and creative director -- “runs the show,” but the relationship is collaborative: Sam Riback, Interscope’s pop-rock A&R head, has made multiple trips to YG’s Seoul headquarters and “has been sending them lots of different ideas,” according to Janick. “Our goal,” he says, “is to amplify what YG has been doing globally.”

If Interscope can help turn Blackpink into a truly global superstar act, the partnership could become a model for other labels looking to invest in K-pop and even pave the way for joint imprints. “This deal could be a benchmark,” says YG’s Joojong “JJ” Joe, who heads the company’s U.S. operations from a small house near Los Angeles’ Echo Park. It will also confirm Interscope’s foresight about K-pop. In 2011, the label signed the group Girls’ Generation during one of the earlier waves of K-pop imports, when artists like BoA and Wonder Girls worked with Western producers and companies.

At the time, those artists barely made a dent on the mainstream charts, and their backers took a hit: Despite high-profile promotional appearances, Girls’ Generation’sThe Boys LP sold only 1,000 copies in the United States during its first week in 2012, according to Nielsen Music. Since then, however, streaming platforms have made it easier for fans to discover and support Korean music, while the growth of social media has also allowed them to forge deep connections with artists everywhere. “In this era, people find their music and their talented artists on the internet,” says Susan Rosenbluth, senior vp at AEG Presents/Goldenvoice, who helped book Blackpink’s North American tour and notes that K-pop’s stateside audience “does not follow along ethnic lines.”

To Janick, the success of Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s chart-topping Latin hit, “Despacito,” aided by a Justin Bieber remix, made English-speaking listeners more open-minded in general to music in other languages. “We’re going to have hits from all different territories -- more of them, and more often than we’ve seen in the past,” he says.

But the onus isn’t just on listeners to embrace Korean music -- it’s on industry gatekeepers too. At the UMG showcase, the reaction to Blackpink is enthusiastic, but it feels muted compared with the rousing ovation the crowd gives classic-rock revivalists Greta Van Fleet, whose 2018 debut album was notoriously panned by some critics as derivative. The response to Blackpink’s Interscope deal, however, suggests that attitude could change.

“So many artists on our roster started calling, saying, ‘I want to work with these girls.’ Radio stations were asking when new music was going to be out,” says Interscope executive vp business development Jeremy Erlich, who facilitated early conversations between the label and YG (he and Joe attended business school together). “The industry’s ready. When the music comes out, I don’t think there’s going to be many people saying, ‘This is just a fad.’”

The day before the showcase, the ladies of Blackpink are ensconced in a hotel suite high above downtown L.A. Lisa, dressed in a gray fleece and a checkered coat, spies the Hollywood sign through a corner window and bounds off a couch for a closer look. Her bandmates, cozied up in brightly colored sweatshirts and cardigans, admit they weren’t expecting Los Angeles in February to be so chilly. During some rare downtime the previous day, they went shopping in Santa Monica. “It was supposed to be for fashion,” says Jennie, “but we ended up just grabbing anything that was warm.”

This is Blackpink’s first trip to L.A., but it has been almost a decade in the making. The group’s members came to Seoul from all over the world starting in 2010 to take part in YG’s rigorous recruitment and training process. The company and its competitors hold tryouts both within and far beyond Korea (Rosé traveled to Sydney from her home in Melbourne), seeking recruits who are typically preteens or teens, ethnically Korean and fluent in the language, though these qualities are not mandatory. Lisa, who auditioned in her native Thailand in 2010, didn’t speak any Korean when she began training in Seoul in 2011.

For all four women, joining YG meant enrolling in a kind of full-time pop-star academy that Jennie calls “more strict than school” and that Rosé likens to The X Factor with dorm rooms. For 12 hours a day, seven days a week, the future members of Blackpink -- along with, by Jennie’s estimate, 10-20 other aspiring singers who cycled through the project -- studied singing, dancing and rapping, taking part in monthly tests designed to identify their strengths and weed out subpar trainees. “Somebody would come in with a piece of paper and stick it on a wall, and it would say who did best, who did worst, who’s going home,” recalls Jennie, whom YG initially steered toward rapping because she spoke fluent English. “You get a score -- A, B, C,” Lisa explains. “Lisa would always get A’s for everything,” adds Jennie with a laugh.

The process was lengthy. Before Blackpink debuted in 2016, Jennie spent six years in training, Lisa and Jisoo five and Rosé four. For the members who had left behind life outside South Korea, the pace of training on top of the culture shock was sometimes tough. “I’d call my parents crying,” recalls Rosé. “But as much as it was hard for me to cope with all of that, it made me more hungry. I remember my mom would be like, ‘If it’s so hard for you, just come back home.’ But I’d be like” -- she mimics a surly teen’s glare, much to the others’ amusement -- “‘That’s not what I’m talking about!’” Lisa credits her future bandmates with easing her transition. “Jennie would speak English to me, and Jisoo helped me out with my Korean,” she says. Rosé was the last of the bunch to enter training, but she remembers the four of them bonding during an all-night jam session when she arrived. “We just clicked,” she says.

That’s clearly still the case: Rosé sometimes puts her hand on Lisa’s knee when translating for her, and at one point Jennie and Jisoo huddle close together to silently adjust one of their necklaces, displaying the intimacy of close friends. “We don’t really have a day off,” says Lisa. (Once every two weeks, Rosé clarifies.) And because their families are so far-flung, they often spend their time off with each other anyway. “We’re stuck together,” says Rosé, laughing.

While K-pop companies have a reputation for packaging groups assembly line-style, Blackpink’s members insist they have plenty of creative input, despite having no official writing credits on their tracks. Park plays them music he’s working on and “really tries to put our thoughts into our songs,” says Jennie. “He really gets his inspirations from us.”

“It’s important as recording artists that they actually truly own their songs,” says Park. The women all make suggestions about who should sing what, and if a part doesn’t feel right to someone, he will make adjustments. “He doesn’t just bring us a song, like, ‘Go practice,’” says Rosé.

Besides, the members of Blackpink have another creative outlet: Last fall, YG announced that they would all release solo material, starting with Jennie, whose debut single, “Solo,” topped Billboard’s World Digital Song Sales chart in December. Though the music is still created and put out by YG, the idea that group longevity and solo success aren’t mutually exclusive is a radical development in girl-group history -- one that Janick says only “makes the brand stronger.”

Stars who come through companies like YG are called “idols” in Korea and have historically been expected to maintain a squeaky-clean image. When Blackpink debuted, Jennie says YG was very selective about its promotional appearances: “We were trained to be a little more...” “Closed in?” Rosé suggests.

“Closed in” is exactly what the outspoken women ruling the U.S. charts now, from Grande to Halsey, are not -- they make deeply personal, even raw, music. But while Blackpink may well find success catering to an audience craving its kind of TRL-era pop spectacle -- Interscope’s Erlich calls the group “the modern Spice Girls” -- lately the band has been less concerned with appearing perfect, both onstage and off. “We always wanted to be out there, to be more true to ourselves and a little more free,” says Jennie. “Even we can get things wrong sometimes. We want to just show them the real us.”

Jennie and Lisa do just that when I ask how they expect to be received as rappers in America. Lisa lets out an embarrassed groan, withdrawing into her fleece. She has loved hip-hop since childhood and is obsessed with Tyga (“I love his swag,” she says, blushing). But she and Jennie seem well aware that a group of Asian women adopting a style pioneered by black American artists might be a hard sell for some stateside listeners who are keenly attuned to debates about cultural appropriation.

“Me and Lisa don’t talk about it out loud, but I know we have this big pressure,” says Jennie, who adds that she studied artists like Lauryn Hill and TLC when she first started rapping. She looks across the room at Lisa: “She’s going to kill it.” Lisa just scrunches up her face.

That kind of vulnerability may be what ultimately endears Blackpink to an American pop audience. “The artists that are the most successful in these situations are really authentic with how they can relate to a coming-of-age experience” in their music, says Goldenvoice’s Rosenbluth. “There’s a certain amount of authenticity to Blackpink that I really love. The dedication is heartfelt.”

Back at the showcase, the band finishes its set with the reggaetón-tinged “Forever Young,” featuring an intricately choreographed, hair-flipping dance break. As the beat reaches its booming climax, the bandmembers whip toward each other and strike a statuesque pose with their hands on their hips, just in time for the music to stop. They hold still for a moment as the lights dim, then drop their arms and turn toward each other, catching their breath and grinning like four young women who can’t quite believe they’re here.

#blackpink #ot4 #m:billboard #press #090103

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monaedroid · 6 years

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She rose to fame as an endlessly inventive pop android. Now, she's finally revealing the real person waiting inside

Janelle Monáe is crying in her spacesuit. It's early April in Atlanta, and she's in one of the basement studios of her Wondaland Records headquarters, surrounded by computer monitors and TV screens, one of them running a screensaver that displays images of her heroes: Prince, Martin Luther King Jr., Pam Grier, Tina Turner, Lupita Nyong'o, David Bowie. She's about to reveal, for the first time, something the world has long guessed, something her closest friends and family already know, something she's long been loath to say in public. As she sings on a song from her new album, Dirty Computer,"Let the rumors be true." Janelle Monáe is not, she finally admits, the immaculate android, the "alien from outer space/The cybergirl without a face" she's claimed to be over a decade's worth of albums, videos, concerts and even interviews – she is, instead, a flawed, messy, flesh-and-blood 32-year-old human being.

And she has another rumor to confirm. "Being a queer black woman in America," she says, taking a breath as she comes out, "someone who has been in relationships with both men and women – I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker." She initially identified as bisexual, she clarifies, "but then later I read about pansexuality and was like, ‘Oh, these are things that I identify with too.' I'm open to learning more about who I am."

It's a lovely spacesuit she's wearing, a form-fitting white NASA artifact complete with a commander patch on one arm and an American flag on the other. She's put it on for no reason at all – there are no cameras in sight – as she lounges around Wondaland. The outfit is a remnant, perhaps, of the android persona, known as Cindi Mayweather, that she fed us all these years: a messianic, revolutionary robot who fell in love with a human and vowed to free the rest of the androids.

Early in her career, Monáe was insecure about living up to impossible showbiz ideals; the persona, the androgynous outfits, the inflexible commitment to the storyline both on- and offstage, served in part as protective armor. "It had to do with the fear of being judged," she says. "All I saw was that I was supposed to look a certain way coming into this industry, and I felt like I [didn't] look like a stereotypical black female artist."

She is also a perfectionist, a tendency that's helped her career and hindered her emotional life; portraying a flawless automaton was also a bit of wish fulfillment. It's one of the many reasons she thought she had a "computer virus" that needed cleaning, which led her to years of therapy, starting before the 2010 release of her debut, The ArchAndroid. "I felt misunderstood," she says. "I was like, ‘Before I self-destruct, before I become a confused person in front of the world, let me seek some help.' I was afraid for anybody to see me not at the top of my game. That obsession was too much for me."

So she overcompensated, as she puts it, leaving fans to puzzle over the sight and sound of a dark-skinned, androgynously dressed black woman creating Afro-futuristic fantasias as trippy as the Parliament-Funkadelic soundscapes she grew up hearing. She became a pop anomaly, a sometimes incongruous interloper in the universes of her earliest supporters, Big Boi and Puff Daddy, the latter having signed her to a partnership with Bad Boy Records in 2008. The ArchAndroidwas a buzzy introduction, and 2013's Electric Lady – certainly the first progged-out concept album in the history of Bad Boy – established her as one of the 21st century's most inventive voices. Years before Frank Ocean, Solange, Beyoncé and SZA pushed arty, alternative R&B to the mainstream, Monáe was already there, bridging the gap between neo-soul and all that was to come, unafraid to fuse rock, funk, hip-hop (when she feels like it, as on her recent single "Django Jane," she's a top-flight rapper), R&B, electronica and campy, drama-kid theatricality.

She always ducked questions about her sexuality ("I only date androids" was a stock response) but embedded the real answers in her music. "If you listen to my albums, it's there," she says. She cites "Mushrooms & Roses" and "Q.U.E.E.N.," two songs that reference a character named Mary as an object of affection. In the 45-minute film accompanying Dirty Computer, "Mary Apple" is the name given to female "dirty computers" taken captive and stripped of their real names, one of whom is played by Tessa Thompson. (The actress has been rumored to be Monáe's girlfriend, though Monáe won't discuss her dating life.) The original title of "Q.U.E.E.N.," she notes, was "Q.U.E.E.R.," and you can still hear the word on the track's background harmonies.

Monáe is the CEO of her own label, a CoverGirl model and a movie star, appearing in the Oscar-winning Moonlight and the Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures, two hits led by black casts. In both films, she tackles black American stories that don't typically get the big-screen treatment. "Our stories are being erased, basically," she says of her attachment to those scripts, which made her "want to tell my story." Monáe does worry that the human behind her masks may not be enough. She has asked aloud, including in therapy, "What if people don't think I'm as interesting as Cindi Mayweather?" She'll miss the freedom of being the android. "I created her, so I got to make her be whatever I wanted her to be. I didn't have to talk about the Janelle Monáe who was in therapy. It's Cindi Mayweather. She is who I aspire to be." On Dirty Computer, the only hints of sci-fi are in the title and the storyline of the accompanying film. The lyrics are flesh-and-blood confessions of both physical and emotional insecurity, punctuated with sexual liberation. They're the unfiltered desires of an overthinker letting herself speak without pause, for once. And she wants to help listeners gain the courage to be dirty computers too. "I want young girls, young boys, nonbinary, gay, straight, queer people who are having a hard time dealing with their sexuality, dealing with feeling ostracized or bullied for just being their unique selves, to know that I see you," she says in a tone befitting the commander patch on her arm. "This album is for you. Be proud."

Monáe grew up in a massive, devoutly Baptist family in Kansas City, Kansas, or as she likes to put it, "I got 50 first cousins!" Not all of them know details of her romantic life, but they have almost certainly seen her wear sheer pants and share a lollipop with Thompson in the "Make Me Feel" video. "I literally do not have time," she says, laughing, "to hold a town-hall meeting with my big-ass family and be like, ‘Hey, news flash!' " She worries that when we visit Kansas City tomorrow, they'll bring it up: "There are people in my life that love me and they have questions, and I guess when I get there, I'll have to answer those questions."

Over the years, she's heard some members of her family, mostly distant ones, say certain upsetting things. "A lot of this album," she says, "is a reaction to the sting of what it means to hear people in my family say, ‘All gay people are going to hell.' "

She began questioning the Bible and her family's Baptist faith early on. Now, she says, "I serve the God of love" – love, she's determined, is the common factor among all religions, an idea Stevie Wonder expanded on in a Dirty Computer interlude.

When we arrive in the flat, industrial Kansas side of Kansas City, her family doesn't actually have any questions – or anything unkind to say, for that matter. There's just a whole lot of love for their homegrown superstar.

Janelle Monáe Robinson was born here on December 1st, 1985, to a mom who worked as a janitor and a dad who was in the middle of a 21-year battle with crack addiction. Her parents separated when Monáe was less than a year old, and her mother later married the father of Janelle's younger sister, Kimmy.

Monáe's loving warnings about the sheer size of her family ring true as soon as we step into her old neighborhood. On one street, her maternal grandmother owned several homes in a row that housed cousins, aunts, uncles and Monáe herself. A few minutes away is her paternal great-grandmother's pastel-coated house. Monáe spent a significant portion of her time there – it was her main connection to her dad and his family as he went in and out of prison; their relationship was rocky until he got sober 13 years ago. Another short car ride away is her maternal Aunt Glo's home, where we meet her mom. "She's my favorite slice of pie," her Auntie Fats says, referring to Monáe's familial nickname of "pun'kin."

Monáe was raised in a working-class community called Quindaro. It started as a settlement established by Native Americans and abolitionists just prior to the Civil War, and became a refuge for black Americans escaping slavery via the Underground Railroad. A few weeks before our visit, vandals painted swastikas and "Hail Satan" on a statue of abolitionist John Brown in the neighborhood. It's since been repainted. "I know nobody in this neighborhood did that," her great-grandmother says, shaking her head. "Outsiders."

On the Missouri side of the bridge, Kansas City is predominately white, but Monáe's community is overwhelmingly black. "I would read about where I was from," she says, "and understand who's really disadvantaged coming from these environments. It sucks. It's like that for brown folks." It's hard to miss her family's religiosity – they hardly get a sentence out without a mention of God's blessings. At 91, Monáe's great-grandma still monitors the halls at the local vacation Bible school with a switch in hand. During our visit, she sits behind a piano to lead a gospel singalong. Monáe, beside an aunt and a cousin, joins in, belting "Call Him Up and Tell Him What You Want" and "Savior, Do Not Pass Me By."

Monáe is never more relaxed during our time together than when she's in Kansas City. Her Midwestern drawl comes back as she screams and sings while running into the arms of her cousins, aunts and uncles, many of whom she gets to see only during the holidays or tour stops nearby. At one point, she curls up into her mom's lap while they look at a homemade poster full of sepia-toned childhood pics. "She was a delightful baby," Auntie Fats recalls.

Monáe's family members all share different versions of the same story: She was born to be a star, and she made that clear as soon as she gained motor skills. There was that time she got escorted out of church for insisting on singing Michael Jackson's "Beat It" in the middle of the service. There were the talent shows for Juneteenth where she covered "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" three years in a row and won each time. She was the star of the school musicals, except for The Wiz her senior year, when she lost the role of Dorothy because she had to leave the audition early to pick up her mom at work. She's still a bit miffed about not getting that part.

Monáe soon passed a bigger audition, for the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, and headed to New York. She studied musical theater and shared a small apartment with a cousin where she didn't even have a bed to herself. When she wasn't in class, she was working.

Meanwhile, an old friend was having the college experience Monáe desired, in Atlanta, so she relocated. The rest is well-trod history in the myth-building of Monáe: She was an Afro'd neo-soul singer strumming her guitar on college quads and working at Office Depot. She was fired from that job for using one of the company's computers to respond to a fan's e-mail, an incident that inspired the song "Lettin' Go."

That song caught the attention of Big Boi, who put her on Outkast's Idlewild and helped connect her with Sean Combs. "I'm-a be honest with you," her dad says, recalling an invite to one of Monáe's shows in Atlanta, where Combs was supposed to be in the house. "I was like, ‘Yeah, right.' I didn't think Puff Daddy was coming."

Skepticism aside, Michael Robinson was proud of the invite. He'd recently gotten sober, and the two were repairing their relationship. He spent much of Janelle's childhood hearing about her immense talents from the more-present members of their family. He was honored that they had come far enough for Monáe to want him to be there for such an important concert. But he still didn't believe Puffy would be there.

"I go down there with my two cousins, and she says, ‘Dad, everyone's gonna know you're not from here. Your jeans are creased.' " Fashion faux pas aside – he insists he hasn't creased his jeans since – Robinson was in for a pleasant surprise when one of his cousins spotted Combs and Big Boi in the back. It was the beginning of his daughter's new life, and he was just in time to be along for the journey. "I remember thinking, ‘This is what the big time is like,' " he muses. "They had all the cameras, all the lights. It was all about Janelle."

