#side note I remember reading articles few years ago that there are very rare major british actors who come from the working class

[harryforguccy]

Did not know Al Pacino was a nepo baby

[queerchoicesblog]

A Promise Kept (OH/WT Crossover, Harper Emery & Ellen Thompson, Friendship)

As anticipated, my very first (official) crossover fanfic for the entry Friendship of the @choicesjulychallenge hosted by @kinda-iconic  ❤️

As I was playing Wishful Thinking I had this crazy idea: I started picturing an Ellen Thompson & Harper Emery friendship. They’re about the same age, they’re both devoted and esteemed professionals (dealing with scumbags like Ellen’s boss and Declan Nash *cough cough*)...long story short a friend-ship canon started shaping. And that’s the result: hope you like it!

Disclaimer: The fic contains a reference to this previous work as well as a personal background and FC (Gugu Mbatha-Raw is not the perfect FC but I get Harper vibes) for Dr. Emery

Prompt: Friendship

Word Count: 1988

Perma Tag: @brightpinkpeppercorn @melodyofgraves @bhavf @begging-for-kamilah @abunchofbadchoices @silverhawkenzie @kennaxval @strangerofbraidwood @crazypeanat @desiree-0816 @universallypizzataco

Harper Emery Tag: @bubblygothzombie @emeryharper @korrasamixfan  @delphinusbae

If you like this, please consider a like, comment, and/or reblog.

_____________________________

"Holy crap! How come I missed this?"

Aurora froze gaping at the box placed on her aunt's new desk. She stopped by to return her set of keys before starting her shift and found Harper unpacking her stuff in her new, well previous smaller yet comfortable office as "Head of Neurosurgery, Edenbrook Hospital". She had never been there before: she had only seen it during video calls but it was the first time she actually set foot there. There were a couple of boxes around filled with the little decor the place needed: her aunt's degrees, a few framed photos (graduation picture with beaming Dad, Grandpa and Nana; a rare shot of Harper and her mentor, Dr. Rabinovits, posing for the cameras and was that Alexander Evans, that former patient she heard of? Well, probably a family photo of the Evans wearing Santa hats), a small ebony sculpture, a painting of a Caribbean landscape and a set of wrist and hand stretchers. Books had already been organized over the shelves.

But that one...that was unexpected.

"What, Rory?" Harper asked, checking her bookcase.

Aurora's fingers grazed a frame before picking her up in her hands.

"You have been interviewed by Ellen Thompson? The Ellen Thompson?" she asked, showing the newspaper article that caught her attention.

Harper slowly diverted her eyes from her previous chore and let them linger a moment over the old article before moving closer and gently taking it from Rory's hands. A tiny smile filled with nostalgia formed on her lips: her younger self flashing an enigmatic smile to the camera casually sit on her desk was still in the dark of the tough challenges her career had in store for her. She was just happy, proud of herself; she was just forgetting for a moment the harsh reality of "that cruel science called neurosurgery", as Dr. Rabinovits put it. But the memory of that day was pleasant, comforting in a way.

"Yes, it was her last article she wrote before being promoted daytime anchor. I thought you knew? I'm pretty sure Nana has a copy of this, Marcus too probably..."

"Yeah probably...I must have missed it. I was too busy with college and my dissertation at the time probably..." Aurora considered. "But how?! I mean, I'm not trying to belittle your achievement, it's just...Ellen!"

"I know, I was surprised too at the time" Harper laughed softly.

"I bet!"

"I didn't think she would accept it. Because of bias, you know? She confessed that it had been quite a tough call for her, she's an incredibly talented professional and being accused of being biased is a capital sin in her field..."

"Biased? How could she be biased?" Aurora furrowed her brows, confused.

Harper took a pause and gave her an amused look.

"Because we're friends, Rory! Don't you remember?"

"You're friends??" Aurora gaped, plopping down on the sofa. "I really slept on this for years?"

"Well, we don't see each other as often as we once did now but we never truly drifted apart. And oh, you were probably too young to remember but she attended my graduation. Nana probably has pictures of that day...there was a small group of friends celebrating with us: you surely remember Bethany - she visited a few months ago, Nate, her college boyfriend, Ricardo, Alison, Elliott-"

"Oh I do remember Elliott! Your college sweetheart, dressed up to the nines and all googly eyes" the young Emery giggled.

"Glad you remember" Harper made a scene of rolling her eyes, smiling. "...and the most elegant of all was Ellen. That Ellen"

Aurora took a moment to reminisce the few memories she had of that day. Yes, probably...no surely! That girl in a gorgeous pink dress clinging her glass and chatting with Nana was Ellen. And...oh gosh, her younger self had even been so nosy to ask Ellen, that Ellen where she bought that dress because she wanted one just like hers. Luckily, Harper spoke again, saving Rory from the embarrassment of that moment.

"As I said we had somehow kept in touch over the years, against all odds. We were both so busy...her internships, her field jobs, my residency. But we managed to check on each other every now and then. Small things, even just a message in the voicemail or a quick call"

She smiled - a quick soft smile- and handed the framed article back to Aurora.

"When I became 'the youngest Head of Neurosurgery in the history of Massachusetts' she showed up at my door" she said, nodding behind her. "And announced that she was gonna interview me. It wasn't even up for debate, she would have signed that article"

"The hell with the friendship bias?" the niece asked, more and more involved in the story featuring two of her personal role model.

Harper smiled again, but it was a weaker one this time.

"Apparently so. She claimed that there were very good reasons to write it, even ethical reasons if you wish. She said that it was a story worth being told, that I could have inspired people out there, little girls in schools, things like that."

She sighed, shooking her head.

"Not sure I lived up to that inspirational role, but I tried, right?".

Aurora diverted her eyes: she knew what her aunt was referring to. She remembered the conversation they had the night before the hearing, their argument during the break of that hearing...and frowned. 

The weight of the last few words lead to a brief silence, interrupted only by the sounds of steps along the corridor. 

"Oh this must be Tanaka with Dr. Yannick. I asked them to stop by to sign those papers...excuse me, it won't be long"

That said, she hurried to meet the colleagues, leaving Aurora alone in her office. 

The Emery girl absentmindedly eavesdropped the three of them discussing a surgical oncology procedure but she got lost in the surgical medicalese the doctors spoke. So her eyes fell on the article in her hands again. She started reading:

“A Promise Kept: Why You Should Know The Story Behind Edenbrook Hospital New Shining Star" 

As some of you probably know, this will be my last article. Before you start getting sentimental about it, I do not regret it: I've spent so many years of my life typing behind a laptop and as much as they will always be an important, essential maybe, part of my life, I'm ready and eager for what comes next. You are going to hear my voice and see my face on your screen, brace yourself, dear readers.

I must confess that I was full of doubts about writing this article because I value ethics and professionalism. But I soon realized that ethics and professionalism are the main topics of this piece I'm writing and well, the very reason why this article should see the light of day.

So, for one last time, let me tell you a story.

More than a decade ago, I was a college student, an ambitious hard-working journalism major struggling over a research project. My professor asked the class to think outside the box and choose an issue we were not familiar with so that we were forced to document, do some real fact-checking and so on just like real reporters do. I spent hours in the library trying to find the perfect issue for a project I wanted to be A+, but nothing came. I was losing all hope when I noticed the notes of the girl sitting in front of me. They were complex anatomy schemes: she was a med student. Frustrated by my current situation, I did what I rarely do: ask for help. So I tapped her shoulder and asked her about controversial issues in the medical sphere she would like to see debated or brought in the spotlight. Just one, it was for a journalism project. The girl took her time to think about it then handed me a piece of paper with her answer:

Less than 19% of surgeons in this country are women and the percentage drops considerably if we consider specific specialties and women of color. It is a truth universally acknowledged yet publicly denied that women are still overlooked for surgical positions: the fair sex is emotional, tends to get to involved in the medical cases, not to mention potentially hysterical and suffering of that dangerous 'lack of refrain' so well known (?) to their male colleagues. They make better nurses than doctors and better GP than surgeons. 

That was a promising start. I thanked the girl and wished her good luck with her upcoming exam. Actually, I saw that girl a few days later: she passed her exam with flying colors and was now standing by my side at a rally. We became friends and one night, the first night of our senior years we made a pinky promise: a solemn silly pinky promise not to give up no matter what obstacles we will have to face later in our careers. A solemn silly pinky promise to be one day the best journalist and best doctor we could ever be. For ourselves and the others out there.

Well, I'm glad and proud to announce that about fifteen years later, that mystery girl has become the youngest Head of Neurosurgeon in the history of Massachusetts. Daughter of an archeology professor and another legend in the surgical field, Eloise Emery, the Haitian born cardio surgeon who successfully performed the first domino heart transplant on pediatric patients at Mount Sinai Hospital, NY, in 1989, Harper Emery is already exceeding any reasonable expectation. Colleagues describe her as 'headstrong, devoted and passionate, a doctor who would go above and beyond for her patients' while prestigious medical magazines crowned her 'the most brilliant neurosurgeon of her generation”.

At first, I thought that I accepted to write this article because I know Harper Emery and I value and respect her dearly both as a friend and a professional. But that is not completely true.

I accepted to write this article because I know Harper Emery and I know that she will always keep her promise. She already did.

Good luck, Dr. Emery!

Author: Ellen Thompson

Aurora swallowed down the lump threatening to form in her throat: that was the aunt she knew and looked up to basically her whole life. An aunt she thought irremediably lost...but maybe she was wrong, after all. As that realization crossed her mind, her phone beeped. It was a message from...Dr. Trihn? It was a selfie of her new flatmates waiting for her at the cafeteria. They had already bought her a cappuccino and a saved her half donut. Oh right, 'roomies breakfast', she had almost forgotten. She cautiously placed the framed article on her aunt's desk and was about to exit the room when she almost bumped into Harper coming back to her office.

"Gotta roll?" she asked.

"Hm yeah. The new roomies want to grab a coffee together at the cafeteria...I suspect, no I'm afraid that is some kind of a 'shining happy people' ritual" Aurora sighed, hanging her head.

Her aunt chuckled at her reaction to a friendly gesture.

"I'm sure it's not as bad as it sounds." she teased then smiled. "Have fun, Rory!"

The Emery girl nodded, even though she wasn't fully convinced, and picked a set of keys out of her pocket.

"Oh here's the keys and...Aunt Harper? You should hang that article to the wall"

Dr. Emery threw her a quizzical look then joked:

"Because it was written by Ellen? It would certainly give me celebrity points to impress the poor souls visit-"

"No, Auntie, you got it all wrong. Hang it to inspire yourself"

Aurora flashed her a quick confident smile and left the room headed to the cafeteria as Harper met once again the fierce joyful gaze of her younger self smiling back at her behind the framed glass.

[canchewread]

Editor’s note: this is going to be a very different sort of book review article than the ones I usually write; namely in that the main essay doesn’t include an actual book review.

For those of you who are curious - “Permanent Record” by Edward Snowden is an enjoyable read which I have no regrets about buying, even in hardcover. Although it’s true that there are no “new” revelations about the NSA mass surveillance program and part of the story Snowden is telling has already been told from the perspective of other people involved in the later stages of the tale, I disagree with the idea that the book presents “no new information.” The author’s impassioned arguments about the need to alter the fundamental functions and purpose of the internet, his clear insight into the reasons why online privacy rights were now as fundamentally essential to a free society as our already recognized rights and freedoms and finally the exposure of the thoughts, motivations and overall rationale that finally pushed Snowden to leak evidence of the NSA mass surveillance program are all fundamentally “new” bits of information - they just aren’t leaks.

All in all I’d say it’s a good book but it’s still a biography and as such you can probably afford to wait for the softcover, unless the CIA finds a way to ban it before then.

---

The Casualties of Cacophony

As those of you who read my post on Can't You Read yesterday already know, I recently purchased the new Edward Snowden biography and I've been reading it during smoke breaks for the past three days.

After hearing from numerous reviewers that the book contained "no new information" my primary motive here was personal enjoyment but even just the act of buying the book itself was telling me a story I wasn't listening to and wouldn't understand until this weekend. I'll explain:

On the day the Permanent Record was released in the country I'm staying in right now, I went out to my local bookstore to purchase it with tampered expectations and yet still, a certain amount of hopeful expectation.

Now before I continue further here I should mention that Americans who do not travel abroad are largely unaware of the tremendous amount of influence U.S. political media and ideological thought have over the (largely) white majority of the West in general and most Five Eyes countries in particular. Furthermore this influence is typically divided along the exact same "culture war" political lines that exist in the United States, although the degree to which they incite passions often varies from region to region - the average Canadian "conservative" cannot afford to be as rabid about opposing gun control laws as the average American "conservative" because culturally the idealized tradition of gun ownership does not exist there - but the idea, even without its systemic reinforcement, does.

I mention this because my local bookstore can be said to have a distinctly Americanized "liberal" set of sensibilities and ideas; although they would likely object to that statement as all Canadians vociferously object when you compare them to Americans. This is reflected in the "balanced" book selections on the shelf (which overwhelmingly consists of mainstream liberal, or conservative writers/thinkers and or Canadian authors) and in the sensibilities of the staff, management, and ownership I’ve encountered while shopping there; all of which were (as far as I can tell) fundamentally identical to those of your average white American Democrat.

I don't say any of these things to disparage them; the shop is a small, single-proprietor business and it's hardly surprising to anyone who understands class dynamics that a petite-bourgeoisie bookstore in a rural "conservative area" isn't going to be a hotbed of left wing thought or ideology. 

Yet despite all of this, I found myself somewhat shocked when the clerk behind the counter informed me that the stored hadn't ordered any copies of Ed Snowden's new biography - so much so that I did a double take. I asked again, if only to confirm that it wasn't a question of U.S. Government censorship or the fact that I was in a country that wasn't home so the release dates had changed - no, they simply hadn't ordered it.

For my part I assumed that was a careless mistake, after all even mainstream liberals had celebrated Snowden as a heroic whistleblower when the results of his revelations were appearing in corporate "liberal" news publications like the Washington Post and The Guardian. At that point (and while still not connecting the dots) I asked the store to order me a copy and helpfully suggested that they might want to order several copies for their shelf as this was the first time to my knowledge that Snowden would be presenting his own thoughts about one of the more important scandals and abuses of government power in our lifetime.

Then I innocently went on my way and back to my busy life for a week until the book finally arrived. As it turned out (and at my insistence) they'd ordered two copies, one of which was mine.

This decision would continue to baffle me for several long hours after I left the bookstore and indeed, none of it would start to make sense until I actually started reading Snowden's book - and with that act, found that the flood of memory about the NSA mass surveillance leaks and the political circus surrounding it, came rushing back to my mind like a raging river of madness and deceit.

There is, especially for the scholar, something altogether terrifying about reading something that you already knew and realizing, as you're in the very act of reading it, that you had for all intents and purposes forgotten something important that you were never supposed to forget. After all you can’t rightly analyze society without analyzing the history that helped shape that society, and you certainly can’t analyze history that you don’t even remember.

This creeping and altogether horrifying feeling of morally inexcusable “forgetting” became my constant companion as I reviewed Snowden's work, in his own words, while reading Permanent Record. I'm not just talking about the NSA spying and online data collection programs either; those I readily remembered, although I can't necessarily say the same for the public at large around me. As Snowden recounted James Clapper lying under oath to Congress, the (now all but completely deposed) wave of Democratic Socialist governments that opposed American internet surveillance and even the U.S. government’s efforts to trap the author in Moscow so he wouldn't fly to Ecuador, I slowly realized what I'd forgotten.

I'd forgotten the sheer breadth and open brazenness of the Pig Empire's war on not just privacy, but the truth. A war conducted not just against the whistleblowers and those rare few souls in the media who would seek to help them expose abuses, violations and atrocities conducted by our governments and the ruling classes of our societies, but also on each of us, on our own feelings, our own memories and dare I say it, our own psychological well-being. A war we are all losing as I write this to you today.

To understand what I mean by that however we’re going to have to go back to the bookstore and answer the question I should have been asking the day I tried to buy a copy of Permanent Record I the first place. That question is of course “what changed?” If only six years ago, Edward Snowden was a hero in liberal media (The Guardian U.S., the Washington Post) for exposing mass surveillance and abuses by the NSA and various arms of U.S. intelligence, why was I getting a weird side-eye for even asking about the book in an ostensibly “liberal” bookstore – especially in Canada?

While I won’t claim to be psychic, I think it’s fair to say that what have largely changed are mainstream liberal attitudes towards leaks, whistleblowers and the larger American national security state. Somewhere in the culture war-fueled anger about losing the 2016 U.S election, among stories of malignant foreign hackers, Hillary’s leaked emails, the Russianization of Wikileaks, the demonization of Julian Assange, the lionization of Barack Obama and a new fascist president’s ongoing war with “true liberal patriots” in his own FBI and CIA, the original signal had been lost. More accurately, the past on some deep and purely emotional level in the larger liberal zeitgeist had been replaced with a new communal understanding that my alienation from mainstream liberal thought had prevented me from recognizing until now. The word ‘replaced’ rather than ‘forgotten’ is important here because due to social pressures and the normal human tendency to forget our own embarrassing mistakes, the memory of Snowden’s time as a brave hero in the liberal reckoning is at best extremely hazy and more often than not, completely gone from the minds of most observers.

