#that in my 20s i connect way more to howard and the image of a baby boy in a dress than i ever did when my own life seemed to mirror that | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

impulsea · 2 years

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This is mostly a reflection, but the more I read about it, the more I believe that Ariel is the 100% Howard Ashman Disney Princess. While Howard did work later in Beauty and the Beast, it was the Beast the character he was mostly drawn to and it shows, Belle's I Want song isn't as elaborate as Ariel's in comparison. And the Aladdin that we got is so distant of his original vision that we can't even say the final Jasmine was his creation. Because of that I think Ariel is the princess where he put all his love and effort and even related to her, which explains the LGBTQA+ subtext in her film, and even Jodi herself said that "Ariel is Howard". It adds such a bittersweet feeling to her character and her movie.

I completely agree with you and this is the revelation I, too, have had somewhat recently (within the past few years). Growing up, I much preferred women- I've never had a male muse for instance- and I never found myself fascinated by male celebrities or writers or the male mind, in general, when it came to a creative sense. As I've mentioned previously, I write for the original four princesses, and for the first three so much of their characterization and inspiration and physical look can be tracked back to their respective voice actresses (Adriana Caselotti, Ilene Woods, and Mary Costa). I assumed it would be the same with Ariel, and I tried to get by that way for a while, but too many bad projects that Jodi was attached to showed me otherwise. Then, I kept hearing her say in interviews over and over and over again that Ariel resided within Howard.

Initially, this honestly somewhat irritated me. It seemed to be a popular thing to say, specifically starting around 2018 that many people began to parrot, and I thought she was underselling herself. After all, she was the one who sang Part of Your World and kept the character afloat for all these years! It felt more like a performative mark she had to hit as opposed to an authentic tribute. But then, as I examined why I originally fell in love with Ariel in such a deep way, yet actively disliked the characterizations of her in the sequels- and always disliked Belle and Jasmine, but loved the Beast- it occurred to me it really was because of Howard.

This might be a controversial take, but I don't think a CIS straight person could ever fully understand or depict the scope of the character of Ariel. I think Howard really captured so much of the gay experience in her character, through her relationship with her father and with Eric, and even her sisters. Every element of the film and its storyline, down to how she feels about her sisters, is eerily realistic and close to what I feel I've experienced when coming out. I think Ariel began to trend of being the "outsider", feeling "different", and straight people attempted to replicate that with characters like Belle but it just never worked for me.

Ariel works because of the LGBT subtext, but that doesn't exist in Belle. With a writer like Linda Woolverton, it's all too apparent that Belle is a straight, white privileged character that doesn't have the same depth of character or isolating/endangering experiences as the other princesses. While Snow White or Cinderella didn't have LGBT subtext, they still grew up incredibly oppressed in abusive households with little to no resources. Snow White even survived an attempted murder and had to find her way after suddenly becoming homeless through no fault of her own. Belle is the white, conventionally attractive daughter of a wealthy landowner and her issue is...what? That she likes to read, so others view her as strange? Well, at the time Belle existed, being literate would've been viewed as a socially desirable attribute as it would've indicated her high class because that education would've been something that most people couldn't have afforded. Belle's also seen reading in public, attending a library, and even getting a free book from the person who opens the shop. I don't understand how this interest has a stigma attached to it, especially compared to Ariel not having any other friends who were interested in the human world, had to actively hide her interest from her close family and the broader public, it seemed to impact her identity and inflict dissonance upon her physical form as a mermaid, and it caused a massive rift (and even put her in physical harm) with others. Belle's love for books impacts the plot in no way or even informs her own identity. I think Belle was just a bunch of socially admired things lumped into one character and framed in an "outsider story" because they thought it would sell (Belle's stunning, but she's sick of only being valued for her beauty! Belle reads and other people ask her about what she's reading and she's even given a library at one point but it has to make her different somehow! Belle wants adventure, and has all the freedom to pursue it, but she feels repressed because of feminism!), but so little of Howard, if any, is in Belle. She doesn't even have her own song in the original film and is the first princess to have that title. Aurora, in Sleeping Beauty, might only speak eighteen lines but even she has main billing in her film and two songs she sings. With Jasmine, I think they erased so much of the Howard characterization and took the same approach as they did with Belle. Howard, originally, wanted Jasmine to be a more unlikable, spoiled character who has an arc in the film. And, honestly, I think she kind of does come off as a spoiled character...but instead of continuing with that authenticity, I keep being told as an audience that she is perfect and incapable of fault and doesn't need a character arc because she was perfect to begin with. I'd be so fascinated to see how different productions like Tangled or even Mulan would've been with Howard's influence.