Wondaland Arts Society's headquarters feels like a utopian synthesis of Monáe's past lives in Kansas City and Manhattan. It sits inconspicuously in the midst of suburban Atlanta and looks like every other neighborhood home, with its two floors and brick exterior. Inside is much more ostentatious, with vintage clocks wallpapering the foyer, pristine white couches in the communal living spaces, and books and records everywhere.

It mimics the close-knit, constant accessibility of her childhood in Kansas City, with all its artists popping in and out of the space throughout each day to record new music, rehearse for shows and present the final product to the rest of the collective. At one point, the singer-rapper Jidenna shows up, having recently returned from a trip to Africa – everyone immediately starts teasing him about his newly buff physique.

Simultaneously, Chuck Lightning, seemingly the more extroverted half of two-man funk act Deep Cotton, who make their own music as well as work with Monáe, grabs a bowl of quinoa from the kitchen as Monáe doles out decisions on which version of the "Pynk" video will be released (they settle on the one without the spoken-word love poem that appears within the song in the film).

Monáe recorded most of Dirty Computer here, in a small studio with Havana-inspired decor. Guests and collaborators ranged from Grimes to Brian Wilson, who added harmonies to the title track. The album's liner notes cite Bible verses and a recent Quincy Jones interview alongside Monica Sjöö's The Great Cosmic Mother and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther.

But she was particularly close to one inspiration. Monáe was good friends with Prince, who personally blessed the album's glossy camp tone and synthed-out hooks. "When Prince heard this particular direction, he was like, ‘That's what y'all need to be doing,' " Lightning says. "He picked out that sound as what was resonating with him." Prince gave highly specific music and equipment recommendations from the era they were drawing on, including Gary Numan, whom he loved. "The most powerful thing he could do was give us the brushes to paint with," Lightning says.

Rumors spread that Prince co-wrote the single "Make Me Feel," which features a "Kiss"-like guitar riff. "Prince did not write that song," says Monáe, who sorely missed his advice during the production process. "It was very difficult writing this album without him." Prince was the first person to get a physical copy of The ArchAndroid – she presented the CD to him with a flower and the titles written out by hand. "As we were writing songs, I was like, ‘What would Prince think?' And I could not call him. It's a difficult thing to lose your mentor in the middle of a journey they had been a part of."

Stevie Wonder was another early fan of Monáe, and a conversation between them – Wonder insisted she record it – appears as an interlude on Dirty Computer. At one point, years ago, her budding friendships with both legends collided: She had to choose between playing with Prince at Madison Square Garden or with Wonder in Los Angeles. Prince encouraged her to pick Stevie.

On election night in 2016, Monáe found herself experiencing an unfamiliar emotion. "For the first time," she says, "I felt scared." Overnight, she went from living in a country whose president loved her music and had her perform on the White House lawn to one where it felt like her right to exist was threatened. "I felt like if I wake up tomorrow," she says, "are people going to feel they have the right to just, like, kill me now?"

Monáe had already been a committed activist. In 2015, with members of Wondaland, she created "Hell You Talmbout," which demands we say the names of black Americans who have been victims of racial violence and police brutality. Before #MeToo and Time's Up, Monáe created an organization, Fem the Future, which stemmed from her frustrations about opportunities for women in the music industry. She was called on to perform at the 2017 Women's March and to speak about Time's Up while introducing Kesha at the Grammys. "We come in peace, but we mean business," she told the cheering crowd.

That sums up Monáe's mindset in the Trump era. She hopes not to destroy the oppressors but to change their minds. "The conversations might not happen with people in the position of power," she says, "but they can happen through a movie, they can happen through a song, they can happen through an album, they can happen through a speech on TV. Most of them will probably turn off their TVs, but . . ."

She's in a New York hotel now, two weeks before the album's release. "There's some anxiety there, but I feel brave," she says, teetering between her typical sternness and a bit of vulnerable shakiness. No tears will be shed today. "My musical heroes did not make the sacrifices they did for me to live in fear." Her activism isn't the focus of Dirty Computer, but it's there, hovering above every note. She ended band rehearsal in Atlanta by asking the musicians to reflect on how American this album is. Monáe's America is the one on the fringes; it accepts the outsiders and the computers with viruses, like the ones she thought she had.

She understands the significance of now making her personal life a bigger, louder part of her art. She cites the conversation around one of her films as an example of how she might use her own story to engage with more-conservative listeners. "When I did Hidden Figures, there were some Republican white men tweeting about it and how they just felt bad. You could feel through their tweets that they were just like, ‘These black women did help us get to space. How could we treat them like that?' "

Meanwhile, she's again anticipating questions from her family back in Kansas. She seems more worried about them than what anyone else has to say. Still, Dirty Computer is meant to be a celebration, and if she loses a few people along the way, Monáe seems OK with that risk.

"Through my experiences, I hope people are seen and heard," she says, sitting at a hotel-room desk, dressed up from a day of promo in a puffy black-and-red jacket, matching red pants and terry-cloth hotel slippers. "I may make some mistakes. I may have to learn on the go, but I'm open to this journey." She sighs, voice confident and stare unfaltering. "I need to go through this. We need to go through this. Together. I'm going to make you empathize with dirty computers all around the world."

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/cover-story-janelle-monae-prince-new-lp-her-sexuality-w519523

#long reads #janelle monae #janellemonae #wondaland #wondaland records #rolling stones #rolling stone magazine #cover #coverstory

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xharmonizer98x-blog · 6 years

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7 Secrets of Wedding Photographers

Wedding picture takers are close by about each snapshot of your big day. They're snapping without end at your most private minutes: your first look at the individual you intend to be with always, your grin as you're at long last marry, and your underlying advance onto that move floor. However, what amount do you truly think about how they work—and for what reason they're so costly?

1. THEY WISH YOU'D ASK FOR THEIR HELP.

Particularly with regards to the timetable for the huge day. "I'd include more opportunity for photographs," says Gina Cristine, proprietor and picture taker with Gina Cristine photography in the Chicago territory. Ordinarily, the lady of the hour and husband to be expect the picture takers simply need 15 minutes for family photographs, she says. Yet, those family photographs could without much of a stretch take 30 minutes, in light of the fact that a relative is continually absent. "We have to ensure we have enough time, and that we're not hurried and feverish," Cristine clarifies.

2. THEY ALSO WISH YOU ACTUALLY ASKED ABOUT EXPERIENCE …

This separates the beginners from the experts, Eva Ho, proprietor and picture taker for Eva Ho Photography in Chicago, says. Her ideal inquiry: "How would you manage XX circumstance?" Ho clarifies that since each wedding is one of a kind, you have to discover a picture taker that is ideal for you—and getting some information about experience will enable you to settle on that choice. It will likewise enable you to comprehend the reason you're enlisting an expert wedding picture taker, as opposed to somebody who just fiddles with photography, for your enormous day.

3. … AND ABOUT THEIR STYLE.

Jason Brown, proprietor and picture taker of J. Dark colored Photography in Chicago, says couples dependably get some information about his cost and his accessibility. Be that as it may, he adores it when the discussion swings to his general style and approach, and they become more acquainted with him as a craftsman. "At that point we can comprehend in case we're a decent match," Brown says. "Not a great deal of customers go there, and I wish more customers would get some information about my methodology."

4. Don't hesitate TO ASK WHY THEY CHARGE AS MUCH AS THEY DO.

Indeed, wedding picture takers may charge a couple of thousand dollars for what appears eight hours of work. Be that as it may, they additionally met with you on many occasions previously the wedding. What's more, do you understand how often you messaged? At that point there's the altering procedure. Those photographic artists put a lot a larger number of long stretches of work into those photos than you at any point envisioned. Additionally, that camera gear wasn't free (and it should be overhauled each couple of years). Stacy Able, an Indianapolis-based wedding picture taker with Stacy Able Photography, says she adores it when couples inquire as to why she charges so much, since it offers her the chance to truly clarify everything that goes into shooting a wedding.

5. THEY'RE WATCHING YOUR CHEMISTRY.

At the point when the couple first observes each other at their wedding and they unwind right away, it's an indication that they're going to last, Cristine says. "They truly appreciate the day together."

"I shoot 20 to 30 weddings per year, and I can tell when a few has extremely extraordinary science," Brown says. "It's the point at which they're in a state of harmony with one another and when they're carefree with one another." Once in a while, however, there's the lady of the hour and man of the hour who aren't generally into one another, and don't generally hang out at the wedding. That is a warning—just like the couple who are stressing unendingly over everything being impeccable amid their wedding rather than essentially unwinding and making the most of their enormous day, Cristine notes.

6. THEY LOVE THE PHOTO BOOTHS JUST AS MUCH AS YOU DO.

Indeed, the nature of the photos in there may not be absolutely astounding, however those photograph stalls are so much fun. Furthermore, they even help the picture takers carry out their responsibilities. "Amid the gathering, we go around and take authentic shots, however it's difficult for us to get a gathering shot since individuals are moving,""We like to realize that the photograph corners are there."

7. Be that as it may, THEY DON'T LOVE THOSE TABLE SHOTS.

Going from table to table to intrude on your supper and make you present for a photograph is the most exceedingly terrible piece of shooting a wedding, Ho says.

8. WHEN IT'S TIME TO POSE, LOOK AT THEM, NOT AT ANYONE ELSE.

At weddings nowadays, everybody is taking pictures with their telephones, and it's inspiring increasingly hard to go after the consideration of the lady of the hour and man of the hour. In the event that wedding picture takers don't get those key shots, nonetheless, they've fizzled at their employments. So take a gander at them when they have the cameras up, not at the telephones.

9. When THE WEDDING IS OVER, THEY AREN'T DONE.

Being a wedding picture taker is an all day occupation, and photographic artists work about each day of the week, composes photographic artist Lauren Lim on a site committed to everything photography. At the point when not really shooting weddings, wedding picture takers are altering photographs, meeting with customers, making photographs, sending solicitations, and promoting their business. What's more, since it is a business, all things considered, they're additionally managing the bookkeeping end of things.

"You are currently the clerk, the bookkeeper, the advertising office, the visual creator, the client administration office, the secretary, and practically some other title you can consider, "There's a perilous fantasy that drifts around proposing that [wedding photographers] just need to work one day of the week and they make huge amounts of money."

In actuality, wedding picture takers work a typical five-day week, in addition to gatherings and commitment shoots in the nighttimes, and weddings on ends of the week. They are the absolute most diligent individuals you'll ever meet.

10. PHOTOSHOPPING ISN'T EASY.

Numerous individuals will request that picture takers make them skinnier, taller, more youthful—and to include individuals into photographs, Able says. However, she clarifies, "Individuals don't understand what that involves." Yes, she can do that. Only not for each photograph.

11. Disregard TRYING TO MAKE IT LOOK LIKE IT DOES ON PINTEREST.

Pinterest is inspiring truly irritating to wedding picture takers, and they're tired of attempting to re-make what you saw there. Spoiler alert: It never resembles the ideal shot you saw on there. Odds are, that was a rare shot or an anomaly of nature. That picture taker got fortunate on the grounds that their groomsman happened to be an Olympic athlete and could be flipped or something. Not going to occur at your wedding.

12. IT'S HARD TO PAY THE BILLS.

Since weddings are regular—a great many people get hitched among May and September—many wedding picture takers end up out of work from October to April, as indicated by "Nothing unexpected that that makes it hard to pay the bills," Lim composes. "You can either endeavor to make enough in the wedding season to get yourself through whatever is left of the year, or discover approaches to continue acquiring cash when the weddings stop." That may incorporate shooting photographs for occasion cards and taking pictures for birthday parties.

13. THEY USE A BLEND OF PHOTOGRAPHY STYLES.

Wedding photography is a mix of various sorts of photography—frequently utilized all at a similar occasion. "We're a mix of an item picture taker, a narrative picture taker, and design picture taker," Brown says. Capable concurs, saying she may utilize scene photography, candid wedding photography, and even full scale photography to catch a wedding.

14. Remaining FOCUSED IS KEY.

Wedding picture takers need to remain rationally and innovatively sharp for a truly lengthy time-frame, Brown says. Capable notes that they likewise manage a huge number of difficulties, including climate that can change in a moment and definitely influence lighting. "You must be gifted at altering rapidly on the fly," she notes. What's more, she includes, the weight is elevated since you have restricted time to catch incalculable minutes.

15. Now and then, THAT'S SCARY.

"Each wedding may have a totally unique dynamic, and you don't have the foggiest idea what you are strolling into," Able says. At times, you can venture into an extremely tense circumstance, and different occasions, the state of mind may be affable party. You never know. "There is a sure dimension of stage trepidation as you must be on your best diversion for 12 hours," she says. "Each work day for us is somebody's greatest day of their lives."

16. THEY DON'T LIKE COPYING OTHER PHOTOGRAPHERS.

picture taker with Photography in Chicago, despises hearing the feared inquiry: "Would you be able to make my photos look like … " That's since she has her very own style and her very own touch, she says. "They more often than not need pictures they like re-made precisely," clarifies. "[But] every picture taker has their very own style and voice and most, such as myself, will in general bashful far from late patterns and approach each wedding in a one of a kind way."

17. WHEN IT'S OVER, STOP BUGGING THEM FOR THE PICTURES.

Ask them once, and after that trust that the procedure will occur. Your picture taker ought to disclose the procedure to you, and most will take around 4 to about a month and a half, Brown says. "Trust the procedure," he says. Since he's hitched himself, Brown sees how passionate you are and that you are so eager to see those photographs. However, the picture taker needs time to alter them, and in the event that you continue irritating him, it gets irritating.

#wedding photographer in Delhi #candid wedding photography #wedding photography

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ltcol-laurens · 7 years

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Any reminiscences of mine of Abbeville of old would be grossly imperfect and partial, that omitted the two Hendersons, Francis senior and Francis junior - father and son. My account of the former is, that he was born in Scotland, and made his way to London when a young man, whether with or without family prestige I know not. He became, however, an officer in the Bank of England, and must have occupied a fine social position to have met there, on a visit to her relatives, the beautiful, accomplished and wealthy Miss Laurens, of Charleston, S.C. She was the only child and heir of Col. John Laurens, who fell (a historical fact,) in a skirmish in South Carolina at the close of the revolutionary war. Col. John was the only surviving child and heir of his father, Col. Henry Laurens, and was the aid and special friend of Gen. Washington. [...] The marriage afterwards referred to was one of those concordant disconcordancies, anomalies, or freaks of Venus that occur once in a while, and I never think of it without being reminded of the remark of the eccentric Judge Dooly, of Georgia, who once said, that "If there were any two things God did not foreknow, they were, who a woman would marry, and what would be the verdict of a petty jury in Georgia." This remark fell out just after a petty jury had rendered a verdict of manslaughter for stealing a hatchet. I have heard further that the former was impressed upon him by the action of a pretty and sensible girl "kicking" the speaker and taking instead a stupid vagabond. However, I mean to cast no personal reflections, upon Francis, sr., except upon his personal appearance. He was certainly the ugliest man in Abbeville or elsewhere, five feet four inches high, shaped like a barrel, with not a feature to plead in extenuation. He was not even intelligent in general or specially; and if he was a business man he had the poorest way of showing it in his own transactions; if he had ever known much, he had forgotten it in less time than any man I ever knew. He had but little confidence in anybody and less in himself. He was a lawyer's client and never moved without him; wouldn't sign a receipt for [___ ___] without the inspection and advice of his attorney. He was the [___ ____] man ever seen, and it was [____] inflection to be in close and constant proximity to him. Meeting him in the morning you had to shake [____] and tell him how you were and at ever encounter during the same day you had to stop and tell him how you were "by this time." [....]. But the point to reach is, that Miss Laurens, with fortune, fame and rank at her feet, waved them off and married little ugly Frank Henderson. This must have occured about the year 1800. They lived together about a year, during which time young Frank was born. [I suppose he was born in London and it was so understood in Abbeville, as I several times heard him say his vote was challenged at Cedar Springs in '30 or '32 for evidence that he was 'civilised.' The husband and wife spent the second year or a part of it, in Paris, and quarrelled and filed bills and cross-bills for divorce, with evidneces that looked ugly for both. I do not know whether the battle was in England , France or South Carolina; no dissolution of the marriage tie was granted but the child was awarded to the father, and also the trusteeship of the estate, the wife being allowed an annuity of $1800, and the balance of income divided between father and son. My understanding is, that the father placed his son in Scotland with his relatives and came himself to the United States to manage the estate, making his residence at Newport, R.I., where he again married and raised a family, spending the winter in Charleston and Abbevilles, leasing and renting the property. The wife remained in England and was living at an advanced age 26 or 28 years ago. Frank junior, was graduated at Edinburgh College and afterwards went through and graduated also at one of the first German colleges and travelled a year or two. He then came to Charleston and read law with Jas. L. Pettigrew, or another, and was admitted after a most brilliant examination and the highest hopes entertained of his. (This I learned from the lips of one who studied and was admitted with him.) But just at that seemingly propitious period, he learned of the existence of his mother, whom he he supposed had died at his birth, and with the message there came too much for his; his proud heart broke, and thought caring not for the bowl he sought refuge in it from thence until the grave closed him. When I first saw him in 1834 he appeared to be between 30 and 35 years of age, and had reached his quart per day; in 1840 he could 'run' it, and to the end there was no difficulty in disposing of it. He made Abbeville his home and never left it but three times that I remember - twice he spent the summers at Flat Rock, N.C., and about 1836 he went to Washington. His father was trying to get reimbursed for a large sum expended by the elder Laurens in aid of the first 'rebellion,' and supposed his presence would aid it. [...] Afterwards he weakened rapidly and required aid at the end of day sittings and on the 'quarter stretch' he had to read and drink mostly in bed. He went under in 1847. How a man could drink so much, so persistently and so long, is a puzzle. My explanation is this: he in the first place inherited a perfect physical development, strengthened by the school and college discipline in Europe and he was free from all irregularities or habits taxing the system until perhaps 27 years of age with the basis of a good constitution established; again he always ate his meals and slept; and drank only the purest spirits, and never before breakfast on an empty stomach. [...] NOTE BY THE EDITOR - Henry Laurens was President of the Continental Congress, and a merchant of Charleston and one of the most distinguished citizens of South Carolina, and being sent by the Revolutionary authorities on a mission to Holland was captured on the high seas by the Bris-ish and was required to spend a long time (four years) in the Tower of London, where he wrote his famous journal. Before the Revolutionary war broke out, he had sent his son John Laurens to London to complete his education. His father, Henry Laurens, had a partner in business in Lodnon by the mane of Manning with whom his son John lived whilst in London. An intimacy grew up between John and the daughter of Mr. Manning, which resulted in his marrying her, and as fame reports it, he never saw his wife after the marriage ceremony, but embarked that very day for Paris, where he was staying when the Revolutionary war broke out. As his father was being carried a captive to the Tower of London, John passed him at sea on his way to join the rebel army. He arrive and became an 'aid de camp' of Washington, and afterwards Lieutenant Colonel of Lee's Legion, after the resignation of Light Horse Harry, and in endeavouring to check a foraging party on the Cumbahee River in this State was killed - the very last man who fell in the Revolutionary war; and it had always been said that he sought his death. He was accomplished and gallant and for him our neighboring County, 'Laurens,' was named. In the mean time, the wife he had left, before she doffed the bridal attire, was delivered of a daughter, Frances Eleanor Laurens, who had a career as remarkable as any lady we ever read of in romance of story. We will not publish all we have heard of her but it connects with our subject, and we state she fell heir, during her life, to the famous Laurens Lands in Abbeville County under the will of her distinguished grandfather Henry Laurens, of which Dr Ramsay, the historian, was executor. She married one Francis Henderson, a Scotchman, then living in London, and said to have been a clerk in the Bank of England. They had one son, Francis Henderson, junior. The marriage was unhappy. W have heard much of one Sir Harry Vane Temple in this connection, but this deponent knows nothing of his own knowledge and therefore forbears to state any more. Suffice it to say that Francis Henderson, senior and his wife Frances Eleanor were divorced in London and by the articles of separation, the quondam husband Francis Henderson, had secured to him during his wife's life, the usufruct of the Laurens lands in Abbeville County and the Hampstead marshes near Charleston. The life of Mrs. Henderson was much prolonged - she lived to quite an old age - said to near a hundred - and died within the last few years. In order to look after these lands and collect his rents, Mr Henderson came to Abbeville and lived with a Scotchman then here, John McLaren. Afterwards he had his son Francis Henderson, junior with him, and these are the people of who our firend, the ex-Abbevillian writes so pleasantly.