To the clerk behind the counter I wasn’t asking for a biography about a heroic whistleblower, but instead a bound volume of lies written by a traitor whose very existence represented a threat to their now-entrenched image of the iconic and canonized last liberal President (Barack Obama) and whose “decision” to hide from “justice” in the now thoroughly hated Russia proved where his true allegiances had always lain. Besides, even if in some unlikely event Snowden was innocent and Obama had gone after the wrong guy - leakers and traitors represent a grave threat to our beloved intelligence agents who are, as you all know from hours of repetition on Rachel Maddow, the only thing standing between everything you love about America and the sinister iron grip of Vladimir Putin.

From the mainstream liberal perspective I might as well have been asking them to fetch me a copy of the latest work by Lee Harvey Oswald at that point. Nothing about Snowden or his earth-shattering leaks had changed, but because the larger feelings about Snowden had been altered, both the leaked information and the author himself were now perceived in a new and wholly less favorable light.

In the often quoted but rarely understood science-fiction novel about authoritarian states entitled 1984, author George Orwell’s central character Winston chillingly observes that “who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.”

What Orwell meant by this is that the powers of the day control our understanding of, perceptions about and feelings towards the past and in doing so can have a tremendous amount of influence on our actions in the future. Of course in his novel the Ingsoc government had absolute control to write and re-write the historical record of society but the author was also engaging a metaphor that cast light on the nature of this truism in even a “liberal democratic” nation like Britain in the late 1940’s. It is not enough to simply acknowledge that “history is written by the victors” but one must also be aware that the writing and analysis of our society’s historical record (which is often conducted in real time by the news media) is largely conducted by upper class writers who are ultimately employed in the service of some aspect of establishment power or another – whether we’re talking about mainstream corporate media companies, the American government itself or the elite educational institutions that churn out historians, journalists and the general class of television punditry.

At this point you might find yourself protesting that despite their upper class backgrounds, the media, publishing houses and academic institutions don’t work for the government and in some broader sense that’s true, but in terms of the facts on the ground in the war against truth, it’s also hopelessly naïve. Setting aside the obvious reality that corporate media and elite educational institutes are themselves part of what any sane person would identify as “establishment power” the fact is that the American government does actively seek to influence the records of our past, both in real time and in its own files.

We know from revelations like “Operation Mockingbird” and the periodic unmasking of intelligence agency employees in the public eye that at least some of “the news” is directly written by folks with very clear ties to U.S. intelligence. From incidents like the Valerie Plame Affair, we know that the government sometimes purposely leaks top secret information to the media for its own nefarious purposes. We know that official government sources and interpretations of events are almost invariably broadcast unaltered and without serious challenge in mainstream media outlets - how many stories in the past month have you read that contained information from “a senior administration source” or “an undisclosed official at the State Department?” I’ll bet it’s happened significantly more times than you’ll remember.

This reinforcement of the establishment line even filters all the way down to your local news, where police department summaries of “officer involved shootings” are routinely broadcast as if they were the established facts of the case with few, if any questions asked about whether or not the department might be somehow motivated to lie about why some cop shot someone in broad daylight, again.

Not sinister enough for you? Okay, how about the Bush administration’s decision to retroactively classify thousands upon thousands of government documents and legal opinions that had already been released to the public, thereby effectively erasing America’s own arguments against the illegal activities the administration engaged in - like mass surveillance, extraordinary rendition (read: kidnapping) and the now rarely-mentioned and almost forgotten CIA torture program? Sort of puts the now infamous Karl Rove quote “we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do” into a new and terrifying perspective, doesn’t it?

Please keep in mind that these are only the direct ways the state, virtually any Pig Empire state, influences the media and thereby our collective real-time record of history; there are quite literally a myriad a indirect ways the state influences the media you consume as well. A good example might be simple access to the information a journalist needs to write stories; if a news outlet is consistently critical of the government and skeptical of the claims made by its officials, how long do you think they’ll keep getting off the record statements, leaks and interviews from people aligned with that government? How about the right-leaning billionaires who own modern media companies, do you think they align with the interests and power of the government? Well they probably should in America at least - thanks to the magic of corporate lobbying and Citizens United they own most of the politicians who work in that government after all. Once you realize that Jeff Bezos owns both the Washington Post and Amazon, the latter of which currently has the cloud computing contract for the CIA, the idea that you can separate establishment power in the state, from establishment power in the private sector (even in private media) starts to look more than just a little bit obtuse.

Of course as Michael Parenti discussed at length in his still spectacular 1986 work “Inventing Reality: the Politics of the Mass Media” not even a corporate news outlet can lie away some stories without irreparably damaging their credibility. Presented with the opportunity for a scoop, irrefutable evidence and public outcry bolstered by outrage among even the average “liberal” voter the corporate media was forced to turn against their own political allies and go along for the ride on the “Edward Snowden is the greatest hero of our time” train - although not without fastidiously printing government lies and denials as if they were fact in the very same articles that proved Snowden’s accusations.

Over time however and under the relentless crushing weight of op-ed after op-ed, an edit here, an omission there, one tiny smear and suggestive bit of framing at a time and the story starts to change. You can’t actually alter history but by subtly washing Snowden’s story in the ongoing smears against Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and other whistleblowers while casually omitting the subject or context of the author’s still mindbogglingly important revelations, you can start to change feelings about the past and the rest is basically a self-reinforcing cycle with a highly predictable outcome.

Memories of complex technical information about online surveillance fade, and the constantly reinforced feeling that leakers and whistleblowers are harming our brave and decidedly “anti-Trump” intelligence agencies in their battle against the dastardly Russian menace and Vladimir Putin, takes their place - until one day, just over six years after Edward Snowden risked his life and freedom to blow the whistle on an ever growing American police state, some clerk at a small town liberal bookstore is eyeing you up as a potential terrorist when you ask about purchasing the Snowden biography in broad daylight.

Understood in that light, perhaps the most alarming thing about Orwell’s quote as spoken by Winston in 1984 is the fact that the author didn’t know about and had no way of conceiving of the internet. Here after all is an environment where editing the record of the past is as easy as pulling down one article and publishing a new one under the same URL as before - and if you don’t think that is happening online, even in stories published by major news corporations you simply haven’t been paying very much attention.

Nor could Orwell have imagined that between social media, the comments section and twenty-four hour cable news programming, we would create a media environment that intrinsically favors outrageous or controversial lies over “boring” and nuanced truths. He could not have predicted that eventually the average American media consumer would become so bombarded with marketing, propaganda and contradictory information that all too often the facts of current events would be lost, replaced only by a wave of vague and hard to pin down emotions that in turn color the observer’s future observations - even observations about the now forgotten facts themselves.

One man however did see it coming and long before the internet existed in its present form - Canadian professor and communication theorist Marshall McLuhan. Combining his study of the effects advertising had on society with some alarmingly prescient observations about the fundamental ways “electronic media” was altering man’s relationship with the world, McLuhan predicted a society totally immersed in a cocoon of endless media content which served more to inspire feelings and emotions than to inform - an idea partially captured in his most famous phrase “the medium is the message.” In the case of ongoing Snowden coverage in the mainstream media, the contents of the stories themselves (and indeed, the author’s act of heroism on behalf of global society) have clearly taken a backseat in favor of defending the national security state and establishment power as a whole over time.

Although this probably isn’t what McLuhan ultimately meant by his famous phrase one can certainly say with a certain amount of bitter irony that in the Snowden story at least, the medium has indeed become the message - the problem is that the medium, corporate liberal media that directly influences mainstream liberal attitudes and opinions, doesn’t like the message our intrepid whistleblower delivered and now after years of subtle propaganda, neither do most of the people consuming that media.

Perhaps the saddest part of it all is that reading “Permanent Record” makes it clear that Snowden himself has almost no idea that this massive cultural shift in attitude towards him has even occurred. Frankly, how could he? Trapped in exile, he didn’t directly experience the slow and often subtle media reconstruction of public confidence in the national security state over these past six years. Having been purposely shut out by both the American government and the mainstream media, Snowden was unable to participate effectively in the ongoing discussion around whistleblowers and the demonization of leaks. In far away Moscow it may not have even occurred to him that hostile feelings towards Julian Assange on behalf of newly-anointed liberal saint Hillary Clinton would poison the liberal discourse towards all other “leakers” like himself.

In some ways the war against truth as it pertains to Edward Snowden has already been won by the national security state. Sure the author’s leaks promoted some legal restrictions on the NSA’s power but even Snowden openly admits that this isn’t nearly enough to effectively stop government mass surveillance. Indeed, Snowden himself and a few of the more famous journalists who told his story are really the only triggers that jog the public memory left in this story. The author exists as a living reminder that freedom and democracy are a sham in a post-internet world and that’s why he will never be pardoned and never be allowed to return home so long as this establishment remains in power - not just the government, but the whole corrupt oligarchy and all of its elite corpse merchants.

All wars, even propaganda wars, have causalities.

- nina illingworth Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog. Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

[dearyallfrommatt]

Alt-weeklies are dead. Blogs are dead. Bootlickers and the civility police won.

 The above story from The New Republic written by Alex Pareene was brought to my Twitter world by Radley Balko, superlative journalist and maybe the only self-described libertarian I’d let thrive after the Purge. In short, it discusses the recent emasculation of Deadspin and how it’s indicative of the death of the “rude press”. That is, the elimination of smaller, shall we say less respectful outlets like Splinter and Gawker, publications that would stick their fingers into they eyes of the rich and the very much richer.

 And it’s not just those web-based publications’ deaths that article warns of. It’s the slow extinction of the alt-weekly or alt-monthly, all to be replaced by boutique publications that won’t be so gauche as to upset their betters. In other words, they’ll be “civil” because “civility” might be the most important thing we’re missing in this cold, cruel world.

 The first writing gig I got out of college was at an alt-monthly and the only “regular job” I’ve ever had was with an alt-weekly, so I might be a bit biased on this matter. Twenty-some-odd years ago in Gainesville, FL, a pair of cats named Colin Whitworth and Mike Podalsky started MOON Magazine, maybe the altest alternative magazine that wasn’t a ‘zine that I’ve ever seen. I mostly wrote about music and Gainesville being what it was, there wasn’t much sticking-in-the-eye that needed doing.

 Though I do remember them pissing of a real estate guy so badly he started his own “alt-monthly” in competition. It lasted one issue as I recall. Every afternoon at 4:20, we'd have a “staff meeting” and the magazine run pieces from severely left-wing sources going after the destruction of the Everglades or the dangers of the Cassini probe. It was that kind of magazine.

 After I left Gainesville for Athens, I took up with Flagpole Magazine, a music/news/arts weekly in Michael Stipe’s hometown. Athens is a different town and publisher Pete McCommons was a different breed. An old school newspaper man contrasted to Mike and Colin’s “young upstarts”, Flagpole was a gentler poke that nevertheless contrasted well with the bought-and-owned-by-the-chamber-of-commerce local daily, The Athens Banner-Herald. He still gave a lot of room to his staff to go nuts, notably my direct editor Ballard Lesemann.

 When I left college in 1997, I had already worked in actual, for real newspapers for almost a decade. Furthermore, I’d grown my hair long and discovered Hunter Thompson, so I was by no means inclined to go back to covering school board meetings for some small town weekly. MOON went the way of the dodo sometime in 2001, and though I left in 2002, Flagpole’s still kicking.

 I rarely made anything close to a living at writing, but I’m thankful of my time with the alts and grateful to Colin, Mike, Pete and Ballard for letting me share the ride with them and have a little fun. So, again, grain of salt. One thing working on alternatives taught me was that “complete objectivity” was not only impossible but unnecessary so long as your cards are on the table, so I ain’t going to put no shuck on you.

 Now, I won’t summarize or really explore what the above-linked New Republic piece goes into. I highly recommend it be read and considered with much gravity. Even if you don’t agree with its conclusions - or even the need for the existence of “rude journalism” - do study on what it suggests. Do we really want a world where the extremely rich, either as individuals or as a group, can shut down publications that don’t show proper fealty and people who’re willing to tell the Boss Man to take this job and shove it?

 The responses to Radley’s retweet and others I’ve seen elsewhere are telling indeed, though. While there are plenty of sympathetic voices, not a few folks are saying “well, good, fuck ‘em”. There is a negative view of journalists, but if anyone suggests that it’s caused by recent events in the business are lying or stupid or ignorant or all three. For as long as there have been rich dudes willing to start wars for more wealth, there have been plenty of poor bastards willing to die for them. Nowadays, we have folks willing to pay Major League Baseball for what they used to get for free, and not even blink an eye.

 A lot of it’s political. Right-wing media doesn’t have the same problems in getting funding because, well, most rich people are quite fine with the nuts and bolts of conservative thought. The economic side, anyway, which spells less taxes or regulation; the social side, they have enough pull to not have to worry about anyone griping unless they piss off someone higher up the ladder.

 Which is extremely amusing, since these are the same folks who stay constantly stricken with the vapors about how much money Hillary Clinton (or Elizabeth Warren or Barrack Obama or Bernie Sanders or fill-in-the-blank-here) bring home. The “common people”, they’re saying, don’t need hoity-toity nerds who can string sentences together and count without taking off their shoes telling us that they’re favorite rich guy needs a kick in the nuts for being the type of bastard that needs kicking in the nuts on a regular basis. The hooting baboons that support digital frat houses like Barstool are happy to stick it to those PC creeps, man, rebelling in that way that hurts the actual elite not one tiny bit.

 They also hate the corporate media and social media sites, which they will tell you endlessly in the comments sections of corporate medias’ pages on social media while FOX and CNN have a special on it every other week. They hate “political correctness” trying to tell them that the “natural order” isn’t just boozy white dudes watching the Pats and gorging on chicken wings, making  cracks about the opposing quarterback being homosexual or making “hey-it’s-just-a-joke” jokes about Serena Williams or some WNBA playing being a “man, baby”.

 There is most definitely a place for big mainstream news sources like CNN or The New York Times or TIME Magazine. A professor of my in journalism school used to repeat the quote, paraphrased from memory, that “journalism is the first rough draft of history”. Despite what the right wing has been screaming for years, whoever the president is, the big papers are rarely out for his blood. Once you become president, you are a “Washington insider” and all the corporate media really cares about is making money. 

 Whatever he says about the “Washington Swamp” and “fake news”, Donald Trump’s been part of that world, as is every Washington politician or media figure. FOX News is the mainstream media and the Washington Examiner has plenty of backing to keep that so. Who funds The Federalist? That publication has its place but that question must be asked. To do otherwise is to tell the powerful that you’re just fine with them running things, thank you very much.

 But there needs to be a place for a small, scrappy paper speaking for the weird and shat-upon, flicking the earlobe of the rich and powerful and running ads for weekly drag shows. The dirtbag center - that’s what I’m calling the tedious middle-class bourgeoisie spawn that all voted for Trump because they hated Hillary but don’t want to admit it and were shocked as the rest of us, deal with it - wants to be kept fat and saucy while their kids joke about “learning to code” and they all grind themselves down in a miserable existence. Sticking it to the media and the elite, man, all up in the “intellectual dark web,” man, just like Peter Thiel or Bari Weiss, man.

 This is one of those things that shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does, because these people are that guy who started a one-run magazine to get back at Colin and Mike for saying hurtful things about them being crooked. In America, at least, there has always, always been a group of people who will kick down for the benefit of their upper-class betters and do it with a smile on their faces. It’s why dumbass country boys went to die for slavery and why thick-necked hardhats smashed picket lines and assassinated union leaders.

 Like the story notes, we all thought that blogs would be the new hotness, but that lasted just long enough for Google to deciding that “do no evil” was bad for the bottom line. People, especially wingnuts, boo-hoo about Facebook or Twitter without acknowledging or even recognizing that Mark Zuckerberg is a greedy little shit and Jack Dorsey is quite comfortable with cosplaying Nazis. Thanks to Ajit Pai’s bought-and-sold ass, Net Neutrality - about the only thing that keeps the internet from being anything other than a glorified Want Ads - is going to be that much harder to make reality.

A lot of this goes back to the “civility” thing, or lack thereof, NYT columnists bemoan whenever they get caught out being a dipstick. We’re too mean to each other, they say, we don’t know how to respect each other, they say. Rich people know how to run things better than the hoi polloi, so do sit down and be quiet like nice children. Or else. 

 Because here’s the thing, friends and neighbors: the rich, I mean really rich class in this country do not give a solid gold shit about you apart from how much more money they can squeeze out. Suck up to Elon Musk all you want and bemoan Bill Gates having to pay so much in taxes that he’s still a billionaire afterwards all you want. They are not going to let you on the space ship with them once they’re done fouling the waters and scouring the land.

 You can cheer the death of Deadspin all you want, hoot at the firings of journalist who say bad things about Trump or the cops or Tom Brady, and general be gleeful that the media all should “learn to code” to your heart’s content. Because it won’t end there. Conglomerations are already scooping up weekly and small town dailies, shuttering the superfluous and give everyone the same story in the same tone while kissing the proper butts.

