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bookoformon · 1 year

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Venturing Forth: Nephi 1.

Idolatry is generally considered the reason Nephi left Jerusalem in 600 BCE. If we use logic from Judaism, this means “everyone started doing their own thing and Godliness left the Holy City.”

We will study the Book of Mormon much like we study the Torah, looking at the Hebrew Terms in English and translating all symbols and memes into an action plan or explanation for a life that is well-practiced.

The Book of Mormon, like the Torah is studied in Four Directions, identified with Four Cities or realms, which are named below:

North= What is hidden by God. Subconscious. “Nephi”

East= Awareness. Conscious. “Bountiful”

South= Maturity. Intelligent. “Zarahemla”

West= AKA Realization. Enlightened. “The City by the Sea”. = by the Mediterranean in the Torah, “Where we see the greatness in ourselves.”

As for the 600 BC comment, this refers to the number of ways the soul can realize itself, try and fail in order to achieve greater depth. This is consistent with Nephi’s need to sojourn:

As we have already said, a person is obligated to learn Torah on all four levels. Now, there are only 600,000 souls…

There are stages in the evolution of the descent of the souls into the world. First there were the three patriarchs. Then there were the seventy souls of the house of Jacob (Ex. 1:5). The sixty myriads of souls come next, due to miraculous fertility during the centuries in Egypt.

But don't we see a lot more Jews than six hundred thousand roaming the face of the earth?! How could there be only six hundred thousand? The answer is that each one is like a grand tree root from which stems out many branches/souls. Thus many people in bodies share the same soul root. If you feel especially connected with certain individuals, this is a sign that you share with them a mutual source.

From this we see how important each individual is! Each of these souls has its own original, custom made connection to the four ways of learning. Therefore, no matter how much Torah has already been written, there is always place for you to come along and give the world new ideas!

The number 600 itself is Hebrew, אֶפֶסאֶפֶס ו‎, which means "And Ephesus," AKA "And so it begins..."

There are 15 Books in the Book of Mormon. They were conceived by the angels, and given to the Prophet by the Father and the Son within 12 Temporal and 12 Spiritual Nephite Plates, some are Greater, some are Lesser, and another set of what are called Jaredite Plates which are 34 and 34.

The Prophet Mormon along with others claim there are a set of Secret Plates which are found within proper decryption of the former. The Book of Mormon was written in a language called Reformed Egyptian, a mixture of English and Hebrew. To understand Reformed Egyptian and continue to decrypt the Plates one must carefully understand how the terminologies in English and Hebrew comprise this new format. Around the time the Book of Mormon was written there was an immense revival of interest in the Hebrew language and the Book of Mormon was no doubt a party to it.

In addition to the juggling of English and Hebrew contained within Reformed Egyptian, Hebew itself is problematic in that it is alpha numeric. Every word is also a number and has to be translated several ways in order to find the best interpretation of the passages in which it is found. This process called Gematria appears throughout this forum.

The Book of Mormon begins with the Book of Nephi which means "spiritually psychic" in Hebrew.

THE FIRST BOOK OF NEPHI

HIS REIGN AND MINISTRY

An account of Lehi “The Jaw” and his wife Sariah “the chief satellite of Yah”, and his four sons, being called, (beginning at the eldest) Laman “responds to the yoke” , Lemuel “to dream or to surpass from hlm in Hebrew), Sam (manos, to flee to a refuge), and Nephi “extraordinary”.

= “An accounting spoken of by the chief Prophet of Yah to the current generation: Respond to the law! Yoke yourself to your humanity, and dream of a refuge for extraordinary young people.”

The Lord warns Lehi to depart out of the land of Jerusalem, because he prophesieth unto the people concerning their iniquity and they seek to destroy his life. He taketh three days’ journey into the wilderness with his family. Nephi taketh his brethren and returneth to the land of Jerusalem after the record of the Jews.

The account of their sufferings. They take the daughters of Ishmael to wife.

Ishmael= To hear, to respond to obey.

His Daughters:

Mahalath= lament

Basemath= precious or pure, sweet smelling

They take their families and depart into the wilderness. Their sufferings and afflictions in the wilderness. The course of their travels. They come to the large waters. Nephi’s brethren rebel against him. He confoundeth them, and buildeth a ship. They call the name of the place Bountiful.

They cross the large waters into the promised land, and so forth. This is according to the account of Nephi; or in other words, I, Nephi, wrote this record.

Wilderness is ownerless, so now we see the Persona in the Book of Mormon is leaving the past behind and through “hearing, obeying, and responding” transform what is as yet inconceivable within himself, what he laments, into something essential and pure of wildness.

CHAPTER 1

Nephi begins the record of his people—Lehi sees in vision a pillar of fire and reads from a book of prophecy—He praises God, foretells the coming of the Messiah, and prophesies the destruction of Jerusalem—He is persecuted by the Jews. About 600 B.C.

1 I, Nephi, having been aborn of bgoodly cparents, therefore I was dtaught somewhat in all the learning of my father; and having seen many eafflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days; yea, having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God, therefore I make a frecord of my proceedings in my days.

2 Yea, I make a record in the alanguage of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.

3 And I know that the record which I make is atrue; and I make it with mine own hand; and I make it according to my knowledge.

4 For it came to pass in the commencement of the afirst year of the reign of bZedekiah, king of Judah, (my father, Lehi, having dwelt at cJerusalem in all his days); and in that same year there came many dprophets, prophesying unto the people that they must erepent, or the great city fJerusalem must be destroyed.

Zedek= Adonai is Righteous, the Lord of Justice.

Iah= Yah, “The Great God.”

"The Lord of Justice told the people of the Great City 'repent or be destroyed'."

5 Wherefore it came to pass that my father, Lehi, “the Jawbone” as he went forth prayed unto the Lord, yea, even with all his aheart, in behalf of his people.

6 And it came to pass as he prayed unto the Lord, there came a apillar of fire and dwelt upon a rock before him; and he saw and heard much; and because of the things which he saw and heard he did bquake and tremble exceedingly.

7 And it came to pass that he returned to his own house at Jerusalem; and he cast himself upon his bed, being aovercome with the Spirit and the things which he had seen.

The Pillar of Fire is associated with the onset of puberty; to be cast on one’s bed by the Spirit in Fear of the unknown is consistent with the rest of the Chapter. All trouble starts when the mouth of the adolescent undergoing puberty falls under the influences of the wicked. The 12 appear in the same vision and tell Lehi to attitude himself like them by reading instead:

Naturally, the ego seeks to preserve itself at all costs. It will permit only such pursuits that are self-enhancing. Knowledge, it fancies, is a possession, an acquisition. But the fire of Torah has no owners. It cannot be possessed but possesses those who study it, filling them with awe, wonder and zeal. So how is the teacher of chasiddut to attract his students to that which we human beings are innately resistant?

8 And being thus overcome with the Spirit, he was carried away in a avision, even that he saw the bheavens open, and he thought he csaw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels in the attitude of singing and praising their God.

9 And it came to pass that he saw One descending out of the midst of heaven, and he beheld that his aluster was above that of the sun at noon-day. [Noon is the same thing as going SOUTH]. To go South and Noon is to wake up and grow up at the same time:

10 And he also saw atwelve others following him, and their brightness did exceed that of the stars in the firmament.

11 And they came down and went forth upon the face of the earth; and the first came and astood before my father, and gave unto him a bbook, and bade him that he should read.

12 And it came to pass that as he read, he was filled with the aSpirit of the Lord.

The Twelve are the same thing as the 12 Noble Skills found in the Torah. They are:

The 12 are the Twelve Noble Skills of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. They are:

from the tribe of Reuben, Shammua [desolation] son of Zakkur [mindfulness];

Leadership and mindfulness overcome carelessness.

5 from the tribe of Simeon, Shaphat [the governor] son of Hori [authority].

From the Law comes government and authority.

6 from the tribe of Judah, Caleb [dog] son of Jephunneh [to turn the corner];

Honor turns the dog into a man.

7 from the tribe of Issachar , Igal son of Joseph;

Friendship redeems defamation and makes men fruitful.

8 from the tribe of Ephraim, Hoshea [salvation] son of Nun [faith];

Prosperity and salvation are the provinces of those faithful to these torahs.

9 from the tribe of Benjamin, Palti [delivers] son of Raphu [heals];

Righteousness delivers and heals.

10 from the tribe of Zebulun, Gaddiel [fortune] son of Sodi [council];

Cities of honor are governed by talented councils.

11 from the tribe of Manasseh (a tribe of Joseph), Gaddi [fortune] son of Susi [swiftly];

Abandon flawed practices of the past and ride to fortune swiftly.

12 from the tribe of Dan, Ammiel [kinsman] son of Gemalli [passes over];

Good Judgement is akin to passing over [the mountain].

13 from the tribe of Asher, Sethur [passed over] son of Michael;

Happiness from passing over is a gift of God.

14 from the tribe of Naphtali, Nahbi [spokesperson] son of Vophsi [yah's abundance];

Governors must be outspoken about injustice.

15 from the tribe of Gad, Geuel [who flowers] son of Maki [passed over, flowers].

Civilization flowers when men cross over.

"My Strength son of the Field of Light was in command."

13 And he read, saying: Wo, wo, unto Jerusalem, for I have seen thine aabominations! Yea, and many things did my father read concerning bJerusalem—that it should be destroyed, and the inhabitants thereof; many should perish by the sword, and many should be ccarried away captive into Babylon.

14 And it came to pass that when my father had read and seen many great and marvelous things, he did exclaim many things unto the Lord; such as: Great and marvelous are thy works, O Lord God Almighty! Thy throne is high in the heavens, and thy apower, and goodness, and mercy are over all the inhabitants of the earth; and, because thou art merciful, thou wilt not suffer those who bcome unto thee that they shall perish!

15 And after this manner was the language of my father in the praising of his God; for his soul did rejoice, and his whole heart was filled, because of the things which he had seen, yea, which the Lord had shown unto him.

16 And now I, Nephi, do not make a full account of the things which my father hath written, for he hath written many things which he saw in avisions and in bdreams; and he also hath written many things which he cprophesied and spake unto his children, of which I shall not make a full account.

17 But I shall make an account of my proceedings in my days. Behold, I make an aabridgment of the record of my bfather, upon cplates which I have made with mine own hands; wherefore, after I have abridged the record of my dfather then will I make an account of mine own life.

18 Therefore, I would that ye should know, that after the Lord had shown so many marvelous things unto my father, Lehi, yea, concerning the adestruction of Jerusalem, behold he went forth among the people, and began to bprophesy and to declare unto them concerning the things which he had both seen and heard.

19 And it came to pass that the aJews did bmock him because of the things which he testified of them; for he truly testified of their cwickedness and their abominations; and he testified that the things which he saw and heard, and also the things which he read in the book, manifested plainly of the coming of a dMessiah, and also the redemption of the world.

20 And when the Jews heard these things they were angry with him; yea, even as with the prophets of old, whom they had acast out, and stoned, and slain; and they also bsought his life, that they might take it away. But behold, I, Nephi, will show unto you that the tender cmercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of ddeliverance.

…

The Jews were prisoners in Egypt because they listened to the wrong person say the wrong things. They rejected reason until Moses and the Pillar of Fire showed up and told them how to behave like decent human beings. Deliverance is for these persons not for the rest. “I will make them mighty unto deliverance.” For this one needs to read the Book and venture out.

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thunderstruck9 · 3 years

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Bridget Riley (British, b. 1931), Study for Stage Sixty Symbol, 1961-65. Ink and pencil on paper, 70.8 x 50.8 cm.

#bridget riley #british art #english art #f #op art

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atheistforhumanity · 3 years

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That Time The Left Went Crazy

There are two things that people primarily remember about the 60's and 70's and those are peace and love. As the baby boomers came of age, youth everywhere were dancing to a completely different beat. That beat was free love, rock, and drugs with a massive push toward left wing social values such as gender and racial equality.

What doesn't come to mind about the 60's and 70's is that hippies, as they are affectionately known, spearheaded a social movement against science, intellectualism, rationality, and objective truth. Hippies didn't just question the standing social structure, the patriarchal authority, and institutionalized racism. They also seriously questioned the nature of reality and how one could come to gain knowledge about reality.

This movement was sculpted out of a large number of culminating influences, but there were two that were responsible for the majority. The first was widespread drug use. In the early 1960's very few college students reported smoking pot. By the late 60's a majority of students reported smoking. This shows the rise in casual drug use, but it was hallucinogens that triggered this fierce movement against reason. College professor Timothy Leary was known as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD, especially among ivy league college students. The second major influence was the Esalen Institute. Located in So-Cal, this place was a literal Mecca for hippies and was disseminating new cultural ideas like STD's.

The primary philosophy that came out of Esalen and proponents of hallucinogens was that anything goes. A philosophy professor named Feyerabend, who I'll come back to, said "only one principle...can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes." (emphasis in original text.) What came from this new philosophy was new age spiritual beliefs, seances, psychics, tarot cards, telepathy, telekinesis, astrology, witchcraft, vision quests, flying saucer cults, glossolalia, faith healing, prophets, messiah cults, death cults, past lives, afterlives, out of body experiences, and countless more unprovable systems of nonsense. It wasn't that these things had never existed before, it was that there was a literal explosion of their popularity and social acceptance in society.

The flower children were not just anti-government when it came to war, bigotry, and other conservative positions. They became completely anti-establishment to the point that professional expertise in any area came to symbolize oppression to them. A French philosopher named Michel Foucault said that rationality was a "regime of truth" that was a form of oppression. The famous left wing figure Paul Goodman commented on the youth saying, "There was no knowledge...research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth." Charles Reich, a Yale Law student at the time, shared his observations of Esalen, and said, "Out here the atmosphere among the students is profoundly anti-intellectual."

In a bizarre dynamic, young people were taking in these anti-intellectual, anti-science ideas from crackpot academics would wrote books trying to discredit their own field of study. Through the 60's and 70's a large number of books were written that attacked rationality, science, and professional knowledge. Feyerabrend, who I mentioned above, was an Austrian who willingly joined the Nazi army and escaped to America to become a Berkley professor, published a book in 1975 titled Against Method: Outline of Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. This text focused on arguing that knowledge could be gained outside of the traditional rationale of facts and research and accused science of being a superstition. The Social Construction of Reality was authored by two sociologists who argued that reality is completely subjective and "what is 'real' to a Tibetan monk may not be 'real' to an American businessman. Thomas Kuhn, a Berkeley professor of science history, wrote a book titled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In this text he argued that what is known by science is fabricated by great thinkers such as Einstein and "normal science" is just an effort to back up their ideas. Again insisting that science is equally subjective as the supernatural. A popular first hand account of the sixties, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe states that "ESP devotees had always believed that there was an other order that ran the universe, one that revealed itself occasionally through telephathy...psychokineses, dematerialization, and the like." Another very popular book was The Secret Life of Plants, which claimed that all plants were sentient beings.

When they said "anything goes" they absolutely meant it. These are just a few of the popular books that launched an assault on reality and intelligence. This pattern of anti-intellectualism and extreme individuality is regularly reoccurring in American history in waves of backlash against intellectual progress. We may often talk about the extreme irrationality of the Right wing or Trump supporters, but political spectrums have never excluded anyone from being swept up in this fever personal belief over objective truth. In the 40's and 50's, science was revered by all Americans Left and Right. All these trends that started in the 60's have lost popularity, but they haven't died out either. Whether it's belief in tarot readings or alien abductions, everyone who participates in these fantasies contributes to the larger anti-intellectual/anti-science culture that permeates both Left and Right today. If we on the left are going to characterize our wing as pro-science, then we need to be consistent in all areas of life.

#science #truth #leftwing #liberals #Anti-science #Anti-intellectualism #hippies #1960s #empiricism #pro-science #progressives #philosophy #sociology

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now-i-understand-that-reference · 4 years

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I just remembered having this stashed somewhere in my library... It’s a movie dossier for Swing Kids (1993), featuring info about the cast, the production, and some nice colour photos. It’s pretty nice :)

Thought I’d share and leave a link to the pdf scan if anyone’s curious, but since the text is in French, I’ll leave a translation for the parts related to the production under the cut hoping that my knowledge of French is still enough after decades of not speaking it. I’ll leave out the historical background and the cultural information as you can probably read that online whenever you want :)

You can find the pdf here

PRODUCTION NOTES

From the rebellion to the participation

Jonathan Marc Feldman (screenwriter):

«Can a youth rebellion lead to an authentic revolt? This is the question I asked myself when learning about the existence of this protest movement, which was born under the nazi regime, and which was called The Swing Kids. These young people appeared to me as the symbol of the strength of the human spirit: if a revolt was able to express itself in such an oppressive context, are not all hopes allowed?»

Jonathan Marc Feldman’s script evokes the friendship between two seventeen-year-old adolescents, Peter Muller and Thomas Berger, both firmly determined not to enlist in the Hitler Youth. When circumstances beyond their control eventually force them to join the “JH”, the two boys claim they will resist their hold: they will be “JH” by day and “Swing Kids” by night. But is it possible to belong to a totalitarian movement without submitting to it with body and soul?