‘Reminiscences of Abbeville’ in the Abbeville Press and Banner, 19 April 1876 [x]

Okay first of all this is all very interesting and I love learning about Frances. Secondly, I just wanted to address a few inaccuracies: the article says that John was the ‘only surviving child’ of Henry Laurens when Martha, Mary, Henry Jr and James were still alive so that’s not true. It also says that John left Martha on their wedding day when they got married October 26th 1776 and he left 2 months later on the 27th of December 1776 and Martha gave birth sometime in January 1777. Further regarding this subject it says that Martha gave birth right after the wedding which isn’t true at all, she gave birth 2/3 months later.

I love the fact that it says ‘a historical fact’ like we aren’t just making this up to feel sad reader, it really happened and as if all of this isn’t historical fact.

Frances died in 1860 at aged 83 so this article was done 16 years after her death.

#just thought I'd put the whole article up #this has a few inaccuracies though so take it with a pinch of salt #this article really hates John I think #Frances Francis and Francis #Frances Laurens #Francis Henderson Sr #Francis Henderson Jr #John Laurens #Henry Laurens

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occultspirits-blog · 5 years

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The final chapter in the sorrowful saga, The Salem Witch Trials.

Hi all and welcome to Spirit’s blog. Today is throwback Thursday, I will be finishing the history of the Salem Witch Trials. This is the final post on this topic, if you missed the other two be sure to read them first. Now without further ado, back to Salem we go.

The years is roughly 1693, many innocent citizens of Salem, MA have been accused, and given a trial. Some have been executed, and others imprisoned for “performing witchcraft” or being a witch. By this point town magistrates had started to arrest people a perform examinations on the spot.

In April of 1692 Sarah Cloyce, a 55 year old mother of 9, was accused of witchcraft. She was accused the day after sticking up for her sister, the sister was accused of witchcraft. At her sister’s trial Sarah was said to cry out in her defense, followed by slamming the church door. She was arrested and transferred to Boston prison, on charges of haunting Abigail Williams and Mary Walcott. Sarah had her charges dropped, on Jan. 3rd 1693, in the meantime both her sisters were executed. She spent her remaining years attempting to clear the names of her sisters.

Elizabeth Proctor was arrested and convicted of witchcraft in March of 1692. The reason for her accusation was for being a Quaker, the Puritans believed Quakers to have witch like tendencies. She was accused by Mercy Lewis, Lewis claimed her spirit came to torture her. On June 2nd a doctor performed an examination of Elizabeth, looking for birthmarks, moles, or any other physical anomaly believed to be sign of the craft. They found no marks on her. She was found guilty and sentenced to death on Aug. 5th 1692. She was given an extension on execution until after the baby she was expecting was born. While waiting for the arrival of her child, her husband John Proctor was executed, but petitions from neighboring towns, proved both their innocence. In May of 1693 the wife of the governor of Massachusetts was accused. This prompted the governor to free 156 prisoners, among them was Elizabeth Proctor.

The Hobbs family, mother Elizabeth, father William and daughter Abigail were all accused of witchcraft. The Hobbs were originally from Maine, in an area that was part of Native American territory. This prompted the accusations, Abigail was arrested and confessed to witchcraft and accused others of partaking with her, such as John Proctor. The parents of the Hobbs family maintained their innocence. All were released when the governor released 156 prisoners.

Once the governor’s wife, Lady Mary Phips, was accused. The governor William Phips sought the help of Increase Mather and his son Cotton. Both ministries found that aside from “spectral evidence”, there was no actual evidence against all those who had been imprisoned. “Spectral evidence” is the term for the girls having fits, or alleging that someone’s spirit attacked them. In response to these findings William Phips signed an order to stop further prosecution, accusations or suspicions of witchcraft in Salem. He also arranged for the freedom of 156 accused that were being held in Salem and Boston prisons. This was the end of the Salem Witch Trials.

In conclusion, the Salem Witch Trials, were the single most deadliest witch hunt in U.S. history. Over 200 people were accused, 19 were executed by hanging. One other Giles Corey, was pressed to death. All of this sparked by the lies of bored children. This was an absolute abomination, and one example of history, that proves people are more afraid of the unknown than they ever let on. So I leave you with this, fear is the only thing that holds us back from our true selves. Blessed be.

#occult #witchcraft #salem witch trials

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siodymph · 7 years

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Fiddlefest! Memories/Recovery

And here's week 2's prompt! This takes places during "Not What He Seems" when Fiddleford runs into the woods and finds the old bunker.

And just a reminder, I'm happy to take requests and I decided to change my cut off date from tomorrow to April 7th! (which is also when the Fiddlefest tumblr page will stop taking submissions as well.) So if you would like to, send any requests about Fiddleford my way!

And as usual, you can read the story under the cut or over on my AO3! Enjoy!

There were still some pretty gaping holes in his memory but Fiddleford felt confident that he’d never felt to utterly terrified in his life. He sprinted through the woods like a mad man. Everything he owned and cared for was slung over one shoulder in a burlap sack and anything else he couldn’t carry with him had been left behind in the junkyard. Now his only objective was finding safety. Somewhere to hide. Somewhere he could think straight and find a solution to avoid the horrible oncoming destruction.

The only thing that terrified him more was the thought of what if he hadn’t fixed his laptop in time. What if he’d kept living in complete ignorance, unaware of the evil about to shake the earth, if he’d hadn’t realized just how close the end times where until it was far too late.

But he hadn’t. He had to keep reminding himself that. He had remembered how to fix his laptop, he found all his information on the gravity anomalies, and most importantly he’d found the countdown to the next colossal anomaly. It would be strong enough to lift up the entire town.

Gravity would fall. Earth would become sky.

Fiddle shook his head as he ran, as if it could dislodge the strange lines going through his mind. He still had no ties to where the words came from, but the words themselves had become a solid, defined memory themselves. But they kept repeating, over and over. A mantra. It was like he’d been branded by the words once he recalled them.

When gravity falls and earth becomes sky, fear the beast with just one eye. When gravity falls and earth becomes sky fear the beast with just one eye. When gravity falls and earth becomes sky fear the beast with just one eye… gravity will fall… the beast will rise…

The words made him ache in his chest. But he still needed to run. It wasn’t too late… It couldn’t be.

He’d been running for a while now he feared when he began he would get lost in the woods but it seemed like his feet were moving on their own. He didn’t consciously know where he was going yet but his body seemed to regain some sort of muscle memory? Or maybe an instinct? Either way something started going off in the back his mind saying he was almost there, wherever there was.

He wanted to keep going but his lungs felt like they were on fire and his legs felt tighter than iron coils. He needed to stop, just for a little bit to catch his breath again then he could be off. So gently setting his sack down so he didn’t hurt the missus and fell back against a tree. Only it didn’t make an ordinary sound. It made a metallic clunk.

That weird feeling in his chest stayed there as he spun around. The… thing he was leaning up again certainly looked like a normal, organic tree. But then he rapt his knuckles against it and there was that metal bang again. And all at once he felt slapped in the face with déjà vu.

He’d done this before. He’d done this hundreds of times before. He knew he did. It was coming back, he could see his hands, young hands, knock on the tree, opening a door on it. He could see himself welding and painting and crafting detailed ridges into the metal.

Oh my, he’d made this tree. Didn’t he?

There was such a familiarity about the thing. He knew he must have.

He drew his fingers all across the tree frame until he found a crease, and forcing his nails under he pulled at the crease and sure enough the creases were from a door and the whole thing finally opened. Inside was a dusty looking panel of buttons, dials and small levers.

No… none of these were right. He needed to find something… He remembered a bigger lever, something that took his whole body to yank to the side. He closed his eyes to concentrate more, will the faint memories he was picking back up to stay. The lever was definitely larger, and heavier. He had to use a whole lot of his upper arm strength from his childhood on the farm to move it. Wait no, that wasn’t right either.

Fiddleford groaned and slammed the metal tree door shut. Dagnabit! How was he supposed to figure out this stupid thing if he couldn’t even remember which lever and switch was which!

He forced himself to step away from the tree. Getting mad and throwing a fit wouldn’t help him get back his memories. And he didn’t have time to waste!

Taking a deep breath and closing his eyes Fiddleford tried to recall the lever. Maybe if he couldn’t remember what it looked like exactly, he could try thinking of things around the lever. What had his other senses picked up way back when? The smell had been the woods, that was for certain. That rich dirt smell and strongly of pine. Not the musty stench from that inner compartment in the tree. Though maybe way back when he first built this thing, it didn’t have that must. He could feel that textured metal frame under his hands. And sunlight peeking through the trees fell onto his shoulders. So the lever had been outside the tree. He walked fully around the tree but he couldn’t see anything else suspicious or lever like.

He closed his eyes and thought over it again. It had been warm… And when he simply felt the air around him now, there was a slight chill about him. The woods, could darken easily the sun had to fight his way through the canopy of trees.

So maybe this lever was higher up.

He looked up towards the branches and there he saw it. About 3/4th up the trunk there was one branch that sprout out a little below all the other branches. Only it didn’t look like it had sprouted, not natural at all. It was the same coloring as the metal panel too. And he knew he just found his lever.

But how to reach it? Maybe he something in his sack he could use.

He turned to go grab his bag when he realized it was a lot less full now. And when he pulled it open and looked inside his raccoon wife was gone.

He whipped his head around, scanning about the woods but he couldn’t find her.

“Gertrude?! Come on Gerdy-girl, where’d you run off to?” He shouted out into the woods. Had that been her name? He wasn’t sure he ever settle on one actually, now that he thought about it more. He started calling out other names to see if he’d get a response. “Fifi! Uhhh, Tilda? Kennedy!?... Jheselbraum!?”

Still no answer. Fiddleford felt worried but he reminded himself that his lil’ Suzy was a wild woman, she’d be alright on her own. But even then Fiddleford decided to leave out some of his scraps of sandwich meat and blackberries for her just in case she did stop by.

He still had this puzzle to figure out and looked back through his hastily packed bag. He didn’t see any rope, no grappling hook, not even wire. Fiddleford stroked his beard in thought. From outward appearance none of his stuff looked like any sort of climbing equipment but perhaps he could make something from the materials he did have. He was first drawn to the burlap sack itself and dumped all his stuff out of it and onto the ground. He could coil up the burlap, it was sturdy material. He’d been real happy when he found it first, he had it for a few years now and still hadn’t lost its durability yet. It wouldn’t be long enough for a rope, but maybe he could use it as a belt.

He found some old clips that could help fasten the burlap belt to his overalls, and he added a little bit of the lard he’d been saving to the other side of the belt that would be rubbing up and down the tree so it moved easily. Rubbing the grease of his fingers and readjusting his overalls one last time, he began his upwards climb up the tree.

On his way up he’d begin getting these brief little snippets of memories. Climbing up trees in an orchard with all his cousins and siblings. God, that must have been ages ago. He hadn’t talked to any of them in so long. They were picking fruit for… for Old Lady… Old Lady something. Darn, he couldn’t remember her name. But he remember her orchard, her warble but kind voice thanking them for helping her out. And he remember her homemade jam she give out to everyone during the holiday season. Her jams tasted great on anything and everything. Bread, biscuits, muffins, meatloaf, pork chops. His ma even used the old lady’s jams as a sweetener for her slow-cooked baked beans a few times as little family experiments. The apple jam beans had been Fiddleford’s favorite, sweet but then still tasted great combined with gravy, and the smoke and-

Fiddleford stopped himself in shock. He… he could actually truly remember his childhood on the farm. The house… the barn… All the animals and little critters… His family. It was actually coming back to him. It was slow, but it was truly happening. He was remembering. It hadn’t all been lost forever like he feared.

He felt like he about to cry when he realized he was still rather high off the ground now. And a fall at the height would be rather nasty, on top of that there wouldn’t be anyone around for miles so he really ought to be more careful. So keeping his breathing in order he continued making his way up the tree to the strange tree-lever.

The closer he got the more embarrassingly clear it became that the thing was fake. No branch would start growing out this low on a full grown tree. Luckily though it was so small and inconspicuous only someone who’s been around trees their whole life would have even noticed such an out-of-place thing like a tiny tree branch. Still though he had to give the young him credit for his craftsman ship, the twists and knots and false leaves had been carefully made with a patient hand and lots of hard-work. And when Fiddleford grabbed the lever and shoved it down, there was a bit of resist before the thing finally clanked down. Not too bad for over 30 years without use.

As soon as the lever went down the whole tree began to quake and shake. Wrapping his legs as snug as he could manage and pulling his belt taunt, he slid down the tree. He could hear a phantom memory in the back of his mind. A man calling for him to hurry down, strong arms helping pull him up when he tumbled onto the ground and away from the sinking tree.

When he hit the ground he pulled himself up and scrambled away from the tree instinctively. And he counted his lucky stars he had because as soon as he stepped away from the thing, the ground around the tree sunk down quickly, and stairs pooped out from the trunk spiraling down. That could of hurt landing on those stairs.

It was strange watching the secret path reveal himself. All at once he was seeing happen now and yet he also could see it from years ago, exactly the same. This had truly been one of his great projects, a secret that hid near-perfectly in plain sight.

What that secret was he still wasn’t quite sure. But as he undid his homemade climbing belt and repacked his sack he could feel he was about to make some great leaps in recovering his memories. And with each step he took, down, down into this secret metal tree thing, he kept courage alive in his heart that things weren’t hopeless. He could do this. He could stop the oncoming destruction. He could protect the Pine’s kids. And he could find himself again too.

#fiddleford appreciation month #fiddlefest #marchgucket #fiddleford h. mcgucket #week 2

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olive-the12thapostle · 8 years

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The Doctor: a Lobotomy Corporation fanfic, Chapter 1

It was an average day for you, at your job at Lobotomy Corp. It had decent pay and you were quickly moving up the ranks of the staff who had direct interaction with the anomalies. Today your assignments included feeding Spider Bud and providing violence work to Beauty and the Beast, you had been warned by other employees to not take the violence too far as according to rumour employees who hurt it too much tend to just disappear in the chamber.

But a new alert had come in quite unexpectedly as you left Beauty and the Beasts chamber, you had been slightly injured by it, a deep scratch on your forehead from one of its horns. You had been instructed to provide cleaning to a new anomaly, you were not sure how it got hear but you do know that your the first one to interact with it. “Great I’m getting sent into an anomaly’s chamber blind and injured” you thought to your self, sometimes management was truly stupid.

You walked down shiny corridors until you reached a new room, the dust had barley settled on the key card scanner. Your pale hand reaches out, swiping your card causes the door breath, a whoosh of fresh air gushes past your smaller frame. You finally see the anomaly for the first time, large black wings for arms and a bird like mask made it look like a medieval plague doctor, it also wore a hat similar to ones from the black death period. You where just going to call it the Plague Doctor for now, it will be much easier to remember than its current on file name.

You start to clean the cage, not paying attention to the Plague Doctor, you don’t notice how it’s staring at your head. It suddenly moves forward, first you flinch back but stop when it gently brushes it wing against your face, it is supprisingly soft and warm. You could almost swear that room lights where starting to change.

The Plague doctor stares down at you, its beak lowered towards your face, large wings move to your sides as the urge to lean in increases. You blush feeling the heat radiating of the bird-like anomaly, the doctor swoops down its beak colliding with your face, in a way this could be kiss, large dark wings shelter from the eyes of the manager.

You feel enlightened now, like a new being thanks to the doctor. The pain from your legs is gone along with the stress of the working day. Looking up you think that there is a slight difference with the doctors feather, is there more or are few a different colour? You’re about to have a closer look when a new assignment comes in, to clean Beauty and the Beast’s containment chamber, when the alarm sounds. “Red Shoes has breached containment!” the administrator called out, using the intercom system. You have no orders to help contain Red shoes so you stay where you are, near the Doctor cell.

Your dreams become stranger to say the least, starting out blurry and unfocused at first then, in the coming days, they bloom into perfect photo, life like to the smallest detail. Work was featured in most of them, but the Doctor was out of its cell and it would great you like you where it’s child or worshipper. You often awoke dazed and confused when these dreams started.

Days pass since your encounter with the Plague Doctor, another employee was also kissed by the doctor, you recall her name being April, and apparently she had also been given the feeling of enlightenment, just like you. You’re starting to suspect that the Doctor is some kind of divine being, giving it kindness and its power to heal for free. Only a selfless divine being would cure the sick and injured for nothing in return. You decided to seek April out, to see if she shares the same views and ideas as you.

Walking down the grey corridors you approach the common room, surely April would be there; it was before the work day started. You have to ask around a bit to find her until your direct by another employee to a short, brown hair lady with olive skin, her black uniform bringing out her hazel eyes. Walking to the other side of the room you start to talk with her, “Hi there, I haven’t seen you around here before, are you new?” you ask her politely. She blushes slightly, then she says “I have only been working at this facility for a week, my name is April, what is yours?”, bluntly you reply, “It’s Martin,” you shift your blue eyes around the room thinking of a way to talk about the plague doctor, without drawing suspicion.

Both of you talk about the company, but then you drop hints about the Plague Doctor, asking April if she had seen it yet. April becomes quite, then excuses herself from the room, but as she left she beckoned for you to come with her.

April stops half way down the corridor and she turns and looks at you, “have you also received his kiss?” April asked keeping her voice quite, you answer quickly before anyone else comes, “yes, do you feel different after it?” April nods just as the work bell rung, everyone’s shift had started. You promised to visit April to talk about the issue in private after your shift.

#fanfiction #its no longer a draft!#lobotomy corporation

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years

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This Company Will Point Satellites at Earth and Use them to Look for UFOs

Nearly 4,000 light-years away, there’s a star called VY Canis Majoris. It is, in a word, huge. It’s 270,000 times as bright as the Sun, and if you plunked it down in the middle of our solar system, it would burn Saturn.