 In the end, we need an antagonistic press. We need someone willing to piss off the deep pockets and old families and moneyed interests. We need someone that’ll give a voice to left-handed, bisexual, transvestite furries who love swing dancing. Or even just a little time, a slice of acknowledgement that the world isn’t just boozy obnoxious white dudes on barstools or bitter wine moms sniping on Facebook. You can cheer the downfall of such, but all you’re doing is putting the noose around your own throat and saving the Powers That Be a little time.

 You may not want to rock the boat, friends and neighbors, but have no illusions. When the rubber hits the road, the Wealthy Elite will throw you over. Don’t make it easier for them.

[amazingreligion]

Human Evolution and Islam

N.B That’s not a new topics ! It’s a part of an archived thread originally posted on sunniforum. This is a thread for this topic and how Islamically we can explain it. It is only for Muslims whilst Muslim biologists are specially invited to participate. It is incumbent upon the Muslim biologists and those in the field to refute those who use biological ideas against Islam. Otherwise don't blame those Muslims who are not biologists yet who take on this task. Here's a start that i wrote elsewhere: Ok after having read a lot since that time, particularly from pro-evolutionists-i'm not convinced by human evolution whilst the topic of other species, it is highly probable that macro-evolution(in case some are wondering, actually some evolutionists accept the distinction) to some extent took place although current evolutionary theory is seriously deficient in its explanations and must be improved-, i've come up several observations: 1) Evolutionists at times have used outright deception to propagate their views(such as Haeckal's embryos) 2) Evolutionists have been very gullible at accepting "evidences" that have turned out to be wrong(the "Piltdown man,"  the "peppered moths", the Miller-Urey experiments etc) 3) Evolutionists have a lot of evangelicals(atheists and agnostics) who are trying to promote their views against theists and thus have no sense of accountability for what they say-provided their not shown to be wrong- and this has been shown by their blatant lies at times. 4) Christians opposing evolution have also used lies and shown ignorance of the topic 5) Thus neither sides have been trustworthy(especially the atheists) 6) Considering the methodology of Islam in accepting information,-more important in this case as the issue affects Islam- i propose that Muslim scientists don't accept information on the topic where the opinion is against Islam(especially when there's a strong bias by the kuffar) but should set stringent criteria for verifying the information and must verify it themselves. 7) The conclusion is that the information that the kuffar provide on the topic of evolution(where is contradicts Islam i.e. human evolution) is not accepted at the current moment until it is verified by trustworthy Muslim scientists. 8) Also Muslim scientists should aim to refute those kuffar who oppose Islamic beliefs through science. Harun Yahya(although not a scientist and i disagree with his works) however must be commended(contrary to the useless Muslim scientists who have done nothing but complain about him) as he has set the groundwork and now the real Muslim scientists should take over and modify and strengthen his arguments. Note that i've talked with a science teacher(who is a biologist and has a masters degree) and he basically said that there's a number of serious problems with the theory but its a developing theory so there's no guarantee on some of the things it says. And he rejected human evolution.

Last edited by loveProphet; 25-06-2012 at 09:26 PM. A thought on human evolution, one thing that we expect if we're created differently to the rest of creation is that we should have unique things. Of course it is obvious in our intelligence(it is the highest) and other behavioural aspects but lets look at the physical aspects. Also why did humans supposedly ditch the trees and the tail? Before it was suggested that being bipedal involved less energy but now its shown to not be the case. Anyways some stuff i picked up from page 7 and onwards: http://www.arn.org/docs/luskin/cl_fa...gentdesign.pdf Sure i'm not fond of ID but they've got neat references that can be checked up. Another study wrote, “We, like many others, interpret the anatomical evidence to show that early H[omo] sapiens was significantly and dramatically different from earlier and penecontemporary australopithecines in virtually every element of its skeleton and every remnant of its behavior.” J. Hawks, K. Hunley, L. Sang-Hee, and M. Wolpoff, “Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Evolution,” Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol. 17(1): 2-22 (2000). One commentator proposed this evidence implies a "big bang theory" of human evolution. New study suggests big bang theory of human evolution The famed late evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted that "most hominid fossils, even though they serve as a basis for endless speculation and elaborate storytelling, are fragments of jaws and s****s of skull" A Harvard evolutionary paleoanthropologist recently stated in the New York Times that newly discovered hominid fossils "show 'just how interesting and complex the human genus was and how poorly we understand the transition from being something much more apelike to something more humanlike.'" Fossils in Kenya Challenge Linear Evolution [ "Other paleontologists and experts in human evolution said the discovery strongly suggested that the early transition from more apelike to more humanlike ancestors was still poorly understood. " And see: Fossil find pushes human-ape split back millions of years "we know nothing about how the human line actually emerged from apes.” Ok so i went through sciencedaily.com some time ago to see what features are unique to humans apart from the soul. I've found out about the brain and humans walking but now i saw this: What Is The Cognitive Rift Between Humans And Other Animals? No Easy Answers In Evolution Of Human Language Complexity Constrains Evolution Of Human Brain Genes Now fit this in with the Islamic idea of man being created differently. On the other hand more on the ERVs: Ancient Retroviruses Spurred Evolution Of Gene Regulatory Networks In Humans And Other Primates Using the tools of computational genomics, the UCSC team gathered compelling evidence that retroviruses helped out. It can be used as an argument that Allah put them there for our benefit. More like a common plan is why you see them at the same loci on the same chromosomes in the different species. Also see for HERVs: Retroviruses Shows That Human-Specific Variety Developed When Humans, Chimps Diverged More: Do orthologous gene phylogenies really support tree-thinking? Results Heat map analyses were used to investigate the congruence of orthologues in four datasets (archaeal, bacterial, eukaryotic and alpha-proteobacterial). We conclude that we simply cannot determine if a large portion of the genes have a common history. In addition, none of these datasets can be considered free of lateral gene transfer. Conclusion Our phylogenetic analyses do not support tree-thinking. These results have important conceptual and practical implications. We argue that representations other than a tree should be investigated in this case because a non-critical concatenation of markers could be highly misleading Originally Posted by ahsanirfan as salam `alaykum I shall respond, but not now. jazak Allahi khayrun for alerting me to it. Insha allah, keep adding whatever you know and I will be sure to read up on it. I took out three books today from the library: Behe, Michael - Darwin's Black Box - I've read this before, but I plan to read it again. Behe, Michael - The Edge of Evolution Gould, Stephen Jay - Punctuated Equilibrium - This is about how there are gaps in the fossil record Let me know if you have more resources that I can look up, insha Allah. I will Insha'Allah write up more when i have time. But Jay Gould's book is definitely great, he started the movement against gradualism(its weak in palaeontology) although he was an atheist. Jeffrey Schwartz has taken the lead, nevertheless they still believe in evolution(and i have no problem with it except with human evolution). As for Michael Behe and a lot of the IDists, they support human evolution so this stuff is of no use to us on this issue. So don't waste your time reading those two although i have the new book by him(got it today from the library called biochemical challenge). What we have to do is really create an Islamic perspective of this. For this the first thing we need is the different Islamic material(Qur'an, Hadith etc) on the creation of Adam(AS) and then we can make logical predictions from them so that we can atleast know what to look for. Though i might read this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Fly-Hors...3647641&sr=8-1 Since however you're not going to be studying biology, you might also want to read this(its simple for laymen to understand): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Evolution-Du...3647683&sr=1-1 There is a discussion over punctuated equilibrium and gradualism in this peer-reviewed article: http://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/Cambrian.pdf This is only because you mentioned Gould's book. I don't the evolution of non-humans to be a discussion here. Remember we're not after evolution of non-humans so don't get too distracted! Last edited by loveProphet; 16-06-2008 at 08:28 PM. Discussions with Christians and Debate Human evolution is not supported by the fossil evidence. Much of the alleged evidence that filled text books over the last 50 years has now been reclassified or rejected altogether. The missing links are still missing. Human Evolution: The Legacy of the Fossil Evidence Human evolution has many issues, including the realities of genetics, biochemistry, design theory, irreducible complexity, DNA structure, and information systems. However, the reality of the human fossil record alone is enough to reject the theory of human evolution all together. Here are just a few of the major problems with the alleged fossil record of the past century: Ramapithecus was widely recognized as a direct ancestor of humans. It is now established that he was merely an extinct type of orangutan. Piltdown man was hyped as the missing link in publications for over 40 years. He was a fraud based on a human skull cap and an orangutan's jaw. Nebraska man was a fraud based on a single tooth of a rare type of pig. Java man was based on sketchy evidence of a femur, skull cap and three teeth found within a wide area over a one year period. It turns out the bones were found in an area of human remains, and now the femur is considered human and the skull cap from a large ape. Neandertal man was traditionally depicted as a stooped ape-man. It is now accepted that the alleged posture was due to disease and that Neandertal is just a variation of the human kind. Human Evolution:  Human evolution has its currently fashionable specimens that lead from small ape-like creatures to Homo sapiens. These are examples of the most recent alleged links: Australopithecus afarensis, or "Lucy," has been considered a missing link for years. However, studies of the inner ear, skulls and bones have shown that she was merely a pygmy chimpanzee that walked a bit more upright than some other apes. She was not on her way to becoming human. Homo erectus has been found throughout the world. He is smaller than the average human of today, with a proportionately smaller head and brain cavity. However, the brain size is within the range of people today and studies of the middle ear have shown that he was just like current Homo sapiens. Remains are found throughout the world in the same proximity to remains of ordinary humans, suggesting coexistence. Australopithecus africanus and Peking man were presented as ape-men missing links for years, but are now both considered Homo erectus. Homo habilis is now generally considered to be comprised of pieces of various other types of creatures, such as Australopithecus and Homo erectus, and is not generally viewed as a valid classification. Human Evolution: The Most Recent Find In July 2002, anthropologists announced the discovery of a skull in Chad with "an unusual mixture of primitive and humanlike features." The find was dubbed "Toumai" (the name give to children in Chad born close to the dry season) and was immediately hailed as "the earliest member of the human family found so far." By October 2002, a number of scientists went on record to criticize the premature claim -- declaring that the discovery is merely the fossil of an ape. Human Evolution: The Theory Has No Support in the Fossil Record Human evolution is a theory in denial. With all of this fossil evidence (or lack thereof) it becomes increasingly clear to an earnest seeker that human evolution did not happen at all. • Lack of Transitional Fossils. Charles Darwin wrote, "Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?" (Origin of Species, 1859). Since Darwin put forth his theory, scientists have sought fossil evidence indicating past organic transitions. Nearly 150 years later, there has been no evidence of transition found thus far in the fossil record. • Lack of a Natural Mechanism. Charles Darwin, in his Origin of Species, proposed Natural Selection to be the mechanism by which an original simple-celled organism could have evolved gradually into all species observed today, both plant and animal. Darwin defines evolution as "descent with modification." However, Natural Selection is known to be a conservative process, not a means of developing complexity from simplicity. Later, with our increased understanding of genetics, it was thought perhaps Natural Selection in conjunction with genetic mutation allowed for the development of all species from a common ancestor. However, this is theoretical and controversial, since "beneficial" mutations have yet to be observed. In fact, scientists have only observed harmful, "downward" mutations thus far. N. Heribert Nilsson, a famous botanist, evolutionist and professor at Lund University in Sweden, continues: My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed… The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled. 4 Even the popular press is catching on. This is from an article in Newsweek magazine: The missing link between man and apes, whose absence has comforted religious fundamentalists since the days of Darwin, is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom creatures … The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms that lie between species, the more they have been frustrated. Is it enough to prove that the human evolution is not possible? As I have already mentioned that in Quraan it is cleared stated that: All human are created from the single pair (ie. Adam and Hawwa) And still today the science is not advance to prove this.  So Quraan is superior to the science. Realistically, if Darwin's theory can't begin to explain the 'evolution' of a system as simple as a ten part mouse trap, what hope has it got in explaining the development of the complex biochemistry associated with a single cell organism, let alone higher life forms? The Test Commandment: Sabbath matter Now examine the account in Exodus 16:1-30. The people of Israel were "murmuring" against God because they wanted more food. So God said, "I will... TEST them, whether they will walk in My LAW or not" (v. 4) Remember that this was a TEST—to see whether they would follow God's law or not. So what did the people do?     As human beings so often do, they did NOT take God seriously! Some Israelites went out and tried to find manna even on the Sabbath. And the only link between the human and the monkey was explained in the Holy Quraan is: And indeed you knew those amongst you who transgressed in the matter of the Sabbath (i.e. Saturday). We said to them: "Be you monkeys, despised and rejected."___(Surah Al baqarah-Verse # 65) So When Allah rejected them and curse them to be monkeys, then is it not possible that those unbelievers turned into the monkeys or ape.  And even if in the future the missing link between the human and monkey is found, it has to be of one of the unbeliver. Ok i found another interesting quote: Considering the very close genetic relationship that has been established by comparison of biochemical properties of blood proteins, protein structure and DNA and immunological responses, the differences between a man and a chimpanzee are more astonishing than the resemblances... Something must have happened to the ancestors of Homo sapiens which did not happen to the ancestors of gorillas and chimpanzees Elain Morgan, The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human evolution

[torontothoughts]

There was so much fun to be had on my trip to Scotland last May (I was there from May 4-20, 2019) that what started as two articles – about walking the West Highland Way and about everything else I did – ended up as six posts because there was just so much to share. If you’re interested in reading more about my trip, check the bottom of the post for more links. And if you’re thinking of visiting Scotland, go! I had an amazing time and would definitely recommend traveling there for many reasons, not the least of which is the beautiful scenery and friendly people.

Stage three of my trip, or maybe it was stage four, was all about the islands. Well, the Isles of Lewis and Harris at least. I remember being fascinated that an island could have two names back when I lived in Scotland (I spent six months on a working holiday on the Isle of Bute after university, more than a decade ago) and had always wanted to visit. Curious about what I did and what I wish I could have done? Keep reading to find out…

Fort William to the Isle of Harris

I took the bus from Fort William to Uig on the Isle of Skye where I caught the ferry to the Isle of Harris. It was a pretty journey (as all of my bus, train and ferry journeys were shaping up to be).��It was also a beautiful day so once on the ferry – super easy to board as a walk-on passenger – I stashed my main luggage and searched for the outside deck so I could watch for marine life. It was such a smooth crossing as there were virtually no waves or wind, but also no marine life other than a few birds. I took lots of photos, mainly playing with the zoom on my camera, but also because the coast of Skye is fun to photograph. It did get a bit chilly as we approached Harris but just “being on the water chilly”, not actually cold. One of the easiest crossings I’ve ever had.

Tonight was a splurge night as I was staying at a hotel, the Hotel Hebrides, rather than my normal hostel, and it was literally across the street from the pier (Tarbert is a small village) so it was easy to find. I quickly checked in and if it wasn’t for the included breakfast the next day, I would have recommended it. The room was nice except the bathroom garbage wasn’t emptied from the previous person. Otherwise, it was comfortable and looked like the photos. Reception was super friendly and helpful. The pub was a pub (more later) with friendly and quick service. But the breakfast was cold/cool except for the eggs, I really should have sent it back, although that’s something I rarely do. Sure, I arrived for breakfast 30 minutes before they stopped serving but I still expected everything that should be hot, to be hot, especially given the price. The server for breakfast (who was also my pub server, and lovely then) was a bit unprofessional to the German couple beside me, who were quite rude first. They must have complained because shortly after they left, a guy came in and reprimanded her in front of me (which was very unprofessional, especially as there was a kitchen a few steps away). So mixed feelings, although the bathroom products smelled nice.

But to backtrack, I had a nice fish & chips and a pint in the pub for dinner, where I shared a table with a chatty English gentleman who was my Dad’s age and from Brighton. He was kind enough to invite me to share his table (the pub was full and I was waiting at the bar) which was nice. He had asked the server to ask if I wanted to join him, she asked me and I thought “why not”. We had a nice conversation, he’s biking the islands, while eating dinner. It’s always interesting chatting with the different people you meet when traveling solo. I never meet as many if I’m traveling with friends. The rest of the evening was spent relaxing, reading and enjoying the quiet of my own room.

A lighthouse on the Isle of Harris

A view from the bus from Fort William

Taking the ferry from the Isle of Skye to the Isle of Harris

Almost at Uig on the Isle of Skye

I found this cliff on the Isle of Skye fascinating

Taking the ferry from the Isle of Skye to the Isle of Lewis

A view from the bus from Fort William

Some of the cliffs on the Isle of Skye

Taking the ferry from the Isle of Skye to the Isle of Lewis

Taking the ferry from the Isle of Skye to the Isle of Lewis

A lake I passed on the bus from Fort William, like a mirror

The Isle of Harris is getting closer

Leaving Skye behind

Eilean Donan Castle from the bus

Such a beautiful day for a ferry ride

Since I was just on Skye, why not have a beer from there

Heading the Isle of Harris

I’m on the ferry

Tarbert, Harris Distillery and then Stornoway

As previously mentioned, breakfast was included so I had the big Scottish breakfast (scrambled eggs, 2 bacon, 1 sausage, 1 slice of Stornoway black pudding, fried mushrooms, baked beans, a bit of cooked tomato, and what I assume was similar to a hash brown). I wasn’t impressed. At. All. It was oily and the only thing that was hot was the eggs. It was my only bad meal of the trip and I expected more from a nice hotel, especially as I’d been looking forward to it.