Robert Sean Leonard (Peter Muller):

«SWING KIDS begins in 1939, before the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland. Peter, like many young people, does not have a sharp political conscience, although he guesses what is happening in the country. He is divided between the swing, which allows him to “have a blast”, and the pride of serving his homeland by submitting. These two temptations are equally powerful, and it is only after discovering the true nature of nazism that Peter will make the right choice.»

Christian Bale (Thomas Berger):

«SWING KIDS is also, and above all, a movie about friendship. Peter and Thomas make divergent choices that will gradually distance them from each other. Thomas does not resist the seduction of the Hitler Youth, he lets the Party’s ideology corrupt him and becomes a cog of the nazi machine. But in the end, the friendship that ties him to Peter will win.»

The origins of the project

After discovering the existence of the Swing Kids in an obscure historical review, Jonathan Marc Feldman undertook in-depth personal research and collected solid documentation about this movement. Passionate about the subject, he quickly communicated his enthusiasm to producers Mark Gordon and John Bard Manulis, who dedicated four years to the development of the script. «It was clear that it could have given rise to a great movie» Gordon points out, «it was a rare opportunity to make a historical movie that speaks to today’s young people» adds Manulis, who personally funded the development of the script. «The Swing Kids looked for their identity in music and dance, just like the following generations, and it was fascinating to observe the contrast between the social oppression they were experiencing and the - incredibly free - form of expression they had adopted».

Jonathan Marc Feldman:

«The young Germans were attracted by the swing because it represented a new, wild, radically original sound. The swing of the years 38-39 possessed a violence that we can clearly perceive in the famous “Sing, Sing, Sing” by Benny Goodman. Moreover, this music was strictly forbidden, for its Jewish and black origin. The mere fact of listening to it was a political challenge.

These young people were fervent anglophiles, who walked with an umbrella at any season, wore Anthony Eden hats, puffy trousers, Scottish coats. They dressed with great elegance and let their hair grow like Hollywood cowboys. Rejected and despised by the good Germanic society, they were the hippies and the punks of their generation».

To make SWING KIDS, Mark Gordon and John Bard Manulis chose Thomas Carter, prestigious television director, winner of several Emmies, who here signs his first movie.

Thomas Carter:

«I immediately liked the SWING KIDS script. It illuminates a reality that few people know. It is both the painting of a generation and the story of a teenager faced with a painful choice that will make him a man».

John Bard Manulis:

«Thomas Carter is very interested in history and how it repeats itself. He captured all the dimensions of the subject, its nuances, its emotional substrate, and staged it brilliantly».

Filming

Mark Gordon Carter, co-producer Harry Benn and chief decorator Allan Cameron visited five countries in ten days before picking Czechoslovakia. The movie was filmed in Prague and in the Barrandos Studios.

Allan Cameron (chief decorator):

«The centre of Prague, which dates back to the Middle Ages, is of great beauty. There are still cobbled streets, beautiful buildings spared from the bombings, remarkable textures and colors. Another advantage: the architectural diversity of the Old Town makes it possible to recreate almost any city in Central Europe».

The main sets of the movie were built at Barrandov Studios, which are among the largest in Europe. Founded in 1931, they offer technical means and financial conditions that seduce international producers: in parallel with the filming of SWING KIDS, Lucasfilm produced the series “Young Indiana Jones” and BBC produced a new version of “The Trial”.

Other big sets were built at Barrandov, and about sixty interiors and exteriors were made with the help of a small British team surrounded by many local technicians. An old 18th century riding school served as the setting for the scene of the Hitler Youth gathering; a residence in the embassy district became the apartment of Thomas’s rich parents; the Prague Library was converted into the SS headquarters and a vast theatre room was redecorated from the top to the bottom for the spectacular sequences of the Bismarck Café.

Casting

In parallel with the location hunting, Carter and his producers started the casting operations by selecting Robert Sean Leonard, one of the protagonists of DEAD POETS SOCIETY, for the role of Peter.

Thomas Carter:

«Robert is an outstanding actor, both for his gifts and for his modesty and availability. We couldn’t have made a better choice. I personally consider him one of the best actors I’ve ever worked with».

To prepare for the role of Peter, which required his daily presence on the set during the ten weeks of filming, Leonard began by reading several studies about Nazi Germany. «But soon I understood that my character had no knowledge of how the Third Reich operated. So I focused my research on the swing, by listening to countless recordings of the great artists of this era. This dance rediscovers the madness of the Twenties and anticipates the promiscuity of the Sixties. Very physical, it entails a huge expenditure of energy and demands great vitality».

For the role of Thomas Berger, the producers hired Christian Bale, revelation of EMPIRE OF THE SUN, and for that of Arvid, Frank Whaley, one of the main performers of Oliver Stone’s THE DOORS. Barbara Hershey (crowned in Cannes for SHY PEOPLE and A WORLD APART) was chosen to play Frau Muller, Peter’s mother.

The other performers were selected with special care, in Austria, The Netherlands, Wales and the United States. «The casting was hard and required a lot of work» concludes Thomas Carter, «I am particularly pleased with it, as it has allowed us to rediscover the emotional atmosphere of the time».

The swing

Robert Sean Leonard and Christian Bale devoted many hours to learning swing, under the guide of New York choreographer Otis Sallid, to whom we owe the dance sequences of MALCOLM X. Sallid recruited a group of Czech, English, American and French dancers, that he initiated with his assistants to the provocative rhythms of swing, jitterbug and lindy hop, and to the “degenerate” music of Benny Goodman, Count Basie and Django Reinhardt, censored by the Reich for reasons of “racial impurity”.

Jonathan Marc Feldman:

«We picked the most attractive compositions for a contemporary ear and those that the Swing Kids actually listened to, that I was able to find. Among the latter are forgotten numbers such as “Harlem”, which was very popular at the time. By working with Robert Kraft at the re-recordings, we attempted to capture the extraordinary power, vitality of this music. In its beginnings, the swing did not resemble any other form of music. Later, it became more civilized and disciplined, but in the late Thirties it was deeply subversive, captivating. Young people gave themselves to it completely, forgetting about everything else...»

#swing kids #swing kids 1993 #Robert Sean Leonard #rsl #christian bale #barbara hershey #peter muller #thomas berger #frau muller #swing kids dossier #hopefully my translation from French to English does not suck #I’m not a native speaker of either lol #love this movie

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lesbian-jo-march · 4 years

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Hamlet Act 5 Scene 2 directed as informed by My Chemical Romance/”Emo” aesthetics

(After so many “Hamlet is an emo” jokes studying the text, I put my money where my mouth is. Thus, this is less a joke itself than an attempt to run a joke to a somewhat informed conclusion.)

Introduction - defining emo

Modern productions of Hamlet such as Olivier’s or Hansguther’s have often cut or reduced the final scene of the play, which broadens into the tragedy of state post-Freudian productions tend to extract a personal and familial tragedy out of. Modern productions should ideally consider both psychological turmoil and tragedy of state. It is not enough for Hamlet to ‘theorise modern selfhood’ (Emma Smith), but it should utilise a modern aesthetic and philosophy which encapsulates both personal and political turmoil, which are inextricably linked throughout the play. The answer is obvious: emo. Unlike punk, it cannot effect meaningful political change but self-exploration, frank to romanticised descriptions of mental health issues, collapse of gender roles and the anxiety of a generation growing up in the instability of a post-9/11, post-recession America are all key tenets of emo perfect for the themes explored in Hamlet as a whole, especially the final scene.

Emo as a genre is much contested but here, I am basing my understanding of emo as that espoused by mainstream fans, so My Chemical Romance who describe themselves as pop-punk instead are considered emo. My focus will be on My Chemical Romance specifically because they are the most popular and recognisable “emo” band. The genre is tied to the collapse of gender roles, society and the self. My Chemical Romance is the best example of this, formed after lead singer Gerard Way was travelling into New York when 9/11 occurred. This stimulated him to check up on old friends and eventually to form a band together.

Prince Hamlet and emo

Hamlet initially seems to be tied to the genre of emo by his depression and suicidal tendencies, clear sexual confusion however that is interpreted, propensity towards wearing black, and inaction taking the form of malcontent’s satire rather than meaningful action. However, by Act 5 Scene 2 there are several more reasons in which he should be tied to the genre. L.C. Knight describes Hamlet’s suicidal desires as ‘a desire to lapse back from the level of adult consciousness’, a common theme for Gen Z explored in the book ‘iGen’ by psychologist Jean M. Twenge who adds colour by her research by pointing to the billboard success of Twenty One Pilot’s song ‘Ride’ containing lyrics ‘Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days’ and ‘Out of student loans and tree-house homes we all would take the latter’. Hamlet ought to be placed in that generation, following Robert Cohen’s convincing arguments that Hamlet is intended to be sixteen, and especially in conjunction with Hamlet’s weltschmerz Eduard and Otto Devrient described as containing (in translation) ‘all the thousand things which betray youth and excuse it’.

(Among these, Hamlet’s ‘pessimism born from idealism’ in particular speaks to the impulse of the young and discontented.)

After Hamlet’s excursion with the pirates, however, he returns with renewed purpose and has to move past this constant clinging to the past. Jon McRae would argue Hamlet has to shed his black clothing by this scene to show he has moved on, since there are no mentions of Hamlet’s father in this scene and Hamlet reaches some kind of acceptance: ‘if it be not now, yet it will come’. Then – should Hamlet shed his emo attire by this point?

I would not agree.

Direction of Act 5 Scene 2

The purpose of Act 5 Scene 2 is to resolve the themes of the play and it does not make sense for Hamlet’s melancholy to just disappear for empty catharsis. Instead, I would argue that while he acknowledges at the beginning to Horatio ‘in [his] heart there was a kind of fighting’ he settled upon the fact that ‘there’s a divinity that shapes our ends’. There is a kind of peace he finds within himself, especially compared to the fact that he initially saw that world as an ‘unweeded garden’, suggesting a distant and uncaring God.

Thus, in this scene Hamlet should be wearing the military jacket worn by My Chemical Romance during the ‘Black Parade’ era. This album is arguably the best in the genre, ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ is a cultural staple and the music video for that song alone is one of MTV’s ‘50 Greatest Music Videos of the 21st Century’. It is extremely recognisable and will conjure to mind the themes of this album, which is a rock opera about a character dying of cancer and his afterlife. Specifically, the final song of the album ‘Famous Last Words’ is a defiant cry of acceptance and confidence in one’s own individuality which sings ‘I am not afraid to keep on living/ I am not afraid to walk this world alone’. In order to accept death Hamlet must reject suicide, the same way that emo does as a genre. The military aspect and black of mourning also recall Hamlet’s father while putting a twist on the masculine, feudal ruler that Old King Hamlet represents – emo, unlike Hamlet, is unabashedly more feminine. The duel is a parody of the martial world of Old King Hamlet, and although Hamlet makes no reference to his father, he does revenge the murder of his mother. Metatheatricality is a key theme which is resolved in the final scene, this is a show battle and Hamlet, dead, is lifted ‘high on a stage’ and the actor takes his final bow. ‘The Black Parade’ is a masterwork in theatre and is visually striking. Bold stage makeup would add to this sense of theatricality as well as showing a completion of Hamlet’s self-fashioning which happens throughout the play. The more feminine aspect hardly absolves him of his blatant misogyny but should tie him to Gertrude as in many ways his fatalistic approach and composure mimic her in Act 1 Scene 2, and it is her death which spurs her revenge.

Claudius should be in a suit; a corrupt, corporate politician, who, like current leaders like Trump and Johnson, has negative qualities mirroring the society he presides over. Direct compromise to either is inadvisable and would not fit, but in an era of increased populism and focus on individual leaders over party policy, the language of corruption of the ruler as in the state in Hamlet definitely mirrors the state of current politics. His grey suit should mirror his ambiguous morals.

However, Laertes, who was previously in a suit, should be in a black one. He is a step closer to Hamlet and while not completely aligned with him he should be visually distinct from the (moral) grey of Claudius and instead share the doomed black of Hamlet as both will die.

The pivot of the scene is Hamlet’s death. It should be focused on with a spotlight over him and Horatio, with the ‘warlike noise’ in the distance muffled. The audience should be drawn into the moment between the two of them, and after the line ‘the rest is silence’, there should be a fade into darkness and silence to mirror Hamlet’s death and suggest that this is indeed the end.

However, it is important that after the cathartic collapse of the family and state there is a new dynasty in place, unlike the bleaker endings such as the ones in the Olivier production. Fortinbras is able to marry both the martial skill of Old King Hamlet and the diplomacy of Claudius in his rhetorical skill. (To demonstrate the latter, ‘I have some rights of memory to this kingdom’ should be emphasised as it is a final comment on the manipulation of history after the hope is raised Hamlet might be correctly remembered after his death). Unlike Hamlet’s role as an outsider malcontent, Fortinbras is a perfect embodiment of someone who can make the system work well. The final line ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot’ shows how he efficiently takes control of Elsinore, and should be delivered with natural authority. The line could allow the interpretation that the surviving characters, including Horatio, are killed and purged by Fortinbras. This is perhaps overly bleak, but it is important that Fortinbras is a foil to Hamlet who stands apart from both him and the previous kings.

As Fortinbras becomes the new establishment he leans back into martial power and thus although it would be comforting to align him with the black of Laertes and Hamlet so all the foils are visually connected, he should be more closely connected with Old King Hamlet and Claudius. He is a new order between martial power and political manoeuvring, so it would make sense for him to be surrounded by soldiers in actual combat uniform but to contrast them by wearing ceremonial dress. In contrast to Hamlet’s black he should be visually striking in a vivid red.

Legacy

Emo and alternative music like punk have made a recent resurgence to combat the rise of the right globally, with Billie Joe Armstrong speaking out against Trump and the recent My Chemical Romance reunion concert taking place against the background of the Angel of the Waters statue, an important LGBT monument. Palaye Royale style themselves after the rock movements of the sixties up to inspiration from My Chemical Romance and focus on authenticity and philosophy conveyed by their music and a magazine made up of fan poetry and writings.

While Fortinbras co-opts the symbol of the military jacket for himself, he twists it, and twists Hamlet’s legacy as a ‘soldier’. He is perhaps a provider of a more stable dynasty than Claudius, but Horatio, left with the legacy of Hamlet and bound like Hamlet by the promise of memory, stands against Fortinbras’ erasure of the very near past. Although Hamlet and the old emo movement bows off the stage, as long as there is an establishment there will be counter-movements.

Therefore, though Fortinbras has the final line and control of the stage, the final image of the play should be Horatio, taking up Hamlet’s jacket not as an act of military resistance but the insistence of vigil, mourning, and awareness of tragedy which emo represents.

#hamlet #shakespeare #my chemical romance #emo #literature #tw mention of suicide #tw death

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religioused · 4 years

Text

Rubber Band Religion

by Gary Simpson

Year A - Sunday, March 29. 2020

Ezekiel 37:1-14 (KJV) The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.

3 And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest. Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.

5 Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord.

7 So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.

9 Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

11 Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it, saith the Lord.

You may wonder why I am delving into the Hebrew Scriptures. We are in Lent in the liturgical year, and, as a province, as a church we are going through a dry-bones Lenten season. There are also members of our congregation who are going through a personal dry-bones Lenten season. I think Ezekiel speaks to the personal, church and provincial dry-bones season. This passage gives hope. Ezekiel’s vision “speaks to us of a God who can achieve the impossible.”[1]

Ezekiel is an excellent name for this book, because Ezekiel can be translated, “‘God will strengthen.’”[2] Ezekiel can be divided into four sections. This week’s passage comes from the part of Ezekiel that is about the restoration of Israel.[3]

I doubt that many people would disagree with those theologians who describe Ezekiel as a street preacher.[4] He may have functioned as a street preacher for 22 years in Babylon.[5] But Ezekiel was far more than just a street-preacher prophet. Ezekiel was both a priest and a prophet.[6] The transformation from priest to prophet is unusual in the Bible. The two roles, priest and prophet, in Biblical tradition are often “antagonistic.”[7]

Ezekiel was an influential personality in the Hebrew Scriptures. Charles Patterson describes him as “often been called the father of Judaism.” Patterson states that for several centuries Ezekiel’s influence on the development of Israel’s religion was “greater than that of any of the other prophets.”[8] In one of my commentaries, a page heading for chapters 25 to 48 is “The Father of Judaism.”[9] Ezekiel is recognized as a prophet by two world religions, Judaism and Christianity. The Christian and Jewish prophet might be the Ezekiel that Muslims also recognize.[10]

Perhaps, God chose a person who could be influential at a time when the children of Israel needed an influential voice to speak to community needs. Commentator Vernon McGee notes that Ezekiel “spoke in the darkest days of the nation.”[11]

The bones in Ezekiel’s vision might have looked like a war had taken place, a war that was so bad there were no survivors to bury the dead.[12] The bones in the deserted battlefield scene could represent both “the extent of the disaster” Israel experienced and the condition of the Jewish exiles.[13] The dead bones can represent those who are spiritually dry or spiritually dead and the dead bones can symbolize those who are “despondent and dejected,” because they have lost hope.[14] Jeremiah’s Jewish contemporaries may have viewed the “land of their captivity as their ‘graves.’”[15]

The historical setting places this story during a time after the children of Israel were defeated. Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed, and the people were exiled in 586 BCE.[16] Many Jewish people were scattered from Israel, living in exile. “The destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple brought a profound crisis of faith.”[17] The dominant non-Jewish culture threatened Jewish people with assimilation and an “identity crisis.”[18] There could be a second reason why Jewish people had an identity crisis. Until the time of Ezekiel, the spiritual identity of Hebrew people was “linked intimately” to possessing the promised land.[19] Without a direct tie to their country, without having the promised land under their feet, the Hebrews may have felt their identity was extinguished.