VY Canis Majoris is a hypergiant star. And perhaps it is no surprise that there’s a tech startup humbly eponymizing it: Hypergiant Industries, a company that aims, its website explains, to be “the guiding light that solves humanity’s most challenging problems.”

The company uses AI in a few different industries: It’s developed the Disaster Mapping System, geospatial software that picks out the hardest-hit buildings after a natural disaster using satellite and drone images, available open-source through an AI platform called Modzy. It’s also created a prototype augmented reality helmet which can detect and classify objects, and offers night vision and thermal imaging in addition to regular seeing. And it’s built a fridge-sized bioreactor prototype that uses AI to regulate things like air flow, light, temperature, and pH so that algae can sequester carbon dioxide and turn it into materials for biofuel. Oh, and it’s built kinda boring workflow efficiency software for companies like GE and Shell, plus a “Virtual Bartender” for TGI Fridays.

Hypergiant was founded just two years ago, in 2018, but the company has already worked with the likes of Booz Allen Hamilton, Shell, NASA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Department of Homeland Security. The company spun up so quickly in part because it didn’t just build from scratch. It fused already-extant elements: buying image-analysis companies, investing in AI developers, and scooping up space technology, in the service of delivering on its slogan: “Tomorrowing today.”

That all sounds pretty legit: Serious government agencies, serious firms, serious fortune, and Fortune 500. And that clout is probably part of why Hypergiant’s R&D division can, without risking too much blowback, now take a risk on something farther-out: UFO research. This may actually be more grounded, and profitable, than it sounds.

Hypergiant was founded by CEO Ben Lamm, a serial entrepreneur who sold his previous companies to big names like Zynga and Accenture. This company, though, he intends to hang on to.

Once Lamm decided he wanted to start Hypergiant, he said in an interview, he and his team started brainstorming where AI could still make a big difference. They settled on three main areas: infrastructure, like supply chains and logistics; defense; and space.

On the list of those projects on the company’s website, though, the new UFO endeavor isn’t listed. The company’s website does list some projects as “redacted,” however.

But Lamm does talk about UFOs, though he calls them UAP: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. It’s the term insiders and the government have introduced to ditch the baggage that the decades-old “UFO” has amassed. If you look at the intersections Hypergiant’s three main interests, says Lamm, “UAPs are the X at the cross center.”

He’s interested in finding out whether those UAP come from here, or out there. “The question of whether we’re alone in the universe is kind of like ‘Is the Earth flat?’” he says (“no” being the answer to both, in his mind).

The US government has recently vocalized its interest in UFOs: the Navy has crafted new guidelines for soldiers to report sightings; Congresspeople have gotten classified briefings; officials speak of strange stuff in the sky as an imposing national-security threat.

Notably, there’s no evidence that directly supports the interpretation that UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin. In fact, signs point in a different direction: the Navy has said that UAP sightings are on the rise “consistent with the wide proliferation and availability of inexpensive unmanned aerial systems,” which are just cheap drones. Military definitions of “UAP” include objects that are simply unauthorized, not necessarily unidentified.

Lamm accepts that the phenomena might just be earthly technology, and he wants Hypergiant to help find whatever truth is out there.

“If this is a brilliant lady and guy who build insane technology in a garage in Iowa, we should know about that,” he says. “Regardless of what the UAP is and whether it has a terrestrial origin or not, I think it’s important for people’s safety.”

Hypergiant’s research trajectory homes in on exactly what UAP investigators have never nabbed: hard data collected in a systematic way. In this case, data largely from Earth-watching satellites.

The company plans to scrutinize that data with software it’s developing called CONTACT: Contextually Organized Non Terrestrial Active Capture Tool. Although it’s still in early stages, it will, the company hopes, burrito together adapted versions of Hypergiant’s existing tools, like the Disaster Mapping System, and new ones, to parse orbital and aerial images in search of Anomalies.

In its future final form, CONTACT will analyze 3-dimensional satellite data. Or ”volumetric” information, that reveals not just where a craft is in terms of its latitude, longitude, and altitude. CONTACT will spot the differences between satellite images and throw up a flag if, say, a mothership flies into a field of view at noon when it wasn’t there yesterday, and then determine whether it’s actually just a jet at a weird angle.

For that task, the team is developing a neural network that can recognize known aircraft. “This is xyz helicopter,” says Lamm. “This is xyz Raptor. This is a Boeing 737.” Those go in the digital trash.

To help train these aircraft-spotting algorithms, Hypergiant is creating a siphon that sucks up public information about creepy sky sightings that people think are unidentified and tags them with locations and times. The software will then dive into satellite and drone archives, gather images of the right regions and hours, and use computer vision to find fliers. After comparing whatever it finds against known airline flight paths, and screening out all the Boeings, the researchers will use what’s left as training data, to help AI identify UAP in future observations.

Hypergiant positions CONTACT as a way to investigate cosmic mysteries: to toss out terrestrial knowns in search of possible extraterrestrial unknowns. But the tool would be equally adept at identifying terrestrial unknowns: experimental drones, and advanced military aircraft tests, for example. Because of this, Lamm believes that CONTACT would be of keen interest to officials with extremely earthly concerns. “It’s highly valuable to big defense contractors, the Air Force, radar operators,” says Lamm.

If things go well, which they often don’t in space, Hypergiant engineers will start gathering their own data. On a rocket scheduled to launch in March, Hypergiant will send up its first instrument that can take 3-D observations, in the form of a payload piggybacked on a larger satellite. Data should start to rain down in April or May.

Assuming that works, the first satellite of Lamm’s 30+ orbiter constellation will go up in the fall, on the Cygnus NG-14 and SpaceX SpX-21 missions. And then, presumably, the other 29 or so. And then, perhaps, the startup will data that will illuminate what we talk about when we talk about UAP, UFOs, or whatever acronyms someone comes up with later. To see whether or not all of that happens, we’ll have to wait till today becomes tomorrow.

This Company Will Point Satellites at Earth and Use them to Look for UFOs syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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glittership · 5 years

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Episode #73 — "Désiré" by Megan Arkenberg

Direct download here.

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 73 is part of the Autumn 2018 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/

Désiré by Megan Arkenberg

From Albert Magazine’s interview with Egon Rowley: April 2943

Egon Rowley: It was the War that changed him. I remember the day we knew it. [A pause.] We all knew it, that morning. He came to our table in the coffee shop with a copy of Raum – do you remember that newspaper? The reviewers were deaf as blue-eyed cats, the only people in Südlichesburg who preferred Anton Fulke’s operas to Désiré’s – but Désiré, he had a copy of it. This was two days after Ulmerfeld, you understand. None of us had any idea how bad it was. But Raum had gotten its hands on a letter from a soldier, and Désiré read it to us, out loud, right there over coffee and pastries.

[Full story after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 73 for June 13, 2019. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story for today is Desire by Megan Arkenberg, read by Dani Daly.

Before we get to it, if you’ve been waiting to pick up your copy of the Tiptree Award Honor Listed book, GlitterShip Year Two, there’s a great deal going on for Pride over at StoryBundle. GlitterShip Year Two is part of a Pride month LGBTQ fantasy fiction bundle. StoryBundle is a pay-what-you-want bundle site. For $5 or more, you can get four great books, and for $15 or more, you’ll get an additional five books, including GlitterShip Year Two, and a story game. That comes to as little as $1.50 per book or game. The StoryBundle also offers an option to give 10% of your purchase amount to charity. The charity for this bundle is Rainbow Railroad, a charity that helps queer folks get to a safe place if their country is no longer safe for them.

http://www.storybundle.com/pride

And now for “Desire” by Megan Arkenberg, read by Dani Daly.

Megan Arkenberg’s work has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies, including Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Shimmer, and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. She has edited the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance since 2008 and was recently the nonfiction editor for Queers Destroy Horror!, a special issue of Nightmare Magazine. She currently lives in Northern California, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature. Visit her online at http://www.meganarkenberg.com.

Dani loves to keep busy and narrating stories is just one of the things she loves to do. She’s a former assistant editor of Cast of Wonders, a retired roller derby player and current soap maker and small business owner. She rants on twitter as @danooli_dani, if that’s your thing. Or you can visit the EA forums, where she moderates the Cast of Wonders boards. You can find stories narrated by Dani on all four of the Escape Artists podcasts, at Star Ship Sofa, and on Audible.com (as Danielle Daly).

Désiré by Megan Arkenberg

From Albert Magazine’s interview with Egon Rowley: April 2943

Albert Magazine: And what did the letter say?

Rowley: The usual things. Blood and, and heads blown clean off, things like that. Horrible things. I remember…[Laughs awkwardly.] I remember Baptist Vogel covered his ears. We all felt it quite badly.

AM: I imagine. Why was this letter so important to Désiré?

Rowley: Who can say why anything mattered to him? Guilt, most likely.

AM: Guilt?

Rowley: Yes. He hadn’t volunteered for the army, and that was something of an anomaly in those days. Everyone was so patriotic, so nationalist, I suppose you’d say. But he had his reasons. I mean, I don’t suppose Désiré could have passed the examinations for enlistment – the psychological examinations.

AM: But it bothered him, that he hadn’t volunteered?

Rowley: Yes. Very much. [A pause.] When he read that soldier’s letter…it was the oddest thing. Like he was reading a love letter, you understand. But, like I said, there was nothing romantic in it, nothing at all. It was…horrible.

AM: What did Désiré say about it?

Rowley: About the letter? Nothing. He just read it and…and went back to his rooms, I suppose. That was the last we saw of him.

AM: The last you saw of him?

Rowley: Yes. [A pause.] Before Alexander.

A letter from Margaret von Banks to Beatrix Altberg: August 2892

Dearest Bea,

The scene: Leonore’s drawing room, around nine o’clock last night. The moment I stepped through the door, Désiré came running up to me like a child looking for candy. “Thank goodness you’re here,” he said. I should add that it was supposed to be a masquerade, but of course I knew him by his long hair and those dark red lips, and I suppose I’m the only woman in Südlichesburg to wear four rings in each ear. He certainly knew me immediately. “I have a bet running with Isidor,” he continued, “and Anton and I need you for the violin.”

He explained, as he half-led, half-dragged me to the music room, that Anton had said something disparaging – typically – about Isidor’s skills as a conductor of Désiré’s music. Isidor swore to prove him wrong if Désiré would write them a new piece that very moment. Désiré did – a trio for violin, cello and pianoforte – and having passed the cello to Anton and claimed the piano for himself, he needed me to play violin in the impromptu concert.

“You’re mad,” I said on seeing the sheet music.

“Of course I am,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. Isidor thundered into the room – they make such a delightful contrast, big blond Isidor and dark Désiré. Rumor is Désiré has native blood from the Lysterrestre colonies, which makes me wonder quite shallowly if they’re all so handsome over there. Yes, Bea, I imagine you rolling your eyes, but the fact remains that Désiré is ridiculously beautiful. Even Richard admits it.

Well, Isidor assembled the audience, and my hands were so sweaty that I had to borrow a pair of gloves from Leonore later in the evening. Désiré was smooth and calm as can be. He kissed me on the forehead – and Anton on the cheek, to everyone’s amusement but Anton’s – and then Isidor was rapping the music stand for our attention, and Désiré played the opening notes, and we were off, hurtling like a sled down a hill. I wish I had the slightest clue what we were playing, Bea, but I haven’t. The audience loved it, at any rate.

That’s Désiré for you – mad as springtime, smooth as ice and clumsy as walking on it. We tease him, saying he’s lucky he doesn’t wear a dress, he trips over the ladies’ skirts so often. But then he apologizes so wonderfully, I’ve half a mind to trip him on purpose. That clumsiness vanishes when he’s playing, though; his fingers on a violin are quick and precise. Either that, or he fits his mistakes into the music so naturally that we don’t notice them.

You really ought to meet him, Bea. He has exactly your sense of humor. A few weeks ago, Richard and I were at the Symphony, and Désiré joined us in our box, quite unexpectedly. Richard, who was blushing and awkward as it was, tried to talk music with Désiré. “This seems to tell a story, doesn’t it?” he said.

“It most certainly does,” Désiré said. “Like Margaret’s uncle Kunibert. It starts with something fascinating, then derails itself talking about buttons and waistcoats. If we’re lucky, it might work its way back to its original point. Most likely it will put us to sleep until someone rudely disturbs us by applauding.”

All this said with the most perfectly straight face, and a bit of an eyebrow raise at me, inviting me to disagree with him. I never do, but it’s that invitation that disarms me, and keeps the teasing from becoming cruel. Désiré always waits to be proven wrong, though he never is.

I should warn you not to fall in love with him, though. I’m sure you laugh, but half of Südlichesburg is ready to serve him its hearts on a platter, and I know he’d just smile and never take a taste. He’s a man for whom Leonore’s masquerades mean nothing; he’s so wonderfully full of himself, he has no room to pretend to be anyone else.

That’s not to say he’s cruel: merely heartless. He’s like a ruby, clear and dark and beautiful to look at, but hard to the core. How such a man can write such music, I’ll never know.

Yours always,

Maggie

III. From a review of Désiré’s Echidna in Der Sentinel: July 2894

For the life of me, I cannot say what this opera is about. Love, and courage. A tempestuous battle. I have the libretto somewhere, in a drawer with my gloves and opera glasses, but I will not spoil Désiré’s score by putting a story to it. Echidna is music, pure music, so pure it breaks the heart.

First come the strings, quietly humming. Andrea Profeta enters the stage. The drums begin, loud, savage. Then the melody, swelling until you feel yourself lifted from your chair, from your body, and you are only a web of sensations; your heart straining against the music, your blood singing in your fingertips. Just remembering it, I feel my fingers go weak. How the orchestra can bear to play it, I can’t imagine.

It is not Echidna but the music that is the hero. We desire, like the heroine, to be worthy of it. We desire to live in such a way that our world may deserve to hold something so pure, so strong, so achingly beautiful within it.

From the Introduction of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele: 2934

Societies are defined by the men they hate. It is the revenge of an exile that he carries his country to all the world, and to the world his countrymen are merely a reflection of him. An age is defined not by the men who lived in it, but by the ones who lived ahead of it.

Hate smolders. Nightmares stay with us. But love fades, love is fickle. Désiré’s tragedy is that he was loved.

From Albert Magazine’s interview with Egon Rowley

AM: And what about his vices?

Rowley: Désiré’s vices? He didn’t have any. [Laughs.] He certainly wasn’t vicious.

AM: Vicious?

Rowley: That’s what the papers called it. He liked to play games, play his friends and admirers against each other.

AM: Like the ladies.

Rowley: Yes. That was all a game to him. He’d wear…favors, I suppose you’d call them, like a knight at a joust. He admired Margaret von Bank’s earrings at the opening of Echidna, and she gave him one to wear through the performance. After that the ladies were always fighting to give him earrings.

AM: To your knowledge, was Désiré ever in love?

Rowley: Never. [A pause.] I remember one day – summer of 2896, it must have been – a group of us went walking in Brecht’s park. Désiré, Anton Fulke, the newspaperman Richard Stele, the orchestra conductor Isidor Ursler, and myself. It was Sonntag afternoon, and all the aristocrats were riding by in their fine clothes and carriages. A sort of weekly parade, for us simple peasants. You don’t see sights like that anymore.

[A long pause.] Anyway, Désiré was being himself, joking with us and flirting with the aristocrats. Or the other way around, it was never easy to tell. Isolde von Bisswurm, who was married to a Grand Duke at the time, slowed her carriage as she passed us and called… something unrepeatable down to Désiré.

AM: Unrepeatable?

Rowley: Oh, I’m sure it’s no more than half the respectable women in Südlichesburg were thinking. Désiré just laughed and leapt up into her carriage. She whispered something in his ear. And then he kissed her, right there in front of everyone – her, a married woman and a Grand Duchess.

AM: [With humor.] Scandalous.

Rowley: It was, in those days. We were all – Fulke and Ursler and Stele and I – we were all horrified. But the thing I’m thinking of, when you ask me if he was ever in love with anyone, that happened afterward. When he jumped down from Isolde’s carriage, he was smiling like a boy with a lax governess, and he looked so… I suppose you might say beautiful. But in a moment the look was gone. He caught sight of the man in the next carriage: von Arden, von Allen, something like that. Tall man, very dark, not entirely unlike Désiré, though it was very clear which of the two was better favored.

AM: Not von Arden.

Rowley: [Laughs.] Oh, no. Maggie von Banks used to call Désiré her angel, and he could have passed for one, but von what’s-his-face was very much a man. Désiré didn’t seem to notice. He stood there on the path in Brecht’s park, staring like… well, like one of those girls who flocked to his operas.

AM: Staring at this man?

Rowley: Yes. And after kissing Isolde von Bisswurm, who let me tell you was quite the lovely lady in those days. [Laughs softly.] Whoever would have suspected Désiré of bad taste? But that was his way, I suppose.

AM: What was his way? [Prompting:] Did you ever suspect Désiré of unnatural desires?

Rowley: No, never. No desire in him could be unnatural.

From the pages of Der Sentinel: May 15, 2897

At dawn on May 14, the composer Désiré was joined by Royal Opera conductor Isidor Ursler and over fifty representatives of the Südlichesburg music ‘scene’ to break ground in Umerfeld, two miles south of the city, for Désiré’s ambitious new opera house.

The plans for Galatea – which Désiré cheerfully warns the public are liable to change – show a stage the size of a race track, half a mile of lighting catwalks, and no less than four labyrinthine sub-basements for prop and scenery storage. For a first foray into architecture, Désiré’s design shows several highly ambitious features, including three-storey lobby and central rotunda. The rehearsal rooms will face onto a garden, Désiré says, featuring a miniature forest and a wading pool teeming with fish. When asked why this is necessary, he replied with characteristic ‘charm’: “It isn’t. Art isn’t about what is necessary. Art decides what is necessary.”

VII. From a review of Désiré’s Brunhilde in Der Sentinel: February 2899

For once, the most talked-about thing at the opera was not Désiré’s choice of jewel but his choice of setting. Südlichesburg’s public has loved Galatea from the moment we saw her emerging from the green marble in Ulmerfeld, and, at last, she has come alive and repaid our devotion with an embrace. At last, said more than one operagoer at last night’s premier of Brunhilde, Désiré’s music has a setting worthy of it.

Of course Galatea is not Désiré’s gift to Südlichesburg, but a gift to himself. The plush-and-velvet comfort of the auditorium is designed first and foremost to echo the swells of his music, and the marble statues in the lobby are not pandering to their aristocratic models but suggestions to the audience of what it is about to witness; beauty, dignity, power. However we grovel at the feet of Désiré the composer, we must also bow to Désiré the consummate showman.

As to the jewel in this magnificent setting, let us not pretend that anyone will be content with the word of Richard Stele, operagoer. Everyone in Südlichesburg will see Brunhilde, and all will love it. The only question is if they will love it as much as Désiré clearly loves his Galatea.

Finally, as a courtesy to the ladies and interested gentlemen, Désiré’s choice of jewel for last night’s performance came from the lovely Beatrix Altberg. He wore her pearl-and-garnet string around his left wrist, and it could be seen sparkling in the houselights as he stood at the end of each act and applauded wildly.