After checking out, I left my bag at reception (the lovely lady at reception was super helpful and friendly), and went for a walk along the road towards Scalpay before heading down a section of the Hebridean Way. It was a lovely morning and I had time to kill before the distillery tour so a walk was just what I needed. It made me wish I was walking more of the Hebridean Way (maybe next time) as the little I did was was lovely.

I then headed to the Isle of Harris Distillery for a tour – which was lovely even if their whisky isn’t ready yet. FYI – 3 year old whisky tastes like rocket fuel! Interestingly, I guessed what the other whisky was (Highland Park) as it’s one I quite like and often buy. Unfortunately, I’m not a gin fan but theirs was interesting, if a bit medicinal for my tastes, and the tour was great. However, I had been told by multiple people that Harris Gin is amazing so if you’re a gin drinker, try it if you have the chance. And take the tour, you get to learn about both gin and whisky.

Afterwards, I had a lovely scone (it was delicious!) with jam and cream and tea (side note: I loved that I could have a pot of tea everywhere, the tea drinker in me was super happy) at their café before heading to catch the bus to Stornoway. It was a nice bus ride and soon, I was on the Isle of Lewis. I easily found Heb Hostel (the hostel I was staying at in Stornoway, and one I would definitely recommend), checked in and then went for a walk around the Lews Castle grounds to explore. Unfortunately, the castle appeared to be under renovations so it was hard to get a good photo but the grounds were fun to explore. 

A lovely day for a walk

A short jaunt along the Hebridean Way

A short jaunt along the Hebridean Way

The Isle of Harris Distillery

A short jaunt along the Hebridean Way

A delicious scone and tea

A short jaunt along the Hebridean Way

A short jaunt along the Hebridean Way

A short jaunt along the Hebridean Way

The Stornoway Harbour

Tasting on the Isle of Harris Distillery

A short jaunt along the Hebridean Way

Some cute statues in Stornoway

Not impressed with this breakfast, although the presentation was nice

Some of the stuff that makes up Harris Gin

The harbour at Tarbert on the Isle of Harris

A closer look at Lews Castle

Callanish, Dun Carloway and Gearannan Blackhouse Village

I love it when two of the places I really wanted to visit were on the way to where I was spending the night. But let’s backtrack, Heb Hostel was comfy and quiet and since everyone else showered in the evening, I had the bathroom to myself (it was a shared ensuite that night). After a quick breakfast, I left my main bag there (I was staying there again the next night) and only took my day bag with enough stuff for the night so I could easily walk between sites and enjoy the gorgeous weather.

I can’t say enough how much I like my new day pack, a Patagonia women’s 18L Nine Trails Pack. It’s perfect for day hikes, an overnight trip, hiking without too much stuff, or hiking when the majority of my stuff was being transferred from one place to another (or I could leave it at a base) so it was fine for my overnight trip to Callanish, Dun Carloway and Gearannan Blackhouse Village. 

But I digress, back to the fun. I headed to the bus station which was about two blocks away (which is also where the ferry is) to catch the bus to the Callanish standing stones. Callanish is impressive, especially as you can actually walk up and around them (not like Stonehenge) and knowing they’re older than Stonehenge. There are also two smaller stone circles about a mile away and you can explore them all for free. Of course, I did. After exploring the main Callanish site, where the visitor’s center is, I walked over to the one that was furthest away (an easy walk), explored it, and then checked out the one in the middle before heading back to grab a quick bite (a scone and tea) at the visitor’s center cafe. All in all, I probably spent two hours there, plus another 30 minutes at the visitor’s center. It was great place to explore at my own pace and the weather was gorgeous – sunny and about 20C. 

I caught another bus (same route) to Dun Carloway Broch. Unfortunately, the bus driver was busy talking and forgot to stop (she said she would so I didn’t miss it) so I had to backtrack from the next stop. No worries, the weather was amazing and it was probably only a kilometer or two. I wandered around Dun Carloway Broch, the best preserved iron age Broch in the Outer Hebrides. It was amazing how short the doorways were – I almost had to crawl to enter. Interesting but a bit claustrophobic for me. There was also a cute little visitor center. I kind of wished I spent a bit more time exploring the area around as afterwards I saw the views from a walk nearby but I had more walking to do and things to see.

So once looking my fill around Dun Carloway Broch, I headed off to Gearannan which was supposed to be about an hour away but it took a bit longer so I think Google was a bit off. No worries though, it was road walking so easy if up and down and the views (and the day) were gorgeous as I was right close to the sea most of the time.

Gearannan Blackhouse Village is not only cool, historical and the hostel a fabulous place to stay but it’s also right on Gearannan Bay so it’s beautiful and there’s lots to explore. Plus it faces west so I got to watch the sunset while drinking a glass of whisky on the beach. I took a jaunt up the cliffside, or rather a walk over the “rocky” beach (large, smooth rocks, not pebbles – see the photos to understand) and then up the trail up and along the cliff for amazing views of the Atlantic Ocean. Lovely! I found a nice place to chill and just let the fantastic views, fresh air and solitude soothe my soul. So happy I stayed there and I’d definitely recommend it – the hostel itself was clean, comfy and way more modern on the inside. But it was the gorgeous surroundings that truly made it stand out. Stay there if you have the chance!

Side note: there were two Canadian girls staying in the hostel room with me and one is from Lindsay which is quite close to my hometown. Small world.

Callanish standing stones

Walking up to Callanish III standing stones, one of the smaller circles

Callanish standing stones

Callanish standing stones

Chilling on the top of the cliff by Gearannan Blackhouse Village

Callanish II standing stones, one of the smaller circles

Callanish standing stones

Looking around near Callanish

Me at the Callanish standing stones

Gearannan Blackhouse Village

Watching the sunset over the bay

The bay at Gearannan Blackhouse Village

It’s a hard life

Gearannan Blackhouse Village

Callanish standing stones

Callanish standing stones

Callanish III standing stones, one of the smaller circles

Sure, it’s windy but it’s a lovely day

Callanish III standing stones, one of the smaller circles

Callanish III standing stones, one of the smaller circles

Dun Carloway Broch

Callanish standing stones

Callanish III standing stones, one of the smaller circles

Gearannan Blackhouse Village

Watching the sunset over the bay

Callanish III standing stones, one of the smaller circles

Gearannan Blackhouse Village

Dun Carloway Broch

Gearannan Blackhouse Village

Callanish standing stones

Callanish standing stones

Looking out at the ocean at Dun Carloway Broch

Gearannan Blackhouse Village

Looking out from inside Dun Carloway Broch

The tide is out

Callanish standing stones

Callanish III standing stones, one of the smaller circles

Dun Carloway Broch

All the stones where so smooth

Callanish III standing stones, one of the smaller circles

Watching the waves come in

The other side of the bay reminded my of a person’s head

Inside Dun Carloway Broch

The ‘beach’ at Gearannan Blackhouse Village

Inside the hostel at Gearannan Blackhouse Village

Dun Carloway Broch

A closer look at one of the blackhouses at Gearannan Blackhouse Village

Such a beautiful view

Taking the ferry from the Isle of Skye to the Isle of Harris

Stornoway

Unfortunately, I woke up completely congested with a severe allergy attack – just in my sinuses but it zapped my energy. It altered my plans as I had no energy or desire despite how amazing the weather was (again!) so I decided not to go up to the Butt of Lewis and instead head straight back to Stornoway.

The bus that I caught from Gearnannan to Stornoway was a local milk run which was a great intro to how old people complain… a lot. The bus was 20 minutes late due to road work and wow, everyone over 50 had something to say about it. It was an interesting insight into locals and one of the many reasons I love traveling by public transit (for real, you get to see what a place is like when you travel with locals).

When I got to Stornoway, I went back to Lews Castle to explore the museum (nice museum, I learned a lot about the history and people of the Isle of Lewis), wandered around the town – the tea shop was closed, no tea to take home for me – and found a bench looking over the harbour to relax, soak in the sun and read. Despite being under the weather, it was a lovely, relaxing day. Oh, and the sandwich I had at the Woodlands Centre on the Lews Castle grounds was lovely.

Other than that, not much to report. My dinner of cheddar, oatcakes and an apple was approved by an older French dude. Oh, and over-the-counter meds are much cheaper in Scotland.

Heading the Isle of Harris

An old gate to the water

Looking up at Lews Castle

One last look at the ocean before heading back to Stornoway

There’s always great places to walk and enjoy the outdoors

Relaxing on a bench and watching the harbour

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, my time on the Isle of Harris and Lewis ended and there was still lots to explore. Despite the allergy attack, I had an amazing time with fantastic weather. I met lots of interesting and friendly people, soaked in a ton of history, learned a bit about island life, relaxed and generally had an amazing time. If you ever have the chance, visit the Outer Hebrides!

Have you been to the Isle of Harris and Lewis? What did you like best?

Revisiting Scotland – Exploring the Isles of Harris and Lewis There was so much fun to be had on my trip to Scotland last May (I was there from May 4-20, 2019) that what started as two articles - about walking the West Highland Way and about everything else I did - ended up as six posts because there was just so much to share.

[michaelfallcon]

Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong

It’s true! Everything you know about tea is wrong—or at least, if you’re me. I grew up on tea bags; I can still see them right now, a yellow box of Lipton tea bags, hanging out in the back of the middle shelf of the bank of cupboards in my mother’s kitchen. Maybe this article should have been titled “Everything Jordan Knows About Tea Is Wrong”—I apologize for making assumptions by using the royal you.

Until a very short time ago, tea was this very ancillary, secondary, overlooked thing in my life. I usually drank it (if I drank it at all) served as iced tea, sweetened of course if I was in the American South, or served dry as a bone over great hulking chunks of ice with a lemon wedge on that rare hot day in the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up. I didn’t take tea seriously—I ignored it on coffee shop menus, I didn’t make it for myself at home, I couldn’t really tell you anything about the various styles and varieties. I didn’t own a gaiwan or any tea-making gear, even at the entry level. I was oblivious to its many cultures and subcultures and rich history.

I was fucking up and I didn’t even know it.

And then very suddenly, everything changed. It started, like literally every major event over the last decade in my life, because of coffee. More specifically, because of a story I was assigned to write for Sprudge. We had noticed an uptick in tea quality at high-end cafes, specifically here in Portland, where the San-Francisco-based tea company Song Tea was showing up on the menu at a couple of the good local coffee bars. We started following Song and realized they were being placed in several well-respected cafes around the country. A hypothesis emerged.

In the early days of Sprudge you could tell if a coffee shop was any good just by the gear. If you walked into a coffee bar in 2009 and they had a La Marzocco and a Mahlkönig, you knew they likely gave a shit. Nowadays it’s harder to tell quite so easily, as the third wave coffee movement has exploded and things like gear and interior design have become more copycat. But maybe this tea brand was on to something; maybe Song was sort of like a third-party quality control vetting system, and that by only going into good coffee shops, we could look at them as a kind of hack. “If a cafe serves Song, they must be good.”

Photos from our 2016 interview with Peter Luong by Zachary Carlsen.

And so I went to San Francisco and interviewed Peter Luong, Song Tea’s founder, who grew up in his family’s tea shop and has been traveling for tea sourcing since he was a kid. You can read the interview here—it’s an okay interview, I think, and it helped turn more people on to the good work Peter is doing. But the subtext of that interview is what leads us here today. Because throughout it, while I asked Peter rudimentary questions about Song’s approach to tea in a coffee context, he was making tea the entire time. Teas like I had never, ever tried before—wonderful buttercream oolongs and chocolatey roasted tieguanyins, Cypress smoked black tea like a campfire jujube and endlessly complex Sichuan greens, all of it served in a procession of simple, stunning, utterly pleasurable teawares. Peter was serving me his own personal take on gong fu cha as I interviewed him, and honestly, it changed my life.

I left high. Floating. Tea drunk, tea stoned, whatever you want to call it. (Although if we really want to get into what psychotropic most mimicked by a sizable consumption of tea, I think it’s closest to a gentle microdose of psilocybin.) Blowing like a feather in the wind around Pacific Heights, with a laptop full of notes and no particular place to head next, clutching my backpack now full of teas for steeping back home.

And steep back home I did—pot after pot, with a strict 10:00pm cutoff so as not to mess with my sleep schedule, chasing the sensory memory of that incredible experience in San Francisco. I love a rabbit hole, a new world to explore, and tea—like coffee, and like natural wine—offered a vast and never-ending beverage culture to soak up like a sponge.

Tea quickly became a daily part of my creative and personal life. I found myself writing better, or at least writing more voluminously (which I know should not be mistaken for “better” but often feels like it) while consuming an ever-growing raft of teas. I started exploring different brands, seeking out interesting tea accounts on Instagram, pouring through websites big and small, from tea purveyors based in China to tea purveyors based a few blocks from my house. I started collecting teawares, began following talented ceramicists from around the world, and started—slowly at first—to begin making tea for others, as a form of expression for this new passion.

I also began traveling with tea in mind, seeking out tea experiences in different parts of the country and digging out time for tea alongside Sprudge’s busy travel schedule. An hour here, an hour there, ducking out of a festival on my lunch break or landing with an extra day to explore tea shops across a city. Along this path I started talking with the people who run these tea shops and bars, asking them about their own journeys with tea, their own perspectives on the drink and the multitudes it contains.

And through it all, I learned a couple of surprising things.

First, tea people are by and large kind to each other. I learned this first by haunting the Instagrams and Reddit forums for tea drinkers, and by taking on some local tea writing for the alt-weekly here in Portland, which got me into more and more local tea bars, begetting more and more happy, sunshiney, tea-stoned conversations. On the internet, and IRL, tea conversations appear at least to this outsider to be mostly full of positivity and kindness. It’s one of the nicest Reddits, which is really saying something, and on Instagram you have to look hard to find tea people being shitty to each other. I can assure you this is not always the case in coffee, and it is really not the case in wine.

Tea scoop and rest inside Floating Mountain. Photo by the author.

The notion of tea’s inherent kindness landed while I was sitting in a tea bar on New York’s Upper West Side called Floating Mountain, whose owner, Lina Medvedeva, escaped the world of Manhattan finance to open a serene, meditative, beautiful little second floor tea bar and gallery above W 72nd Street. Over a single pot of Phoenix Dan Cong (I can still taste its warm red comforting flavors now, months later writing this) we talked about her past life, her upbringing in Russia’s far east, near Vladivostok (“We grew up drinking tea like water”), and how Floating Mountain came to be. It was once a tailor shop, and today is imbued with the most glorious Manhattan light, streaming in through floor to ceiling windows, like an oasis of energy and calm in the middle of the city, just blocks from The Dakota and Central Park.

Lina’s gong fu cha is minimalist, with everything just so—nothing extravagant, nothing loud. A tea scoop from the Czech Republic, made from vitrified bogwood. A simple porcelain gaiwan. A glass water kettle. An hour became two, and I was then hopelessly late for my next appointment, but I remember asking: “Is it just me, or do tea people seem rather content? Like as a culture, it seems to be a pretty positive place…do you agree?”

“You can never know the inside of another mind,” she replied, “but the tea speaks. There isn’t much left to say.”

The house of Liquid Proust. Photo by the author.

A few weeks and a thousand miles later I sat for another tea experience, where I learned a lesson on tea’s power to transform our very souls. This time it was inside an unassuming house, on a nondescript street amongst a row of clapboard little boxes in suburban Columbus, Ohio. This is the home of Andrew Richardson, who goes by Liquid Proust on Instagram and runs a fast-growing digital tea company of the same name. His focus is on rare and aged teas, typically from Yunnan but also some truly remarkable oolongs from Taiwan and eastern China. His entire business and network of tea community happens online, and walking up to the house, you would never in a million years guess that inside it dwells one of the foremost young American collectors and distributors of vintage single-origin tea.

Nearly every surface inside of Andrew’s house is covered in tea: tuongs, satchels, bags, parcels, caddies, ceramic resting jars, wooden commemorative chests, boxes and boxes and boxes with China Post shipping labels affixed (oh, what the mailman must think!) and enough shipping material to ensure safe passage between here and Mars and back, Express Class. There is more tea in this house than one person could drink in a thousand lifetimes, though I suspect Liquid Proust would die happy trying. In his cluttered office (tea, tea everywhere) across an industrial minimalist metal tea table, Andrew brewed me a procession of increasingly rare and fine teas, and talked to me at length about his growing business.

Liquid Proust began as a side hustle from Andrew’s full-time job, which is as a business advisor and student in a corporate MBA program. He fell down a particular sub-section of the tea rabbit hole, chatting with tea purveyors in China and Taiwan and Malaysia using auto translate programs, assuming financial risk by purchasing lots–large and small–of vintage tea, and documenting all of it on Instagram. Today his website is an ever-changing array of tea offerings, collaborative buys and special lots, handpacked from his home in Ohio.