In the book of Ezekiel, there is a strong sense that God poured out judgment on the children of Israel. And that God’s judgment was the reason why the children of Israel were in such a bad position. Judgments are also proclaimed against some of the neighboring kingdoms.[20] These neighboring nations are judged because they were “malicious neighbors,” who were “rejoicing over Israel’s misfortune” and were “hoping to profit” by gaining territory from Judah.[21] There is little room for people of faith to rub their hands together in glee when they see others experiencing a tragedy. Profiting from the misfortune of others can be an ethically dubious practice.

God asks, “Mortal, can these bones live?” God's question, “Can these bones live?” might have been a question on the minds of the Jewish people living in exile.[22] And Ezekiel answers, “O Lord God, you know.”[23] I like the way Peter Craigie, author of the Ezekiel volume of The Daily Study Bible, paraphrases the passage. He says Ezekiel’s response to God could mean, “You know the answer to that. Of course, they can’t live!”[24] For me, the dry-bones Lenten seasons of life are times when I want to paraphrase Ezekiel’s response to God, “You know the answer God. Of course, things will never be the same. Things will never be normal again. Dead bones can’t live again!”

Contributors to The Interpreter’s Bible Commentary ask who has not stood by the grave of hopes.[25] As a province, we stand at the grave of our dreams. The price of oil is down. Visions of prosperity, a big home, expensive luxury SUV automobiles, and all of the toys are gone. We are seeing government budget restraint, layoffs in the public sector and in non-profit service agencies. Those who lost jobs may find that our provincial dry-bones Lenten season may change their lives for many years. As a province, we are living through the dry-bones phase – economic stress and strains, and budgetary restraint. And now the world is going through a dry-bones Lenten season – with the worldwide pandemic. Many people are working from home, businesses are closed. There are times when challenging news comes in threes, and it can feel overwhelming.

2 Samuel Chapter 23 mentions that Benaiah killed a lion. [26] That might not impress you, but the lion was in a pit and it was a snowy day. We are not told much about the story, but I have visions of being in a pit, on a snowy day, standing on slick ground, and getting ready to fight with a lion. Some of us may feel that we are sharing a pit with a lion on a snowy day.

In our church, we are living through a dry-bones Lenten stage too. For some of us, the dry-bones experience started about a year and a half ago. A few members of our congregation have come through the dry-bones period. Still others may be living through our community Lenten experience for a few more weeks, for a few more months. I am not sure if there is a more appropriate verse for us to reflect on, especially during the liturgical cycle of Lent.

We do not know what the future holds for our church or for the province. We can be like the rubber band, always fighting to return to its original position. The stress on our lives can be overwhelming when we fight to be just as we have always been. Another option is for us to be more like water. In some respects, water represents resiliency better than the rubber band. Water forever remains water. The shape of the container may change, the volume may change, but water remains water, in the face of changes. The secret to resilience is to be true to ourselves, to be a people of faith, to reduce oppression and inequity, no matter what shape life circumstances give us. Some of us may long for our church to return to the days when we were one of the biggest churches in the city. After the Hebrews returned to the promised land, things did not look just exactly like they did before the war, before the people were carried off into captivity. Our church, when restored might look very different than what it looked like in sixty years ago.

Gaither Bailey was pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Palestine, Texas. He describes the dry bones periods of life as times when “we ask ourselves, ‘Will I ever be normal again? Will my life ever be the same?’” Bailey says these are times when, like Ezekiel, we face “devastation and doubt.”[27] The vision was intended to “cheer up” the captive Jewish people. [28] Ezekiel’s goal is to offer hope to the oppressed people. The hope that Ezekiel offers is that God will not condemn any person who turns to God, regardless of society’s mistakes, regardless of society’s sins.[29] And Ezekiel’s dream can still help give hope.

At rock-bottom, it feels like there is nowhere to go but up, no place to look but up. Ezekiel’s dream gives hope to those who are in rock-bottom places. Commentator Samuel Almada observes, “From the rock-bottom place, a new conscience begins to take root where the impossible is possible; dry bones revive, dispersion changes into community, weakness into strength and widespread pessimism into hope.”[30] Ezekiel’s vision is about a “God who can achieve the impossible.”[31] The dream of giving life to a pile of bones represents God doing what feels impossible to us. “God will see us through the valley of dry bones.”[32] God will see you through the dry valley of the dry bones of your dry-bones Lenten experience.

Notes

[1] George Buttrick, et al, eds. The Interpreter’s Bible. Vol. VI. (New York: Abingdon Press, 1956), 267.

[2] Samuel Almada. “Ezekiel 1-39.” Global Bible Commentary. (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2004), 236.

[3] Merrill F. Unger. Unger’s Bible Handbook: An Essential Guide to Understanding the Bible. (Chicago: Moody Press, 1967), 364.

[4] Ezekiel is described as a street preacher in Bruce B. Barton, et al., eds. Life Application Study Bible. (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Pub., 2004), 1306.

[5] Barton, et al. (2004), 1306.

[6] Samuel Almada. “Ezekiel 1-39.” Global Bible Commentary. (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2004), 236.

[7] Almada. (2004), 236.

[8] Charles H. Patterson. CliffsNotes on the Old Testament. Kindle ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003), ebook.

[9] William Neil. William Neil’s One Volume Bible Commentary. (London: Hodler and Stoughton, 1976), 267.

[10] “Prophet Ezekiel.” Muslim Prophets. n.d., 02 Mar 2020. <http://muslimprophets.com/prophet.php?pid=249>.

[11] J. Vernon McGee. Thru the Bible with J. Vernon McGee. Kindle ed. (Pasadena, California: Thru the Bible Radio, 1998), ebook.

[12] NIV Foundation Study Bible. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Pub., 2015), 920.

[13] George Buttrick, et al, eds. The Interpreter’s Bible. Vol. VI. (New York: Abingdon Press, 1956), 267.

[14] NIV Foundation Study Bible. (2015), 920.

[15] A.R. Fausset. A Commentary Critical, Experimental, and Pratical on the Old and New Testaments. Vol. 2. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 1995), 346.

[16] Almada. (2004), 236.

[17] Almada. (2004), 235.

[18] Almada. (2004), 235.

[19] Peter C. Craigie. The Daily Study Bible: Ezekiel. (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1983), 6.

[20] Almada refers us to Ezekiel Chapter 25. (2004), 236.

[21] Almada. (2004), 236.

[22] George Buttrick, et al, eds. The Interpreter’s Bible. Vol. VI. (New York: Abingdon Press, 1956), 266.

[23] Ezekiel 37:3 (NRSV).

[24] Peter C. Craigie. The Daily Study Bible: Ezekiel. (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1983), 260.

[25] George Buttrick, et al, eds. The Interpreter’s Bible. Vol. VI. (New York: Abingdon Press, 1956), 267.

[26] 2 Samuel 23:20.

[27] Gaither Bailey. “Dry Bones.” Sermon Central. 09 Apr 2011, 19 Feb 2020. <https://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/dry-bones-gaither-bailey-sermon-on-affliction-155999?ref=SermonSerps>.

[28] A.R. Fausset. A Commentary Critical, Experimental, and Pratical on the Old and New Testaments. Vol. 2. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 1995), 347.

[29] William Neil. William Neil’s One Volume Bible Commentary. (London: Hodler and Stoughton, 1976), 266.

[30] Almada. (2004), 243.

[31] George Buttrick, et al, eds. The Interpreter’s Bible. Vol. VI. (New York: Abingdon Press, 1956), 267.

[32] Bailey. (2011). <https://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/dry-bones-gaither-bailey-sermon-on-affliction-155999?ref=SermonSerps>.

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blackkudos · 4 years

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Billy Dee Williams

William December "Billy Dee" Williams Jr. (born April 6, 1937) is an American actor, voice actor, and artist. He is best known as Lando Calrissian in the Star Wars franchise, first in the early 1980s, and nearly forty years later in The Rise of Skywalker (2019), marking one of the longest intervals between onscreen portrayals of a character by the same actor in American film history.

Williams was born in New York City, and raised with his twin sister Loretta in Harlem. In 1945 he made his Broadway theatre debut at age seven in The Firebrand of Florence. He later graduated from The High School of Music & Art, then won a painting scholarship to the National Academy of Fine Arts and Design, where he won a Hallgarten Prize for painting in the mid-1950s. To fund his art supplies he returned to acting, including stage, films, and television. He kept creating art, his work has since been shown in galleries and collections worldwide.

Williams’ film debut was in The Last Angry Man (1959), but he came to national attention in the television movie, Brian's Song (1971) which earned him an Emmy nomination for Best Actor. He has appeared in at least 70 films over six decades including critically acclaimed and popular movies such as, Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and Mahogany (1975) both starring Williams paired with Diana Ross; and Nighthawks (1981). In the 1980s he was cast in his most enduring role as Lando Calrissian, becoming the first African-American actor with a major role in the Star Wars franchise, in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983). He also delivered Lando as a voice actor in video games, animated series, and the National Public Radio adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back. He was inducted into the Black Filmmaker's Hall of Fame in 1984, and earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1985. Another enduring franchise relationship started with Batman (1989), playing attorney Harvey Dent, a role that was also developed into a villainous alter-ego, Two-Face, which he voiced for The Lego Batman Movie (2017).

Williams's television work has over sixty credits starting in 1966 including recurring roles over the decades in Gideon's Crossing; Dynasty, General Hospital: Night Shift; and General Hospital. Numerous cameos and supporting roles included being paired with Marla Gibbs on The Jeffersons, 227, and The Hughleys. Later work included voice acting in the series Titan Maximum (2009), and appearing on the reality show Dancing with the Stars (2014). His work has earned him numerous awards and honors including three NAACP Image Awards, and the NAACP Lifetime Achievement award.

Early life and education

William December Williams Jr. was born in New York City, the son of Loretta Anne (1915–2016), a West Indian-born elevator operator at the Lyceum Theatre and aspiring performer from Montserrat, and William December Williams, Sr. (1910–2008), an African-American caretaker, with some Native American ancestry from Texas. He grew up in Harlem on 110th Street, between Lenox and 5th, adjacent to Central Park North–110th Street station. He used to go to Central Park to see the Negro league players and the Cuban baseball league, “They were fantastic, and I wound up working with a lot of those guys,” (in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976)). He has a twin sister, Loretta, and they were raised by their maternal grandmother while their parents worked several jobs. His mom had studied opera for years, becoming an accomplished opera star who wanted to break into movies; the family was richly cultured, exposing the children early on to drawing, painting, theatre and similar creative experiences; Billy Dee would remain a fan of the arts including opera. In March 1945 he made his Broadway debut at age seven portraying a page in The Firebrand of Florence, Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin’s operetta starring Lotte Lenya. His mom, who worked at the theatre, volunteered him for the part which he found boring.

Williams attended Booker T. Washington Junior High School where he had dreams of being a painter. He graduated in 1955 from the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan, where he majored in arts with a focus on visual arts. The school would later be the subject for Fame (1980), and its derivative television series. While there he got a two-year scholarship for the National Academy of Fine Arts and Design in New York—which later changed its name to National Academy of Design—to study with a focus on "classical principles of painting". He was nominated at eighteen or nineteen years old for a Guggenheim Fellowship grant—for “creative ability in the arts;” and won a Hallgarten Prize in the mid-1950s. Although he had scholarships to pay for school tuition, he turned to acting to pay for his paints, supplies, and canvasses. His first Broadway theatre “big break” was a play, A Taste of Honey. He continued to struggle as an actor for ten years working as an extra, doing small and large theatre, and “slowly breaking into television and film”. During art school he gained interest in the Stanislavsky Method—experiencing a role contrasted with representing it, to mobilize an actor's conscious thought and will to in turn activate emotional response and subconscious behavior—and began studying at the Harlem Actors Workshop. It was run by blacklisted actor Paul Mann who embraced actors of all races; Williams also studied there under Sidney Poitier. He first viewed his acting as a way to pay for his art supplies, by the early 1960s though he began to “devote all of his energy to performance.” In succession he got an actor agent through a friend, started getting major Off-Broadway roles, then work on Broadway.

Career

Stage

Williams first appeared on Broadway in 1945 in The Firebrand of Florence. He returned to Broadway as an adult in 1960 in the adaptation of The Cool Word. He appeared in A Taste of Honey in 1960. A 1976 Broadway production, I Have a Dream, was directed by Robert Greenwald and starred Williams as Martin Luther King Jr. His most recent Broadway appearance was in August Wilson's Fences, as a replacement for James Earl Jones in the role of Troy Maxson in 1988.

Film and television

Williams made his film debut in 1959 in The Last Angry Man, opposite Paul Muni, in which he portrayed a delinquent young man. He was frustrated in the 1960s with the “paucity of parts for leading black men,” the majority of roles he wanted went to Sidney Poitier. He enjoyed doing theater and television, but “his slow-building film career ate at him.” He found LSD, a popular hallucinogenic drug with the era’s hippie movement to be a cure, “LSD saved my life ... I wasn’t doing it to get high. It let me get inside of myself.” Otherwise he is anti-drug.

He rose to stardom after starring in the critically lauded blockbuster biographical television movie, Brian's Song (1971), in which he played Chicago Bears star football player Gale Sayers, who stood by his friend Brian Piccolo (played by James Caan), during Piccolo's struggle with terminal cancer. The film was so popular that it was given a theatrical release. Both Williams and Caan were nominated for Emmy Awards for best actor for their performances. Williams said the role was the one of which he was most proud:

It was a love story, really. Between two guys. Without sex. ... It ended up being a kind of breakthrough in terms of racial division.

Having broken through, Williams’ success with Brian's Song earned him a seven-year contract with Motown's Berry Gordy. He became one of America's most well-known black film actors of the 1970s, after starring in a string of critically acclaimed and popular movies, many of them in the "blaxploitation" genre. In 1972, he starred as Billie Holiday's husband Louis McKay in Motown Productions' Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues. The film was a box office blockbuster, becoming one of the highest-grossing films of the year and received five Academy Award nominations. Through his portrayal he became “a full-fledged sex symbol, touted as the ‘black Clark Gable.’” Diana Ross starred in Lady Sings the Blues opposite Williams; Motown paired the two of them again three years later in the successful follow-up project Mahogany.

1980-present

Williams was cast as Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), becoming the first African-American actor with a major role in the series. J. J. Abrams, who would direct Williams in the ninth installment film in 2019, noted, “Lando was always written as a complex, contradictory, nuanced character. And Billy Dee played him to suave perfection, ... It wasn’t just that people of color were seeing themselves represented; they were seeing themselves represented in a rich, wonderful, intriguing way.” He would reprise the role soon after in Return of the Jedi (1983). Between the latter two films, he starred alongside Sylvester Stallone as a cop in the thriller Nighthawks (1981). The charm of his role as Lando Calrissian proved to be popular with audiences. Williams has voiced the character in the 2002 video game Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, the audio dramatization of Dark Empire, the National Public Radio adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back, two productions for the Star Wars: Battlefront series, The Lego Movie, and in two episodes of the animated TV series Star Wars Rebels. Some fans were disappointed with Calrissian's absence from the first film in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, The Force Awakens, but in July 2018 it was announced that he would reprise his role in The Rise of Skywalker (2019), marking one of the longest intervals between onscreen portrayals of a character by the same actor in American film history.

Williams co-starred in 1989's Batman as district attorney Harvey Dent, a role that was planned to develop into Dent's alter-ego, the villain Two-Face, in sequels. However, that never came to pass; he was set to reprise the role in the sequel Batman Returns, but his character was deleted and replaced with villain Max Shreck. When Joel Schumacher stepped in to direct Batman Forever, where Two-Face was to be a secondary villain, Schumacher decided to hire Tommy Lee Jones for the role. There was a rumor that Schumacher had to pay Williams a fee in order to hire Jones, but Williams said that it was not true: "You only get paid if you do the movie. I had a two-picture deal with Star Wars. They paid me for that, but I only had a one picture deal for Batman." Williams eventually voiced Two-Face in the 2017 film The Lego Batman Movie.