VIII. From Albert Magazine’s interview with Egon Rowley

AM: They say that Désiré’s real decline began with Galatea.

Rowley: Whoever “they” are. [Haltingly:] 2899, it was finished. I remember because that was the year Vande Frust opened her office in Südlichesburg. She was an odd one, Dr. Frust – but brilliant, I’ll give her that.

AM: Désiré made an appointment with Dr. Frust that June.

Rowley: Yes. I don’t know what they talked about, though. Désiré never said.

AM: But you can guess, yes?

Rowley: Knowing Dr. Frust, I can guess.

AM: [A long pause.] As a courtesy to our readers who haven’t read Vande Frust’s work, could you please explain?

Rowley: She was fascinated by origins. Of course she didn’t mean that the same way everyone else does – didn’t give half a pence for your parents, did Vande Frust. She had a bit of… a bit of a fixation with how you were educated. How you formed your Ideals – your passions, your values. What books you read, whose music you played, that sort of thing.

AM: And how do you suppose Désiré formed his Ideals?

Rowley: I don’t know. As I said, whatever Désiré discussed with Dr. Frust, he never told me. And he never went back to her.

From Chapter Eight of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele

Whether or not Désiré suffered a psychological breakdown during the building of Galatea is largely a matter of conjecture. He failed to produce any significant piece of music in 2897 or the year after. Brunhilde, which premiered at the grand opening of Galatea in 2899, is generally acknowledged to be one of his weakest works.

But any concrete evidence of psychological disturbance is nearly impossible to find. We know he met with famed Dr. Vende Frust in June 2899, but we have no records of what he said there. The details of an encounter with the law in February 2900 are equally sketchy.

Elise Koch, Dr. Frust’s maid in 2899, offers an odd story about the aftermath of Désiré’s appointment. She claims to have found a strange garment in Dr. Frust’s office, a small and shapeless black dress of the sort women prisoners wear in Lysterre and its colonies. Unfortunately for the curious, Dr. Frust demanded that the thing be burned in her fireplace, and its significance to Désiré is still not understood.

From the report of Hans Frei, prostitute: February 12, 2900

Mr. Frei, nineteen years old, claims a man matching the description of the composer Désiré approached him near Rosen Platz late at night last Donnerstag. The man asked the price, which Mr. Frei gave him, and then offered twice that amount if Mr. Frei would accompany him to rooms “somewhere in the south” of Südlichesburg. Once in the rooms, Mr. Frei says the man sat beside him by the window and proceeded to cry into his shoulder. “He didn’t hurt me none,” Mr. Frei says. “Didn’t touch me, as a matter of fact. I felt sorry for him, he seemed like such a mess.”

No charges are being considered, as the man cannot properly be said to have contracted a prostitute for immoral purposes. The composer Désiré’s housekeeper and staff could not be found to comment on the incident. One neighbor, a Miss Benjamin, whose nerves make her particularly susceptible to any irregularity, claims that on the night of last Donnerstag, her sleep was disturbed by a lamp kept burning in her neighbor’s foyer. Such a lamp, she states, is usually maintained by Désiré’s staff until the small hours, and extinguished upon his homecoming. She assumes that the persistence of this light on Donnerstag indicates that Désiré did not return home on the night in question.

From a review of Désiré’s Hieronymus in Der Sentinel: December 2902

Any man who claims to have sat through Désiré’s Hieronymus with a dry eye and handkerchief is either deaf or a damned liar. Personally, I hope he is the damned liar, as it would be infinitely more tragic if he missed Désiré’s deep and tangled melodies. Be warned: Hieronymus bleeds, and the blood will be very hard to wash out of our consciousness.

XII. A letter from Margaret von Banks Stele to Beatrix Altberg: March 2903

Dearest Bea,

Richard says war is inevitable. His job with the newspapers lets him know these things, I suppose: he says Kaspar in the foreign relations room is trying to map Lysterrestre alliances with string and cards on the walls, and now he’s run completely out of walls. That doesn’t begin to include the colonies.

The way Richard talks about it, it sounds like a ball game. Bea, he jokes about placing bets on who will invade whom – as if it doesn’t matter any more than a day at the races! I know he doesn’t need to worry, that at worst the papers will send him out with a notepad and a pencil and set him scribbling. The Stele name still has some pull, after all – if he wants to make use of it.

I don’t, Beatrix. If war breaks out with Lysterre, I want you to know that I am going to enlist.

Yours, Margaret Stele

XIII. From Chapter Eleven of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele

It was inevitable that the War should to some extent be Désiré’s. It was the natural result of men like him, in a world he had helped create. Dr. Vande Frust would say it was the result of our Ideals, and that Désiré had wrought those Ideals for us. I think Désiré would agree.

We – all of us, the artists and the critics with the aristocrats and cavalrymen – might meet in a coffee shop for breakfast one morning and lay some plans for dinner. The cavalrymen would ride off, perhaps as little as ten miles from Südlichesburg, where the Lysterrestre troops were gathered. There would be a skirmish, and more often than not an empty place at the supper table. Désiré took to marking these places with a spring of courtesan’s lace: that, too, was a part of his Ideal.

In this war, in our war, there was a strange sense of decorum. This was more than a battle of armies for us, the artists. Hadn’t Lysterrestre audiences applauded and wept at our music as much as our own countrymen? The woman whose earring Désiré had worn one night at the opera might be the same one who set fire to his beloved Galatea. The man who wrung Anton Fulke’s hand so piteously at the Lysterrestre opening of Viridian might be the same man who severed that hand with a claw of shrapnel. How could we fight these men and women, whose adulating letters we kept pressed in our desk drawers? How could we kill them, who died singing our songs?

XIV. From Albert Magazine‘s interview with Egon Rowley

AM: Do you think Alexander was written as a response to the War?

Rowley: I know it was. [A pause.] Well, not to the War alone. A fair number of things emerged because of that – Fulke’s last symphony, which he wrote one-handed, and Richard Stele’s beautiful book of poems. Who knew the man had poetry in him, that old newspaper cynic?

AM: His wife died in the War, didn’t she?

Rowley: Yes, poor Maggie. It seems strange to pity her – she wouldn’t have wanted my pity – but, well, I’m an old man now. It’s my prerogative to pity the young and dead.

AM: But to return to Désiré –

Rowley: Yes, to Désiré and Alexander. You must have seen it. All the world saw it when it premiered in 2908, even babes in arms…How old are you?

AM: [The interviewer gives her age.]

Rowley: Well, then, you must have seen it. It was brilliant, wasn’t it? Terrible and brilliant. [A pause.] Terrible, terrible and brilliant.

A letter from Infantryman Leo Kirsch, printed in Raum: September 2907

Gentlemen,

I cannot make you understand what is happening here, less than a day’s ride from your parks and offices and coffee houses. I can list, as others have, the small and innumerable tragedies: a headless soldier we had to walk on to cross through the trenches, a dead nurse frozen with her arms around a dead soldier, sheltering him from bullets. I can list these things, but I cannot make you understand them.

If it were tears I wanted from you, gentlemen of Südlichesburg, I could get them easily enough. You artists, you would cry to see the flowers trampled on our marches, the butterflies withering from poisonous air. You would cry to watch your opera houses burn like scraps of kindling. Me, I was happy to see Galatea burn. Happy to know it would hurt you, if only for a day.

But I don’t want your weeping. If I want anything from you, it is for you to come down here to the battlefields, to see what your pride, your stupidity, your brainless worship of brainless courage has created. It is your poetry that told that nurse to shelter her soldier with her body, knowing it was useless, knowing she would die. Your music told her courage would make it beautiful. I want you to look down at the headless soldiers in the trenches and see how beautiful dumb courage really is.

The Lysterrestre have brought native soldiers from their colonies, dark men and women with large eyes and deep, harrowing voices. They wear Lysterrestre uniforms and speak the language, but they have no love for that country, no joy in dying for it. Yesterday I saw a woman walking through the battlefield, holding the hands of soldiers – her people, our people, and Lysterrestre alike – and singing to them as they died. That courage, the courage of the living in the face of death, could never come from your art. For us, and for Lysterre, courage of that kind is lost.

I tried to join her today. But I did not know what to sing, when all our music is lies.

XVI. From a review of Désiré’s Alexander in Der Sentinel: August 2908

Richard Stele has refused the task of reviewing Alexander for Der Sentinel, and it is easy to see why. Stele is a friend of Désiré, and it takes a great deal of courage – courage which Désiré brutally mocks and slanders – to take a stand against one’s friends. But sometimes it must be done. In this instance, standing with Désiré is not only cowardly; it is a betrayal of what all thinking, feeling men in this country hold dear.

Nine years ago, after the premier of Brunhilde, Stele famously refused to summarize its plot, saying we would all see it and love it regardless of what he said. Well, you will all see Alexander regardless of what I say. And you, my friends, will be horrified by the change in your idol.

XVII. From Chapter Twelve of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele

The War changed Désiré. Alexander changed us all.

It seems to be a piece of anti-Lysterre propaganda, at first. Alexander, a Lysterrestre commander, prepares for war against the native people of the Lysterrestre colonies. Shikoba, a native woman, rallies her people against him. The armies meet; but instead of the swelling music, the dignity and heroism Désiré’s audience have come to expect, there is slaughter. The Lysterrestre fling themselves at the enemy and fall in hideous, cacophonous multitudes. At the end of the opera, Alexander is the last Lysterrestre standing. He goes to kill Shikoba; she stabs him brutally in the chest and he collapses, gasping. Shikoba kneels beside him and sings a quiet, subdued finale as he dies.

This is an opera about courage, about heroism. Its heroes turn to all the other operas that have ever been written and call them lies. When audiences leave the opera house, they do so in silence. I have heard of few people seeing it twice.

At some point during the writing of Alexander – in October 2907, I believe – Désiré announced at a dinner of some sort that he had native blood, and had been born in the Lysterrestre colonies. This did not matter much to the gathered assembly, and besides, it was something of an open secret. We took it, at the time, to be a sort of explanation, an excuse for the powerful hatred that boiled in him each time we mentioned the War. Not that we needed any explanations; my wife, Margaret von Banks Stele, had died at Elmerburg about a month before.

Now, of course, I wonder. Why did it matter to Désiré that the world he shaped so heavily was not his by blood? What exactly had the War made him realize – about himself, and about the rest of us?

It is significant, I think, that in Galatea’s burning all the Lysterrestre army costumes were lost. “Fine,” Désiré said. “Borrow the uniforms of our countrymen. They all look the same from where we’ll be standing.”

XVIII. From Albert Magazine’s interview with Egon Rowley

AM: The War marked the end of an era.

Rowley: The death of an era, yes. Of Désiré’s era. I suppose you could say Désiré killed it.

XIX. From the obituaries page of Raum: June 2911

The editors of Raum are saddened to report the death of the composer, architect, and respected gentleman Désiré. We realize his popularity has waned in recent years, following a number of small scandals and a disappointing opera. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge our debts to the earlier work of this great and fascinating man, whose music taught our age so much about pride, patriotism and courage.

Something of an enigma in life, Désiré seems determined to remain so hereafter. He directed his close friend Egon Rowley and famed doctor Vande Frust to burn all his papers and personal effects. He also expressed a desire to be cremated and to have his ashes spread over Umerfeld, site of both his destroyed Galatea and one of the bloodiest battles in the recent War.

No family is known, nor are Mr. Rowley and Dr. Frust releasing the cause of death. Désiré is leaving Südlichesburg, it seems, as mysteriously as he came to it.

From a report on Native Boarding Schools in the Lysterrestre Colonies: May 2937

Following almost twenty years of intense scrutiny and criticism from the outside world, Native Boarding Schools throughout the territories of the one-time Lysterrestre Empire are being terminated and their records released to the public.

Opened in the late 2870s, Native Boarding Schools professed to provide native-born children with the skills and understandings necessary to function in the colonial society. In the early years, the children learned the Lysterrestre language and farming techniques; over time, some of the schools added courses in machine operation. Criticism centers on both the wholesale repression of the students’ culture and the absence of lessons in science or the fine arts.

“We went around in shapeless black dresses, like criminals in a prison,” Zéphyrine Adam, born Calfunaya, says of her time in the Bonner Institute. “They say they taught us to speak their language, but they really taught us to be silent. They had rooms full of books, music sheets and phonographs, but we weren’t allowed to use them. Not unless we were too clumsy to be trusted by the factory machines. They understood, as we do, that stories and music give us power. They were afraid of what we would do to them if they let us into their world.”

In the face of such accusations, the majority of Native Boarding School instructors seem reluctant to speak, though some still defend the schools and their intentions.

“The goal was to construct a Lysterrestre Ideal for them, but not to hide their natural-born talents,” says Madame Achille, from the Coralie Institute in what is now northern Arcadie. “We simply made sure they expressed them in the appropriate ways. I remember one girl, one of the first we processed back in 2879. An unhappy little thing most of the time, but a budding musician; she would run through the halls chanting and playing a wooden drum. Well, we set her down one day at the pianoforte, and she took to it like a fish to water. The things she played, so loud, so dignified! She had such talent, though I don’t suppose anything ever came of it.

“A lot of them had such talent,” she adds. “I wonder whatever became of them?”

END

“Désiré” was originally published in Crossed Genres and is copyright Megan Arkenberg, 2013.

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Episode #73 — “Désiré” by Megan Arkenberg was originally published on GlitterShip

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lodelss · 5 years

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Evelyn McDonnell | Longreads | March 2019 | 11 minutes (2,166 words)

When Janelle Monae inducts Janet Jackson into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on March 29, it will be a beautiful moment: a young, gifted, and black woman acknowledging the formative influence — on herself and millions of others — of a woman who seized Control of her own career 33 years ago. It will also be an anomaly.

Jackson is one of only two women being inducted into the hall this year, out of 37 inductees, including the members of the five all-male bands being inducted. The other woman is Stevie Nicks. During the 34 years since the hall was founded by Jann Wenner and Ahmet Ertegun, 888 people have been inducted; 69 have been women. That’s 7.7 percent. The problem is spreading.

A November Rolling Stone article announced that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, was collaborating with the Rock Hall on a new exhibit of “iconic instruments of rock ‘n’ roll” called Play It Loud. Scheduled to open on April 8, the list of acts whose instruments would be on display included only one woman. My social media feeds exploded with rage and quips, as we wondered whether St. Vincent made the cut because the curators assumed from her name that she was male. Since then, the Met has added several women (and men) to the exhibit list, including Patti Smith, Wanda Jackson, and Joan Jett. It isn’t clear whether the Met added these women as a result of the internet outrage or if they were part of the show all along. After all, all three institutions — the hall, the museum, and the magazine — have, as Jett might say, a bad reputation for excluding women from their reindeer games.

People and institutions have to stop defining rock and rock ‘n’ roll as music played by men, especially white men, with guitars.

The Rock Hall is the most obvious offender in what I’ll call the manhandling of musical history. Manhandling is akin to, and often — as with the Rock Hall — intersects with, whitewashing. Manhandling pushes women out of the frame just as whitewashing covers up black bodies. People of color account for 32 percent of Rock Hall inductees, a far better figure than for women, but still not representative of the enormous role African Americans and Latinx people have played in American popular music. Manhandling is standard practice on country radio; there were no women in the Top 20 of Billboard’s country airplay chart for two weeks in December. Manhandling is standard practice on classic rock radio, where women are relegated to token spots on playlists, and are never played back-to-back. It’s standard in histories of music; there are no women featured in Greil Marcus’s seminal book Mystery Train: Images of Rock ‘n’ Roll in America. And of course, it’s standard practice at IM Pei’s partial glass pyramid in Cleveland. One year of affirmative action at the Grammys cannot wipe away decades of manhandling.

The problem is pervasive, and it is ideological. It is a way of seeing and presenting the world that is based on projections of power and control, not on reality. People and institutions have to stop defining rock and rock ‘n’ roll as music played by men, especially white men, with guitars. We have to change this image, this historiography, this institutionalization, this lie. In short, you do not need a cock to rock.

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Exhibit A: Sister Rosetta Tharpe. In the 1930s, the blues and gospel singer began picking her guitar in a way that we now recognize as the foundation of rock ‘n’ roll playing — she laid the foundation upon which Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly built. There’s footage of her with a Gibson that’s been viewed 2.7 million times on YouTube. If you’re not one of those viewers, become one now. Tharpe was finally inducted into the Rock Hall in 2018.

Holly and Berry were both among the first 16 acts inducted in the Rock Hall, in 1986. All their fellow inductees were male. Built on such grotesquely imbalanced footing, the institution may never get itself right. After all, its main instigator was Ahmet Ertegun, an admittedly legendary records man who treated women abominably, according to Dorothy Carvello’s 2018 memoir Anything for a Hit. Carvello is a music executive who began her career working for Ertegun at Atlantic. Ertegun subjected her to crude sexual harassment and once fractured her arm in anger. The Rock Hall named its main exhibition hall after Ertegun. How can this ever be a place where women feel welcome, let alone safe? Just as universities have removed from buildings and fellowships the names of film executives who gave them money, such as USC renaming their Bryan Singer Division of Critical Studies, the Rock Hall should remove Ertegun’s name from the building and from the annual industry executive award that bears his name. It’s an award that has never been given to a woman.

I would like to not care about what institutions such as the Met and Hall of Fame do.

I pick on the Rock Hall because I care. I love rock ‘n’ roll, to borrow a phrase. I attended the building’s inaugural event, and despite my ever-growing disenchantment, I always pay attention to who is nominated and who wins. I even get to vote — finally. Aware of the way it was increasingly being seen as a sort of hospice for aging white men, the hall has been trying to diversify its voting body, or risk obsolescence. After two decades as a professional rock writer, I was finally asked to vote a few years ago, and to recruit friends. The problem is, every inductee also gets a vote. So every year, more and more men get the franchise and vote in their friends and heroes, who tend to be men. The hall rigged its own system with its testosterocking inaugural class, and despite efforts to add gender and color balance, the numbers are getting worse.

It’s tempting to just say so what. I would like to not care about what institutions such as the Met and Hall of Fame do. They are essentially shrines to white men created by white men, so of course, they honor white men. But they pretend to serve the public — and in the Met’s case, it is in part a publicly funded institution. The Hall of Fame and its associated museum have enormous cultural power, writing in stone the historical importance of individuals in a way that no other institution or publication or organization does. They also create real economic benefits for culture workers. Being inducted into the Rock Hall doesn’t just look good on your resume, it helps sell records and tickets. Most importantly, these institutions provide inspiration — role models — for future generations. And if the only women you’re going to see receiving awards on that stage at the Barclays Center are Janet Jackson and Stevie Nicks, would you, if you were a little girl, go pick up a guitar?

Time’s up for the Rock Hall and the music industry. The Grammys got called on its #GrammysSoMale gender gap in 2018. After women complained that they were largely shut out of the telecast winners, Recording Academy president Neil Portnow responded that female artists needed to “step up” and they would be welcome. Needless to say, that patronizing, clueless comment went over like a lead zeppelin; there were calls for Portnow’s head, including an online petition for him to resign. So this February, the telecast featured an impressive roster of contemporary and historic talent, from Lady Gaga and Brandi Carlile to Dolly Parton and Diana Ross. But then Portnow stepped on stage and publicly patted himself on the back for the show’s sudden gender balance, like he was our white savior, our knight in shining armor coming to our emotional rescue with this feel-good moment.