Tea has been a transformative force in Andrew’s life. “Tea has taught me to be accepting,” he told me. “I grew up in a very conservative religious family, and without tea, I think I be like… somebody totally different. A Christian conservative Trump supporter, most likely.” He grew up drinking Bewley’s tea bags with his family, he tells me sheepishly, and I can relate. As tea gained more and more prominence in his life, the old vestiges and relationships of his past life fell away. He fell into a new world of tea drinkers and tea lovers—diverse, international, accepting, kind. His doors are always open to fellow tea heads on the same journey.

“People come to this house from around the world,” he tells me, as we look over jar after jar, bag after bag, an entire living room given over to boxes to ship, every square inch of kitchen counter overflowing with tea from his remarkable collection. “We just start laughing together, and talking. It’s almost like drinking beer—if you drink enough tea you get silly after a while, and then you get to really hear about people’s lives, their views on religion and love, and who they truly are. I would have never had this conversation before—I would have never known you.”

Too soon I was back outside in the Ohio chill, waiting for a Lyft to take me back into the city, my bag and mind and heart crammed full to bursting with tea. I started crying in the back of the car.

As a Western tea drinker, tea doesn’t need me. Not economically, not culturally, and certainly not spiritually. Indeed, there is something almost comically absurd about obsessing over tea here in America, thousands of miles from where it’s cultivated and revered, separated by a vast ocean both literal and cultural, although I’d like to think it’s kind of modern and cool too—bridging language and culture gaps digitally over a shared love for something truly good. But the economy and language of tea is quite happily percolating along in the countries where tea is produced, a brisk market of sales and consumption and obsession. Tea is not, like coffee, primarily an export crop. It’s more like wine—the cultures that grow it most revere it, and typically keep all the good shit close to home.  Indeed, as I understand it is only relatively recently that truly great teas from China and Taiwan have even been available for mass consumption in the United States. General access to premiere quality tea in America is a fairly new thing informed by the opening up of China’s flexible take on communism vis-a-vis small business growth, the linking of our world through the towering modern marvels of online shopping, international shipping (thanks China Post!) and global free trade.

Tea prices, trade wars, globalism: all of this is made possible by international commerce and the free movement of goods and services and ideas through international markets. Like coffee, tea is an unexpectedly and explicitly political product to consume in the best of times. And today? When these trade freedoms are imperiled by tariffs and racism and shudderingly incompetent political leadership? Drinking good tea in America right now is a profoundly political act, more so than at any time since the American revolution.

Tea doesn’t need the West but I think we need it. I think we could all stand to sit with this stuff as a regular part of our lives; not to replace coffee in the mornings, or instead of wine at night, but as a bridge and a complementary force alongside the other drinks we already love. Tea is a vast, bottomless, endlessly complex world of styles, producers, history, modern expression, accoutrement and idiosyncrasy. It is a lifetime—indeed, many happy lifetimes—of culinary inquiry. Drinking good tea can make your life better. Drinking good tea has definitely made my life better, made me a happier person and a more creative thinker, a better friend and colleague and partner. It has comforted me in times of sadness and tragedy, and I have celebrated good news with it, and it has been there for me as alacrity fuel of the highest order on plain old boring work nights.

I strongly recommend drinking a lot of good tea to anyone who wants to better know their own mind. Bathe your brain in theanine any possible chance you get. Think of it almost as like a performance-enhancing drug for your life.

I will end this essay by telling you a secret. I’m “the guy from Sprudge” which means that every so often at an event (be it family or promotional) someone expects me to make coffee. And I can do it serviceably well enough. I’m okay at it, but I don’t think I’m particularly great at it, or that I approach it with the easy confidence and muscle memory of a champion barista or anything. My coffee brewing prowess is nothing special, and I always kind of dread being asked, because it comes with a lot of expectations that frankly I’ve done nothing to deserve beyond stringing lots of flowery words together.

But I love making tea. Adore it, really. I love making it for myself, for my friends and family, for guests at our Sprudge offices in Portland, at parties or brunches or pretty much wherever. I love (and I mean love) the ceramics; I love the tactile change from dry to porous; I love the flavor variation across a long session; I love the steeping rhythm; I love the intimacy it creates, the way you really get to know someone somewhere between the fourth and seventh cup. Some of the very best conversations of my life have taken place over the last two years, with friends new and old, across a gaiwan.

My dream is that someday I will be able to give my own personal expression of gong fu cha to someone else and change their life, too, by opening their eyes and mind up to what tea can be, just as Peter Luong and Lina Medvedeva and Liquid Proust have done for me.

It’s the least I can do.

Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge. 

Editor: Liz Clayton. 

All photos by Anthony Jordan III (@ace_lace) unless otherwise noted. The top image for this feature depicts a ceramic teascoop “chahe” from Russian ceramicist Anton Filonov, distributed in the United States by Liquid Proust. 

Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong appeared first on Sprudge.

Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee

[epchapman89]

Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong

It’s true! Everything you know about tea is wrong—or at least, if you’re me. I grew up on tea bags; I can still see them right now, a yellow box of Lipton tea bags, hanging out in the back of the middle shelf of the bank of cupboards in my mother’s kitchen. Maybe this article should have been titled “Everything Jordan Knows About Tea Is Wrong”—I apologize for making assumptions by using the royal you.

Until a very short time ago, tea was this very ancillary, secondary, overlooked thing in my life. I usually drank it (if I drank it at all) served as iced tea, sweetened of course if I was in the American South, or served dry as a bone over great hulking chunks of ice with a lemon wedge on that rare hot day in the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up. I didn’t take tea seriously—I ignored it on coffee shop menus, I didn’t make it for myself at home, I couldn’t really tell you anything about the various styles and varieties. I didn’t own a gaiwan or any tea-making gear, even at the entry level. I was oblivious to its many cultures and subcultures and rich history.

I was fucking up and I didn’t even know it.

And then very suddenly, everything changed. It started, like literally every major event over the last decade in my life, because of coffee. More specifically, because of a story I was assigned to write for Sprudge. We had noticed an uptick in tea quality at high-end cafes, specifically here in Portland, where the San-Francisco-based tea company Song Tea was showing up on the menu at a couple of the good local coffee bars. We started following Song and realized they were being placed in several well-respected cafes around the country. A hypothesis emerged.

In the early days of Sprudge you could tell if a coffee shop was any good just by the gear. If you walked into a coffee bar in 2009 and they had a La Marzocco and a Mahlkönig, you knew they likely gave a shit. Nowadays it’s harder to tell quite so easily, as the third wave coffee movement has exploded and things like gear and interior design have become more copycat. But maybe this tea brand was on to something; maybe Song was sort of like a third-party quality control vetting system, and that by only going into good coffee shops, we could look at them as a kind of hack. “If a cafe serves Song, they must be good.”

Photos from our 2016 interview with Peter Luong by Zachary Carlsen.

And so I went to San Francisco and interviewed Peter Luong, Song Tea’s founder, who grew up in his family’s tea shop and has been traveling for tea sourcing since he was a kid. You can read the interview here—it’s an okay interview, I think, and it helped turn more people on to the good work Peter is doing. But the subtext of that interview is what leads us here today. Because throughout it, while I asked Peter rudimentary questions about Song’s approach to tea in a coffee context, he was making tea the entire time. Teas like I had never, ever tried before—wonderful buttercream oolongs and chocolatey roasted tieguanyins, Cypress smoked black tea like a campfire jujube and endlessly complex Sichuan greens, all of it served in a procession of simple, stunning, utterly pleasurable teawares. Peter was serving me his own personal take on gong fu cha as I interviewed him, and honestly, it changed my life.

I left high. Floating. Tea drunk, tea stoned, whatever you want to call it. (Although if we really want to get into what psychotropic most mimicked by a sizable consumption of tea, I think it’s closest to a gentle microdose of psilocybin.) Blowing like a feather in the wind around Pacific Heights, with a laptop full of notes and no particular place to head next, clutching my backpack now full of teas for steeping back home.

And steep back home I did—pot after pot, with a strict 10:00pm cutoff so as not to mess with my sleep schedule, chasing the sensory memory of that incredible experience in San Francisco. I love a rabbit hole, a new world to explore, and tea—like coffee, and like natural wine—offered a vast and never-ending beverage culture to soak up like a sponge.

Tea quickly became a daily part of my creative and personal life. I found myself writing better, or at least writing more voluminously (which I know should not be mistaken for “better” but often feels like it) while consuming an ever-growing raft of teas. I started exploring different brands, seeking out interesting tea accounts on Instagram, pouring through websites big and small, from tea purveyors based in China to tea purveyors based a few blocks from my house. I started collecting teawares, began following talented ceramicists from around the world, and started—slowly at first—to begin making tea for others, as a form of expression for this new passion.

I also began traveling with tea in mind, seeking out tea experiences in different parts of the country and digging out time for tea alongside Sprudge’s busy travel schedule. An hour here, an hour there, ducking out of a festival on my lunch break or landing with an extra day to explore tea shops across a city. Along this path I started talking with the people who run these tea shops and bars, asking them about their own journeys with tea, their own perspectives on the drink and the multitudes it contains.

And through it all, I learned a couple of surprising things.

First, tea people are by and large kind to each other. I learned this first by haunting the Instagrams and Reddit forums for tea drinkers, and by taking on some local tea writing for the alt-weekly here in Portland, which got me into more and more local tea bars, begetting more and more happy, sunshiney, tea-stoned conversations. On the internet, and IRL, tea conversations appear at least to this outsider to be mostly full of positivity and kindness. It’s one of the nicest Reddits, which is really saying something, and on Instagram you have to look hard to find tea people being shitty to each other. I can assure you this is not always the case in coffee, and it is really not the case in wine.

Tea scoop and rest inside Floating Mountain. Photo by the author.

The notion of tea’s inherent kindness landed while I was sitting in a tea bar on New York’s Upper West Side called Floating Mountain, whose owner, Lina Medvedeva, escaped the world of Manhattan finance to open a serene, meditative, beautiful little second floor tea bar and gallery above W 72nd Street. Over a single pot of Phoenix Dan Cong (I can still taste its warm red comforting flavors now, months later writing this) we talked about her past life, her upbringing in Russia’s far east, near Vladivostok (“We grew up drinking tea like water”), and how Floating Mountain came to be. It was once a tailor shop, and today is imbued with the most glorious Manhattan light, streaming in through floor to ceiling windows, like an oasis of energy and calm in the middle of the city, just blocks from The Dakota and Central Park.

Lina’s gong fu cha is minimalist, with everything just so—nothing extravagant, nothing loud. A tea scoop from the Czech Republic, made from vitrified bogwood. A simple porcelain gaiwan. A glass water kettle. An hour became two, and I was then hopelessly late for my next appointment, but I remember asking: “Is it just me, or do tea people seem rather content? Like as a culture, it seems to be a pretty positive place…do you agree?”

“You can never know the inside of another mind,” she replied, “but the tea speaks. There isn’t much left to say.”

The house of Liquid Proust. Photo by the author.

A few weeks and a thousand miles later I sat for another tea experience, where I learned a lesson on tea’s power to transform our very souls. This time it was inside an unassuming house, on a nondescript street amongst a row of clapboard little boxes in suburban Columbus, Ohio. This is the home of Andrew Richardson, who goes by Liquid Proust on Instagram and runs a fast-growing digital tea company of the same name. His focus is on rare and aged teas, typically from Yunnan but also some truly remarkable oolongs from Taiwan and eastern China. His entire business and network of tea community happens online, and walking up to the house, you would never in a million years guess that inside it dwells one of the foremost young American collectors and distributors of vintage single-origin tea.

Nearly every surface inside of Andrew’s house is covered in tea: tuongs, satchels, bags, parcels, caddies, ceramic resting jars, wooden commemorative chests, boxes and boxes and boxes with China Post shipping labels affixed (oh, what the mailman must think!) and enough shipping material to ensure safe passage between here and Mars and back, Express Class. There is more tea in this house than one person could drink in a thousand lifetimes, though I suspect Liquid Proust would die happy trying. In his cluttered office (tea, tea everywhere) across an industrial minimalist metal tea table, Andrew brewed me a procession of increasingly rare and fine teas, and talked to me at length about his growing business.

Liquid Proust began as a side hustle from Andrew’s full-time job, which is as a business advisor and student in a corporate MBA program. He fell down a particular sub-section of the tea rabbit hole, chatting with tea purveyors in China and Taiwan and Malaysia using auto translate programs, assuming financial risk by purchasing lots–large and small–of vintage tea, and documenting all of it on Instagram. Today his website is an ever-changing array of tea offerings, collaborative buys and special lots, handpacked from his home in Ohio.

Tea has been a transformative force in Andrew’s life. “Tea has taught me to be accepting,” he told me. “I grew up in a very conservative religious family, and without tea, I think I be like… somebody totally different. A Christian conservative Trump supporter, most likely.” He grew up drinking Bewley’s tea bags with his family, he tells me sheepishly, and I can relate. As tea gained more and more prominence in his life, the old vestiges and relationships of his past life fell away. He fell into a new world of tea drinkers and tea lovers—diverse, international, accepting, kind. His doors are always open to fellow tea heads on the same journey.

“People come to this house from around the world,” he tells me, as we look over jar after jar, bag after bag, an entire living room given over to boxes to ship, every square inch of kitchen counter overflowing with tea from his remarkable collection. “We just start laughing together, and talking. It’s almost like drinking beer—if you drink enough tea you get silly after a while, and then you get to really hear about people’s lives, their views on religion and love, and who they truly are. I would have never had this conversation before—I would have never known you.”

Too soon I was back outside in the Ohio chill, waiting for a Lyft to take me back into the city, my bag and mind and heart crammed full to bursting with tea. I started crying in the back of the car.

As a Western tea drinker, tea doesn’t need me. Not economically, not culturally, and certainly not spiritually. Indeed, there is something almost comically absurd about obsessing over tea here in America, thousands of miles from where it’s cultivated and revered, separated by a vast ocean both literal and cultural, although I’d like to think it’s kind of modern and cool too—bridging language and culture gaps digitally over a shared love for something truly good. But the economy and language of tea is quite happily percolating along in the countries where tea is produced, a brisk market of sales and consumption and obsession. Tea is not, like coffee, primarily an export crop. It’s more like wine—the cultures that grow it most revere it, and typically keep all the good shit close to home.  Indeed, as I understand it is only relatively recently that truly great teas from China and Taiwan have even been available for mass consumption in the United States. General access to premiere quality tea in America is a fairly new thing informed by the opening up of China’s flexible take on communism vis-a-vis small business growth, the linking of our world through the towering modern marvels of online shopping, international shipping (thanks China Post!) and global free trade.

Tea prices, trade wars, globalism: all of this is made possible by international commerce and the free movement of goods and services and ideas through international markets. Like coffee, tea is an unexpectedly and explicitly political product to consume in the best of times. And today? When these trade freedoms are imperiled by tariffs and racism and shudderingly incompetent political leadership? Drinking good tea in America right now is a profoundly political act, more so than at any time since the American revolution.

Tea doesn’t need the West but I think we need it. I think we could all stand to sit with this stuff as a regular part of our lives; not to replace coffee in the mornings, or instead of wine at night, but as a bridge and a complementary force alongside the other drinks we already love. Tea is a vast, bottomless, endlessly complex world of styles, producers, history, modern expression, accoutrement and idiosyncrasy. It is a lifetime—indeed, many happy lifetimes—of culinary inquiry. Drinking good tea can make your life better. Drinking good tea has definitely made my life better, made me a happier person and a more creative thinker, a better friend and colleague and partner. It has comforted me in times of sadness and tragedy, and I have celebrated good news with it, and it has been there for me as alacrity fuel of the highest order on plain old boring work nights.

I strongly recommend drinking a lot of good tea to anyone who wants to better know their own mind. Bathe your brain in theanine any possible chance you get. Think of it almost as like a performance-enhancing drug for your life.

I will end this essay by telling you a secret. I’m “the guy from Sprudge” which means that every so often at an event (be it family or promotional) someone expects me to make coffee. And I can do it serviceably well enough. I’m okay at it, but I don’t think I’m particularly great at it, or that I approach it with the easy confidence and muscle memory of a champion barista or anything. My coffee brewing prowess is nothing special, and I always kind of dread being asked, because it comes with a lot of expectations that frankly I’ve done nothing to deserve beyond stringing lots of flowery words together.

But I love making tea. Adore it, really. I love making it for myself, for my friends and family, for guests at our Sprudge offices in Portland, at parties or brunches or pretty much wherever. I love (and I mean love) the ceramics; I love the tactile change from dry to porous; I love the flavor variation across a long session; I love the steeping rhythm; I love the intimacy it creates, the way you really get to know someone somewhere between the fourth and seventh cup. Some of the very best conversations of my life have taken place over the last two years, with friends new and old, across a gaiwan.

My dream is that someday I will be able to give my own personal expression of gong fu cha to someone else and change their life, too, by opening their eyes and mind up to what tea can be, just as Peter Luong and Lina Medvedeva and Liquid Proust have done for me.

It’s the least I can do.

Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge. 

Editor: Liz Clayton. 