#ask #anonymous #- message in a bottle <#it's so interesting #that in my 20s i connect way more to howard and the image of a baby boy in a dress than i ever did when my own life seemed to mirror that #situation early on so many times

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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Bill Gates will kill us all

2.5b people in Earth's 130 poorest countries have not been vaccinated. The 85 poorest countries won't be vaccinated until 2023. The humanitarian cost is unforgivable - and self-defeating, as each infected person is a potential source of new strains.

https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19-5-february-2021

How the actual fuck did this happen?

What happened to the early pledges by governments, the WHO, public health experts and leading research institutions to create global cooperation in vaccine development, eschewing patents and secrecy so that we could rescue our species?

That dream was smashed.

Many people helped create our vaccine apartheid, the single individual who did the most to get us here is Bill Gates, through his highly ideological "philanthropic" foundation, which exists to push his pitiless doctrine of unfettered monopoly.

It was Gates who sabotaged the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), replacing it with his failed ACT-Accelerator, a system of patents and secrecy and vast profits for the pharma industry, ornamented with nonbinding, failed promises of access for poor nations.

It was Gates who convinced Oxford to renege on its promise of patent-free access to its publicly funded vaccine research for the global south in favor of exclusive patent access for Astrazeneca.

https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine-oxford-makes-a-deal-with-drugmaker/

When we hear ghoul sellouts like Howard Dean pushing the racist, genocidal lie that "patents don't matter" because brown people in poor countries can't make vaccines, we're hearing Gates's talking points:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream

Gates's role in vaccine apartheid is laid out in exquisite detail in Alexander Zaitchik's outstanding New Republic feature, which delves into Gates's longstanding project to sideline democratic governments and cooperation in favor of monopoly tyranny.

https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines

This goes way, way back. I mean, *waaaay* back, all the way to 1976, when Gates wrote his infamous "Open Letter to Hobbyists," decrying the dominant, cooperative mode of software development and calling its practitioners thieves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Gates's fortune depended on creating a software monopoly, and that monopoly required "intellectual property" protection. Gates has always been a monopolist, and so naturally, he loves IP (before "IP" was a common term, copyrights and patents were called "monopolies").

Intellectual property is a very important part of the inequality story, the story of how we got to a world where billions of people are denied vaccines and where all people face new, more virulent strains as a result.

As UNCTAD chief economist Richard Kozul-Wright told Lynn Fries for GPE: "[IP allows companies] to grab a larger share of what has already been produced in the economy."

It's a means of extracting rents, not for doing things, but for OWNING things.

IP is key to tax avoidance: companies like Ikea transfer "IP" (the Ikea trademark) to a numbered company in a tax haven; each national Ikea subsidiary pays "licensing fees" for the trademark equal to 100% of their in-country profits, so they never earn a (taxable) cent.

The transformation of the world into a monopolized system of IP-heavy, rent-extracting, tax-dodging companies really kicked into gear after 1999, with the signing of the WTO agreement and its IP adjunct, the TRIPPS, and as Zaitchik details, Gates was instrumental there.

For this part of the story, Zaitchik talks to Jamie Love, who was at the UN when NGOs like his were pushing to create vaccine and other pharma pools for the global south, while pharma companies handed out pamphlets bearing the Gates Foundation logo, smearing the plan.

Though the US delegation struggled for credibility, the combination of the Gates Foundation, and former US trade officials fronting for the global pharma industry managed to sideline the project, which was being driven by the demand for equitable access to AIDS drugs.

With Gates's help, the WTO emerged as an IP enforcement powerhouse. Zaitchik cites Dylan Mohan Gray: "it took Washington 40 years to threaten apartheid South Africa with sanctions and less than four to threaten the post-apartheid Mandela government over AIDS drugs."