Moments are not enough. Thankfully, Portnow is stepping down from his position in July. And yes, I’m sure a woman would be happy to take his place. This is part of the change that must happen in the businesses and nonprofits that support music. Women must be hired and promoted across all facets of the industry: as the editor in chief of Rolling Stone, the chairman of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the CEO of Universal Music Group. After all, a recent study from the University of Southern California shows that women are outnumbered in most aspects of the business, accounting for only 2 percent of producers and 12.3 percent of songwriters, for instance.

Some of this imbalance is a result of outright exclusion or unwelcoming environments. (Just ask any woman who has worked at a music magazine or a recording studio what it’s like to be, as former Rolling Stone writer Robin Green titled her 2018 memoir, “the only girl.”) Some is a result of sexual harassment or assault, which leaves women so traumatized that their careers stall or even stop. Ever wonder why a favorite artist, songwriter, or DJ ghosted for years? Increasing revelations about the predatory behavior of musicians, publicists, producers, managers, and executives show that, as a whole, the music industry can be a frightening place to be female, whether you’re a young intern working for R. Kelly or a talented country singer married to Ryan Adams. Mandy Moore married Adams in 2009, and hasn’t released an album since. They divorced in 2016. A New York Times investigation of Adams’s alleged predatory behavior toward younger women described him as “psychologically abusive” to Moore.

Guys like Ertegun, who died in 2006, reportedly manhandled in the workplace, in addition to creating the Cleveland shrine to gender inequity. Carvello’s book documents in scandalous detail how he and other executives created a boys’ club environment where women had to either pretend to be one of the boys, betraying their sisters, or trade sex for promotion. In Ertegun’s world, women were not allowed to step up; they were stepped on. Having systematically excluded and oppressed women from the business of making music, Ertegun and his cronies at the Rock Hall then carved that exclusion into stone by essentially writing them out of history, year after year after year. When women do get let into the Rock Hall boys’ club, it is on the arms of men: Carole King is there for her songwriting with Gerry Goffin, not as the woman who recorded numerous hit songs herself, including those on the record-smashing album Tapestry. Tina Turner was inducted alongside her abusive ex-spouse Ike. Indeed, the hall seems to define rock in a way that is disturbingly masculinist, as opposed to expansive and risk-taking — the qualities I like to think of as defining popular music. How about a Hall of Fame that includes Selena, TLC, Patsy Cline, and Grace Jones?

There’s nothing so scary to certain men as a bunch of women banding together. That’s another tool of the patriarchy: divide and conquer.

I’m delighted that two deserving female artists, Janet Jackson and Stevie Nicks, will be inducted this year. It’s particularly noteworthy that Nicks is getting the nod as a solo artist, after she was already inducted as part of Fleetwood Mac; she’s the first woman to be inducted twice, joining 22 men in the so-called Clyde McPhatter Club. Next year, the Hall must do the same for Tina and Carole. After being nominated so many times, Chaka Khan must finally be inducted as well.

That still won’t be enough to counteract the sheer numerical voting power of all the male musicians who get in as members of bands, especially if the men of Rufus, Khan’s collaborators with whom she has thrice been nominated, are inducted alongside Khan. There are three things the Hall of Fame can do to rectify that imbalance: 1. Flood the nominating committee and voting membership with more women. Six out of 29 members of last year’s nominating committee were women; the notoriously tight-lipped hall has not revealed this year’s committee members. 2. Reduce the voting power of members inducted as players in bands (so, say, the five dudes in Def Leppard each get one fifth of a vote). 3. Nominate a shit ton of all-female bands next year.

Female musicians and groups are particularly absent from the Rock Hall, as from the industry. There’s nothing so scary to certain men as a bunch of women banding together. That’s another tool of the patriarchy: divide and conquer. It’s why Lady Gaga is basically the only woman in A Star Is Born, a film ostensibly celebrating female artistry. She has no mother, no sister; even her girlfriends are male, and they’re drag queens. By focusing on individual artists, not a collective, the entertainment-industrial complex elevates the star, not the gender. The lioness is separated from her pack.

That’s why some women involved in music have formed an activist group, named Turn It Up! As our mission statement says, we “advocate for equal airplay, media coverage and industry employment of groups who are historically and structurally excluded from the business and the institutions of music-making.” And yes, we’re coming for you, sons of Ertegun.

Here’s who I’d like to see inducted in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame next year:

Tina Turner

Chaka Khan

Carole King

Diana Ross

Dolly Parton

The Go-Go’s

The Runaways

Bikini Kill

The Crystals

Labelle

Salt N Pepa

That would add more than 30 women to the voting rolls. It’s not enough to correct the historical record, but it’s a step up.

***

Evelyn McDonnell is associate professor of journalism at Loyola Marymount University. She has been writing about popular culture and society for more than 20 years. She is the author of four books: Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways, Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids and Rock ‘n’ Roll, Army of She: Icelandic, Iconoclastic, Irrepressible Bjork, and Rent by Jonathan Larson. She coedited the anthologies Women Who Rock: Bessie to Beyonce. Girl Groups to Riot Grrrl, Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop and Rap, and Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth and edit the Music Matters series from University of Texas Press. She lives in Los Angeles.

Flor Amezquita, Marika Price and Adele Bertei assisted with research for this article. Figures are based off the official Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s induction page, which was then cross-referenced with multiple lists and sources.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Matt Giles

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rebeccahpedersen · 5 years

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Micro Condos Are The Future of Downtown Toronto

TorontoRealtyBlog

I have never taken a big interest in April Fool’s Day.

That’s not to say I have no sense of humour, but just the idea that we pick one day per year to play pranks really takes the element of surprise out of the equation.

Anybody who follows the comedic staples on Instagram would have undoubtedly seen this a couple of times:

Right.

Kudos to Gail. You have to admit, she’s trying!

It sort of reminds me of a company meeting we had 5-6 years ago where an older lady stood up during the Q&A after the “Social Media” presentation and said, “How do I…..do…..a Twitter?” Applause ensued. Hey, she was trying. She smiled when she asked the question, she wasn’t quite sure of the verbiage, but she stood up nonetheless.

Gail, you’re an Instagram legend, even one year after your epic April Fool’s Day prank.

On Monday, I fell for not one, but two real estate related April Fool’s Day prank.

Do you have one of those email accounts you use for ordering pizza, signing up for Best Buy when you order one $9 cord online, and subscribing to real estate websites? I do. It’s the same Hotmail account I’ve had since 1997. So while looking through my copious amount of eBay emails on Monday, I saw one from Condos.ca about the “first and only dog condo” in Toronto.

So cool, I thought!

I remember the first condo to have no parking spaces, marketed as the first only “bicycle condo,” so wasn’t it only a matter of time before we saw a condo that had no restrictions on pets? Or, wait. What is a “dog condo?” The more I read, the more I realized this made no sense. A dog condo, like, for dogs?

Then I read more, and I realized this was a joke.

Ah, yes, it was April Fool’s Day, after all.

But I read the entire thing! I clicked all the links!

It was really funny, really creative, and I have to give them credit for putting so much work into this.

Check it out HERE.

And they even started a website called www.condogs.ca

Great work!

But the day was still young, and I had yet to perk up from my morning coffee. So upon seeing my colleague, Steven Fudge’s latest blog post advertised on Facebook, I was hooked!

“You Can Buy A Sleeping Pod In A Toronto Micro Condo For $49,900”

For those of you that don’t read Steven, you’re missing out. He’s very unique, as is his writing style, and he’s always got something interesting to say. Bookmark him and you won’t be disappointed.

I started reading the blog post, and I was just shocked. “What is this city coming to?” I thought, upon seeing what people are resorting to:

Ashamed as I am to admit this, it wasn’t until I saw Gotcha! Happy April Fool’s! that I realized this was all a joke.

Am I stupid? Gullible? Or both?

I was just tired. Oh, so, so very tired on Monday morning after very little sleep and a lot of……umm……what do they call it……….ah, parenting, on the weekend.

I feel as though if you’re not paying extremely close attention, and if what’s in front of your eyes is convincing enough, your brain allows you to believe it. That photo above with the guys sleeping in pods is real, after all. That’s in China.

And we all know that, as Britons found out on April 1st, 1957, spaghetti does grow on trees.

youtube

That truly is the greatest April Fool’s Day prank ever played. And I fell for that as a child when my Dad showed it to me on TV.

Anyways…

Upon falling for Steven Fudge’s “micro condo pod” story, I began to consider just how small condos have become. In fact, this has been on my mind since the Liberals announced their budget two weeks ago, and a couple of readers commented that their plan to help first-time buyers, who are purchasing for under $480,000, might cause developers to build smaller condos.

Well, they’re already building smaller condos.

So can they start building them even smaller?

If, for argument’s sake, this first-time home-buyer loan from the federal government (or shared mortgage, whatever you want to call it) has legs, then it’s possible that will push the lower end of the market, across the country, and even here in Toronto.

If, for argument’s sake, there are more and more buyers looking for $350,000 condos in downtown Toronto (that currently don’t exist), it’s possible that developers will start building them.

And where does that leave the rest of us, ie. those that don’t want to live in micro-condos?

Well as I said, it’s already happening, and the writing has been on the wall for some time.

Think about how a developer makes his money; he sells gross floor area.

Let’s say that a developer purchases a site, and the buildable area is 400,000 square feet. Maybe the condo is 100 feet wide, by 100 feet deep 44 stories high, and minus elevators, common area, and mechanical rooms, there’s 400,000 square feet of upon which to build condos.

If a buyer wanted a 400,000 square foot condo, then great! The developer will just sell all 400,000 square feet and be done with it. But we know this isn’t how it works, so the developer will chop up the 400,000 square feet into multiple units of varying shapes, sizes, floor plans, and combinations of beds and baths.

Maybe the developer chops up the 400,000 square feet into 100 units, or maybe it’s 500. Who knows.

How the developer determines this is a combination of saleability and marketability, ie. what can be sold, and for how much.

There’s a larger market for smaller units, and smaller units sell for higher prices, so it seems to reason that most of a new development will be small 1-bedroom condos. It didn’t use to be this way. When I got into the business in 2004, the larger the unit, the higher the price per square foot! Just imagine how crazy that would seem today?

So let’s consider that in, say, 2008, you might be looking at a 565 square foot condo for $500 per square foot, or $282,500. That was affordable for a lot of folks then, but folks today can only dream about that price point.

As time went on, and prices went up, the price per square foot increased along with the absolute price, ie. unit price.

What we have come to realize in 2019 is that developers are not concerned with the price per square foot, since consumers clearly aren’t, and instead they are looking at the absolute price.

Today, a buyer might think they have struck gold to find a condo for “only” $399,000. But whereas in 2004, this purchased a 1,050 square foot unit, in 2019, it might only purchase a 362 square foot unit.

And that is why units are shrinking in size.

It’s not because of what people want, it’s because of what people can afford.

Tell me that people want smaller units, and I’ll you you’re wrong. This is merely a function of price, and it’s been force-fed to us by developers who recognize that setting a unit-size floor of 580 square feet, like we used to see in 2004, might set a price floor of $600,000, and that’s not going to attract buyers.

Do you know what will attract buyers?

Condos @ Dundas & University, Starting From $479,900 – On VIP Sale NOW!

That’s highly attractive…..

……to morons.

Because not only are these pre-construction condos that may never be built, may be cancelled, may be delivered in 2028, may have insane closing costs, may be in “occupancy” for two years, and so on, but these are…………wait for it…………..279 square feet in size.

Yup, and if you do the math, you’ll see that this is a whopping $1,720 per square foot.

Oh, so now I’m not a jerk for calling would-be buyers, “morons?” Admit it, you were thinking that…

Yes, $1,720 per square foot, which is just absurd. It’s also insulting. But I’m sure sales are fantastic!

What does a 279 square foot condo look like?

This:

(Courtesty of Condonow)

That’s a kitchen, living, and dining all combined into one room that’s 12’1″ x 10’0.” I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but my office is 17′ by 16′. Wait, come to think of it, my office is the overall condo size! I don’t know how I can come in here every day with the same perspective…

But consider 12’10” x 10’0″ when having to find a place for your fridge, stove, dishwasher and/or microwave if you can fit them, kitchen sink, bed, and somewhere to put clothing, and maybe, I dunno, stuff?

While I recognize that there are people all around the world living in smaller spaces, I just don’t know that this is going to work in Toronto.

At the risk of sounding repetitive, it warrants mentioning once again: nobody wants to live in spaces this small; these are being built by developers who are chasing a price-point.

And that’s the sad reality of our market.

Developers, who effectively run the city of Toronto (at least the downtown core), can’t build larger units because the market for them is smaller. And what this means, in my opinion, is that thirty years from now, the entire downtown core will be full of micro condos, and society will largely adapt as a result.

Think of the fallout from this!

Furniture designers, appliance retailers, and scores of “smart” products will all be affected by the size of properties in which people live.

Just to show you that the 279 square foot unit at “United BLDG Condos” isn’t an anomaly, here’s a 300 square foot condo at the “YSL Residences” at Yonge & Gerrard:

(Courtesy of Condonow)

Just in case you had your chequebooks ready, this condo is $459,900.

That��s $1,533 per square foot!

And despite the fact that this 300 square foot unit is larger than the 279 square foot unit above, the layout is actually worse, since the living/dining/kitchen is smaller. Note the large hallway entrance – this is BRUTAL for such a small unit!

Is that a TV across from the bathroom?

It’s just crazy.

And the prices, wow!

How does this make any sense?

You’ve heard my pre-construction rants for over a decade now, but geez, why would anybody pay $1,533 per square foot for a pre-construction condo when they can buy across the street for $800?

Am I losing my mind here?

What’s going on?

youtube

Yeah, exactly like that.

Well, if this is the part where you’re hoping I tell you that over $1,700 per square foot is an April Fool’s Day joke, you are sadly mistaken.

Because it is both sad, and a mistake, in my opinion, that we’re starting to build sub-300 square foot condos in the downtown core. I understand that not everybody can afford to buy larger condos, but not everybody needs to own either. As rare as it is to hear a real estate agent say that, I just think this obsession with ownership and the entitlement that leads people to think they “should” live five minutes from work, has brought us here.

Let’s see how many more new developments give us floor plans like those shown above…

The post Micro Condos Are The Future of Downtown Toronto appeared first on Toronto Realty Blog.

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60stvshows-blog · 6 years

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60s TV Shows

He moved to Hollywood in 1946 at a friend's suggestion. Her gift for being able to do dialects (Scottish, Irish, Spanish, Italian, German and Russian - to name a few) got her hired straight away and she soon became one of the regular members of the radio series Hollywood Hotel. For more details on the best 60s TV shows see our resources section below.

While the series animated in large networks seemed mediocre, the cable television cartoon achieved several successes. It was while she was attending Los Angeles City College she was persuaded to audition for a role on a radio show. Before the TV show, there was a Gunsmoke radio show than aired from April 26, 1952 through June 18, 1961, co-existing with the Gunsmoke TV show for six seasons! Gunsmoke remains available on television and other media formats in the United States and worldwide. In the United States the frontier is open ended and usually means West.Other cultures have sometimes different understanding of frontiers.

60s TV Shows

For me, they are among the best Western TV themes, but I know I have omitted some other good ones. I know you were probably taught like me, not to stare at people, not to eavesdrop because it’s rude, not to judge people without knowing them, but that doesn’t stop us, does it? I like L'Amour. Many films have been made of his stories. The Museum continues to receive great ratings on the popular travel web sites, so someone else out there still appreciates Western art like I do. Gunsmoke was the first TV Western that appealed to adult viewers, depicting life as it might have been in a frontier town. Have a blessed night. One of his cowboys is always studying around the campfire at night reading Blackburn or other law books bartered for or bought. My one desire for Halloween, as yet unfulfilled, is to go out with friends dressed as Stormtroopers.

Go out as Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem! I just couldn’t concentrate on what the preacher was trying to say because from the back there were so many people to watch and notice instead of hearing the message. After all, there were, what, eight channels for 150 million people in those days? Abraham Lincoln had quite an impact in Springfield -- he worked as an attorney there, served as an elected official in the Old State Capital, and is buried there. Refresh your memory of the old TV shows that were popular in the 50's and 60's. Listen to the music that was popular during those years. No. That's an old concept/pass. There was a Western movie serial called The Black Whip. My dad has always been fond of the "Western" because many of them show a clear division between the good guys and the bad guys. The main characters were highly motivated, and tried their best to protect their community from some really bad guys.

This is my favorite, firstly because it's the earliest one I remember from the times I watched it with my father and secondly because it's the best. The first one was terrible. While there had been other westerns before such as "The Lone Ranger" and "Annie Oakley", Gunsmoke was the first one oriented towards Adult audiences. First Lady, "Lady Bird Johnson", was such a huge fan of the program that, when she learned that James Arness was a Republican, she felt personally betrayed! Starring James Arness, Milburn Stone, Amanda Blake, Dennis Weaver, Ken Curtis, Burt Reynolds, Buck Taylor, Glenn Strange, Roger Ewing and many other regular stars and guest stars. Ten years later their police began regular patrols. The museum began as a non-profit in 1960 with the help of Barry Goldwater and H K Machennan. The Museum has a website with information on current exhibits, upcoming exhibits, volunteering, special events and membership. Alongside mainstream animation nineties there was a strange and experimental movement.

In a short animation festival in 1989, organized by Craig Decker and Mike Gribble Spike (known as "Spike & Mike") and originally located in San Diego. I don’t remember him even kissing anyone during the series. I was not exaggerating about men and women kissing on the lips on camera for fear of the censor cutting scenes. Brian De Palma also borrowed from it in his movie "Body Double." De Palma borrowed quite a bit from Hitchcock. Updated on October 21, 2017 Denise McGill moreAs a Baby-Boomer, Denise and millions of others are becoming senior citizens. He chooses to fight because he knows that if he runs the bad guys will simply hunt him down anyway. The movies tend to present the townspeople as wimps and cowards, such as in high noon, where Gary Cooper had to face the bad guys alone because none of the townspeople would support him.

The series currently features the central characters of the USS Enterprise as well as several recurring characters. The U.S.S. Enterprise from 1967 (the Original) has always fascinated audiences and fans alike! Other fans have undergone various treatments to look exactly like Elvis Presley or Johnny Cash at various stages of their careers. Just to provide some perspective, let's take a look at what it would take to get one of the higher end rare weapons that you will need at the end of the game. You need to work hard to keep your ring intact. But for the aliens to reach Earth, dozens or hundreds of light years away, they would need quite sophisticated spacecraft. Experience the Star Trek universe like never before in STAR TREK TIMELINES, a truly immersive mobile game featuring hundreds of characters, stunning 3D ship battles, and an immense galaxy to explore. Trek number 3 was the last newspaper style format of the magazine, the new format began with the next issue number 4 and it featured a full color cover of a harder stock and high-quality paper and printing.