Williams' television work included a recurring guest-starring role on the short-lived show Gideon's Crossing. He is also known for his advertisements for Colt 45, a malt liquor, for a five-year period starting in the mid-1980s; he would reprise his spokesperson role in 2016. Williams brushed off criticism—for the subtext of the ad campaign, ‘works every time,’ and the target audience—of the choice, "I drink, you drink. Hell, if marijuana was legal, I'd appear in a commercial for it." Colt 45 hired Williams “simply because he was so cool,” and went from trailing behind Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company in barrels produced, to “skyrocketing” a year after the 1986 ads ran to two million barrels in the top spot for malt liquor.

In the 1984–1985 season of Dynasty, he played Brady Lloyd opposite Diahann Carroll. Williams was paired with actress Marla Gibbs on three situation comedies: The Jeffersons (Gibbs's character, Florence, was in love with Williams and challenged him on everything because she thought Williams was an imposter); 227 (her character, Mary, pretending to be royalty, met Williams at a banquet); and The Hughleys (Gibbs and Williams portrayed Darryl's parents). In 1992, he portrayed Berry Gordy in The Jacksons: An American Dream. In 1993, Williams made a guest appearance on the spin-off to The Cosby Show, A Different World, as Langston Paige, a grumpy landlord, in a backdoor pilot for his own series. Williams appeared as himself on Martin where he provided Martin Lawrence's character with advice on getting back together with Gina.

Williams made a special guest appearance on the hit sketch comedy show In Living Color in 1990. He portrayed Pastor Dan in an episode of That '70s Show. In this episode, "Baby Don't You Do It" (2004), his character is obsessed with Star Wars, and uses this to help counsel Eric Forman (himself a Star Wars fan) and Donna Pinciotti about his premarital relationship. Williams made a cameo appearance as himself on the television series Lost in the episode "Exposé". He also appears regularly on short clips on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! as a semi-parody of himself. In February 2006, Williams guest starred as himself in the season 5 episode "Her Story II" of Scrubs, where he plays the godfather of Julie (Mandy Moore). Turk hugs him, calling him "Lando", even though he prefers to be called Billy Dee. Williams played Toussaint Dubois for General Hospital: Night Shift in 2007 and 2008. Williams reprised his role as Toussaint on General Hospital beginning in June 2009. Also in 2009, Williams took on the role of the voice of Admiral Bitchface, the head of the military on the planet Titan, in the Adult Swim animated series Titan Maximum. In July 2010, Williams appeared in the animated series The Boondocks, where he voiced a fictionalized version of himself in the episode "The Story of Lando Freeman".

In February 2011, Williams appeared as a guest star on USA Network's White Collar as Ford, an old friend of Neal Caffrey's landlady June, played by Diahann Carroll. In February 2012, Williams was the surprise guest during a taping of The Oprah Winfrey Show spotlighting Diana Ross. Ross and Williams were reunited after having not seen each other in 29 years. In October 2012, Williams appeared as a guest star on NCIS in Season 10 Episode 5 titled "Namesake", as Gibbs's namesake and his father's former best friend, Leroy Jethro Moore. On January 9, 2013, Williams made a cameo appearance as himself on Modern Family, season 4, episode 11 "New Year's Eve".

In 2014 Williams competed on the 18th season of Dancing with the Stars, a reality show/dancing competition partnered with professional dancer Emma Slater. The couple had to withdraw from the competition on the third week due to an injury to Williams's back.

Over the years, Williams has been a featured guest at fan conventions, mostly science fiction ones for his iconic Lando Calrissian role in the Star Wars franchise. Of his fan interactions he has said they have mostly been positive ones, "I love every single moment of it, I'll have an audience for the rest of my life."

Return to painting

In the late 1980s, Williams resumed painting devoting much of his time to the work. He returned to New York to star in August Wilson’s play Fences replacing James Earl Jones in the lead for four months starting in February 1988. It marked a turning point for him, returning home, and for him, the center of the art scene. He also renewed his friendship with Peter Max who had also trained, and sold art in the city, and renewed Williams' interest in painting. Within a two year span he “cranked out 120 original works of art.”

Williams is the Honorary Chairman of Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (TMIJ) in Washington, D.C., which fosters jazz education. TMIJ uses his artwork each year for its competition programs since 1990. He had his first solo exhibition in 1991 followed by many throughout North America, and later, the world. Around 1992, Williams, inspired by his friend and fellow New York artist Peter Max who had a teapot collection, started a cookie jar collection. Being an opera fan, he first found a jar in the shape of a singer in an opera gift shop by artisan couple Michael and Shelley Buonaiuto; later buying more than a dozen from their limited lines including ones of jazz artists Josephine Baker and Fats Waller. His 1993 self-portrait is at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.) with a description that he “specializes in acrylic paintings combining traditional brushwork with an airbrushing technique;” he also works in oils. Williams painted a series of impressionistic portraits of the Tuskegee Airmen, the “African-American pilots whose real-life exploits changed the course of American military history.” He started the series in the 1990s but when officials from National Air and Space Museum (NASM) saw them they wanted more, and to use them in an exhibition. In 1999 they were displayed at the African-American Museum of Art, Culture and History in New Orleans, and in early-2000, the NASM in Washington, D.C.

He was commissioned for four paintings—including one of track and field star Jesse Owens sprinting, and another of a pair of boxers in a fight ring—for Nissan that were displayed at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1997 he did paintings for Walt Disney Company’s Mighty Ducks arena for the Anaheim Ducks. From a description, circa late 1990s, at one of the galleries that carries his work, “Billy’s paintings are usually acrylic on canvas, applied with brush and airbrush. He also works with collage elements and has even created three-dimensional canvasses incorporating ceramic, Lucite, and neon light.”

He got permission from Star Wars’ creator George Lucas to sell lithographs of a montage of Williams’ iconic character from the franchise, Lando Calrissian. As of 2001 his paintings sold for an average of $10,000 to $35,000 (equivalent to $50,537 in 2019). "I call my paintings 'abstract reality.” Said Williams, “Sometimes I refer to them as 'impressions/expression.' It's the best way I can explain them." In early 2001 Williams was one of the celebrity artists painting seven-foot angel sculptures as part of the Oscar Academy’s sponsoring L.A.’s “A Community of Angels” charity project. The art angels were displayed for months then auctioned to raise funds for L.A. youth programs. In his online gallery biography, he states, “[an] interest in Eastern philosophy characterizes his images, first to record the physical reality, and then to uncover through the application of light, color and perspective. He cites Edward Hopper, M. C. Escher—the Dutch Master, Frida Kahlo, Tamara de Lempicka, Thomas Hart Benton, and the exciting, vibrant forms of African art as some of his strongest influences.” Williams’ work is included at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, and the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.

In a 2001 interview he said, "Either I want to drop dead with a paint brush in my hand or I want to drop dead doing a soliloquy on the stage, I love acting. I love it. I take my acting very seriously, but I also find it fun. To do what children do and get paid for it is a lot of fun. I'm very fortunate." In late 2007 he was a guest artist on a ten-day Princess Cruise liner. They bought about eighty pieces which they put on their cruises and then auctioned off. He was commissioned for another set of Disney paintings to be unveiled in 2011 at Disney’s D23 Expo, also in Anaheim, California. For those, he set iconic Disney characters Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and Goofy in jazz music settings. In a 2011 interview he said, “I mostly create abstract paintings. I paint what's obvious to the eye and then incorporate an abstract point of view, which allows me a lot of space to play in. I work a lot with acrylic and oils, mostly acrylic right now and do a lot of line drawings.” In a September 2015 interview he said he finds painting “cathartic” compared to collective film work, “When you’re painting you just lock yourself up in your little private world. And it’s all about you and your imagination and nobody else interfering with that. It’s a great exercise because you really start discovering who you are and what you are without a lot of assistance … and the moment you come up with something interesting it’s a success that’s really based on your own personal, private sensibility.” As of 2019 he has made around 300 paintings, which Williams sees as his legacy.

Other ventures

Let's Misbehave

In 1961, Williams recorded a jazz LP produced by Prestige Records entitled Let's Misbehave, on which he sang swing standards. The album, which was a commercial success, earned Williams a spot on Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever (1983).

The album included the first-ever vocal recording of “A Taste of Honey”, a song by Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow later covered by The Beatles on their 1963 debut album Please Please Me. Williams was the first to sing the song in the U.S., on the Broadway stage with Joan Plowright as part of the original Broadway production of the play A Taste of Honey. Williams said of the album, “Recording it was sort of a lark. I did some singing in clubs, for a moment, and then I stopped. I have too much respect for singers to really think that I'm a singer.” The album was re-released on CD, Download and Streaming platforms in 2014 and continues to be available.

Thirty years later, in the early 1990s, he sang on a “celebrity-packed charity single,” “Voices That Care,” to honor U.S. troop of Operation Desert Storm, the 1990-1991 Gulf War, and supporting the International Red Cross. The single reached number eleven on the Billboard Hot 100, and number six on the Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks. Through sales and plays of the song Williams and the other celebrities became platinum-recording and Billboard-charting artists.

Video games

Williams voiced Lando Calrissian in the video game Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Star Wars Battlefront as well as the spin-off Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron. However, the Battlefront appearances were archive footage and his voice-appearance in Elite Squadron is left uncredited or unknown. He also played a live-action character, GDI Director Redmond Boyle, in the game Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, which was released in March 2007. This made him the second former Star Wars actor to appear in a Command & Conquer game, with the first being James Earl Jones as GDI General James Solomon in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. Williams voiced Lando Calrissian in 2015's Star Wars: Battlefront for the DLC pack Bespin and its 2017 sequel Star Wars Battlefront II.In the 2016 game Let It Die, Williams voices Colonel Jackson, who acts as the 2nd major boss players face.

Internet

In 2008, Williams reprised his role as Lando Calrissian to appear in a video on Funny or Die in a mock political ad defending himself for leader of the Star Wars galaxy against vicious attack ads from Emperor Palpatine. Williams is currently a cast member of Diary of a Single Mom, a web-based original series directed by award-winning filmmaker Robert Townsend. The series debuted on PIC.tv in 2009.

Personal life

Williams has been married three times, and has three children, and two grandchildren. His first marriage was to Audrey Sellers in 1959. They were divorced some years later, after which he apparently became depressed. He stated that "there was a period when I was very despondent, broke, depressed, my first marriage was on the rocks." They had a son, Corey Dee Williams, born in 1960. In 1968, Williams married model and actress Marlene Clark in Hawaii. They divorced in 1971. He moved from New York City to California in 1971.

He married Teruko Nakagami on December 27, 1972. She brought a daughter, Miyako (b. 1962), from her previous marriage to musician Wayne Shorter. Together they have a daughter, Hanako (b. 1973). In 1984 he bought a “Zen-like contemporary” home in the Trousdale Estates neighborhood of Beverly Hills, California; he sold it in 2012. He filed for an amicable divorce from Nakagami in 1993, but they reconciled, and were again living together by 1997.

Williams was arrested on January 30, 1996, after allegedly assaulting his live-in girlfriend, whom the police did not identify. He posted a US$50,000 bail. L.A. Police said the woman had minor bruises and scratches. The attorney's office filed misdemeanor charges of spousal battery and dissuading a witness. The woman later stated that the incident was her fault and hoped the police would drop the case. In a plea bargain, Williams was ordered to undergo 52 counseling sessions. In a 2019 interview, Williams says he never slapped or abused women.

In late 2019, Williams talked about his feminine side in an interview, and used masculine and feminine pronouns to refer to himself. Media outlets widely speculated that Williams might be gender fluid, but he clarified that he was referring to anima and animus: the feminine side of men and the masculine side of women in Jungian psychology.

Honors and awards

Primetime Emmy [Nominee] (1972) for Outstanding Single Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in "Gale Sayers" in Brian's Song (1971)

Inducted into the Black Filmmaker's Hall of Fame in 1984.

Hollywood Walk of Fame

Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films

Film Independent Spirit Awards

Multicultural Motion Picture Association (Diversity Awards): Circa 2000-2001, Lifetime Achievement Honor

Black Reel Awards: Nom 2002 Theatrical - Best Supporting Actor for The Visit

NAACP Image Awards (NAACP)

Indie Series Awards

TV Land Awards

African-American Film Critics Association (AAFCA)

Behind the Voice Actors Awards

American Black Film Festival

Star on the Walk of Fame (1985) at 1521 Vine Street.

Saturn Award [Nominee] (1981) for Best Supporting Actor in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Saturn Award [Nominee] (1984) for Best Supporting Actor in Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)

Independent Spirit Award [Nominee] (2001) for Best Supporting Male in The Visit (2000)

Image Award [Winner] (1972) for Best Actor - Motion Picture in Lady Sings the Blues (1972)

Image Award [Winner] (1977) for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976)

Image Award [Nominee] (2001) for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture in The Visit (2000)

Lifetime Achievement Award for his outstanding contributions to the arts in 2006.

ISA [Winner] (2010) for Best Performance by a Guest Actor in Diary of a Single Mom (2009)

ISA [Nominee] (2011) for Outstanding Supporting Actor in Diary of a Single Mom (2009)

TV Land Award [Winner] (2006) for Blockbuster Movie of the Week In Brian's Song (1971)

TV Land Award [Nominee] (2003) for Most Memorable Male Guest Star in a Comedy as Himself In The Jeffersons (1975)

Special Achievement Award [Winner] (2012)

BTVA Feature Film Voice Acting Award [Nominee] (2018) for Best Vocal Ensemble in a Feature Film in The Lego Batman Movie (2017)

(2018) Hollywood Legacy Award

Books

PSI/Net (1999), ISBN 978-0-312-86766-9, novel co-written with Rob MacGregor based on an actual government program of psychic spying.

JUST/In Time (2001), ISBN 978-0-8125-7240-7

Filmography

Williams’ film debut was in The Last Angry Man (1959), but he came to national attention in the television movie Brian's Song, which earned him an Emmy Award nomination for Best Actor. He has appeared in at least 70 films over six decades, including critically acclaimed and popular movies Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and Mahogany (1975), which both starred Williams paired with Diana Ross, and Nighthawks (1981).

In the 1980s he was cast as Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). He would portray Lando in the Star Wars franchise for nearly forty years, including The Rise of Skywalker (2019), and as a voice actor in video games and animated series. Another enduring franchise relationship started with Batman (1989) playing attorney Harvey Dent, a role that was also developed into a villainous alter-ego, Two-Face, which he voiced for The Lego Batman Movie (2017).

#04/06

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blackphoenixalchemylab · 5 years

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Harvest Moon + Friday the 13th

The Harvest Moon is sailing toward us, arriving nonchalantly on Friday, 13th 2019 as if that’s a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to do. The nerve!

But we are here for it, and you, with a cluster of Lunacy offerings to sweeten the season and ward off any unnecessarily hard luck.

Here’s everything you’ll need!

++ A LITTLE LUNACY

HARVEST MOON

Harvest Moon is celebrated in almost every culture, and the bounty of the season is marked in a myriad of ways. Harvest Moon touches the Equinox, the festival of Janus, the culmination of Homowo, the “crying of the neck” in Cornwall, and the Women’s Festival of the Moon. This is a day that celebrates abundance and beauty, fertility and progress, and the light of this full moon blesses new undertakings and reunites lost loves.

The Harvest Moon, by definition, is the Full Moon that falls closest to the Autumnal Equinox, and thus, it shares some of that Sabbat’s characteristics. This Full Moon was thus named because it rises within half an hour of the sun’s setting, in the Northern Hemisphere, and at this time farmers are able to work longer into the night by the light of this Moon. As the year draws to a close, the Full Moon rises an average of fifty minutes later each night, with the exception of a few nights surrounding the Harvest Moon, which only rises 10-30 minutes later. This moon is also, to the human eye, the fullest and largest of the year’s Moons, hanging gloriously huge, yellow and low in the night sky, and many lunar illusions play tricks our eyes at this time.

The Harvest ushers in many celebrations, including the Equinox and the Festival of Janus, God of Doors. Janus is the Roman Lord of Gateways, beginnings and endings, and transitions. Thus, the Harvest Moon is a time for blessing new ventures, the onset of new and progressive phases in one’s life, and rites of passage into adulthood. This time of year also marks one of the Festivals of Dionysus, Lord of Ecstasy and the Vine.

This Harvest lunacy blend combines the autumnal scents of dry leaves, mulling spices, balsam fir, pine needles, cedar, juniper berry, clove, saffron, damson plum, white sage, yarrow, and lily twined with Dionysus’ sacred grapes and ivy, a bounty of apple, black fig, and pumpkin, and the amaranth and lingum aloes of Janus, all touched by a gentle breath of festival woodsmoke and sweet wine.

(Don’t forget, you can also purchase Dan Santat’s Harvest Moon illustration, pictured above, as a tee shirt!)

++ DUETS

A fresh batch of simple, two-note perfumes!

👯 LIME AND WHITE MUSK

Startlingly invigorating!

👯 RED AMBER AND OUD

Fierce, warm, and animalic.