Incredibly, the Gates Foundation used this to burnish its humanitarian image: they solicited donations from pharma companies and used them to subsidize AIDS drugs in the global south, a maneuver that let them seem like philanthropists.

When in reality, they had overseen a program to systematically deny the world's poorest and most threatened people the right to make their own drugs, making them dependent on the whims of multinational corporate charity instead.

Sound familiar? Today, Gates runs around repeating the lie that poor people can't make their own medicine, saying that patent exemptions won't make a difference now - to the extent he's right, the world *now* is the crucial one.

Having sabotaged the efforts by poor countries to engage in the kind of production ramp-up the rich world saw as vaccines were being developed, it may *now* be too late. "Because of my bad ideas *then*, it's too late *now*."

The connection between IP and elite philanthropy is deep and important. IP's rent-seeking and tax-dodging has made poor countries beholden to offshore monopolists in health, agriculture and IT, and then starved them of taxes to build up domestic alternatives.

This, in turn, makes them dependent on "gifts" from the billionaires who arm-twisted them into IP treaties, forced them to pay rent on all domestic production, and then profit-shifted the funds out of the reach of their tax-collectors.

As Anand Giridharadas reminded us in his seminal "Winners Take All," the core purpose of elite philanthropy has been the same since the robber-baron era: to burnish the reputations of monsters who take everything and give back crumbs.

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/10/winners-take-all-modern-philanthropy-means-that-giving-some-away-is-more-important-than-how-you-got-it/

Reading Jamie Love's quotes in Zaitchik's article reminded me of my own time working with Jamie and Knowledge Ecology International at WIPO in Geneva, when I was an NGO delegate to a global DRM treaty.

You see, at WIPO, the vast majority of NGOs aren't human rights organizations or other public interest groups - they're industry associations representing tech, entertainment, broadcast and pharma monopolists.

These guys - almost all guys - were just aghast when real NGOs started showing up for these meetings and were absolutely shameless in their sabotage of our efforts to balance their corporate lies (absolutely bald-faced lies were routinely entered into the debates).

How petty? Well, they had been accustomed to writing up "fact-sheets" for the day's debate and handing them off to WIPO staffers working for the secretariat, who would photocopy them and set them out on literature tables for the national delegates.

So we started doing this too: we'd take careful notes on the day's debates, convene with global experts to debunk industry association lies, get our Indymedia friends to translate them into six languages, and hand them off to the secretariat in the morning for copying.

So they got the secretariat - a former US textiles negotiator who made her bones helping create the conditions for slave labor in places like Bangladesh - to end the practice of photocopying papers for all NGOs.

Of course the industry bodies had cushy offices in Geneva, whereas we stayed in flophouses and youth hostels. They could ask their underlings to come in early and do their copying for them, whereas we had to take a bus to the all-night copy-shop to get our handouts copied.

Here's where it gets super-weird: our handouts started to go missing. We'd set out our stacks of paper on the literature tables before the morning session and an hour later, they'd all be gone, but none of the delegates had managed to get a copy.

We found those missing handouts...in the garbage, behind potted plants and in the *toilets*.

No, seriously.

And here's the kicker: during the ensuing furore, the main response from the pharma lobbyists was to object to us calling ourselves "public interest NGOs."

I'll never forget this smarmy sociopath in his expensive suit, with his shit-eating grin, standing there saying, "Phamaceuticals serve the public interest, and our industry association is a nonprofit. We are a non-profit, public-interest NGO."

It was a remarkable sight. 20 years later, their version of the public interest - the doctrine of Gates - has produced a multi-billion-person reservoir of the sick and vulnerable who are doomed to serve as factories for highly virulent variants.

This is a literally genocidal doctrine, and it threatens our very civilization. It's a funny kind of non-profit, public interest move for an industry and its billionaire ideologue funders to have made.

But hey, at least no one's "intellectual property" took a hit.

#pluralistic

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ratingtheframe · 4 years

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So 2020 sucked... but the films didn’t! The top twenty films of 2020 (in my humble opinion).