All photos by Anthony Jordan III (@ace_lace) unless otherwise noted. The top image for this feature depicts a ceramic teascoop “chahe” from Russian ceramicist Anton Filonov, distributed in the United States by Liquid Proust. 

Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong appeared first on Sprudge.

seen 1st on http://sprudge.com

[mrwilliamcharley]

Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong

It’s true! Everything you know about tea is wrong—or at least, if you’re me. I grew up on tea bags; I can still see them right now, a yellow box of Lipton tea bags, hanging out in the back of the middle shelf of the bank of cupboards in my mother’s kitchen. Maybe this article should have been titled “Everything Jordan Knows About Tea Is Wrong”—I apologize for making assumptions by using the royal you.

Until a very short time ago, tea was this very ancillary, secondary, overlooked thing in my life. I usually drank it (if I drank it at all) served as iced tea, sweetened of course if I was in the American South, or served dry as a bone over great hulking chunks of ice with a lemon wedge on that rare hot day in the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up. I didn’t take tea seriously—I ignored it on coffee shop menus, I didn’t make it for myself at home, I couldn’t really tell you anything about the various styles and varieties. I didn’t own a gaiwan or any tea-making gear, even at the entry level. I was oblivious to its many cultures and subcultures and rich history.

I was fucking up and I didn’t even know it.

And then very suddenly, everything changed. It started, like literally every major event over the last decade in my life, because of coffee. More specifically, because of a story I was assigned to write for Sprudge. We had noticed an uptick in tea quality at high-end cafes, specifically here in Portland, where the San-Francisco-based tea company Song Tea was showing up on the menu at a couple of the good local coffee bars. We started following Song and realized they were being placed in several well-respected cafes around the country. A hypothesis emerged.

In the early days of Sprudge you could tell if a coffee shop was any good just by the gear. If you walked into a coffee bar in 2009 and they had a La Marzocco and a Mahlkönig, you knew they likely gave a shit. Nowadays it’s harder to tell quite so easily, as the third wave coffee movement has exploded and things like gear and interior design have become more copycat. But maybe this tea brand was on to something; maybe Song was sort of like a third-party quality control vetting system, and that by only going into good coffee shops, we could look at them as a kind of hack. “If a cafe serves Song, they must be good.”

Photos from our 2016 interview with Peter Luong by Zachary Carlsen.

And so I went to San Francisco and interviewed Peter Luong, Song Tea’s founder, who grew up in his family’s tea shop and has been traveling for tea sourcing since he was a kid. You can read the interview here—it’s an okay interview, I think, and it helped turn more people on to the good work Peter is doing. But the subtext of that interview is what leads us here today. Because throughout it, while I asked Peter rudimentary questions about Song’s approach to tea in a coffee context, he was making tea the entire time. Teas like I had never, ever tried before—wonderful buttercream oolongs and chocolatey roasted tieguanyins, Cypress smoked black tea like a campfire jujube and endlessly complex Sichuan greens, all of it served in a procession of simple, stunning, utterly pleasurable teawares. Peter was serving me his own personal take on gong fu cha as I interviewed him, and honestly, it changed my life.

I left high. Floating. Tea drunk, tea stoned, whatever you want to call it. (Although if we really want to get into what psychotropic most mimicked by a sizable consumption of tea, I think it’s closest to a gentle microdose of psilocybin.) Blowing like a feather in the wind around Pacific Heights, with a laptop full of notes and no particular place to head next, clutching my backpack now full of teas for steeping back home.

And steep back home I did—pot after pot, with a strict 10:00pm cutoff so as not to mess with my sleep schedule, chasing the sensory memory of that incredible experience in San Francisco. I love a rabbit hole, a new world to explore, and tea—like coffee, and like natural wine—offered a vast and never-ending beverage culture to soak up like a sponge.

Tea quickly became a daily part of my creative and personal life. I found myself writing better, or at least writing more voluminously (which I know should not be mistaken for “better” but often feels like it) while consuming an ever-growing raft of teas. I started exploring different brands, seeking out interesting tea accounts on Instagram, pouring through websites big and small, from tea purveyors based in China to tea purveyors based a few blocks from my house. I started collecting teawares, began following talented ceramicists from around the world, and started—slowly at first—to begin making tea for others, as a form of expression for this new passion.

I also began traveling with tea in mind, seeking out tea experiences in different parts of the country and digging out time for tea alongside Sprudge’s busy travel schedule. An hour here, an hour there, ducking out of a festival on my lunch break or landing with an extra day to explore tea shops across a city. Along this path I started talking with the people who run these tea shops and bars, asking them about their own journeys with tea, their own perspectives on the drink and the multitudes it contains.

And through it all, I learned a couple of surprising things.

First, tea people are by and large kind to each other. I learned this first by haunting the Instagrams and Reddit forums for tea drinkers, and by taking on some local tea writing for the alt-weekly here in Portland, which got me into more and more local tea bars, begetting more and more happy, sunshiney, tea-stoned conversations. On the internet, and IRL, tea conversations appear at least to this outsider to be mostly full of positivity and kindness. It’s one of the nicest Reddits, which is really saying something, and on Instagram you have to look hard to find tea people being shitty to each other. I can assure you this is not always the case in coffee, and it is really not the case in wine.

Tea scoop and rest inside Floating Mountain. Photo by the author.

The notion of tea’s inherent kindness landed while I was sitting in a tea bar on New York’s Upper West Side called Floating Mountain, whose owner, Lina Medvedeva, escaped the world of Manhattan finance to open a serene, meditative, beautiful little second floor tea bar and gallery above W 72nd Street. Over a single pot of Phoenix Dan Cong (I can still taste its warm red comforting flavors now, months later writing this) we talked about her past life, her upbringing in Russia’s far east, near Vladivostok (“We grew up drinking tea like water”), and how Floating Mountain came to be. It was once a tailor shop, and today is imbued with the most glorious Manhattan light, streaming in through floor to ceiling windows, like an oasis of energy and calm in the middle of the city, just blocks from The Dakota and Central Park.

Lina’s gong fu cha is minimalist, with everything just so—nothing extravagant, nothing loud. A tea scoop from the Czech Republic, made from vitrified bogwood. A simple porcelain gaiwan. A glass water kettle. An hour became two, and I was then hopelessly late for my next appointment, but I remember asking: “Is it just me, or do tea people seem rather content? Like as a culture, it seems to be a pretty positive place…do you agree?”

“You can never know the inside of another mind,” she replied, “but the tea speaks. There isn’t much left to say.”

The house of Liquid Proust. Photo by the author.

A few weeks and a thousand miles later I sat for another tea experience, where I learned a lesson on tea’s power to transform our very souls. This time it was inside an unassuming house, on a nondescript street amongst a row of clapboard little boxes in suburban Columbus, Ohio. This is the home of Andrew Richardson, who goes by Liquid Proust on Instagram and runs a fast-growing digital tea company of the same name. His focus is on rare and aged teas, typically from Yunnan but also some truly remarkable oolongs from Taiwan and eastern China. His entire business and network of tea community happens online, and walking up to the house, you would never in a million years guess that inside it dwells one of the foremost young American collectors and distributors of vintage single-origin tea.

Nearly every surface inside of Andrew’s house is covered in tea: tuongs, satchels, bags, parcels, caddies, ceramic resting jars, wooden commemorative chests, boxes and boxes and boxes with China Post shipping labels affixed (oh, what the mailman must think!) and enough shipping material to ensure safe passage between here and Mars and back, Express Class. There is more tea in this house than one person could drink in a thousand lifetimes, though I suspect Liquid Proust would die happy trying. In his cluttered office (tea, tea everywhere) across an industrial minimalist metal tea table, Andrew brewed me a procession of increasingly rare and fine teas, and talked to me at length about his growing business.

Liquid Proust began as a side hustle from Andrew’s full-time job, which is as a business advisor and student in a corporate MBA program. He fell down a particular sub-section of the tea rabbit hole, chatting with tea purveyors in China and Taiwan and Malaysia using auto translate programs, assuming financial risk by purchasing lots–large and small–of vintage tea, and documenting all of it on Instagram. Today his website is an ever-changing array of tea offerings, collaborative buys and special lots, handpacked from his home in Ohio.

Tea has been a transformative force in Andrew’s life. “Tea has taught me to be accepting,” he told me. “I grew up in a very conservative religious family, and without tea, I think I be like… somebody totally different. A Christian conservative Trump supporter, most likely.” He grew up drinking Bewley’s tea bags with his family, he tells me sheepishly, and I can relate. As tea gained more and more prominence in his life, the old vestiges and relationships of his past life fell away. He fell into a new world of tea drinkers and tea lovers—diverse, international, accepting, kind. His doors are always open to fellow tea heads on the same journey.

“People come to this house from around the world,” he tells me, as we look over jar after jar, bag after bag, an entire living room given over to boxes to ship, every square inch of kitchen counter overflowing with tea from his remarkable collection. “We just start laughing together, and talking. It’s almost like drinking beer—if you drink enough tea you get silly after a while, and then you get to really hear about people’s lives, their views on religion and love, and who they truly are. I would have never had this conversation before—I would have never known you.”

Too soon I was back outside in the Ohio chill, waiting for a Lyft to take me back into the city, my bag and mind and heart crammed full to bursting with tea. I started crying in the back of the car.

As a Western tea drinker, tea doesn’t need me. Not economically, not culturally, and certainly not spiritually. Indeed, there is something almost comically absurd about obsessing over tea here in America, thousands of miles from where it’s cultivated and revered, separated by a vast ocean both literal and cultural, although I’d like to think it’s kind of modern and cool too—bridging language and culture gaps digitally over a shared love for something truly good. But the economy and language of tea is quite happily percolating along in the countries where tea is produced, a brisk market of sales and consumption and obsession. Tea is not, like coffee, primarily an export crop. It’s more like wine—the cultures that grow it most revere it, and typically keep all the good shit close to home.  Indeed, as I understand it is only relatively recently that truly great teas from China and Taiwan have even been available for mass consumption in the United States. General access to premiere quality tea in America is a fairly new thing informed by the opening up of China’s flexible take on communism vis-a-vis small business growth, the linking of our world through the towering modern marvels of online shopping, international shipping (thanks China Post!) and global free trade.

Tea prices, trade wars, globalism: all of this is made possible by international commerce and the free movement of goods and services and ideas through international markets. Like coffee, tea is an unexpectedly and explicitly political product to consume in the best of times. And today? When these trade freedoms are imperiled by tariffs and racism and shudderingly incompetent political leadership? Drinking good tea in America right now is a profoundly political act, more so than at any time since the American revolution.

Tea doesn’t need the West but I think we need it. I think we could all stand to sit with this stuff as a regular part of our lives; not to replace coffee in the mornings, or instead of wine at night, but as a bridge and a complementary force alongside the other drinks we already love. Tea is a vast, bottomless, endlessly complex world of styles, producers, history, modern expression, accoutrement and idiosyncrasy. It is a lifetime—indeed, many happy lifetimes—of culinary inquiry. Drinking good tea can make your life better. Drinking good tea has definitely made my life better, made me a happier person and a more creative thinker, a better friend and colleague and partner. It has comforted me in times of sadness and tragedy, and I have celebrated good news with it, and it has been there for me as alacrity fuel of the highest order on plain old boring work nights.

I strongly recommend drinking a lot of good tea to anyone who wants to better know their own mind. Bathe your brain in theanine any possible chance you get. Think of it almost as like a performance-enhancing drug for your life.

I will end this essay by telling you a secret. I’m “the guy from Sprudge” which means that every so often at an event (be it family or promotional) someone expects me to make coffee. And I can do it serviceably well enough. I’m okay at it, but I don’t think I’m particularly great at it, or that I approach it with the easy confidence and muscle memory of a champion barista or anything. My coffee brewing prowess is nothing special, and I always kind of dread being asked, because it comes with a lot of expectations that frankly I’ve done nothing to deserve beyond stringing lots of flowery words together.

But I love making tea. Adore it, really. I love making it for myself, for my friends and family, for guests at our Sprudge offices in Portland, at parties or brunches or pretty much wherever. I love (and I mean love) the ceramics; I love the tactile change from dry to porous; I love the flavor variation across a long session; I love the steeping rhythm; I love the intimacy it creates, the way you really get to know someone somewhere between the fourth and seventh cup. Some of the very best conversations of my life have taken place over the last two years, with friends new and old, across a gaiwan.

My dream is that someday I will be able to give my own personal expression of gong fu cha to someone else and change their life, too, by opening their eyes and mind up to what tea can be, just as Peter Luong and Lina Medvedeva and Liquid Proust have done for me.

It’s the least I can do.

Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge. 

Editor: Liz Clayton. 

All photos by Anthony Jordan III (@ace_lace) unless otherwise noted. The top image for this feature depicts a ceramic teascoop “chahe” from Russian ceramicist Anton Filonov, distributed in the United States by Liquid Proust. 

Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.

The post Everything You Know About Tea Is Wrong appeared first on Sprudge.

from Sprudge https://ift.tt/2tPQWD6

[goldeagleprice]

Deep South home to historical banks

By Mark Hotz

I found myself flipping through my National Currency collection the other week, and I came across a few Georgia notes that reminded me of visits I had made to their towns more than a decade ago. I thought it would be fun to revisit those towns since I rarely have a chance to do articles on towns in the Deep South. So this month, let’s take a hop over to rural Sparta and Greensboro, Georgia.

Sparta is the seat of Hancock County, a rural subdivision midway between the cities of Macon and Augusta but not accessible by any interstate highway. Hancock County was created in 1793; originally part of Greene and Washington counties, Georgia’s 15th county was named for the first signer of the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock. Founded in 1795 during Georgia’s Greek Revival Period, the city of Sparta was named for the classical Greek city and was incorporated as a town on Dec. 3, 1805.

The Hancock County Courthouse dominates the downtown area of sleepy Sparta.

The very attractive Hancock County Courthouse, a classic-style structure erected in 1882 and now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was the first building I came across as I entered Sparta, which is located at the junction of State Routes 22, 16, and 15. Almost immediately, though, I began to notice that Sparta was rather poor. While the courthouse itself was majestic and well preserved, the square in front of it was poorly maintained and contained a rather shabby Confederate monument. Even more surprising was that directly across from the courthouse, on the opposite side of the square, stood a very dilapidated but still occupied home. It certainly appeared that Sparta had fallen on hard times.

Here is the impressive LaFayette Hotel in Sparta, which traces its origins back to taverns from the 1820s.

Once the center of a vibrant agricultural economy, Sparta is now a very sleepy town in a subdivision now more forest than farmland. The population hovers around 1,500. This does not mean, however, that Sparta did not have a significant past. Though now a mere shadow of its former self, Sparta still has considerable relics of Georgia history. Just next to the courthouse is the impressive LaFayette Hotel. This period structure was erected in 1840 on the site of the Eagle Tavern, which once served as a stagecoach stop on the Augusta to Macon line. In 1825, the Eagle Tavern was the scene of a great ball held for the visiting Gilbert du Moitier, Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American War of Independence. The Eagle Tavern burned in the late 1830s and was replaced by the current structure in 1840. Then known as the Edwards’ House, and renamed the Drummers’ Home in 1897, it was, in 1900, voted the most popular hotel for traveling men (salesmen) in Georgia.

Here is a rare large size note issued by the First National Bank of Sparta, Georgia, prior to its liquidation in 1923. Notes from this bank are very rare. (Photo courtesy Heritage Auctions.)

The Hancock National Bank of Sparta, named for the country, succeeded the liquidated First National Bank. A small group of high-grade notes came out in recent years, providing some excellent examples for collectors from an otherwise unavailable town. Note the bank officers signatures are the same on both the First National and Hancock National Bank notes.

Currency collectors remember Sparta as the home of two national banks. The First National Bank of Sparta was organized at the end of 1903 and received charter #7067. It issued all three types of Series 1902 notes until voluntary liquidation in 1923. It was immediately replaced by the Hancock National Bank of Sparta, charter #12317, which opened concomitantly with the closing of the First National Bank. The Hancock National Bank issued just large and small-size $5 notes before being closed by the receiver in 1932. In general, notes from Sparta are scarce.Just two notes are reported from the First National Bank; ten large and a single small are reported from its successor. I have included photos of large notes issued by both the First National and Hancock National Banks, the latter of which is from my collection. Note that the signatures of the cashier and president are the same on both notes, conclusive proof that the Hancock National Bank was the direct successor of the First National.

Here is the old Copelan National Bank building as it appears today in downtown Greensboro.

The first bank building I spied was a semi-boarded up corner structure that had been the Bank of Sparta. This building was not a national bank but was available for rent if someone is looking for a dilapidated bank structure. Farther down Main Street, I found the First National Bank building, with its gaping arched entrance, now housing Hancock Propane. This attractive structure still had its construction dates “1904-1907” on the top pediment. Apparently, after the closure of the First National Bank in 1923, the Hancock National Bank operated out of this same building. I have included a photo of the bank, set within the center of the block.