👯 TUBEROSE AND MANGO

Sweet and strangely sensual.

👯 BOURBON VANILLA AND YELLOW CARNATION

An absurdly happy scent.

👯 RED ROSE AND TOBACCO ABSOLUTE

A filthy, heady bouquet.

++ FRIDAY THE 13TH

13 is significant, whether you consider it lucky, unlucky or just plain odd. Many believe it to be unfortunate…

…because there were 13 present at the Last Supper.

…Loki crashed a party of 12 at Valhalla, which ended in Baldur’s death.

…Oinomaos killed 13 of Hippodamia’s suitors before Pelops finally, in his own shady way, defeated the jealous king.

…In ancient Rome, Hecate’s witches gathered in groups of 12, the Goddess herself being the 13th in the coven.

Concern over the number thirteen echoes back beyond the Christian era. Line 13 was omitted form the Code of Hammurabi.

The shivers over Friday the 13th also have some interesting origins:

…Christ was allegedly crucified on Friday the 13th.

…On Friday, October 13, 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered the arrests of Jaques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templar, and sixty of his senior knights.

…In British custom, hangings were held on Fridays, and there were 13 steps on the gallows leading to the noose.

To combat the superstition, Robert Ingersoll and the Thirteen Club held thirteen-men dinners during the 19th Century. Successful? Hardly. The number still invokes trepidation to this day. A recent whimsical little serial killer study showed that the following murderers all have names that total thirteen letters:

Theodore Bundy

Jeffrey Dahmer

Albert De Salvo

John Wayne Gacy

And, with a little stretch of the imagination, you can also fit “Jack the Ripper” and “Charles Manson” into that equation.

More current-era paranoia: modern schoolchildren stop their memorization of the multiplication tables at 12. There were 13 Plutonium slugs in the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. Apollo 13 wasn’t exactly the most successful space mission. All of these are things that modern triskaidekaphobes point to when justifying their fears.

For some, 13 is an extremely fortuitous and auspicious number…

…In Jewish tradition, God has 13 Attributes of Mercy. Also, there were 13 tribes of Israel, 13 principles of Jewish faith, and 13 is considered the age of maturity.

…The ancient Egyptians believed that there were 12 stages of spiritual achievement in this lifetime, and a 13th beyond death.

…The word for thirteen, in Chinese, sounds much like the word which means “must be alive”.

Thirteen, whether you love it or loathe it, is a pretty cool number all around.

…In some theories of relativity, there are 13 dimensions.

…It is a prime number, lucky number, star number, Wilson Prime, and Fibonacci number.

…There are 13 Archimedean solids.

AND…

…There were 13 original colonies when the United States were founded.

Says a lot about the US, doesn’t it?

This version of 13 is a departure from our usual theme for this ongoing project. So many of us are going through so much right now; it seems right to make an oil that contains 13 herbs, flowers, and resins of peace, tranquility, and grounding: lavender, litsea cubeba, sandalwood, ylang ylang, king mandarin, patchouli, blue tansy, Roman chamomile, bergamot, Oman frankincense, angelica, hops, and borage.

++ VIRGO SEASON

VIRGO LOCKET

The Zodiac lockets have returned! Exquisite, elegant, and exclusive to Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab.

These are heavy lockets, thick with silver, and are perfect for use as a perfume oil conduit. Dab your favorite Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab concoction onto muslin, velvet or cotton, and place the swatch inside the locket. Your body will warm the silver, and the locket will exude pure, unadulterated scent.

The Zodiac lockets are hand cast 925 sterling silver that has been partially gold washed using a method popularized in the 19th century, and each is adorned with at least one stone corresponding to the sign the locket represents. Each locket’s bale sports one of the BPAL logos: the alchemical symbol for brimstone. Portions of the face of the lockets have been deliberately tarnished. They measure approximately 1.25″ in diameter. These lockets are heavy. They are not fragile, filigreed pieces; they are durable, extremely weighty with silver, and are suitable for your most adventurous airship excursions.

These lockets are exclusive to Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, and were created by and for Black Phoenix. They cannot be found anywhere else in all of Heaven and Earth.

Each piece is hand cast.

Our lockets come with a 24″ nickel-plated iron chain.

The Zodiac lockets were designed by Alicia Dabney of Elements and Artifacts.

VIRGO SOCKS

Created in the USA by the wonderful people at Sock Dreams for Black Phoenix, these socks are exclusive to Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab!

They’re made from 80% cotton, 15% nylon and 5% elastic!

...Also, PSST! Guess what? We’ve freshly restocked our REVENANT RHYTHM!

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signlanguage-forthe-mindandbody · 4 years

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Iconicity & Semantic Relatedness in Sign Language

I did not realize how lucky I was to be able to communicate with words until taking this course. My cousins went to a deaf school from the ages of five to eleven. Neither of my cousins are deaf but my Aunt and Uncle wanted them to be exposed to children who learned differently because they thought it would be beneficial to their learning experiences. Due to this, my sister and I learned sign language as well so that we could help them with homework and communicate with them. This research discusses iconicity in signs. Some signs are non-iconic which in simpler terms means that it is harder to realize what they mean because they are not as obvious as other signs like“love” for example. Love in my opinion is obvious because a lot of people know it. There is even an iPhone emoji for it. To sign love you put up your pinky finger, pointer finger and thumb.

There are some important terms discussed in the research that it is important to define. Priming is defined as the implicit memory effect. This is with exposure to a stimulus influence to a later stimulus. In psychology specifically it is used to train someone’s memory, in positive and negative ways. Priming is when exposure to one thing can later alter a behavior or a thought. Lexical priming effects have been found for words that are phonologically, morphologically, or semantically related. Priming effects provide evidence for how linguistic information is structured and accessed in the mental lexicon. Identifying modality-independent and modality-specific effects is imperative for knowing what aspects of lexical processing are universal to all written languages. Along with documenting how the characteristics of sign versus speech shape lexical access and word recognition. Sign phonology is not based on sound and does not involve oral articulation. It is not clear why different priming patterns are observed for different phonological units in sign language. Iconicity is the form of a sign and its meaning. Lastly, Modality is the model quality. This is a particular mode in which something exists or is experienced or expressed.

There were a couple of words throughout this study that I knew but needed a little more clarification for. These words were iconicity, semantic, lexical, priming, and priming effect, and modality. The goal of this study was to replicate the semantic priming effects initially observed in the article. The other goal of this study was to examine a modality-specific semantic property of sign language. Semantic is the study of meaning in language, this is concerned with like-words, phrases, signs, and symbols. Lexical is relating to the words or vocabulary of a language.

In this study there were twenty deaf signers, six were men and fourteen were women. All participants were exposed to American Sign Language or ASL by the age of five years. All but three participants had at least one deaf signing parent or older sibling. All participants used ASL on a daily basis as their primary or preferred form of communication. Sixty-eight hearing participants with no knowledge of ASL rated a large corpus of ASL signs for iconicity and semantic relatedness. An additional five deaf signers who did not participate in the experiment provided iconicity, semantic relatedness, and familiarity ratings for the stimuli. The target sign PIANO was primed equally by the iconic sign GUITAR and the non-iconic sign MUSIC.

Semantically related and unrelated prime-target sign pairs were created in which the prime was either iconic or non-iconic. The first set was designed to find out whether iconicity emphasized semantic priming. The second set was designed to find out whether iconic signs were recognized faster than non-iconic signs in a lexical decision task. When both are preceded by primes that are semantically unrelated. Participants were instructed in ASL to decide whether the second sign of each pair was a true ASL sign. They responded by pressing the appropriate button which was marked either a green “YES” or a red “NO”. Each participant did this twelve times.

The results showed targets preceded by semantically related primes were responded to significantly faster than targets preceded by unrelated primes. The iconicity of the prime did not increase the priming effect. There was no difference between response latency for targets preceded by iconic vs. non-iconic primes. The amount of priming created by iconic and non-iconic semantically related primes was basically identical.

Psycholinguistic research has shown both similarities and differences in lexical access and representation for signed and spoken languages. Lexical access for both involves a sequential mapping process. Both words and signs must be phonologically decoded and encoded. Lexical access for sign language involves a two-stage recognition process where one set of elements are initially assessed and identified then that leads to lexical recognition. This occurs earlier for signs than words because of the high degree of simultaneous phonological structure. Although phonological organization differs by modality, the organization of lexical semantic structure does not.

In conclusion, iconicity did not increase the priming effect. Iconic signs were not recognized faster or more accurately than non-iconic signs. These confirm the existence of semantic priming for sign language. Iconicity does not play a robust role in on-line lexical processing. Signers were faster when making lexical decisions to signs that were preceded by a semantically related prime than by an unrelated prime. Semantic priming is a universal linguistic process that is unaffected by language.

Earlier I talked about how my cousins and I learned sign language. I think this was overall an amazing idea on my Aunt and Uncle’s part. I would not go as far as to say that I can sign perfectly but I can sign enough to help my cousins with homework. I would also be able to help someone navigate and be able to make life a lot easier for them. This relates to iconicity. We learned sign language by studying symbols, objects, images, and events. This allowed me to understand signs and symbols between me and my instructor.

References

Bosworth, R. G., & Emmorey, K. (2010). Effects of iconicity and semantic relatedness on lexical

access in american sign language. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,

Memory, and Cognition, 36(6), 1573-1581. doi: 10.1037/a0020934

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jorjdsfeadle-blog · 5 years

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mainly as regards to international terrorism

worldwide tensions between Islam and the West. Striking examples of this style encompass Kabir Khan's New York (2008), Karan Johar's My Name is Khan (2010), Rensil D'Silva's Kurbaan (2009) and Apoorva Lakhia's Mission Istanbul, to name a few. Films like Anil Sharma's Ab Tumhare Hawale Watam Sathiyo (2004) and Subhash Ghai's Black and White (2008) consciousness on terrorist problems in the Indian subcontinent itself. The latter films have continued inside the subculture of pre 9-11 terrorist movies like Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Mission Kashmir (2000), Mani Ratnam's Dil Se (1998) and Bombay (1995). Ratnam's Bombay treated the devastating Hindu and Moslem riots in 1991, which value over a one thousand lives. Study in Canada after Graduation Chopra's Mission Kashmir dealt with a situation of neighborhood terrorist activity inside the Kashmir location sponsored by global terrorist cells operating from Afghanistan. In this manner the terrorist style is not a wholly new style in Bollywood, nor is terrorism an strange phenomenon in the day to day sports of the Indian subcontinent (the maximum current and brutal terrorist assault was the Mumbai bloodbath in 2008). What makes the current spate of terrorist movies thrilling is that they have entered the global sphere and have emerge as component and parcel of a transnational talk between East and West and Islam and the opposite.

To make the terrorist style extra palatable, Bollywood has traditionally spiced up the violence and suspense with the hallmark Bollywood music and dance interludes and sentimental romantic exchanges among the hero and heroine. Mission Kashmir is infamous for its swish dances and stirring emotional exchanges between the primary protagonists, played out on the violent backdrop of terrorism in Kashmir. Mani Ratnam's Bombay likewise mixes up the maximum brutal scenes of Hindu and Moslem hatred and violence with scrumptious comedy and a forbidden love affair between a pious Moslem woman and a boy from a highly positioned Shaivite Hindu circle of relatives. His father is the trustee of the village temple and each the family patriarchs are violently opposed to the youngsters marrying out of doors their caste and non secular community.

Karan Johar's My Name is Khan

Following inside the Bollywood lifestyle of blending genres (known inside the enterprise because the masala or highly spiced recipe movie), Karan Johar's My Name is Khan blends comedy and romance with the political hot potato of post Sep 11 bigotry and racial hatred inside the US. The film's theme of ultra-nationalist extremism culminates in the senseless killing of a younger Indian boy Sam or Sameer, who's overwhelmed to dying with the aid of youths within the soccer ground, in part due to the adopting of his stepfather's name Khan. Overflowing gushes of emotion and coronary heart stirring romantic songs, inclusive of the integration of the 1960's counter tradition anthem "We Shall Overcome" (sung in both Hindi and English), arise at some point of the film to both lighten the tension and to exemplify the presence of light and hope in a global darkened with the aid of the bitter shadow of world terrorism. The truth that the imperative protagonist Rizvan Khan is a pious Moslem, and politically impartial to the hysteria of the debate, is considerable. Brought up by using his mom that there aren't any constant labels including Hindu and Moslem, however best good and bad human beings, Rizvan Khan freely practises his religion with identical love and admire for all other races and creeds, simplest differentiating among what is within the hearts and minds of humans, now not to what religion they profess, or to what race, culture and nationality they belong.

My Name is Khan is also considerable for Bollywood fanatics in that it reunites the most important heart throb couple of Hindi cinema from preceding decades, Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan. The duo was previously paired in of Karan Johar's in advance blockbusters Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1995) and Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham (2001). Both of these movies had been sentimental gushy romances, literally overflowing with juicy outpourings of emotion and feeling; a phenomenon which is termed rasa in India. The song and dance sequences were also very elaborately staged and blended a stability of the traditional Indian music and dance forms (Hindustani tune and traditional folk dances) in addition to contemporary Western forms. This ensured the movies' immense reputation in both India and diaspora countries like Canada, the USA and the UK.

Karan Johar continues to utilise the Bollywood masala formula in My Name is Khan, exploiting a sentimental and once in a while drawn out love affair between the autistic hero Rizvan Khan and his eventual Hindu spouse Mandira, a proprietor of a a hit hair dressing salon in San Francisco (the "town of love" which symbolizes the 1960s counter lifestyle motion exploited through Johar inside the "We Shall Overcome" sequence). In the preliminary scenes of the movie, America is portrayed because the land of freedom and opportunity, the nation wherein all races and religions are given the opportunity to move forward and gain prosperity and happiness in a way that is visible to be nearly not possible in a rustic like conventional India, buffeted as it's miles with caste and non secular prejudices and between half of and two thirds of its population living in poverty.

For overseas nationals or NRI's (non-resident Indians), however, Sept. 11 radically adjustments this formulation and shatters the American dream nurtured for decades by using an Indian diaspora which has merged its Indian cultural roots with American beliefs of person freedom and patron prosperity. According to Johar's film, this is now the plight of the Khans who, instead of persevering with to act as fully included contributors of the mainstream community, now find themselves at the outer edge of a post-9-11"us and them" rhetoric, fuelled through an ultra-nationalist Republican President, who perceives the sector in black and white realities, that have little to do with the ordinary lives of the average character. It isn't any accident that it's miles the newly elected President Barack Obama (played by means of his appearance alike Christopher B. Duncan) who greets Rizvan Khan on the quit of the film and applauds him for his faith in God and his humanity and perseverance. For Karan Johar, Obama's election is symbolic of the "us and them" divisions within the US psyche being delivered to a close in conjunction with the restoration of the innate beliefs for which the American Republic and its people stand.

Before the nation's divisions are healed, however, the Khan's revel in intense non-public hardships due to their ethnicity. These hardships culminate within the tragic death in their teenage son Sameer, overwhelmed to death in the school playing field by way of racist youths. In her grief, Sameer's mother Mandira blames her husband Rizvan, accusing him of the truth that if she and her son had not taken the call of Khan, he would now not be dead. She then tells him that the handiest way he can make amends for this stigma of being a Khan and, by means of implication a Moslem, is to fulfill the United States President (at the time it's miles George W. Bush) and to inform him that: "My Name is Khan and I am now not a Terrorist." This easy phrase turns into a form of mantra throughout the film, powerfully confronting the viewer's post-September 11 prejudices by way of refusing to link the two standards of Islam and terrorism together: i.E. My call is Khan, therefore I am a Moslem, however on the identical time just because I am a Moslem, does this mean that I am a terrorist? Unhappily, for the duration of the hysteria that followed inside the wake of September 11 for many Westerners the two terms, Moslem and terrorist became quite plenty synonymous.

This is a movie consequently which, in contrast to its predecessors, isn't always simplest aimed at teaching Indians and West Asians (it broke all data in Pakistan), however is also geared toward teaching and enlightening Westerners. This it does in a completely diffused and didactic way, no longer simplest thru its exploitation of acquainted West Asian icons, however additionally thru its exploration of issues and photographs established to the USA and the West: the 1960s counter way of life, the plight of the coloured people in the South and references to the civil rights movement through the film's subject matter tune "We Shall Overcome." This well-known anti-establishment song from Sixties when sung in Hindi via a religious Moslem in a black gospel church offers the target audience an nearly surreal feeling of each merging and, at the equal time transcending, national, racial and socio-spiritual cultural borders: a direction to global brotherhood and solidarity which has been courageously expounded via of the 20th century's brilliant non secular leaders, India's Mahatma Gandhi and America's Martin Luther King.