On purchase of your ticket you will receive an email that will contain your ticket in PDF format. Does it make sense to purchase medical evacuation insurance? It was puzzling to gauge why Krall was scouring the Enterprise looking for this magical device. Its fun watching Star Trek's classic episode of "the Cage" today with the camera sweeping across the "Enterprise" bridge officers on duty. You can acquire new bridge officers either from a personnel requisition officer or through completing missions. More and more of you will end up picking through the same generic artwork and similar cookie cutter designs, all while never finding better artwork. Read more why girls will strap this guitar on and not want to take it off! You know you want to. Geordi LaForge : 'The laws of physics just went right out the window. Check out Disposal Rule Adopting Launch, supra notice 15, at component II.B.

Now its time to install the blu-ray. Most of the time you have to interact with an anomaly or a star system, and often there is no combat involved but rather a lot of scanning and environmental interaction. I accepted that, however, there is still a way to manipulate time and transfer information in the form of blank to gain control and establish order and the best reality possible for the United States Of America. Desert or Mountain weddings such as Valley of Fire, Red Rock Canyon or Mount Charleston are possible with little effort on your part. No premiere date has yet been set for the second season of “Star Trek: Discovery.” But the new season is beginning to come into focus as casting and story details are revealed. Star Trek: Discovery’s second season is inching closer to its start of filming. Charlie X is a first season classic Star Trek episode written by Gene Roddenberry and DC Fontana. Here is another Shatner cult classic from The Transformed Man. I introduced this concept here at Star Trek Sci Fi Blog eleven years ago and then wowsers on the 60s tv shows!

What could be more Trek than a landing party encountering a race of peacenik energy beings on a planet that emits its own electromagnetic ‘music? As the Name Brand of "Star Trek" Progressed from the 1960's, the popularity of Star Trek also continued to grow. Publisher: IBArena The Star Wars legacy brings forth brilliant ideas for a Halloween party theme. Either way your friends list needs to be targeted to your market. While this feature appears often in single player RPGs, it is a rare inclusion in a MMORPG and has been a cornerstone for the game's ever growing success in a tough market. With the tough trekking done, the second night’s camp had a much more lively spirit. Chords are combinations of two or more notes. All rooms are spacious, airy inside and are exceptionally good, it's worth remembering. When Tribbles are near, Klingon's have plenty to fear which proved true.

There was a time when there was not any woman with their own talk show. But it did because TV only needed one prime time cartoon and The Flintstones came first. I wondered what his story was and how it all came about. She wasn't the most powerful witch and sometimes her spells came out all wrong. Take this quiz to find out if you’re a true child of the Sixties! As with many 60s TV series' the viewer is just expected to take the show's premise at face value. However, the R rating was introduced in the late 60s so it was clear that subject matter would become a bit more adult-oriented as the decade waned. The majority of today’s rising videographers tend to be more familiar with non-linear video editing. Using the switcher, cuts are easily done in varied video sources and in wipes, dissolves, and fades. This is the question that more and more thinking people are asking as it becomes more and more apparent. To this day, with the exception of maybe the Simpsons, it is one of the most well known cartoons and one of the few that went from cartoon to the silver screen using real people.

These characters are real and their interaction almost comic - it has kept viewers glued to the goggle box every afternoon. The show takes place in the year 2517 and follows the characters as they encounter and wrangle a whole new frontier- a new star system. You could easily do a Part 2 and more on this topic to capture more clueless characters! At the end of 1939, Sinatra accepted an offer from the more popular big band leader Tommy Dorsey. But the worst is "Potsie" from Happy Days, who went from cunning and clever to early altzheimer's by series end. Cox, of course, would go on to star in the mega hit series Friends. Due to presenting the changed behavior of cops, The Mod Squad became a big hit and one of the few cop shows with a big audience of youngsters. Due to the hiatus, Damages has fallen off the radar, but this show absolutely deserves a "best of TV shows" nod. The following list charts the best shows that are currently trending right now on Netflix Australia. Shows are made up connected with several specific graphics termed supports. Gail Leino takes a wise practice way of preparing and organizing events, celebrations and vacation parties with unique a few ideas for sixties party items and fun sixties topic celebration games.

Artificial material have been really widely-used throughout the Sixties. No, but i've done some things that may have seemes weird to someone in the mid-1960s. I am certain Judy Carne might have worn a romper like this one on the iconic 60's TV show, "Laugh In". People like talk show topics that the whole family can watch, and that entertains us. Which ones did you like best? What this means is that the actual set can be a lot thinner than a CRT receiver and that is very attractive for people as the old ones were very bulky and took up a lot of room. She can twist very well. Each episode of In Treatment features therapist Dr. Paul Weston (actor Gabriel Byrne) having a session with one of five patients. The show remained popular during its initial run of five seasons and 123 episodes. The show went up against Dallas and fared horribly in the ratings, it was then scheduled against Beauty and the Beast and did even worse in the ratings, if that was possible. Sinatra acted in a television special in November 1965, A Man and His Music, and released a corresponding double vinyl album, which reached the Top Ten chart and also went gold.

Television New version in 1976 only. The soap opera will be a perennial television favorite - we will always need to wash our hands, will we not? The cab converted into a helicopter when the need arose. The fascination with the dysfunctional family dynamics, the ornate settings of the Southfork Ranch and the glamour that surrounds the three sons - JR,Bobby and Gary - all contribute to this programs ready viewership. The show aired 143 episodes all of them in black and white. Fashionwise, the black leather catsuits became instead a set of colourful Emmapeelers. Set in the midwestern town of Salem, Days of Our Lives revolves around the Horton and Brady families - and the ongoing tussle will always be a crowd teaser. Sham-Ir gives Jeannie two weeks to find a new master, or return to Mesopotamia forever. I researched the Internet for costume, hair, and magic bottle reference photos to assist me in painting Jeannie.

The Saturday night show starred Groucho Marx, his cigar, George Fenneman, and the Duck with the Magic Word. PuffnStuff show. I thought Witchie-Poo downright mean. You mean the 1995 mini-series with Scott Bakula? Perfect for layering over bell bottom jeans. And those lessons stayed with us over the years, molding us into good citizens who care about community and country and, most importantly, each other. In 10 years - who knows. Macnee’s character appeared in all but two episodes, accompanied by a string of beautiful women who were his sidekicks. Since there was no internet, everything was stacked in warehouses. Which of these cartoons was not on TV during the 1960s? I absolutely loved to hate Dr Zachary Smith in Lost in Space. It is a gothic style house. I loved the 60's/70's and really miss them. Their records sold through the roof. She was signed by the Wilburn Brothers to their Sure Fire Publishing as they were highly impressed with her song writing skills.

Top Tv Shows of the 60s

In the 1st STAR TREK film, Gene Roddenberry finally had the cost to create every one of the footage he wanted of ENTERPRISE just a slave to, looking real purty, and also by gum he was gonna put it to use all. I personally don't mind watching all those minutes, 22 or 187 or whatever it had been, but many folks think that's excessive. If your main readers say something needs to be changed or added or deleted, tune in to them.

The villains with the movie really stick out though it is like they fight to fill an opening the Joker forgotten. Alone, none in the villains really supply the type of memorable performance Heath ledger surely could display at nighttime Knight, however each villain does a great job of testing Batman/Bruce Wayne and pushing him to the limits. Tom Hardy as (Bane) is definitely an absolute force of nature, towering, intimidating, and intelligent, he plays the entire package and certainly the most physical challenge that Batman has faced yet. Anne Hathaway in the role of Selena Kyle a.k.a. Catwoman presents a totally different undertake the type, she actually is much more of a modern-day grifter then this cat like super villain we all grow up watching. Gary Oldman returns as Commissioner Gordon, he really nails his performance when on-screen, it is possible to really feel the inner turmoil that lying towards the people of Gotham is responsible for him, and just how hard it really is to praise the man that almost killed his son. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (John Blake) comes through once again which has a great performance, you sense him because the moral compass with the movie, one character with no mask really wanting to do a little good.

The graphics were created to mimic the actual feel of the comic book. Despite the coming of numerous versions, the launch from the Batman version for PlayStation 3 this year developed a revolution in the gaming world. The title was Batman: Arkham Asylum and was rated as the best among each of the Batman Games created up to now. With advancements in technology and widespread use with the Internet, it's got greater prospects inside future. Its evolution from 2-dimensional graphics for the latest 3-dimensional graphics depicts its growth and demand among Batman fans.

Storylines emerge outer space actually give you a fantastical and fascinating place for a plot to unfold, especially since it refers to women. In addition to the romantic storylines that inevitably come up, living in a limited space such as a space ship and managing the unpredictable natures of intergalactic enemies brings out multiple elements of a character's personality. This gives writers the opportunity to develop interesting, dynamic female roles which go beyond slapstick humor or trivialities.

There is much fascinating science that may be found in the Star Trek series and many movies. Sure, some of it is simply not possible, but mostly things that will make for a boring storyline should they weren't possible. The real catch and the reason the series has stood the exam of your time is that it is essentially a representation products we may be in some centuries like those 60s tv shows.

Resources:

The 12 Best TV Shows of the 1960s – Blaze DVDs

1960's TV Shows - Best of 60's TV - Popular Series 1960-1969

60s TV Shows Top Rated - Strikingly.com

#60s tv shows

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elasianstar · 6 years

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the world on a turtle’s back Chapter 2

Sunday afternoon and time to head down to the lair for game night with the turtles. After the day I'd spent with Raphael I couldn't keep myself from thinking about the big guy. Yeah he was hot headed from time to time but he was really sweet. He doesn't talk much, mostly speaking through glances and body language, but I don't mind. The silences we had shared were mostly comfortable. Maybe Mikey was right, maybe Raph is just a big ol teddy bear, though an incredibly violent one.

Realizing the time, I pulled my glittery owl shirt out of my dresser and pulled it on over my fighting leathers. I obscured my wings and ran out the door. My bike Niltsi was in the building's basement garage waiting for me.

the golden feather painted on its black tank glimmered in the neon lights as we sped through the streets of New York toward the garage where the turtles kept the shell raiser. Donnie was under the garbage truck when I pulled in and heard the motor.

“Hey Casey, Raphael is down in the lair.”

“Hey Donnie, it's not Casey.”

“Elasia!”

In his surprise he accidently smacked his forehead on the exhaust, luckily it wasn't hot. When he saw me getting off my bike he whistled low and pinched the tip of his tongue between his lips in thought.

“This is Niltsi.”

“Didn't think you were into motorcycles. You have to show that thing to Raph, he's an old motorcycle junkie. You might get him to show you Raijin. Just don't mention it to Leo.”

“Will do, thanks Donnie!”

Once I was down in the lair I was quickly attacked by a flying ninja hug from Mikey, luckily I was used to it by now and the 250 pound turtle didn't knock me off my feet like he had the first few times.

“Hey Mikey.”

“Heya, Angelface! You ready for game Night? We got sorry, monopoly, clue, cards against humanity, uno….”

“Wait like board games?”

“Yeah it's family game night!”

“I thought you meant video games.”

“Nah, the last Sunday of every month Splinter sets up the board games for a family night, no training allowed, no fighting, just a good night of games and snacks!”

Dragging me off to the dining table he showed me the mismatch of salvaged games laid out. The boxes were banged up and the pieces looked to have belonged to several copies and editions of certain games but they were all complete and playable. Near the end of the table sat 5 small handmade figures not unlike those used to play dungeons and dragons. the first one was sculpted from clay and painted with ink to look like a tiny Leonardo, the next was carved wood dressed in actual cloth and made to look like Raphael, the third was a metal Donatello complete with a small solar light where his projection system usually sits, the fourth was a 3D printed Mikey painted to look like an old cartoon character, and the sixth was a small glass splinter. Each statue displayed a different medium and art style but each was masterfully made.

My thoughts were interrupted by loud barking as I was swept off my feet from behind.

“Addie’s back, how are you feeling girl!”

A large roan American Staffordshire terrier was jumping and pawing at mikey's plastron before noticing me and slobbering all over my face.

“bleck, ok ok down girl.”

A deep rough voice stopped the dog.

“ANDROMEDA.”

The happy pit ran over to her master, sitting somewhat calmly at his side as he grabbed her pink spiked collar. A blown glass galaxy hung in place of a tag.

“She isn't supposed to jump but she's kind of excited.”

Wiping the drool off my face I knelt in front of the dog at Raphael’s side and gently scratched her.

“It's alright, I get a fair share of dog drool at home, I'm used to it. She’s an absolutely gorgeous American Staffie. I've never seen one with a roan coloring before, it's a beautiful genetic anomaly, and the brown and green heterochromia in her eyes. She's a beautiful little lady, yes she is!”

“Raph rescued her as a puppy when we busted a dog fighting group in queens. She's actually been at the vet expecting a litter of her own.”

The dog showed no signs of having recently given birth and the somewhat heartbroken look on Raph’s face spoke volumes.

“What happened.”

He knelt down next to the dog who pressed her head up against him with a whimper.

“April took her in for her checkup and the vet said that she wasn't producing the hormones needed to birth and nurse the pups, more likely than not she would have reabsorbed the whole litter. They did a cesarean and managed to save two but 8 didn't make it. The two babies are going to stay with April and Casey so they can get store bought formula.”

I didn't know what to say so I just placed a reassuring hand on Raph’s where he had stilled petting Andromeda. His eyes darted over to meet my own for a second before he patted Addy and sent her off to say hi to her other uncles.

“Did they at least let you see the babies?”

“yeah, they were just as small and soft as Addy was when I found ‘er. Named the baby girl Cassiopeia, and the boy Orion. Vet says they'll be fine. Addy had to stay topside for a while to heal up but I'm glad I've got her back.”

“She’s a sweetheart that's for sure. I don't mean to sound insensitive, but have you considered having her spayed. With the two genetic anomalies of her coat and eye colors this most likely was caused by another genetic mutation, especially if she was improperly cross bred to be a fighting dog.”

“Yeah the vet already thought that would be best. Didn't really tell me the reasonin’ behind it though. That makes sense though.”

...

“Is that your cafe racer in the shop?”

“Yeah got it in ‘78, harley Davidson XCLR 1000cc, named it Niltsi after the navajo wind god. Donnie mentioned you've got your own, Raijin?”

“Yeah it's an old Indian I found in the scrap yard when I was 15. Donnie and I fixed it up and Mikey touched up the paint for me. Leo doesn't know…”

“Yeah Don already told me, my lips are sealed. Can we go see it?”

Just then splinter and Leo came in from their sanctuary.

“Ah Elasia, Michelangelo told me he had invited you. I hope you enjoy our little get together.”

“Yes I'm excited to play some games, I already told Mikey that I'd kick his butt in clue.”

Splinter laughed touching my shoulder in a fatherly way.

“I'm afraid to say that won't be too hard. My youngest son is gifted in many ways, conventional problem solving is not one of them.”

“Daaaad!”

Leo was helping Mikey move the snacks out of the kitchen, with Addy on their heels, he bumped his little brother with his elbow reassuringly.

“Don't sweat it Mikey, you know you're the king of pictionary.”

“Did someone say clue? Just let me put up my spot welding mask in the lab and I'll be right there!”

Donnie ran off to his lab, tossing the mask through the door before rejoining the group. Unable to escape now Raph grabbed my hand, leaning down to whisper in my ear.

“I'll show you the bike later, just have to get through a few hours of games.”

Nodding just enough for him to notice I made my way over to what has been dubbed my seat at the end of the table, and joined in on the debate over what game would be first.

“We can't play sorry Elasia doesn't have a lead piece.”

“Well then Donnie we can use something as a stand in, like a dice or the monopoly car or something.”

“Actually Leo I have something that will work pretty well.”

Digging into my bag I pulled out a small obsidian raven statue with golden eyes, setting it amongst the 5 figures of the hamato family.

“That's cool, did you make it?”

“No my brother Gabriel made it, he's into stone cutting. You should see the maple leaf pendant he carved out of garnet for his mate, it's gorgeous.”

…

L-“Sorry Mikey!”

M-“uuuwaaaa, chrrrrr. Leo you suck!”

E-“Uuuwaaaa, chrrrr.”

Four sets of eyes snapped on me as I covered my mouth. What did i say!?

M-“you speak turtle!?”

L-“your voice sounded exactly like mikey’s how did you do that.”

E-“I didn't mean to I just mimic sounds sometimes! I didn't….”

S-“Corvids are commonly known for their exceptional mimicry skills, it makes sense that Ms.Elasia would demonstrate that trait.”

M-“What's a corvid and what does mimicry mean.”

R-“It means that she can copy sounds and voices moron.”

S-“Corvids are birds like crows and ravens Michelangelo. Elasia seems to be a hybrid of a Raven as you are a turtle, or I am a rat

M-“Cooooool, can you do it again?”

I anxiously peeked at each of the four turtles, they seemed like they genuinely wanted to hear me mimic something else.

E-“Can you do it again?”

Mikey’s eyes went wide at the sound of his own voice leaving my throat and the other three looked mildly impressed.

M-“Do Leo, Do Leo next!”

L-“Mikey, that isnt..”

E-“Mikey, that isnt…”

M-“Awesome!!! Do Donnie.”

E-“I need a sound to focus on, Donnie?”

D-“ummm, I guess saying anything would work right?”

I tried something, “Right anything would work.”

D-“Interesting, it seems to be more than simple repetition, once you get a voice down can you say just about anything?”

Closing my eyes tight in concentration I tried to say something unique in Donatello’s voice.

E-“I've never tried that before but due to the repetitive sounds and cadences of the English language I could probably figure it out once I had enough data.”

R-“Damn, that's impressive.”

I tried to copy Raph’s voice only for a breathy croak to leave my throat.

E-“I guess Raph’s voice is out of my register, I need to expand my low range.”

M-“Awwww now my prank plans are ruined.”

E-I wasn't going to help you start a fight between Leo and Raph anyway Mikey.”

He legitimately pouted.

M-“But Elasia, think of the pranking potential!!”

S-“I am thinking of who will possibly win this game, now my sons, Ms.Elasia, if we could continue.”

ALL-“Hai sensei”

It was Splinter who eventually won but what he didn't know was that i saw him move his pieces with his tail while the brothers had been distracted.

The night was going great, Mikey and I teamed up during pictionary and kicked butt. Donnie won the game of clue, predictably playing as Professor Plum. Leo pissed everyone off in the first few rounds of monopoly when he somehow managed to get both of the high roller properties. Raph killed trivia pursuit, constantly answering every question correct except in the the entertainment sections.

Now we were playing scattegories, Mikey, Leo, and Splinter v.s Raph, Donnie, And I. Mikey kept triggering me to make noises during my turns causing me to have trouble answering my cards, in retaliation Raph had started putting him into a headlock and covering his mouth on our turns.

“Ok Elasia This is the last Round and we need 10 points to win, Oh this card is actually fitting, and a little ironic. In 60 seconds name as many biblical angels as you can. GO!”

“Cassiel, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, Lailah, Xapham, Zuriel, Jophiel, Afriel…”

Mikey wrestled free and started making the most obnoxious sounds he could.

“BEEP!... Honk!...RACAAAAW!!!...”

“Five seconds!!!”

“R...RA..RAH...RAPHAEL!!!!!”

“TIME!”

Raph snatched mikey, smacking him over the back of the head while yelling at the smaller turtle. Donnie was searching for each of my answers to calculate points.