From Sparta, I headed north on State Route 15 twenty miles to Greensboro, the seat of Greene County. Greensboro, situated at the junction of US 278 and State Routes 15 and 44, was founded in 1786 and incorporated in 1803. Both Greensboro and Greene County were named in honor of General Nathaniel Greene, a hero of the American War of Independence. Greene County is the birthplace of Mercer University and was originally the first choice for the location of the University of Georgia. Greene County was home to the first paper mill in the state as well as the location of both the oldest jail and the oldest Pentecostal church in the state of Georgia.

The Greene County Courthouse, built in the Greek Revival style of the time, dominates the center of Greensboro, Georgia.

Greensboro is a very attractive town, and it had been on my list of places to visit because I have a large-size note from the Copelan National Bank of Greensboro. I found Greensboro very inviting. While the Greene County Courthouse was not quite as magnificent as others I had seen on this trip, it was a very impressive example of Greek Revival architecture. The town currently is home to around 3,500 residents.

Here is a large size note from Greensboro National Bank of Greensboro, the first of the two national banks that served this town.

Greensboro itself had been the home to two national banks. The Greensboro National Bank, charter #6967, was organized in 1903 and closed by the receiver in 1926. It issued a variety of Series 1902 notes to the tune of $563,000. Just half a dozen notes are recorded, and as this bank closed early, no small-size notes were issued. I have included a photo of a note issued by the bank. Unfortunately, the bank’s original structure has been razed and replaced with a modern building.

Edward A. Copelan founded the Bank of Greensboro, which he converted to national status in 1906, naming the bank for himself. Here is a large note issued by that bank, with his signature as president.

Greensboro’s second bank was the one I had been seeking. The Copelan National Bank of Greensboro was chartered at the end of 1906, but a local depression forced its closure in 1924. It was absorbed by the Greensboro National Bank and its circulation assumed by that institution, which itself only lasted another two years. The Copelan National Bank had a similar issue to the Greensboro National, and virtually the same circulation: $562,000. I have included a nice note from this bank; note the signature of E.A. Copelan as president. I was fortunate to locate the Copelan National Bank building and to learn a lot about its founder and namesake.

Here is the old Copelan National Bank building as it appears today in downtown Greensboro.

The Copelan National Bank was named for prominent citizen and first president Edward A. Copelan. He was a very important local businessman and one of the forces behind the Mary-Leila Cotton Mill, one of the largest in the area. He also founded the Bank of Greensboro, which he converted to national bank status under his own name in 1906. He was elected to the Georgia State Senate and served as the president of his bank until his death in 1918. The bank building, erected on the site of a former hotel in 1889, still stands at the corner of Main and Broad Streets. It is a lovely old bank, rich in ornamental architectural detail. It has served as a bank, hardware store, and currently is home to the Towne House restaurant. It is worth noting that after his retirement from Major League Baseball, Mickey Mantle spent his final years in Greensboro.

Readers may address questions or comments about this article or national bank notes in general to Mark Hotz directly by email at markbhotz@aol.com.

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The post Deep South home to historical banks appeared first on Numismatic News.

[k2kid]

Introduction

The blog has come into the possession of an exciting and valuable series of documents care of Dan Moat, a member of the 18th Battalion Facebook Group. His Great Grand-Father, Lance-Corporal George Henry Rogers, reg. no. 123682 was an active member in the 18th Battalion Association and the Royal Canadian Legion. With is interest in the post-war Association a series of “MEMORIES” in the form of one-page stories relate many of the Battalion’s experiences from the “other ranks” soldiers’ point-of-view.

It appears that the documents were written in the early 1970s, a full 50-years after the end of The Great War and are a valuable social history of soldiers’ experiences as told in their own words about the events that happened a half-century ago to them, and now a full century for us. This is the first of the series, and suffice to say, the reference, names, experiences, and strong immediacy of these stories bring the men of the 18th Battalion alive.

The format of the post will be the “Memory” with associated online references and end-notes.

Article

18th Battalion Association Windsor and Detroit Branch

Do you remember the night we left London? There was a big crowd to see us off but we eventually got started. Our first stop was Montreal where we only remained long enough to change engines. For the next three days we travelled through some sparsely settled country. There was not much scenery as there was a lot of bush on both sides of the track. We all enjoyed eating in the Dining Car. It was the first time we had ever been in one.

About the third day out we were told to get cleaned up as were going to get off at the next town and go for a march. We did at a place called Moncton, N.B. We marched up the main street, made a right hand turn and came back on a lesser main street. The people were friendly but not overly-excited as other Battalions had likely done the same. About two days later, we repeated and got off at a place called Truro. This must have been a mill town as there was a lot of young women around. While a short over weight Town Official stood by the Colonel reading a speech of welcome, most of the fellows were flirting with the young girls who were standing nearby. They were very friendly and after we had our little march, many of the natives were at the Station all waving goodbye as we pulled out.

On a very rainy Sunday moring [sic], we arrived at dockside Halifax. It didn’t take long to transfer from the train to the S.S. “Grampion[i]” [sic] which was docked nearby. As soon as we were settled we had our first meal aboard. It was not too good. Just before dusk the Grampion sailed and we were on our way. There was not too much excitement crossing the ocean. We had some sea sickness, physical jerks Crown & Anchor, etc., and about the sixth day out, we stopped and waited for the H.M.S. “Cumberland” to pull close. A young Naval Officer was rowed over to consult with our Captain. While this was going on our band was on deck playing Rule Britannia and other selections. It didn’t take too long and we were again on our way. The Battleship[ii], the first one we had ever seen, going in the opposite direction[iii].

About two mornings later, we went on deck and found we were sailing up the Mersey[iv]. Two hours later, we landed at a place called Avonmouth. We soon moved from the Grampion to a waiting train and after a short delay we were again on the move. We travelled through some populous districts and about four hours later got off at a little place called Westenhanger. We marched from there to West Sandling camp, a distance of three miles, where our war training was to begin in earnest. We had left London on April 12, 1915, and arrived in West Sandling on April 29th, 1915.

TEMPUS FUGUT [Time Flies]:  It was raining the night we left Sandling for Folkestone. When we got there we immediately boarded the Channel Steamers and were soon on our way. The Fourth Brigade General Staff had embarked the Channel Steamers and were with us. After a long eventful trip we were towed into Boulogne about mid-morning[v]. We then marched up the steep hill to the tented assembling centre at the top. The cooks got busy as everyone was hungry. It had been a long long night. After supper we marched to the Boulogne station where we boarded a French train. After riding in the darkness for nearly seven hours, we detrained, the station sign said St. Omer. The next day and for several days after that we were again on the move always edging closer to the front line. On the Thursday, we arrived at a small French village called Eeyck [Eecke], and were told we would rest here for a few days. We did and while we were there we heard (through the grapevine) that someone had swiped the Colonel’s horse while the Transport wasn’t looking. It turned out to be true.

On the Saturday we were inspected by Major General Alderson who was said to be the Commander of the Canadian Corp. The following day our Chaplain Captain Carlisle held an open-air service that was well attended. He preached a wonderful sermon and we all sang the old favourites. The following Tuesday we were again on the march, and after a day or so we arrived in Dranoutre which was considered the gateway to the Western Front. After supper we started marching again and a few hours later the order “Single File” was given. We then left the cobblestone road and entered a soggy field still in single file. Everything was quiet until Billy Dewer [sic] let out a yell. He had been hit in the leg and dropped. We all dropped with him. The stretcher bearers took care of Billy, our first casualty, while the rest of “d” [company] continued to a sand bagged area, where we relieved the 3rd Royal Fusiliers.

The Platoon officers were busy setting out the guards, possibly the most that had been assigned since the war started. When daylight came it was interesting to read the sign “S.P. No. 20. This strong point must be held at all costs.” It made us feel important. AS we thought things over, we realized we had travelled from Queens Park and Wolseley Barracks to the Western Front. It had taken us nearly a year, (with lots of activities in between) to do so but here we were at last. What the future held only time would tell.

We have omitted some of the details as space is a factor. We know you will understand.

Top of page of “Memory”.

Bottom of page of “Memory”.

The “memory” relates the Battalion’s departure from London, Ontario where it formed from October 1914 until its departure on April 12, 1915. It relates in some detail giving the reader some insight to the experiences of the rank and file of the Battalion. The images of the “sparsely settled country” of the south shore of the province Quebec and the immense forests of New Brunswick contrast with the rare civilizing experience of dining in the “Dining Car” of the train, giving rise to the logistics involve in transporting the 1,000 odd men of the Battalion. This speaks to the relative small geographic reach a typical Canadian of that era would have experienced, especially the native-born Canadians. Travel by train for a labourer or farmer would be rare and of short distance and duration and the relative economic ability to partake in using the facility of a dining car on a train was rare enough to make the author of this memory remark upon it.

A trip from London, Ontario to Halifax today takes 1 day and 10 hours and appears to mimic the same route by travelling along the north shore of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River until Montreal, where it slides south over the river and follows the south shore, effectively paralleling it until the tracks hit Mont Joli, Quebec. Turning south, the train would cross the Gaspe Peninsula and entering New Brunswick at Campbellton passing through Bathurst, Moncton, Truro until its last stop, Halifax. The trip took seven days and must have been monotonous for the soldiers aboard the train. Even with the breaks at Moncton and Truro the men must have been itching to get aboard the transport and get on their way to the next stage of their service.

A brief description of the crossing offers some insight into the activities of the men. Some gambling ensues “Crown and Anchor” and a later memory relates how one of the soldiers, Private George Dickson, reg. no. 53410, who tattooed the soldiers’ arms with the crest of the 18th Battalion as the men travelled aboard ship. Though there “was not too much excitement” one would suspect that there was tension and expectation and a little melancholy for those soldiers leaving family in Canada and anticipation for those men who still had family in the British Isles.

On April 29, 1915 the Battalion arrived and set foot on the soil of England and very quickly they were transported (in four hours in contrast to seven days) to West Sandling, Kent to begin their next stage of training. The train trip must have an eye opener for the rural born and raised from Canada. They were travelling in the cradle Empire, witnessing a vibrant society that was one of the most powerful Empires in known history. The turn of the century and the end of the Victorian era with its replacement of the Edwardians and the relative comfort and national malaise which helped lead to the current events that lead to war and required the men of the 18th Battalion to train, fight, and sacrifice for this country passing by the windows of the train carriages transporting them closer to the mechanized and organized Armageddon of the Western Front. These soldiers would experience this new era, the Great War, in its full force and fury. But, for now, the pastoral fields of England passed, enveloped by the Spring of 1915.

Seventeen days of travel resulted in four months of training and the Battalion embarked for the Continent and Flanders on September 15, 1915. The “memory” offers a brief description of the route taken by the Battalion and compresses time by relating six days of activity in one paragraph culminating in relating an event very important to the family of the author:

“After supper we started marching again and a few hours later the order “Single File” was given. We then left the cobblestone road and entered a soggy field still in single file. Everything was quiet until Billy Dewer [sic] let out a yell. He had been hit in the leg and dropped. We all dropped with him. The stretcher bearers took care of Billy, our first casualty, while the rest of “d” [company] continued to a sand bagged area, where we relieved the 3rd Royal Fusiliers.”

The War Diary of the Medical Officer relates this event with this entry: “While marching to R.E. Farm no. 53902 Pte. Dewar was wounded by bullet through fleshy part of thigh. Was sent to hospital.”  [emphasis by author] The significance of this event for Private Dewar is not in dispute, but even with the official record of the war diary relating this event there was a certainly lack of certainty making claim that this relative (my Grandfather on my mother’s side) was, in fact, the absolutely first soldier of the 18th Battalion to be wounded during active service. The “memory” not only confirms this but puts it in a broader context, connecting Private Dewar more intimately with the unit as they call him “Billy” and not Bill or William. This was detail gives us his nickname and solidifies his existence in the history of the Battalion. The events being related happened fifty-five years prior to their writing in the 1970s and thirty years after my Grand Father had died, having passed on April 18, 1939. There is a certain comfort and pride that his memory and experience was remembered by the author of this “memory” and it was a shock to see his name on the page. His wounding required over a year and a half treatment and convalescence before he was fit for service and returned to his Battalion.

One wonders what ribbing or teasing occurred from his comrades-in-arms as they met after the war at their Association events and reunions. His wounding and its significance to the Battalion history and folklore may have fueled may stories from the survivors of the original members of the Battalion.

The “memory” stands on its own but there is not doubt of its significance to the author of this blog and his family. Private Billy Dewar. One of the many who made the 18th Battalion a living part of our Canadian Military heritage. Thanks to Private Rogers and his family it can be shared to a larger audience.

  [i] S.S. Grampian.

[ii] The H.M.S. Cumberland was an Monmouth-Class armored cruiser.

[iii] This is a curious memory as Antal and Shackelton in Duty Nobly Done: The Official History of the Essex and Kent Scottish Regiment, indicate that the Cumberland escorted the S.S. Grampian and other ships of that convoy until they met two anti-submarine destroyers at the Bristol Channel, after which the Cumberland departed.

[iv] The port of Avonmouth, a part of Bristol, is on the Severn River.

[v] One of the paddle-steamers collided with a Royal Naval destroyer during maneuvering at Folkestone, England. This may have necessitated a tow from another ship for the steamer transporting the Battalion to make the journey across the Channel safely. The War Diary is not clear about this event and gives the impression that the Battalion needed more than one steamer to transport the Battalion. See September 14, 1915 War Diary entry for reference.

“Do Your Remember the Night We Left London?”: First in the Series of “MEMORIES” Introduction The blog has come into the possession of an exciting and valuable series of documents care of Dan Moat, a member of the 18th Battalion Facebook Group.

[fingaudioart]

Quiet and Loud, at -16 LUFS

One of the great tool of cinema is “dynamics.” Some scenes are loud, some are quiet, and the contrast makes the story world feel even bigger.

This is a harder to do in a modern audio drama. After all, audio dramas are very rarely listened to in a quiet room over a nice sounding sound system. The “best” listening experience for your typical audience member is going to be over a pair of headphones while they clean their house, and often people listen while driving in a noisy car.

If you decide “Screw those people who don’t listen in quiet places, I’m gonna mix it so it sounds best!” and create quiet parts and loud parts, I have bad news for you: Your audience is inches away from the volume control. They’ll likely turn it up and down on their own, keeping it at their own personal sweet spot as it plays, getting a little annoyed every time they do.

But, still. Dynamics is a powerful tool. It’s a shame to walk away from it.

Well, luckily, I have a theory.

Sounding Loud and Sounding Quiet

In our everyday lives, we spend time in quiet places, and we spend time in louder places. Unless the sound is outside of a certain range--unless it’s exceptionally quiet, or painfully loud--we don’t notice these volume changes. When we talk in these different places, we naturally raise the volume of our voice to be heard by the people we are talking to, or lower it so we don’t disturb the people we aren’t talking to it. This is done by pure instinct.

So Note #1: In our lives, the volume of the world changes from place to place, and our ears automatically adjust.

Note #2: When we change the volume of our voice, it’s not just the volume that changes, but also the *quality* of our voice.

This is easiest to see at the extreme ends of our voices, with whispering and screaming. You can turn up the volume on a recording of a whisper, and it’ll still sound quiet, and a scream will always sound like a scream, no matter the final output level. This also applies to more normal ranges of speech. We speak differently on busy street corner than we do in our living room.

Which brings us to Note #3: No matter the level of the final piece, the volume your actors use when recording will essentially calibrate the listeners and tell them how loud other sounds are. So if an actor is yelling at the top of their lungs, but the club music is drowning them out, the listener will understand that the club music is fucking loud. If the characters are talking in hushed voices, the scene will feel quiet to the audience, even if you’re hitting -12LUFS.

But we have to be reasonable, here. If the actor is whispering, but is still audible over the loud club music, it’ll sound canned.  The trick to seamlessly adding a noisy background is to make sure the actors raise their volume to the appropriate level when recording. In fact, this is one of the spots where a lot of audio dramas get into trouble...the actors speak at a normal volume in a noisy airplane, and it just doesn’t match. (This is also one of the dangers of recording actors remotely: they each read at a different volume, so their conversation doesn’t match.)

But the big take away here: you can make your piece feel loud and feel quiet, even if the final mix is all at roughly the same level.

Dynamics Are a Story Choice

While the majority of this article is going to be about production techniques, it really begins in the script. A scene that’s set in the middle of the night wants to be quiet. A scene that’s set in a night club wants to be loud. More to the point, if all of your settings are in similar places, your piece is going to want to be at the same volume.

If you’re going to embrace dynamics, you need to write them in. Consider changing the setting of a scene to create more contrast with the previous scene. Design the drama in a way where characters will need to be quiet for some parts, and loud for others.

Recording Loud Scenes

Sorry to belabor the point, but the key to dynamics is in the actors’ performances. To make a scene sound loud, the actors need to speak loudly, and the background ambience needs match in both quality and in the mix.

In my experience, it is very hard for an actor to speak louder than the environment. If you are recording in a quiet room, they tend to trail off to quieter level. Often the actor will be so concerned about their volume, it will hurt their performance. Other times, one actor will maintain and the other drops off, making the conversation feel very unnatural.

So a couple tricks.