Karan Johar therefore attracts upon both the Western ideals of liberty and individualism, as well as propounding the roots of West Asian non secular piety and communal solidarity. By doing this My Name is Khan proposes an alternate version of worldwide brotherhood and transnational identities and exchanges. This new worldwide model for Johar is one that attracts its notion and ideals from the grass roots level- from the terrible coloureds of Georgia, from the socially ostracised Moslems, and from the autistic and mentally handicapped. All of them are an integral a part of this international humanity and in the end the parent of Shah Rukh Khan, the most important megastar in the worldwide forum today (such as Hollywood), speaks for all of them, when he says my call is Khan and I am not a terrorist, now not an outcaste and now not a hazard to the US or the crucial values which it seeks to export to the relaxation of the sector. Rather, as pious Moslems, those like Rizvan Khan have some thing of value to contribute to america and the West, and while the ones in strength allow them to do so, the vital values which have made the US excellent can no longer most effective be maintained however extended and broadened. On the other hand, ultranationalist extremist practises will handiest create increasingly hatred and division, in order that even the ones who have assimilated the American Dream will grow to come to be its maximum sworn enemies. This is the main topic of Kabir Khan's New York, which I will briefly discuss in part of this article.

Kabir Khan's New York

Although now not as a hit on the box workplace as Karan Johar's blockbuster, Kabir Khan's New York is possibly an even more exciting example of the transnational trend in the Bollywood terrorist genre. Released in 2008, New York makes a speciality of the lives of three brand new young Indians analyzing at New York State University together. The usual Bollywood masala romance dominates the first 1/2 of the movie, specializing in a sentimental love triangle between Maya (Katrina Kaif), Sameer or Sam (John Abrahams) and Omar (Neil Mukesh). Both Katrina Kaif and John Abrahams, in addition to Irrfan Khan (gambling the FBi agent Roshan) are properly installed stars in Bollywood (Irrfan Khan also starred as the policeman who interrogates the primary protagonist in Slumdog Millionaire). And the presence of these stars, along with the solid musical score and the dramatic love triangle situation, assured the film's success despite its debatable subject. Significantly, Sam and Maya fall in love and shatter Omar's emotional world at around the same time as the two hijacked passenger planes are driven into the Twin Towers. As with My Name is Khan, real pictures of the terrorist attack at the World Trade Centre is utilised in the film.

From this factor onwards, a film which has been mainly concentrated upon a sentimental love conflict between three friends now becomes a political indictment of the Bush administration's post-9/11 terrorist policies. Sam, as part of the FBI's nationwide hunt for terror suspects, is arrested, incarcerated and tortured. These tortures are graphically depicted within the film and are apparently primarily based on actual life debts of harmless victims, who have been illegally arrested and incarcerated for no other purpose than their having the wrong ethnic historical past and spiritual persuasion. During the final credits a grim word to this impact informs the visitors of the records that: "In the days following 9-11 greater than 1200 guys of overseas origin within the US had been illegally abducted, detained and tortured for as lengthy as three years. The government did not discover proof linking a unmarried one among them to the 11th of September assault.

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wilsondownes · 5 years

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The Red Serpent: 5. Reaching the Meridian Line

Rassembler les pierres éparses, oeuvrer de l'équerre et du compas pour les remettre en order régulier, chercher la ligne du méridien en allant de l'Orient à l'Occident, puis regardant du Midi au Nord, enfin en tous sens pour obtenir la solution cherchée, faisant station devant les quatorze pierres marquées d'une croix. Le cercle étant l'anneau et couronne, et lui le diadème de cette REINE du Castel.

To assemble the dispersed stones, work with square and compasses to put them back together again in regular order. Seek the meridian line going from the East to the West, then look from the South to the North, finally in all directions, to obtain the searched-for solution, positioning oneself in front of the fourteen stones marked with a cross. The circle being the ring and crown, it is the diadem of this QUEEN of Le Castel.

The poet is clearly done with pleasantries, like introducing friends and relating long walks. In this stanza, he seriously calls one’s attention to the bigger picture. The fact that one should evidently start looking all over the place for clues, leads one to suspect that the landmarks will eventually reveal some kind of geometrical pattern too — the meaning of which, like those in the texts, is still a mystery in itself.

5.1 With square and compasses

One is now instructed to assemble the ‘sixty-four dispersed stones of the perfect cube’ and put them back together again. Exactly what ‘in regular order’ means is at this stage anyone’s guess. The relevant landmarks in the area, which seem to have been scattered randomly, therefore actually form part of a well-ordered whole — the bigger picture.

To reduce the seeming chaos to order, one is told to use two instruments, namely a square and a pair of compasses. These are the two most basic measuring instruments, which still today figure prominently in Masonic lodges. This is quite logical, as the latter had developed from earlier builders’ orders in which these instruments were paramount. A square is used to draw straight lines and rectangles, and compasses, obviously, to draw circles. These are once again antipoles, with which the poem is interspersed.

A square and compasses are mainly used to draw sketches and diagrams on paper, and in this case, the ‘paper’ is undoubtedly a map of the area. Although the map at the back of Boudet’s book (see Figure 14) only includes the region from the entrance to the Sals Valley south of the town of Serres to the Serrat Plateau south of Rennes-les-Bains, and is also not drawn exactly to scale, it shows certain landmarks that are not indicated on modern maps and that could be significant. For this reason, Boudet’s map should be used as a basic map of the area.

The poet mentions two more landmarks on the route, namely those one apparently has to regard as starting-points in order to uncover the geometrical pattern(s) in the area. The first is a spot where a certain line of longitude and a certain line of latitude cross, and the other a place that seems to be the centre of a circle. Next, one is supposed to ‘look ... in all directions’, which implies that from there, one can systematically start working towards ‘the searched-for solution’.

5.2 The St. Sulpice meridian

The obvious question now is: Exactly which of the multitude of meridians and lines of latitude crossing each other on the map is the poet alluding to?

The only meridian singled out in the document Le serpent rouge is the one indicated by the copper strip on the floor of the St. Sulpice Church in Paris. As was mentioned earlier, the floor plan of this church included in the document clearly shows this meridian, with the letters P and S and the words ‘PRAE-CUM’ next to it. This meridian runs 2°20’05.6”E of the prime meridian at Greenwich. It lies very close to the Parisian meridian — 11.4”W of it — which dates from before when the Greenwich meridian started being used as the international line of reference for coordinate systems.

On Boudet’s map, this specific line of longitude runs close to the eastern border of the area, in other words, east of the immediate area in the Sals Valley where one finds oneself at this point.

The question arising, though, is whether somebody alluding to a meridian that in all probability relates to the hiding place of a treasure, would make it this easy to pinpoint. One tends to believe that the St. Sulpice meridian would rather lead one to the exact meridian — and region — the poet has in mind.

Fig. 14. The map of Edmond Boudet

5.3 The Rose Line

In the document Au pays de la reine blanche, a meridian that might be the line one is looking for is mentioned.

Just to put this document in perspective: It was published under the pseudonym Nicolas Beaucéan, which Franck Marie in Rennes-le-Château, étude critique [40] (‘Rennes-le-Chateau, A Critical Study’) deems to be one of Pierre Plantard’s pseudonyms. The name Beaucéan refers to the Knights Templar’s flag. (The Knights Templar was a Medieval Christian military order that existed from shortly after the first crusade until 1307.) This flag comprised parallel white and black blocks — once again echoeing the white and black theme in the poem. In the documents in the French National Library, the Order of the Knights Templar is also associated with the forerunner of the Prieuré de Sion, the Order of Sion.

As for the meridian: The one referred to in the above-mentioned document is called the ‘Rose Line’, in other words, the ‘red line’, which immediately calls to mind the ‘red serpent’. According to the author of this document, the abbé Courtauly had the following to say about the Rose Line: ‘If the parishes of Peyrolles and Serres are the twin children of Saint Vincent, the parish of Rennes-les-Bains protects the heart of the Roseline.’ The Rose Line therefore runs past (or through) the church of Rennes-les-Bains. The fact that this particular line falls almost exactly in the centre of Boudet’s map, leads one to believe that this could be the line the poet has in mind.

The towns of Peyrolles and Serres mentioned in the quotation, lie to the north of Rennes-les-Bains. One can easily spot these from the lookout point on the hiking path between Roque Nègre and Blanchefort. The writer connects them with the ‘twin children’ of St. Vincent — a saint one has already come across: It is said that he is mentioned in one of the parchments allegedly discovered in Rennes-le-Château.

St. Vincent was a friend of Jean-Jacques Olier, the founder of the St. Sulpice Church, wherein a meridian is indicated across the floor. Just like Olier, St. Vincent is also associated with the leadership of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, which apparently was a front (or another name) for the Prieuré de Sion.

In the above quotation, the churches of Peyrolles and Serres are linked to the Rose Line. A quick glance at the map reveals that they fall on lines of longitude on either side of the Rennes-les-Bains church. Upon closer examination, however, one discovers that these churches lie perfectly symmetrical on either side of the meridian running through the cemetery behind the Rennes-les-Bains church.[41] As the Rose Line dates from the time when these churches were built, one could allow for a minor error of a few metres. The directions in Au pays de la reine blanche therefore correspond exactly to what one finds in reality: The church of Rennes-les-Bains indeed ‘protects’ this line.

On the map, this meridian runs past Lampos in the north — the white rock formations on the slopes of Cardou. Lampos lies straight across from Blanchefort on the other side of the ravine when entering the Sals Valley from the north. South from there, the meridian runs through the Rennes-les-Bains cemetery, further south through the spot where the Sals and Blanque Rivers converge, and still further south, past a fountain called Fontaine de Madeleine (‘Fountain of the Magdalene’.

The fact that this meridian runs through the convergence of the mentioned rivers unveils a beautiful symmetry in the area. This, once again, corresponds to the balancing of the poles in the riddle, which is crucial to finding one’s way.

5.4 Lampos

According to Boudet, the name Lampos comes from the word ‘lamb’. He writes: ‘This last rock separated from Cardou and presenting several points reunited at the base, gave our ancestors the idea of small beings comprising a family ... [They] poetically named these needles Lampos. This word derives from ‘lamb’ or ‘to lamb’, when speaking of the sheep.’ [42] This rock structure does indeed look like white lambs grazing on the slopes. The poet later also connects it with the baptism of Christ, and therefore John’s words: ‘Behold the Lamb of God.’

When looking at the copper strip indicating a meridian in the St. Sulpice Church, one makes the astounding discovery that it is indeed linked to the ‘Lamb of God’. At the one end, the line runs to the gnomon in the northern wing of the church, on which it is vertically produced. Right next to the line on the gnomon there is an inscription — as well as the symbol of the Lamb of God! This inscription also appears in the document Le serpent rouge. Just as the Rose Line runs through Lampos, so the meridian line in St. Sulpice is (literally) connected with the Lamb of God. It is therefore highly likely that this symbol on the gnomon serves as an indication of where the relevant meridian lies — the one that runs through Lampos at Rennes-les-Bains!

This discovery is the first indication that the riddle in the poem and the information in the related documents possibly not only pertain to the convictions of Pierre Plantard and his circle of friends, but could also be based on a geometrical pattern in the Rennes-les-Bains region that had existed long before any of them did! Although it is certainly possible that Pierre Plantard linked the symbol of the Lamb of God on the gnomon to Lampos, the fact that both had existed long before his time implies that others before him had the exact same association in mind. It is therefore not coincidental that the meridian running through Lampos also falls in the middle of Boudet’s map, and that all the landmarks on this map can easily be ordered in respect of this meridian. This proves that Pierre Plantard did indeed have access to certain secrets that at least date from the time of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement.

Fig. 15. The inscription on the gnomon

5.5 The Rennes-les-Bains cemetery

To reach the cemetery behind the church of Rennes-les-Bains, one takes the footpath from Blanchefort, and at the fork, the path going down to the tarred road. At the second little bridge, there are steps leading down to the water from the Pontet Fountain that flows from a pipe underneath the bridge. This water is rich in iron and leaves a reddish deposit on the ground. From here, one follows the road into Rennes-les-Bains.

It is quite a rare experience relaxing with a cold drink outside the café fronting the town square, which is shaded by the majestic plane-trees in the centre. The opposite right-hand corner of the square conceals the entrance to the passage-way that leads to the church.

When entering the vestibule, which is separated from the church itself by a door, the first thing that catches the eye is an iron cross decorated with roses, with a Virgin and Child in the centre. Underneath this cross one finds three inscriptions: ‘IN HOC SIGNO VINCES’ (‘BY THIS SIGN YOU WILL CONQUER’), ‘DOMINO VIE RECTORE’ (‘TO THE MASTER WHO SHOWS THE WAY’) and ‘PETRUS DELMAS FECIT’ (‘MADE BY PETRUS DELMAS’), with the date 1856 underneath. One immediately wonders if the abbé Vie, whose name features in the middle inscription, is the one who is supposed to show the way.

As for the third inscription: In 1856, Petrus Delmas apparently published a writing entitled L’Armorial du Languedoc-Roussillon (The armorial bearings of the Languedoc-Roussillon’) in which one or more of the antique Plantard family coats of arms appeared. The existence of such a book can, however, not be verified.

Walking straight through the vestibule, one reaches the cemetery behind the church. Here one finds the grave of the abbé Jean Vie, who died in 1872 at the age of 64. According to his epitaph, he became a priest at 32, which neatly divides his life into two parts of 32 years each, 32 ‘black’ and 32 ‘white’ years — corresponding to the Knights Templar’s flag, as well as the blocks on a chess-board.

The date on his grave, namely the 1st September, is written as ‘1 er 7 embre’, and therefore also implies 17 (in French, 7 is ‘sept’). Together with the French pronunciation of his name, ‘Janvier’ (meaning ‘January’), one therefore has an allusion to the 17th January — the same day Sigebert is said to have been brought to Rhedae. This is also the holy day of the archbishop of St. Sulpice, the patron saint of the church in Paris that had been named after him, who died on the 17th January, 647. Given the connection between this date and St. Sulpice, it is highly likely that this grave relates to the meridian indicated on the floor of the St. Sulpice Church.

Next to the grave of the abbé Vie is that of Boudet’s mother and sister. The white tombstone is bestrewn with black crystals - again the white-black theme. Between their epitaphs is a vertical line with arrowheads at the top and bottom, and one’s first thought is whether this is not perhaps indicative of the Rose Line.

As the Rose Line indeed runs past these graves,[43] there is little doubt that they are connected with it. This would imply that the cemetery not only boasts an important meridian, but also that the priests of the church had been aware of it and left all sorts of clues about it. Another grave to be found here — which later on proves to be of great significance — is that of Paul-Urbain de Fleury, the son of Paul F. Vincent de Fleury and Gabrielle, Marie de Blanchefort’s daughter.

According to Au pays de la reine blanche, the church of Rennes-les-Bains protects the ‘heart’ of the Rose Line. This ‘heart’ in all probability alludes to a point where the Rose Line and a line of latitude cross, which would imply this line of latitude is the other line the poet is referring to. The next landmark implicitly mentioned in the poem is therefore to be found here in the Rennes-les-Bains cemetery.

5.6 Mirror images

One now expects the poet to enter the church of Rennes-les-Bains. He does, after all, mention the 14 ‘stones’ marked with a cross, which undoubtedly refers to the 14 Stations of the Cross. The Stations in the Rennes-les-Bains church, however, do not include any of the peculiarities found in the Rennes-le-Chateau church, which means it is rather the latter that is relevant at this point. One therefore has to position oneself in front of the Stations of the Cross in the church of Rennes-le-Château — which forms part of the ‘all directions’ one is told to look in.

The poet switches very cleverly between the two churches of these towns. Just as one thinks one is supposed to enter the church of Rennes-les-Bains, he actually has the one in Rennes-le-Château in mind. He clearly had no intention whatsoever of making this a walk in the park.

Just as the poet metaphorically refers to the landmarks on the route as stones, so he also calls the Stations of the Cross in the church of Rennes-le-Chateau ‘stones’. There is therefore a parallel to be drawn between the route in the Rennes-les-Bains area and the Stations of the Cross in the Rennes-le-Château church. This emphasises precisely what one discovered earlier, namely that he calls the route a pilgrimage as an allusion to the Way of the Cross as depicted in the Rennes-le-Château church. The route outside the church of Rennes-les-Bains therefore corresponds to the Way of the Cross inside the church of Rennes-le-Château. These two are therefore mirror images, as it were.

One now starts noticing exactly to what extent the poet’s description of the route tallies with the inside of the Rennes-le-Chateau church. As was mentioned earlier, the description of the poet’s friend standing on Blanchefort corresponds in detail to the first Station of the Cross in this church. The high pulpit directly to the right of the first Station could certainly also be indicative of this look-out on top of Blanchefort.

In the description of the route past Roque Nègre he mentions having to chop down vegetation. This tallies with the depiction in the second Station of a boy dressed in brown, gathering pieces of wood. In the following stanza, wherein a flight is mentioned, the Pontet Fountain is the next landmark, as it is the only place in the region that can be directly linked to Sigebert.

Just after the second Station of the Cross is a statue of St. Anthony the Hermit, who, just like the boy in the second Station, is dressed in brown. The question is whether one can link St. Anthony to the Pontet Fountain — or maybe rather to Sigebert.