R-“You dirty lil’ fuckin cheat!”

D-“That’s ten we win!”

R-“What?”

L-“No that can't be right she only said 9 angel names, recount Donnie?”

D-“No look Leo, right here, the comprehensive list of biblically named angels…”

L-“Well dang, I wouldn't have guessed…”

M-“No she only said 9 names, I stopped her.”

D-“The tenth name was Raphael. It says here that he is the patron angel of healers in Judaism, and one of the four archangels. John 5:1–4 references him, ‘an angel of the Lord descended at certain times into the pond; and the water was moved. And he that went down first into the pond after the motion of the water was made whole of whatsoever infirmity he lay under.’ In the bible of Islam he is known as the burning one.”

M-“Raph’s soul heart thingy was burning when you did your magic healing stuff!”

R-“No you guys got it all wrong I ain't no angel… I...”

E-“No, you aren't an angel, but no one can deny that you’ve been touched by one. You are the best of your brothers at stitching up wounds, relating to the healing abilities of your namesake. Your soul is one of few that are somewhat stably related to the element of fire. though you demonstrate the stereotypical emotional flare ups you work quite well with the more mundane aspects of your element for someone with almost no training in the discipline. Plus the angel Raphael is the spirit most closely related to the idea of guardian angels, all four of you fit quite well into that roll for a lot of people in this city.”

Raph looked visibly uncomfortable with all of the attention so i was quick to move the subject to someone who would quickly divert the attention.

“And you Mikey, Your name Michelangelo literally translates to ‘Of the angel Michael’. Michael is known as the leader of the army of God and the divine good. It is prophesied that it will be Michael who rises against Lucifer in the time of the end. He is known as the defender and is often associated with children or those of a youthful disposition.”

“Awesome!!! I’ve got an angel too! What about Leo and Donnie?”

I noticed Raph escaping to the snack table, glad I diverted that one.

“Well Leonardo means Lion bold. It doesn't have a biblical connection but there is a link to the constellation Leo, the lion killed by Hercules during his great trials. The bright star at the chest of the lion is called Regulus, it is also known as the King star. It’s believed that all of the greatest leaders are born under the lion.”

Leo puffed at that, shooting a glance toward Raph that practically boasted his supposed celestial disposition toward leadership.

“As for Donatello, It's derived from the Latin Donatus which means “Given” in the context of being a divine gift. It is also loosely translated as ‘to pardon’ or to forgive. It speaks of a kind and charitable nature.”

Donnie blushed, fiddling with his glasses in embarrassment.

L-“Elasia, you forgot your name. What does it mean?”

“Well in my people’s tongue it means the guardian of stars. In our mythology Elasia is the name of the daughter of the moon goddess Lunis and is responsible for guiding the souls of the dead into the night sky. The name is also synonymous with night or darkness, which is why it was adopted by the survivors of the great war as the name of the unified civilization of species.”

L-“So you're named for you people's grim reaper or angel of death figure. I guess that explains the skull charms you wear.”

I nodded, fiddling with the brass Raven skull at my throat.

M-“No our Elasia IS ELASIA. Why else do you think she has all of those wicked soul powers and stuff. She said herself that she lived multiple lives!”

R-“Mikey shut yah trap, can't you see you're makin her uncomfortable?”

M-“Sorry Angelface, I didn't mean…”

I gave Mikey a small hug when he knelt in front of me.

M-“It's alright Mikey, and don't worry we're still friends and super awesome gaming buddies.”

M-“Awesome, wait how did you know i…”

I just smirked tapping my temple.

M-“Jedi… I knew it”

It was then that my alarm went off.

“Well sorry guys, if i'm going to get any sleep before work in the morning i'm going to have to head back. It was really fun, we should definitely do this again.”

“Hey Elasia, one question.”

“Yeah don?”

“This job of yours, its a human surface job right?”

“Yeah i'm internshiping with the local forensics unit, why?”

“How do you manage to hide your, physical differences?”

I dug around in my bag, pulling out a blue glass bottle with a cork.

“This, its a potion used to concentrate the natural obscurants of my people. It doesn't make my wings go away but it does make them look like something else. The effects are only temporary though and the enchantment is very easy to break if necessary.”

I took a quick swig and pulled my wings against my back where they melted into a dark tribal tattoo. with a quick shake however they became wings again and a thin opalescent blue dust fell to the floor.

“It's not the easiest stuff to make and it's a bit painful. but it’s a viable option for those who have to interact with humans on a daily basis, especially if they have features that aren't easily hidden by other means.”

“Would it work for us?”

“I'm not sure, each person who uses it has to tailor the recipe to their species and individual biology in order to get the right results. I could look into it. I really should be going though.”

“I’ll walk you up.”

“Thanks Raph.”

…

When we got to the garage Raph led me to a dark and cluttered back corner, revealing a cleverly constructed trash cave just big enough for what was hidden inside. A modified Indian “Big Base” Scout with a deep burgundy and cherry red accented paint job. It was gorgeous.

“Damn, talk about a beauty, and he’s an old classic, 1948.”

Raph grabbed the handlebars like he was handling the love of his life as he rolled it out of its cubby and parked it at my feet.

“It's not entirely original, Donnie and I had to make some modifications and figure out how to build some parts from scratch so that it’d fit me.”

I had already gotten down on the floor of the shop and was curiously poking around the mechanics of the bike.

“Yeah it looks like you lengthened and reinforced the frame, and the suspension obviously, adding in the liquid cooling system was definitely a smart move, I can hardly see your additions on the cosmetic pieces, a human would never notice. This is really well done, How does he ride?”

“It’s a little heavy on the handling, nothing i can't handle though, gets a bit rough around 80 MPH.”

“But that’s expected of older models, even my XLCR gets a little shaky at higher speeds and its what 30 years newer?”

“I could… Drive ya home, if ya want. I mean so ya can hear what the engine sounds like.”

“That would actually be pretty nice. Doubt I'll hear it over the growl of MY bike though.”

At this i cocked my hip and snapped a sharp turn, swaying as i moved to mount Niltsi. Switching it on i revved the engine hard, the roar causing a smirk to pull at my lips, especially in response to the gigantic smile on Raph’s face. Starting up his engine he quietly rolled it to meet me at the mouth of the garage. Checking that the roads were clear our eyes met, a silent nod signaling the peal of thunder caused by both bikes speeding off down the road at the same time.

At first we kept pretty equal but as i started to pull ahead a bit Raph started to speed up, pulling ahead of me and starting a race. Narrowing my eyes i shifted my position so that i was lying as flat as possible against the tank of my Harley and raised my wings into an angle, the increased aerodynamics of the position causing me to rocket past Raph as my engine roared in victory. Raph decided if he couldn't beat me in speed then he’d beat me in style, as our bikes settled in next to each other he slowly began to raise up onto the seat of his Indian until he was riding the machine like a skateboard. One of his large two toed feet controlling the handlebars while the other maintained his balance and position. I couldn't help but throw my head back with laughter, leaning back in my seat and throwing my hands up as i steered with the toes of my riding boots. Soon though we reached my apartment and pulled the bikes into the alleyway parking behind the building.

“That was so much fun! I can't believe you surfed on that thing!”

“That thing you did with your wings was pretty cool, what do you call that?”

“Its called stooping, its a position used to increase diving speeds in falcons.”

In our excitement we both jumped around the alley, burning off adrenaline until we somehow ended up nearly chest to chest, the smiles on our faces bright and open.

“Your hair is all fluffy.”

Without thinking Raph smoothed his large hand over my short hair in an attempt to right it only for it to pop right back up. I couldn't help but notice how nice the sensation felt and to laugh at his frustrated expression.

“It does that when i'm excited, it's called plumeing….its a bird thing.”

“Like a parrot. Its cute.”

Realizing what he said his face immediately fell back into its intimidation mask and he moved to get back on his bike.

“Wait Raph….”

He started the engine and drove away as quickly as he could.

“Its ok…..”

When he disappeared from sight i spread my wings and with a few flaps landed on my apartment balcony. From here i could just make out his headlight shining between the buildings. I gently ran my fingers through my hair, copying the motions he had made.

“Goodnight Raphael.”

…

Raphael's POV

How fucking stupid am I! We were having so much fun, the night was going great and I go and ruin it by being a sappy anxious jackass! She probably thinks I'm a dopey dweeb!

Pulling quietly into the shop I hid Raijin back in the pile and stormed through the lair toward the dojo. Mikey tried to ask me how it went but I just growled low in my throat and pushed him away as I stormed past.

I needed to beat my anger into something.

After about an hour of destroying another training dummy I moved to the free weights. I needed to cool off.

What if she really meant what she said tonight? I mean she said nice things about everyone but I think that might have been a distraction tactic. Couldn't have my brothers calling me angel, or for Mikey to staple wings to my shell in my sleep. She looked so happy tonight, laughing and speeding on that beaut of a Harley. And her hair did look really nice all sticking up and wild, it was soft.

Throwing the bar back on the stand I rubbed the heels of my hands down my face. It couldn't happen I needed to stop fooling myself. Staring down at my hands I imagined her own looking so small and delicate against my rough green skin. No it would never work.

…

Elasia’s POV

The next day at work all I could think of was his smile and the feel of his hand in my hair.

No he would never like me like that, we're just friends, I need to stop reading so much into it.

I wore my red flannel tank top anyway.

#tmnt #teenage mutant ninja turtles #the world on a turtle's back #Elasia OC #raphael tmnt

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dmmowers · 7 years

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The presence of hope

The presence of hope A sermon for Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis. III Easter | April 30, 2017 | Year A Acts 2:14a, 36-41 | Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19 | I Peter 1:17-23 | Luke 24:13-35 "Grandma, what do you have in here to eat?" I peered into the refrigerator. My dad's people were all Methodists, and the Methodist church had these clubs called circles for the ladies in the church. They met at each other's houses each month. When circle came to Grandma’s house, Grandma cooked. A hefty slice of pineapple upside down cake would appear in the refrigerator, as if my grandma knew in advance that her 11 year old grandson might come over the next day and ask, "Grandma, what do you have in here to eat?" I'd get my pineapple upside down cake, my can of regular Coke - a real upgrade over the diet caffeine free Sam's Choice cola my dad always stocked our refrigerator with - and park myself on Grandma's couch. Next to the couch Grandma and Grandpa had a magazine rack. Good Housekeeping, magazines with fun pictures of birds, magazines with walleyes as big as your head. And then, my personal favorite: Reminisce Magazine.

There are probably some Reminisce Magazine subscribers here today, but Reminisce was basically a collection of readers' photos from days gone by. There were pictures of people working in textile mills in the 50s in front of great looms full of thread. There were newspaper typesetters, hands inky black even in the grainy photograph. It had aIl sorts of photos of life in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s – a kind of life that was different from my own. A foreign kind of life. A life where, maybe, Grandma and Grandpa hadn’t lost their farm and had to move to town. Where maybe they weren’t quite so old. Where things seemed simpler than they were to a farm kid in Illinois corn country in the late 1990s. The presence of the past in these grainy photographs stained with cake crumbs was comforting.

Our disciples this morning had no such sweet memories of their recent past. When the man on the road spoke to them, they stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, "Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?" Jesus asked them, "What things?" They replied, "The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel."

All Jerusalem has been talking about this - what rock had this guy been hidden under? But it didn't matter anymore - this was all past tense. Jesus of Nazareth had been a prophet in word and deed, but he was no more. He was in the past. The chief priests and leaders had handed him over to be crucified, and he was crucified, and that was the end. Even the disciples’ trust in him was past tense: we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel, to set Israel free. But even that trust was in the past. Even the wild rumors they had heard circulating that morning were just that – old wives’ tales.The disciples had hoped that Jesus was the one to redeem Israel.

But that hope was in the past. They didn’t say that they trusted Jesus so that they would go to heaven when they died. They say, they had hoped that Jesus would come to free Israel. They believed that God called Israel to be a righeous nation, living according to the laws of God so that they and, through them, the entire world would be blessed. Israel failed repeatedly to live up to this calling; as a result, when foreign nations invaded them, God did not rescue them. They were exiled into Assyria and Babylon. Even though they eventually came back, they were always ruled by others. They were captive to foreign powers, and these disciples thought that Jesus was the prophet foretold in the Old Testament, the one who was coming to end the exile that had never really ended even though they had come home.But hope had been dashed. These disciples had gone from trusting Jesus and following him around Judea to saying, "We had hoped." We had trusted, but we were wrong. We had trusted, but Jesus wasn't who we thought he was. We had trusted, but the government did what the government always does. No sweetness to those memories, just the bitter reality that they had invested years of their lives and emotional energy into a dream that had just been put on a cross.

II.

In 2015, two economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, a married couple, discovered an odd anomaly in their data. They were studying the rates at which people die - can you imagine the dinnertime conversation at their house? They noticed that for the first time since 1993, Americans’ life expectancy went down rather than up. At first they thought that something must be wrong with the data, but as Case and Deaton dug into it they realized that the death rate for white men between ages 40 and 60 had skyrocketed, and in fact had risen every year since 1999. "We knew what they were dying from,” Deaton said. “We knew that suicides were going up rapidly, and that overdoses mostly from prescription drugs were going up, and that alcoholic liver disease was going up. The deeper questions were why those were happening - there's obviously some underlying malaise, reasons for which we didn't know." Case went to say that these were "deaths of despair." (http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/521083335/the-forces-driving-middle-aged-white-peoples-deaths-of-despair).

In Baraboo, we know Case and Deaton's research from the inside. We know people who have dropped out of the labor force after not finding jobs year after year. We know people who we went to high school with or who used to be our neighbors who have struggled with addiction. We know what it is to have had dreams about what we were going to be when we grew up not work out. We know what it is to be alone when we wished that special someone was in our lives or was still in our lives.Yes, we have been in these disciples' shoes, we have been Cleopas and his friend on the road to Emmaus. We know what it is to have big dreams that died. We know what it is to invest years of our life into a business that we thought would work, into a lifestyle that we thought would make us happy only to learn much too late that we were wrong.Where are the people who are struggling today with broken dreams in Baraboo, in Lake Delton, in Portage? Some of them live on our streets, some of them ride on our school bus, some of them used to be our friends and drifted away. Some of them are in this room this morning. One of the things this morning’s reading tells us is that Jesus – and the people who are called to minister to a broken world in the name of Jesus – go to the people whose dreams have died and walk along the road with them. Who’s walking on that road of despair that we can walk beside? Who in this room today is walking that road of despair that we can encourage?

The disciples on the road to Emmaus saw Jesus, a prophet mighty in word and deed, as the one coming to save Israel and to set her free. But they had been wrong. So when Jesus asks them what they are talking about, the only thing they can do is to stand there looking sad. They were walking a road of despair, a road of not knowing where to turn next, a road of loneliness.III.What they didn’t know yet as they walked that road was that Jesus had come to bring their past into their present. As they walked along the road, Jesus explained from the Scriptures how the Messiah had to come and die for the brokenness of the world, how those ideas about the Messiah leading a military revolt had been all wrong. Messiah was going to come to set people free from everything that stood in the way of the righteous reign of God over the world – including a corrupt Temple, death and all evil.Israel had been called to be a blessing to unbelievers – to the Gentiles! – but had been so caught up in its identity as a people that it only looked down upon them.

And so Jesus came to set Israel free from superiority, so that the people of God, Jew and Gentile, could worship God apart from corrupt religious authorities, so that the people of God could be a blessing to all nations. For the first time on that road to Emmaus, the disciples realized that the glory of the Messiah was not the glory of a military conqueror, a Napoleon or an Alexander the Great, but rather the glory of one who came to serve the world by dying for it. The death of Jesus was not the end. It was not the death of a dream. It was not the revelation of a pretender to the throne. It was the coronation of a king. It was a dream turning into reality. It was a terrible past that was about to break into the disciples’ present and be the anchor for the disciples’ future.But the disciples were sad. They heard all of the explanation and knew that the dead stay dead, that this could not possibly be true. Then they arrived at Emmaus. They asked the man to stay with them and to have dinner.

When he took up the bread and the cup and blessed them, doing those actions that more than any other identified him as the dead man who, days before, had taken up bread and wine in just the same way, they recognized him. Jesus was here. Jesus had been the one explaining the Scriptures to them on the road. Jesus was the one who had been crucified three days before. Jesus was present. And suddenly, hope was present. The dream was no longer a past fiction, but a present reality.What had been dead was now alive. What had been a sad, misguided chapter in these disciples' lives became the anchor for the rest of their lives. What had been past tense was now present tense and would be future tense.And like most of our lives, they knew it only after the fact. They looked back on that walk on the road, and said, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us as he spoke to us?” They had known that Jesus was present, but they dared not hope that Jesus could be present on such a road of despair.

IV.

Many of us dare not hope that Jesus could be present with us on such a road of despair. Unlike those disciples, Jesus’ presence doesn’t just make our broken dreams come to life. Like you, I remember my late grandparents – may they rest in peace and rise in glory – and even though I often know Jesus’ presence in my life, they still wait for that glorious day of resurrection.

For those of us who are struggling, who are unemployed, who are addicted or in recovery, the presence of Jesus doesn't necessarily make life easier or give us a job or help us to be sober today. For those of us who are dealing with bullies at work or at school, the presence of Jesus doesn't necessarily make the bullies go away. And yet. And yet. The presence of Jesus may not change our material circumstances, but it might change the way we view those circumstances. So many of us are prone to thinking that we are only worthy of love if we have the kind of job that we dreamed about growing up, or that our worthiness to be loved depends on how large our paycheck is. We are prone to thinking that we are only worthy to receive love if we have kicked our addiction; when we sneak that drink or look at that website, we think that we are too broken to have anyone love us anymore. We are prone to thinking that bullies have power over us so that we have no options, no recourse, except to give in.

We find ourselves walking slowly along a road of despair, not really seeing what's happening around us. A man starts walking next to us, and we really wish that he would just stop talking. Can't he see that our minds are on other things? Can't he see that the only thing that matters is that we can't find a job? Can't he see that the only thing that matters is that we're stuck selling trinkets when we hoped that we would be able to make a difference in our career? Can't he see our grandparents and our parents and our children have died, and that they are all that's on our mind? And yet, there's something comforting in his words. So we invite him in, and he takes up the bread and the wine and blesses them and then we recognize him: this is Jesus. This is not a grainy photograph looking into a world gone by; rather, we who are grainy and black-and-white are transported into a world of living color. Our past is now our present and our future. Our dearly departed who have died in Christ will rise again. Our dead-end job can change the world, because this is a God who takes small acts of kindness and uses them to change the world. Our addictions are broken, our bullies are under God's judgment, and we are worthy of love no matter what voice whispers inside our head. Our past has been made present through this Jesus. Our past has been made our future through this Jesus. In a few moments' time, we'll receive Jesus' body and blood together. In this Eucharist, may all those voices that tell us we are broken be silenced. May we welcome the comfort of Jesus' presence to overcome all of life's difficulties. May we welcome the power of Jesus' presence to serve the struggling in his name. The promise of Jesus' presence is for us, and for our children, and for all who are far away from God, for everyone that the Lord our God will call. (Acts 2:39 para). Amen.

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