Record on location. If it’s a scene on a busy street, go out on a street and record it. The actors will naturally adjust their pitch, and will even interact with the environment (when the traffic gets louder, they’ll talk louder). Use a shotgun mic to reduce the amount of ambience, if needed. And make sure to record room tone/ambience. This only works where the noise is steady and constant, like freeway traffic. It won’t work with music.

Bring a recording of what the intended space will sound like, and play that for the actors before recording. It sounds goofy, but it really helps. At the very least, it’ll help convince the cast that you aren’t insane when you remind them to keep the volume up.

Have the actors sit further apart from each other than they normally would. For instance, if it’s two people sitting at a table in a noisy club, have them move to opposite sides of the room and talk to each other. They’ll naturally raise their voices to make themselves heard.

Yell at the actors. More precisely, raise your voice to the volume you want before beginning a take. “OKAY, THIS IS YOUR VOLUME. SCENE 4, TAKE 2. AND...ACTION!” The talent will usually bend their voice to match yours, at least at first.

Shorten long takes. As we said, people naturally adjust their volume to their environment, and an actor may gradually bring their voice back to the normal range over the course of a scene. Break the scene up into smaller pieces, if you need to, AND KEEP TALKING LIKE THIS.

Give the actors earplugs or earmuffs. I haven’t actually tried this, but I’m 95% sure it would work great.

Most importantly, whoever is directing/producing needs be aware of this choice, and to not give up on it. It can be a struggle, but I think it’s worth it in the end.

Recording Quiet Scenes

It’s a lot easier to “bring your voice down” than it is to talk loudly, and your actors will probably do it easily. But quiet scenes have their own difficulties. Specifically:

Silence is a myth. It doesn’t exist.

If you go into a very quiet space, you’ll still hear something. Maybe the ventilation system. Maybe your breath. Your heartbeat. A slight ringing in your ears from that absurdly loud concert you went to years ago (Too Much Joy at the 9:30 Club and it was totally worth it). If you put pure silence into your audio drama, you aren’t telling the audience that it’s quiet, you’re telling them that you, the storyteller, have taken a break from the story.

So while your actors will have an easier time talking quietly, to make it feel quiet, you actually need to add the sounds you only hear when it’s quiet. Wind blowing. Breath. A clock ticking. Footsteps, which are usually problematic, can actually work better in a very quiet scene.

Recording very quiet sounds can be difficult. Unless you are using very expensive equipment, it’s hard to get levels above the noise of your recorder. Bringing the mic close to, say, the clock you want to record, may give you better levels, but may also bring out the mechanical sounds of the clock that you wouldn’t hear in the room. And the quiet nature of the scene means that imperfections in the recording can stick out more.

Plugins can really help, here. A noise-reducing plugin (such as Izotope’s Dialog De-noiser) can be magic. “Convolution Reverb” is kind of plugin that uses reverb impulses to recreate a physical space (such as Altiverb, or Reaper’s ReaVerb), and these can help more than adding a more traditional reverb effect. Adding a subtle layer of tape-hiss can also help, believe it or not.

Using Dynamics to Create Motion

One of my favorite uses of dynamics is *inside* of a scene. Remember how people generally adjust their speaking volume to be just loud enough to be heard? By having your actors change the volume of their speech, you can create movement in the scene without narration. Consider:

[Andy enters the room] Andy: Bob! How are you? Bob: Andy! It’s been forever. Andy: You look terrible, Bob.

If you have Andy and Bob raise their voices at the beginning, like they are talking across the room, the audience will understand they are far apart. If they lower their voice over the first few lines, the audience will know that have come together. If Andy whispers “You look terrible, Bob,” the audience will know that Andy has moved very, very close to Bob.

And now, you have one of film’s most powerful tools at your disposal: Blocking. As the drama in a scene unfolds, the characters can physically move to reflect the story, or perhaps counterpoint the story. In the example above, if Andy is whispering “You look terrible,” it’s become a character moment--Andy and Bob apparently aren’t close, and Andy is invading Bob’s personal space.

If Andy quietly professes his love for Bob, and Bob is moving to the other side of the room as he responds, we might understand that Bob doesn’t return that love, even if he says he does.

To me, that is the true power of dynamics in audio drama. It’s a way to add subtext to a highly restrictive medium.

One Last Time: It’s Not about Output Levels

If we get philosophical about it, dynamics is not about volume at all. It’s about people interacting with the world, trying to make themselves heard in a noisy environment. People trying to be just loud enough to get what they want.

One of my goals in telling any story is to make the audience feel like the story exists in a larger world, without boring them with exposition. There are a ton of techniques to help this happen. Have things happen “off screen.” Have characters with motivations that aren’t on the nose of the plot. Start scenes in the middle, not at the beginning.

Varying the dynamics is another way to do this.

See, when you start making your character change how they speak, you are forced into paying attention to the things the audience may not consciously notice, but that they will feel. It’s no longer “restaurant ambience,” but “a quiet restaurant where waiters almost whisper,” or “a crowded, noisy sports bar.”

It’s not a particularly complicated concept. It’s not that hard to implement. But the impact it can have on a piece can feel like magic.

[canchewread]

Editor’s note: a few months ago on this blog, I wrote a short essay that used a quote from Matt Taibbi’s “Insane Clown President” as a vehicle to explore structural similarities between establishment power in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, as it pertained to the ability to hold off an internal insurgency during their respective nomination processes. Today, I’d like to return to that argument and discuss why there are even more structural reasons to believe Bernie Sanders will eventually emerge as the Democratic candidate in 2020; but first, let’s look at our quote.

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A Brief Look at Listen Liberal:

Today’s quoted passage comes from the 2017 updated paperback edition of Thomas Frank’s “Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People” - a book about which I have many complicated feelings and opinions.

First and foremost I should say that this book is quite frankly an excellent study of the how and why behind the US Democratic Party’s abandonment of the labor class and subsequent marriage to the far more affluent and influential professional class. As those of you who read my theory work are no doubt aware, this is a subject near and dear to my heart and as such I’m inclined to view Frank’s illuminating tome in a very favorable light.

As the author himself notes, “Listen, Liberal” is primarily an autopsy of the Democratic Party’s historic failure to reconnect with the labor class in the post Bush era, despite the existence of optimal conditions for success in doing so and the obvious tangible benefits that strategy would have presented. Frank also devotes multiple chapters to exposing how the idiosyncrasies, arrogant assumptions and open blind spots inherent to the rarely-discussed professional class - which now represents the “soul” of the Democratic Party (such as it is) - have acted as a driving force behind this failure. This identification and discussion of what Frank calls “the professional class” is to my knowledge, wholly unique in current mainstream literature and after reading “Listen, Liberal” I found it impossible to ignore the connections between the dominant beliefs of this professional class and the disastrous campaign run by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US election.

On both of these fronts, it is unreasonable to regard this book as anything less than a smashing success and within the confines of those two discussions, this is quite literally “must read” material. Indeed, if America had anything resembling a “free and democratic press“ Frank would probably be lauded as a brilliant soothsayer who effectively predicted Clinton’s 2016 election loss in March of that year - before she’d even sew up the Democratic Party nomination.

So, what’s the problem? Fundamentally, Thomas Frank is himself a professional class liberal; albeit a reformist - but certainly not a radical. While this naturally makes his analysis of what’s wrong with the liberal professional class more incisive and accurate, it has the downside of clouding his understanding of the very working/labor class people he’s arguing the Dem Party needs to return to representing.

In fact, I’d go so far as to argue that the author’s very conception of class is rendered at least somewhat inaccurate by the sheer number of comfortable mainstream “truths” he adopts without question in “Listen, Liberal” - things like the standard (and incorrect) North American conception of “the middle class” or his belief and insistence that the Democratic Party has a long history of supporting and representing this same “middle class.”

Truthfully, the so-called “New Dealers” that came to power in the post-war, anticommunist era after the death of FDR (who himself represented a desperate compromise by elite liberals to retain power in the face of a labor class revolt) were just as married to capital and the professional class as the corporate, center-right party Frank derides today. Even if you ignore the Democratic Party’s violent, authoritarian attempts to shatter labor on behalf of American capital from the end of the Civil War, all the way up to Woodrow Wilson’s “Red Scare” - there is almost no historical record of the Party as a whole supporting labor over capital, with the exception of FDR’s four term Presidency. Whereas Frank identifies the betrayal of the working class as something that largely begun under Bill Clinton, any history student worth their salt will tell you that Truman’s post-war, anti-Communist crusade effectively destroyed organized labor in America and eventually ushered in the modern neoliberal era the author correctly identifies as being toxic for the labor class.

In short, while Frank does a magnificent job of identifying what’s wrong with the Democratic Party today - his ideas about how to address those problems are fundamentally rooted in a reformist fantasy that at some point in the past, the Democratic Party ever stood with labor when the working class didn’t have a knife at their throat. This is simply not accurate, and as such it distorts some of Frank’s theories about where we go from here; after all, if you can’t even properly identify the “labor class” it’s hard to see how you’re going to restore political power to them. This problem isn’t big enough to seriously impact the value of “Listen, Liberal” for those looking to understand the professional class or why the modern Democratic Party is completely out of touch, but it also makes it impossible to recommend the work to readers without noting that Frank’s reformist tendencies and nostalgia for a party that probably never existed, occasionally cause him to get the wrong answer. In the final analysis this makes “Listen, Liberal” an unquestionably important, if imperfect addition to “the discourse.”

Bernie, Biden and the 2020 Democratic Party Nomination

So, if Frank is right and the Democratic Party has not only abandoned the labor class, but actually no longer even has any real contact with the roughly eighty-nine percent of the population who ultimately comprise the labor class - what does this mean for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest currently being waged across America? What does it mean if the Democratic Party establishment has lost touch with most of its base? Good things, if you’re a fan of Vermont’s democratic socialist Senator, Bernie Sanders.

In my February article, we examined the eerie similarities between the quietly shattered mainstream Republican leadership in the wake of losing the 2012 election, and their counterparts in the Democratic Party after their shameful elevation of, and eventually defeat to, a reality TV host, billionaire fascist. The crux of my argument then was that the leadership of both parties had expended all of their political capital to force through an unpopular (and ultimately unsuccessful) candidate against the wishes of growing insurgent forces within their own base. When these candidates then failed to deliver victory, the power structure behind these failures was left shattered, and wholly inadequate for the purposes of opposing those same insurgent forces during the next election cycle.

In the case of the Republicans, we already know how that story ends because Trump was indeed propelled to the nomination by a revanchist, reactionary base he easily pried away from mainstream GOP candidates, simply by being a better fascist than anyone else up on the stage. Whether or not that effect will be repeated on the Democratic side of the equation with a wholly different type of insurgency, is a question we won’t be able to answer until the end of the 2020 nomination contest - but as you can read, I’m betting that answer is “yes.”

Now that the nomination race has more fully shaken out, let’s take a look at the structural similarities between the nomination races themselves. How does the 2016 GOP contest that ultimately served up Donald Trump resemble the crowded 2020 Dem nomination race and what can that tell us about who will eventually emerge to run against the swine emperor?     

The first and most obvious similarity between the two nomination contests is the sheer size of the field; the 2016 Republican nomination fight began as a seventeen candidate “clown car” battle while there are currently twenty-two officially declared candidates (Rolling Stone forgot to count Mike Gravel) for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination. Furthermore, although Biden’s supporters would undoubtedly deny it, there are a number of strong similarities between Palooka Joe and presumed 2016 Republican front-runner Jeb Bush - neither is a particularly strong campaigner, neither of them has met a banker or wealthy donor they didn’t love and both men advocate for policies and positions that are fundamentally out of step with their own party’s base. Finally of course, there’s the breakdown of the field into the various “lanes” that you would expect in each primary. In both cases, there is really only one viable insurgent candidate and very little tangible policy differences between the rest of the field - with apologies to Tulsi Gabbard (not viable) and Liz Warren (not insurgent enough.)

For perhaps the first time in his life, being left of and therefore outside of, the mainstream liberal orthodoxy is working in Bernie’s favor here - just as Trump’s open fascist tendencies worked to differentiate Herr Donald from the rest of the 2016  GOP field, and galvanize insurgent support around him for a revolt against the mainstream GOP leadership and their chosen candidate. More to the point however, the ace up Bernie’s sleeve is the fact that his policy platform and long-held public positions actually cleave far, far closer to those of the voting public than those of Joe Biden or the rest of the neoliberal passengers on the 2020 Dem Nomination fail-bus do.

Why does this matter? There’s a clue if you remember that when the 2016 GOP nomination began, the vast majority of the Republican establishment (and their candidates) were united in their opposition to Trump - mainstream “conservative media” in particular regarded him as a crude, hopeless outsider who would be dispatched quickly; even Fox News opposed Trump until it was clear he’d win the nomination for example. Of course, that’s not what happened is it? Why?

To put it simply, establishment Republicans either forgot about, or simply had no real connection anymore, to their own base. After a solid three decades of pushing the party further right, employing revanchist ideas to consolidate power and openly inviting extremist elements into the party, GOP leadership found itself facing down a voting base that agreed with and admired Trump’s open fascism, more than they agreed with anything Jeb Bush or the other fifteen candidates in the race had to offer. Republican primary voters wanted a crude, bigoted, anti-establishment candidate; they wanted to punish liberals and leftists, they did in fact like fascism, they did in fact like racism, etc. This in turn made Downmarket Mussolini largely unassailable because attacking the things that made Trump different from the rest of the field, also explicitly meant attacking the voting base and the ideas or values they shared with Trump!

Well, all of that took basically one primary contest for GOP mainstream candidates and their campaign advisors to figure out. Once they could no longer afford to attack Trump, the rest of the candidates predictably turned their attention on Jeb Bush (and each other) - resulting in a truly spectacular level of chaos, carnage and cannibalism. At various points the mainstream Republican leadership tried to rally the party around a single, “Trump-slayer” candidate (Bush, Rubio, Kasich and eventually Cruz) but because the party was no longer strong enough to force candidates out of the field, the result was always the same - the candidates who weren’t favored by the establishment at that moment would largely ignore Trump and tear down the presumed “unity” candidate, just to stay alive in the race.

Frankly, if you think about it from the perspective of the candidates, such behavior was perfectly rational - after all, attacking Trump not only brought the ire of the base, but also helped someone else get closer to the nomination; at that point you might as well just drop out unless you’re prepared to wrestle away the title of chosen unity candidate from whichever stiff the GOP establishment picked to rally behind at that time. The rest is as they say, “history.”

Turning our attention back to the 2020 Democratic Party nomination race, it’s impossible not to notice how similar the contest appears to the one that ultimately destroyed the RNC and surrendered control of the party to an insurgent candidate more in line with their own voting base; namely Donald Trump.

Although the issues that drive the democratic socialist movement behind Sanders are entirely different than the issues that drive Trump Nation, the dynamics of the struggle that propelled the swine emperor to victory are clearly being replicated on the Democratic side, with Bernie Sanders (and to a lesser degree, perhaps Elizabeth Warren.) Any policy or ideology based attack on Sanders, is effectively going to be an attack on the base - and in the meantime, every vote a candidate can snatch away from Sanders is going to help Joe Biden as much, or more, than any other candidate on the stage.

In light of all this, I believe there’s really only one more question you have to ask yourself - do you believe that the roughly nineteen other mainstream neoliberal candidates are in this race to make Creepy Uncle Joe Biden the President of the United States?

Before you answer I want you to think about who these people really are for a moment; Senators, members of Congress, government officials - many of whom have never lost an election in their entire lives. They each have their own donors, their own campaign war-chests, their own in-pocket media minions and supporters. These are people from the right families, and the right educational background who believe they have been overachieving their entire lives. They’re the success stories of capitalism, the best and the brightest; valedictorians, doctorate holders, egomaniacs who think they’re “the smartest people in the room” no matter what room they walk into.

Do you believe that these folks are going to lay down for the oldest, slowest, fattest antelope on the plains, in Palooka Joe - just because Tom f*cking Perez says so? If the Democratic Party establishment actually had the power and influence necessary to force them out of the race to prop-up an anti-Sanders coalition, don’t you think it would have happened already? The polls have pointed to a Biden versus Sanders race for months and months now, with no variation whatsoever on that front - shouldn’t neoliberals be dropping out and supporting Biden already if there is to be a united anti-Sanders resistance from the party?

When the rubber hits the road, do you sincerely think the other nineteen candidates are going to help the Democratic Party take out Bernie, even if it helps Joe Biden get further out in front of the rest of the pack?

Yeah, neither do I.

All of this is actually kind of ironic because the Democratic Party establishment has spent the past three years constantly attacking Bernie by saying he’s like Trump. This is of course balderdash; Sanders is nothing like Downmarket Mussolini and even ignoring the vast gap in their stated ideologies, their campaign styles aren’t even remotely similar either. But in the wake of their disastrous failure in the 2016 election, the Democratic Party establishment has found itself in absolutely the same position their Republican brethren faced in the wake of their 2012 loss with Mitt Romney. That is the real similarity, and in the end I believe that’s why Bernie Sanders will win the 2020 Democratic Party nomination.

That is, unless they shoot him.

- nina illingworth