Astonishingly, there are indeed two things pertaining to St. Anthony that relate to Sigebert. The first is that the holy day of St. Anthony falls on the 17th January — the day (in 681) Sigebert had allegedly been brought to Rhedae. The second is that, while St. Anthony is regarded as the prince of all hermits, Sigebert (as well as his next two descendants, Sigebert V and Bera III) was also referred to as the ‘hermit prince’ as a result of his living in a cave on a hill close to Rhedae. It would therefore seem that the ornamentation between the Stations of the Cross in the church of Rennes-le-Chateau also relate to the route!

In the fifth stanza, one discovers the next landmark on the route to be the heart of the Rose Line in the cemetery behind the church of Rennes-les-Bains. The rose-decorated iron cross in the vestibule of this church could also allude to this heart. In addition, the fourth Station of the Cross is dominated by rose colours: Mary Magdalene is dressed in apricot-coloured clothes with shades of pink in the creases, and Jesus’ mother is wearing a light rosy pink dress.

Next to the fourth Station is a statue of St. Germaine of Pibrac, holding a bunch of roses in her dress. She was a shepherdess of the Languedoc who was raised to sainthood in 1867. Her story corresponds greatly to (and is probably just another version of) that of St. Roseline, whose holy day is also on the 17th January. St. Germaine’s day of remembrance, the 16th June, is also the day on which the French nun Marguerite Marie Alacoque had the vision that led to her worship of the ‘Sacred Heart’. This, too, could be related to the heart of the Rose Line.

Roses, St. Roseline and the Sacred Heart, all related to the Rose Line, can therefore be linked to St. Germaine. The similarities between the landmarks on the route and the ornamentation in the church of Rennes-le-Chateau are therefore unmistakable. This means one can again and again search the Stations of the Cross and the ornamentation for clues — precisely as the poet suggests.

5.7 The circle

After being led to the heart of the Rose Line in the Rennes-les-Bains cemetery, one is now lured to the ‘circle’. This reference is not merely to this shape — it has a bearing on another spot just a short distance from the cemetery, on the outskirts of Rennes-les-Bains, called Le Cercle (‘The Circle’). In view of the fact that compasses are mentioned, it would seem that this place is to be used as the centre of the circle one has to draw. Boudet alleges that this very spot is the centre of the stone circle that is to be found in the area.

To get to Le Cercle, one walks in a southerly direction from the church of Rennes-les-Bains down the main road. Right on the outskirts, a narrow road branches off slantwise to the right. Following this, one turns left just before the last stone building on the left-hand side.

Entering the house’s yard, one immediately sees Le Cercle — an ancient stone circle of about 7 m in diameter. The house to the left was built on top of some of these stones, which are visible at the bottom of the wall to the left of the front door. Some of the other stones are only just visible above the surface.

The poet compares this stone circle to a ring and a crown. This brings to mind the ring of Solomon, which is also associated with a treasure. The crown does, after all, have a royal connotation. According to legend, Solomon appointed the devil Asmodeus as keeper of the cave in which his treasure was hidden. One day, the king lost his seal ring, upon which the devil refused him entrance to the cave. It was only after Solomon had found the ring again that he could drive the devil away.

In accordance with this tale, the devil does indeed also figure in our story — and he has an armchair just a short distance from Le Cercle!

Figuring out how the stone circle could be symbolic of Solomon’s seal ring is the easy part. The ‘seal’ of Solomon, which is also the symbol of the poet’s friend, does, after all, have a circle as base, with all the points of the hexagram on it. One therefore has a circle here that could easily be drawn on a map, with Le Cercle as the centre thereof. This corresponds to the poet’s advice about using a pair of compasses.

What strikes one is that the two geometrical patterns that are implied in this stanza, namely two lines crossing, and a circle, correspond to the two geometrical patterns on the coded texts, namely lines that cross each other, and a hexagram. This could certainly imply that the geometrical patterns on the texts are related to the last two landmarks in the area, namely the heart of the Rose Line and Le Cercle. The latter should, by the looks of it, serve as the base for drawing the seal of Solomon (a hexagram).

Besides the ring and crown, the poet also mentions the diadem of the queen of ‘Le Castel’. The ring, crown, diadem and queen are all indicative of royalty.

This is not the first time one hears about a queen. The poet already in the third stanza refers to the ‘BEAUTY’ and ‘QUEEN’, both in upper case. In the fourth stanza, he follows it up with another reference to the ‘BEAUTY’, and here, in the fifth, with another to the ‘QUEEN’. As in the rest of the poem, everything is in perfect dualistic harmony.

The queen is of ‘Le Castel’, which either refers to a place called Le Castel, or alludes to a castle. It also calls to mind the area where our queen Blanche came from, namely Castille — a name that also has a bearing on a castle. It is furthermore reminiscent of the castle where the ‘sleeping BEAUTY’ lies.

The ‘QUEEN’ and the ‘BEAUTY’ most likely refer to different aspects of the same female figure, and ‘Le Castel’ is where one is headed. It would seem, then, that the poet is drawing more attention to the fact that the ‘solution’ of the bigger picture will only be clear once one has reached this ‘castle’.

Hope maketh not ashamed.

40. Marie, F. 1978. Bagneux: S.R.E.S.

41. The western walls of these churches provide the best reference lines.

42. Boudet, H. 1886. La vraie langue celtique ... Carcassonne. Reissue: 1984. Belisane: Nice, p. 231.

43. The grave of Jean Vie lies on 2°19'11.7"E, which I took as the Rose Line.

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ruminativerabbi · 5 years

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The Elections in Israel: The View from Old Athens

Although my Greek never really got good enough to read the great tragedians in the original without a dictionary by my side, I nevertheless grew through my studies to love their work and to understand why Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, all of whom lived and worked in the fifth century BCE, eventually became pillars of Western culture. Even today I retain a real fondness for their work and an appreciation of its value and its artistry. But the part I always liked the best was their common use of an on-stage chorus—known to history because of them as a “Greek” chorus—to act sometimes as a kind of intermediary between the playwright and the audience, but other times as a kind of fictive corporate personality in its own right that interacts not with the audience but with the various characters in the play. In either case, however, the idea is almost always the same—to remind viewers that things are never as they seem, that behind even the most banal off-hand remark can hide a universe of emotion and meaning, and that we are, all of us, bit players in a huge drama that none of us has read and that no one therefore fully understands. It is that specific concept of an all-knowing Greek chorus that I would like to bring to bear in my attempt to analyze the results of last Tuesday’s elections in Israel.

As has so often been the case in these last years, the results at best equivocal—somehow both clear and unclear with respect to their potential impact on the future. As I write these words on Wednesday afternoon, it feels as though Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party will probably end up with a slight edge—something like 32 or 33 seats to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party’s possible 31 or 32. With 95% of the votes tallied, it feels likely that those numbers will hold, but even if the numbers were reversed the outcome will be exactly the same because no one party will have won enough seats—sixty-one— in the Knesset to govern all by itself without the need to form any sort of coalition. (Indeed, no party in the history of the state has ever won a majority of seats, the closest being the 56 seats that the Alignment coalition won in 1969.) And with that thought in place, let’s bring the chorus out onto the stage.

In classic Greek plays, the chorus is often depicted as a chorus of elderly persons possessed specifically of the kind of wisdom that, if it comes at all, comes to most in old age and it is precisely that kind of chorus of wise oldsters that in my mind’s eye I see stepping onto the stage. In my mind’s eye, I see them dressed in shapeless robes, their demeanor suggestive not of creeping senescence but of burgeoning insight as they turn first to face the audience and then, one by one, to the players in the drama unfolding on stage to offer them the benefit of their perceptive acumen, of their deep awareness of how things really are. The strange masks they are wearing are part of this as well: by denying them specific in-play identities, the members of the chorus appear instead as symbols of wisdom itself. And, indeed, the characters in the play are generally depicted either as being entirely deaf to the insight being offered them by the chorus or, in some ways even more tragically, as being vaguely aware that it is being offered but, at the same time, being far too distracted or otherwise occupied by their own egos to take the information being offered to them to heart.

The whole parliamentary system of government is theoretically designed to make elections more about ideas and policies than specific individuals. And that is how things are, at least theoretically, in Israel: voters don’t actually vote for anyone at all, just for the party they wish to see form the next government. Of course, the personalities involved are well known to all: as part of its campaign, each party publishes a list of the specific individuals who will serve in the Knesset if the party gets enough votes to seat people that far down the list. So everybody knows who will be Prime Minister if any specific party gets enough votes to form the next government because that individual appears as number 1 on that party’s list. The only problem is that the system doesn’t work quite as well as intended and, even though Israelis technically aren’t voting for any individuals at all, it somehow feels entirely as though people are voting for the person who will serve as Prime Minister if his party gets to form the government.

And now the curtain goes up to reveal our opening tableau. At the back of the stage on a kind of platform is the chorus, their wise presence as reassuring as their masks are unsettling. Upstage in the center is Reuven Rivlin, the President of Israel, wearing a dark suit and looking as though he knows his lines well enough but can’t quite remember to whom he is supposed to deliver them. To his right is a nattily-dressed but still clearly dejected Bibi Netanyahu. To the left, looking slightly surprised to be on stage at all and not at all ready to be off-book, is a rumpled-looking Benny Gantz, leader of the Blue and White Party. And hovering overhead, held in place by a hoist similar to the one that holds the Angel aloft in Angels in America, is Avigdor Lieberman, outfitted with a set of outsized white wings like Emma Thompson’s in the mini-series.

The audience quiets down and waits for the play to begin. All eyes, naturally, are on Rivlin, whose job it is to invite someone to attempt to hobble together a coalition large enough to govern effectively…or at all. Clearly, the opening soliloquy, ideally in the form of an invitation to get to work forming a government, is his to deliver. But as he produces some sort of computer print-out from his inside jacket pocket and begins to scan the numbers yet again, the chorus quickly intercedes and sternly instructs him to remember that he is above the system and not bound to the tyranny of its numbers, that he can—that he must—guide the nation forward by selecting the individual whom he deems the most likely to be able to govern wisely and well, not slavishly to turn to the guy whose party got the most votes. That makes his job both simpler and infinitely harder: simpler, because he can act as he wishes; but far more daunting because his decision will almost undoubtedly affect the nation’s future in a profound, perhaps even irreversible way…and he is far too savvy to pretend that he doesn’t understand that fully. As the chorus sings out their warning, his face grows pale, almost ashen. He seems weighed down with responsibility. He himself belongs to Netanyahu’s party. But he knows that his job is not to support Bibi, but to keep the Angel overhead aloft and the ensemble below from being crushed if he descends too quickly or too roughly.

And now Bibi steps forward and delivers his own opening soliloquy. Yes, he admits, his party got fewer votes than Benny Gantz’s. But why should that matter? Is Mrs. Clinton President of the United States? What should matter, he declaims in his weirdly American English, is that he can form a coalition, that he can govern, that he can and will lead the nation forward. He clearly has more to say, but again the Chorus intercedes. Looking not at Bibi but at Benny, they sing out a warning. “Remind him that he won’t be able to lead the nation that effectively from a prison cell…and that even you have lost track of the numerous indictments pending against him.” Then they look to Lieberman, still hanging there in mid-air and looking as smug as ever. “And you there,” they continue, looking up at the kingmaker, “remind him, again, that the way to bring you into the government is to form a grand coalition with Benny and yourself…and specifically to leave the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, out of the mix. Tell him, again, that it’s you or the black-hats…but not both. Not until they agree to serve in the IDF like every other Israeli citizen. He knows all that, to be sure. (You have told him that a few dozen times in the last few days alone.) But can you be sure Bibi always knows where his own best interests lie? Why not tell him again anyway? What can it hurt?”

And then, clearly on a roll, the Chorus of the Elderly, turns to Benny Gantz. He is a tall man, and wearing his newly pressed IDF uniform—he was, after all, the Chief of the General Staff, the Ramatkal, from 2011 to 2015—he looks even taller. He somehow seems sure and unsure of himself at the same time, confident and ill at ease. He wanted this, obviously. He personally founded the Hosen L’yisrael (“Israel Resilience”) party just last year and guided it into the coalition first with Telem, the party of Moshe Yaalon (also a former Chief of Staff of the IDF) and then with Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”), Yair Lapid’s centrist party. The resulting Blue and White party is therefore his baby, something he himself created, something in the remarkable victory of which he can take personal pride. And yet he looks uncertain. He looks at Bibi and feels untried and inexperienced in the ways of government. He looks up at Lieberman, still menacingly hovering overhead, and wonders what price he will have to pay to bring Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel Our Home”), Lieberman’s party, into a coalition. And then he looks at Rivlin and wonders what it’s going to take to get him to stop staring at Bibi with that unsettling mixture of awe and frustration.

I would tell you more, but the play is still in rehearsal and only opens in a few weeks when President Rivlin formally asks someone to form a coalition that could conceivably govern effectively. As also on Broadway, things in Israel can (and probably will) change dramatically before opening night. But the Chorus is already in place, already positioning itself to remind the players that what they see is not all there is, that acquiring power and exercising it wisely are not at all the same thing, and that the fate of the nation—and, by extension, the course of Jewish history—depends not slightly or tangentially, but fully and really on what the show actually looks like when the curtain goes up and the show actually opens.

#Binyamin Netanyahu #Avigdor Lieberman #Benny Gantz #Reuven Rivlin #Israel

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crimethinc · 6 years

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The Yellow Vest Movement in France–Between “Ecological” Neoliberalism and “Apolitical” Movements

The past weeks have seen a massive confrontational movement arise in France opposing President Emmanuel Macron’s “ecological” tax increase on gas. This movement combines many contradictory elements: horizontally organized direct action, a narrative of being “apolitical,” the participation of far-right organizers, and the genuine anger of the exploited. Clearly, neoliberal capitalism offers no solutions to climate change except to place even more pressure on the poor; but when the anger of the poor is translated into reactionary consumer outrage, that opens ominous opportunities for the far right. Here, we report on the yellow vests movement in detail and discuss the questions it raises.

A las barricadas: the yellow vest movement has provided a venue for people to revolt without giving up their identity as consumers.

Preface: The Ruling Center and the Rebel Right

In the buildup to the 2018 elections in the US, we heard a lot of arguments that it would be better for centrist politicians to win control of the government. But what happens when centrists come to power and use their authority to stabilize capitalism at the expense of the poor? One consequence is that far-right nationalists gain the opportunity to present themselves as rebels who are trying to protect “ordinary people” from the oppressive machinations of the government. In a time when the state can do precious little to mitigate the suffering that capitalism is causing, it can be more advantageous to be positioned outside the halls of power. Consequently, far-right nationalism may be able to gain more ground under centrist governments than under far-right governments.

In attempting to associate environmentalism, feminism, internationalism, and anti-racism with neoliberalism, centrists make it likely that at least some of the movements that arise against the ruling order will be anti-ecological, misogynistic, nationalistic, and racist. That works out well for centrists, because it enables them to present themselves to the world as the only possible alternative to far-right extremists. This is precisely the strategy that got Macron elected in his campaign against Marine le Pen. In this regard, centrists and nationalists are loyal adversaries who seek to divide up all possible positions between themselves, making it impossible to imagine any real solution to the crises created by capitalism.

A social movement of anger and confusion.

In short: if the wave of nationalist victories still sweeping the globe eventually gives way to a centrist backlash, but anarchists and other revolutionaries are not able to popularize tactics and movements that adequately address the catastrophies that so many people are facing, that could pave the way for an even more extreme wave of far-right populism.

We should study populist social movements under centrist governments in order to identify the ways that far-right groups can hijack them—and figure out how we can prevent that. This is one of the reasons to pay close attention to the “yellow vests” movement unfolding right now in France under the arch-centrist President Macron.

The “yellow vests” movement shows the strange fractures that can open up under the contradictions of modern centrism: above all, the false dichotomy between addressing global warming and addressing the ravages of capitalism. This dichotomy is especially dangerous in that it gives nationalists a narrative with which to capitalize on economic crisis while discrediting environmentalism by associating it with state oppression.

Against the dictatorship of the rich: a banner seen near Nantes.

What is taking place in France is reminiscent of what happened in Brazil in 2013, when a movement against the rising cost of public transportation provoked a nationwide crisis. This crisis gave tens of thousands of people new experience with horizontal organizing and direct action, but it also opened the way for nationalists to gain ground by presenting themselves as rebels against the ruling order. There are two significant differences between Brazil in 2013 and France today, however. First, the movement in Brazil was initiated by anarchists, but grew too big too quickly for anarchist values to retain hegemony—whereas anarchists have never had leverage within the movement of the “yellow vests.” Second, the movement in Brazil took place under a supposedly leftist government, not a centrist one. The hijacking of the movement against the fare hike in Brazil set the stage for a chain of events that culminated in the electoral victory of Bolsonaro, an outright proponent of military dictatorship and extrajudicial mass murders. In France, the context seems even less promising.

What should anarchists do in a situation like this? We can’t side with the state against demonstrators who are already struggling to survive. Likewise, we can’t side with demonstrators against the natural environment. We have to establish an anti-nationalist position within anti-government protests and an anti-state position within ecological movements. The “yellow vests” movement provides an instructive opportunity for us to think about how to strategize in an era of three-sided conflicts that pit us against both nationalists and centrists.

Burning barricades.

The Yellow Vest Movement in France

Several weeks ago, the Macron government officially announced that, on January 1, 2019, it will once again increase taxes on gas, which will raise the price of gas in general. This decision was justified as a step in the transition to “green energy.”

Diesel vehicles comprise two thirds of vehicles in France, where diesel is less expensive than regular gas. After decades of political policies aimed at pushing people to buy cars that run on diesel, the government has decided that diesel fuels are no longer “eco-friendly” and therefore people must change their cars and habits. Macron reduced taxes on the income of the super-rich at the beginning of his administration; he has not taken steps to make the wealthy pay for the transition to more ecologically sustainable technology, even though the wealthy have been the ones to benefit from the profits generated by ecologically harmful industrial activity. Consequently, Macron’s ecological arguments for the gas tax been largely ignored. Many people see the decision to increase the tax on gas as yet another attack on the poor.

The French government is responsible for creating this false dichotomy between ecology and the needs of working people. Decades of spatial planning have concentrated economic activity and job opportunities in bigger metropolises and developed public transportation in those same areas while isolating rural areas, making cars necessary for a large part of the population. Without any other option, many people are now completely reliant on their cars to live and work.

Blocking a toll collection point.

In response to Macron’s announcement about the tax on gas, people started organizing on the internet. Several petitions against the increase of the price of gas became viral, such as this online petition that is about to reach a million signatures as this text goes to press. Then, on September 17, 2018, a driver organization denounced the “overtaxation of fuels,” inviting its members to send their gas receipts to President Macron along with letters explaining their disapproval. On October 10, 2018, two truck drivers created a Facebook event calling for a national blockade against the increase of gas prices on November 17, 2018. As a result, more and more groups appeared on Facebook and Twitter sharing videos in which people attack the president’s decision and explain how difficult their financial situations already are, emphasizing that increasing the taxes on gas will only make it worse.

On the eve of the national call, about 2000 groups across the country were announcing their intention to block roads, toll collection points, gas stations, and refineries, or at least to hold demonstrations.

In order to identify the participants during this day of action, demonstrators decided to wear yellow emergency vests and asked sympathizers to show their support to the movement by displaying these vests in their cars. The symbolism behind this vest is simple enough. The French driver’s manual mandates that every driver must keep an emergency vest inside their car in case of accident or other issues on the road. In view of their dependency on cars, fearing to see their living conditions worsen, protestors chose these emergency vests as a symbol of resistance against Macron’s decision. By extension, protestors and media came to call this movement the “yellow vests.”

A blockade near Nantes on November 17.

Thousands of actions took place during the weekend of November 17. Approximately 288,000 “yellow vests” protestors were present in the streets for the first day of national blockade. This was a success for the movement, especially considering that it did not receive any assistance from trade unions or other major organizations.

Unfortunately, things escalated when fights broke out between “yellow vests” and other individuals. One “yellow vest” protester, a woman in her sixties, was killed by a driver, a mother who was trying to take her sick child to the doctor and attempted to drive through a blockade when people in yellow vests started smacking her car. Altogether, more than 400 people were injured, one protestor was killed, and about 280 individuals were arrested that weekend.

The movement remained strong despite these incidents. The blockades continued over the following days, even if participation diminished. In order to maintain the pressure on the government, the “yellow vests” made another national call for the following Saturday, November 24. Once again, various “yellow vest” groups on Facebook planned actions and demonstrations everywhere in France and circulated a call to converge in Paris for a big demonstration.

Facing a water cannon.

At first, this demonstration was planned for the Champs de Mars, near the Eiffel tower, where law enforcement would have surrounded and contained the protestors. However, this official decision did not satisfy some “yellow vesters,” and other calls circulated on social media. The November 17 demonstration in Paris had failed to reach its objective, the Presidential palace; consequently, the “yellow vesters” who were about to converge in Paris decided to repeat that effort on November 24. So it was that, rather than gathering at the base of the Eiffel tower, people converged and blocked the Champs Elysées, a target with powerful symbolic status. This luxurious avenue is the most visited in Paris; the Elysée palace where President Macron resides is located at the end of this avenue.

As they had the preceding week, demonstrators tried to get as close to the Presidential palace as possible. Barricading and confrontations took place all day along the most well-known Parisian avenue. It was reported that this second round of actions gathered about 106,000 participants throughout France, with about 8000 in Paris. These figures suggest that the movement is losing momentum. In the course of the demonstration in Paris, 24 people were injured in clashes and 103 people were arrested, of whom 101 were taken into custody. The first trials took place on Monday, November 26.

Bonfire on the Champs Elysées.

What Kind of Movement Is This?

The “yellow vests” movement describes itself as spontaneous, horizontal, and without leaders. It is difficult to be certain of these statements. The movement started via social media groups that facilitated decentralized actions in which people decided locally what they wanted to do and how to do it. In this regard, there is clearly some kind of horizontal organizing going on.

Regarding whether the movement is truly leaderless, this is more complicated. From the beginning, “yellow vesters” insisted that their movement was “apolitical” and had no leader. Instead, it was supposed to be the organic effort of several groups of people working together on the basis of their shared anger.

Nevertheless, as in practically every group—anarchist projects included—there are power dynamics. As is often the case, some people manage to accumulate more leverage than others, due to their access to resources, their capacity to persuade, or simply their skills with new technologies. Scrutinizing some of the self-proclaimed spokespersons of the “yellow vest” movement, we can see who has been able to accumulate influence within the movement and consider what their agenda might be.

Christophe Chalençon is the spokesperson for the Vaucluse department. Presenting himself as “apolitical” and “not belonging to any trade union,” he nevertheless presented his candidacy for the 2017 legislative election as a member of the “diverse right.” When we dig deeper into his personal relations and Facebook profile, we can see that his discourse is clearly conservative, nationalist, and xenophobic.

In Limoges, the organizer of the November 17 action of the “yellow vests” in the region was Christophe Lechevallier. Once again, the profile of this “angry citizen” is quite interesting. The least we can say is that Christophe Lechevallier seems to be a turncoat. In 2012, he presented his candidacy for the legislative elections as a member of a centrist party (the MoDem). Then he joined the extreme-right Front National (now called the Rassemblement National) and invited in 2016 its leader Marine Le Pen to a meeting. In the meantime, he was also working with the French pro-GMO agricultural organization FNSEA (the National Federation of Agricultural Holders’ Unions), known for defending the use of chemicals, such as the Glyphosate, to intensify their productions.

In Toulouse, the “yellow vest” spokesperson is Benjamin Cauchy. This young executive has been interviewed several times on national and local media. Again, this spokesperson is hardly “apolitical” if we consider his past. Benjamin Cauchy speaks freely about his political experience as a member of the traditional neoliberal right (at that time, the UMP, now known as Les Républicains). However, during law school, Benjamin Cauchy was one of the leaders of the student union UNI—well-known for its connections with conservative right and far-right parties and groups. But even more interesting, Benjamin Cauchy has not publicly acknowledged that he is now a member of the nationalist party Debout La France, whose leader, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, made an alliance with Marine Le Pen (of the Rassemblement National) during the second round of the last presidential election in hopes of defeating Macron.

There are frustrated consumers on both sides of the barricades.

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So it is clear that conservative and far-right groups are hoping to impose their discourse, spread their ideas, and use this “apolitical movement of angry citizens” as a way to gain more power. This has not gone entirely unopposed. The yellow vesters of Toulouse decided to evict Benjamin Cauchy from their movement due to his political views. On November 26, while invited at a radio show, the latter said that as an answer to his eviction, he was creating a new national organization entitled “Les Citrons” (the Lemons) to continue his fight against tax rises and took the opportunity to denounce the “lack of democracy that exists within the ‘yellow vests’ movement.”

Finally, it seems that the so-called “leaderless movement” completely changed its strategy in the aftermath of the second Parisian demonstration. On Monday, November 26, a list of eight official spokespersons of the movement was presented to the press. Apparently, the preceding day, yellow vesters were asked to vote online to elect their new leading figures. These nominations and strategic decisions are already creating tension within the movement. Some yellow vesters are now criticizing the legitimacy of the election, raising questions about how these leaders got selected in the first place.

Meanwhile, some members of the movement have called for another day of action on Saturday, December 1. The demands are clear: 1.) More purchasing power; 2.) The cancellation of all taxes on gas. If these demands are not granted, demonstrators say that “they will march towards Macron’s resignation.” So far, 27,000 persons have announced that they will participate in this event. Once again, the unity that was the watchword several weeks ago seems to have evaporated, as several local organizers have dissociated themselves from the movement in opposition to the more confrontational path that the movement seems to be taking.

A blockade by night.

Rather than addressing the question of horizontality, corporate media outlets have been focusing on another question: is the protesters’ anger legitimate?

Many media outlets have suggested that this movement is mostly composed of undereducated low-income people who are against protecting the environment; they describe the demonstrations as violent in order to delegitimize the anger of the participants. Despite this, some media outlets have shifted their discourse over time, becoming somewhat less condescending and more whiling to broadcast demonstrators’ concerns. For example, after the confrontations at the Champs Elysées last Saturday, Christophe Castaner, the new Minister of the Interior, said: “the amount of damages is poor, they are mostly material ones, that’s the most important thing.” Quite a surprising statement, considering how corporate media outlets and politicians have decried similar actions during the demonstrations on May Day and the protests against the Loi Travail.

From our perspective, there’s no doubt that their anger is legitimate. Most people who take part in this movement speak of the difficult living situations they have to deal with every day. It makes sense that they are saying that they have had enough; the gas issue is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. The lower-class population has to struggle harder and harder to survive while everyone else remains comfortable enough not to be affected by economic shifts and tax increases targeting consumers. For now, at least.

So anger—and direct action—are legitimate. The question is whether the political vision and values that are driving this movement can lead to anything good.

“Well, let’s give them biofuels - Brigitte Macron.”

Troubled Waters

Numerous racist, sexist, and homophobic acts have taken place during yellow vest actions. During the November 17 demonstration in Paris, several well known anti-Semites and nationalists were seen among the crowd of demonstrators. Members of far-right and nationalist groups participated in the demonstrations on November 24 in Paris, as well. Some comrades have reported that the presence of the far right in the Paris demonstration is “undeniable.” They describe seeing a group of monarchists with a flag; the crowd considered their presence “insignificant” compared to the water cannons that law enforcement used during the clashes.

The same report also mentions several elements that are difficult to interpret. For example, while the crowd in Paris chanted some classic slogans of May 1968 (“CRS SS”) and the Loi Travail demonstrations (“Paris debout, soulève toi!”), they also chanted the first verse of the Marseillaise, which is currently associated with traditional republican parties and the far right, not radicals. This chant could be understood as a reference to its origins in the French Revolution, but the song has been coopted by its role as the French national anthem, giving it a patriotic and nationalist tone.

Yellow bloc.

Another example: while marching down the Champs Elysées, the crowd chanted “We are at home.” For an English-speaking reader, this statement seems innocuous enough, an affirmation that the demonstrators had taken the streets, as the authors of the above report framed it. However, this chant echoes the one regularly used by National Front supporters during their meetings. Understood in that context, “we are at home” has a more sinister connotation. For nationalists, it means that France is and will always be a white, Christian, and nationalist country. Everyone who doesn’t fit their identity and political agenda is therefore considered a stranger or an intruder. In other words, this slogan creates a narrative about who belongs and who doesn’t. The use of these words during the yellow vest demonstrations is poorly chosen, if not ominous.

Paris is not the only place reactionary tendencies have emerged in the movement. Indeed, on November 17, in Cognac, yellow vest protestors assaulted a black woman who was driving a car. During the altercation, some protestors told her to “go back to [her] country.” The same day, at Bourg en Bresse, an elected representative and his partner were assaulted for being gay. In the Somme department, some yellow vesters called the immigration police when they realized that migrants were hiding inside a large truck stuck in traffic. The list goes on.

Finally, some participants in this “apolitical” movement have openly expressed contempt for social movements in general—including the movement for better education, the movement to defend hospitals and access to health care, and the movement of the railworkers. In effect, this movement that purports to dissociate itself from collective struggles so it can benefit “everyone” ends up promoting individualistic self-interest: the right of isolated consumers to keep using their cars however they want at a cheap price, without any real vision of social change.

Police block the freeway as yellow vesters make representations of themselves.

How Should We Engage?

Among anarchists and leftists, we can identify two different schools of thought regarding how to engage with the “yellow vests” phenomenon: those who think that we should take part in it, and those who think that we should keep our distance.

Arguments to distance ourselves:

The yellow vest movement claims to be “apolitical.” By and large, the participants describe themselves as disgruntled citizens who work hard but are always the first to suffer from taxes and government decisions. This discourse has a lot in common with the Poujadisme movement of the 1950s, a reactionary and populist movement named for deputy Pierre Poujade, or, more recently, with the “Bonnets rouges” movement (the “red beanies”).

The idea that the movement is “apolitical” is dangerous in that it offers a perfect opportunity for far-right organizers, populists, and fascists to insinuate themselves among protesters. In other words, this movement offers the far right a chance to restructure itself and regain power.

As soon as the movement gained widespread attention, extreme-right politician Marine Le Pen and other conservatives and populists expressed support for it. So much for the talk about being “apolitical”!

“The ultra-right will lose!”

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Arguments in favor of participating in the movement:

This appears to be a genuinely spontaneous and decentralized movement involving low-income people. In theory, we should be organizing alongside them in order to fight capitalism and state oppression. Mind you, the concepts of class war and anti-capitalism are far from being accepted or promoted among the demonstrators.

Some argue that we should participating in order to prevent fascists from coopting the movement and the anger it represents. Some radicals believe that we should take part in these actions as a way to make new connections with people and spread our ideas about capitalism and how to respond to the economic crisis.

For some radicals, being skeptical of the current movement and not wanting to take part in it can also indicate some sort of class contempt directed at the “apolitical” poor. Others argue that in every situation, we should always aim to be actors rather than spectators. Some even assert that if we are “true” revolutionaries, we should leap into the unknown and discover what is possible instead of passively criticizing from a distance.

All these arguments are valid, but if they lead to anarchists participating in a movement that offers fascists a recruiting platform—as some anarchists did in the Ukrainian revolution—that will be a disaster that opens the way for worse catastrophes to come.

“Down with the state, the police, and the fascists.”

The fundamental problem with the yellow vest movement is that it begins from the wrong premises, attempting to preserve conditions that we should all have been fighting to abolish in the first place. Rather than seeking to protect today’s alienated and miserable consumer way of life, which is itself the result of a century of defeats and betrayals in the labor movement, we should be asking why we are so dependent on cars and gasoline in the first place. If our ways of surviving and traveling had not been constructed in such an isolating, individualized way—if capitalists were not able to exploit us so ruthlessly—we would not have to choose between destroying the environment and giving up the last vestiges of financial stability.

We have to change our habits and give up our privileges in the course of fighting for another world (or another end of the world), but as always, governments and capitalists are forcing us to bear the brunt of the problems they caused. We must not permit them to frame the terms of the discussion.

“Overthrow Macron, disband the government, and abolish the system.”

Open Questions

Incidentally, the situation is quite different outside the French homeland. On the island of Reunion, since November 17, there has been a social upheaval in which all strategic sites have been blocked—the port, the airport, and the prefecture. Fearing that they might lose control of the situation and being concerned about the impact on the economy, French authorities established a curfew on November 20 that lasted until November 25.

In Europe, as the yellow vest movement attempts to restructure itself after being weakened by leadership issues and conflicts over strategy, this might be an opportunity to create new bridges and make proposals about more systemic solutions to the problems that caused this movement.

Regarding ecology, we have to emphasize that the rich are the ones chiefly responsible for climate change, and that they will have to be the ones who pay to deal with it—if we are not able to dethrone them first. To some extent, this seems to be what the current blockading movement against capitalism and climate change Extinction Rebellion is trying to do in England. It is ironic that two different blockading movements about capitalism and ecology are taking place on either side of the English channel right now—one making ecological demands of the state, the other reacting to state environmental measures.

About nationalism, we must assert that it is no better to be exploited by citizens of our own race, gender, and religion than it is to be exploited by foreigners, and emphasize that we will only be able to stand up to those who oppress and exploit us if we establish solidarity across all the various lines of difference—race, gender, religion, citizenship, and sexual preference. We are inspired by the yellow vest protesters in Montpellier who formed a guard of honor to welcome the feminist and antisexist march on November 24.

Above all, we need an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-sexist and ecological front within the space of social movements. The question is whether that should take place inside the “yellow vests” movement, or against it.

Chaos for Christmas.

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