AT LAST. This godforsaken year is over and as we venture into a new year, let's hope and pray that the art’s industry finds a way to build themselves back up again, in a way that is safe and necessary for them to bring us the entertainment we so crave. It has been a crazy and unprecedented year for the film industry, a year that it has never seen with losses of an estimated $5 Billion at the end of March. Some of the most anticipated blockbusters of all time had to be put on hold and postponed for hopefully next year with No Time to Die, A Quiet Place II, Wonder Woman 1984, Dune and Black Widow being a slim few that never got onto a silver screen this year. However, there is no reason to fret or relinquish the loss film has had this year, as hopefully next year once we’ve had a better understanding of this virus, these films along with many others will have their audience. Amongst the postponed releases, many films have been resilient to the virus and still managed to gain a spot in the cinema despite the circumstances.

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet was the only multi-million dollar film to be released this year and even though the risk of release could have meant nothing for the film, it still managed to rake in a staggering $361 million, an expected profit for a film of its size. However, despite the film's success, Nolan made it clear that this shouldn’t be taken lightly and that the safety of film consumers comes before the profits themselves.

Even though we will have to be more cautious in the cinema, films will return, once we have regulated safety measures in cinemas and film festivals to ensure that customers can feel comfortable. For now, HBO has planned to put many releases from Warner Bros. straight onto its streaming platform as well as in the cinema next year, in an attempt to prevent the spread of COVID whilst still being able show the films we’ve been craving. There’s no telling what next year will bring, what the Oscars will look like or if filming for the next Batman film will ever end, however it's clear to see that the film industry has shown resilience amongst this pandemic and will continue to do so in years to come, no matter the challenges.

Here are twenty of the films that made it to the cinema (or streaming platforms) this year, that proved the durability of the film industry during this time.

20. Tenet directed by Christopher Nolan

We can all agree that Chrisopher Nolan’s Tenet should be handed the award of Most Confusing Yet Entertaining Film of the Year, or ever made in fact. The sci-fi epic adventure that sees its lead (named “the protagonist) travel back in time and then forward in time and then back in time again (?)... yup, I didn’t get it either, but I’m not the only one seeing as Robert Pattinson who played alongside John David Washingston hadn’t a clue what was going on either. And he was in the film. However, despite the film's confusion, it doesn’t make it a bad or “lazy” film, for every aspect of this film from lighting, sound design, casting, direction, stunts WAS ON POINT and those elements are truly what sets this film apart. The story may have been perplexing but at least there was one.

19. Nomadland directed by Chloé Zhao

It is such a shame that Nomadland may not get the audience it deserves due to the COVID-19 pandemic as it is a truly moving and rich film. The Nomads are a group of real Americans who’ve hit the road in various mobile homes after the Great Recession in 2008 caused millions to be homeless and redundant. Frances McDormand plays Fern, one of these Nomads and child of the road whilst the film follows her simple, yet melancholy journey across Western America. Chloé Zhao has been tipped several times for an Oscar with Nomadland after winning the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Let’s hope that if this goes onto the Academy Awards, Nomadland will find the audience it so craves.

18. Uncut Gems directed by the Safdie Brothers

YES, Uncut Gems came out THIS YEAR, which is an insane thought seeing as I saw the film in a packed cinema before it was released onto Netflix. The Safdie Brothers, Josh and Benny brought us Uncut Gems this year, a declining tale of a man’s test with fate and the many many second chances he gets at life, only to f*** all of them up. Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a pawn shop owner and frequent gambler. This is Sandler’s best ever role and the multifaceted, gritty work of the Safdie Brothers (Heaven Knows What, Good Time) really brought something brilliant out of him.

17. The Half of it directed by Alice Wu

The Half of It wins the Most Surprising Film of the Year. A highly credible film directed by Alice Wu, The Half of It is EVERYTHING we want and need in this world. In fact, it’s everything we kind of already have in this world, but hardly see on screen. Non white leads, queer non stereotyped relationships, unpredictable endings; The Half of It was an all rounder for me. Some may roll their eyes at the amount of diverse elements to the film and see it as a way of gaining brownie points, but why does that have to be a thing? Why can’t having active and authentic representation across all films just be normal rather than political? If anything, it should be encouraged. The story was brilliant (and made me cry) as it had so many layers to it as well as the characters.

16. 7500 directed by Patrick Vollrath

Definitely the wildcard of this list, 7500 is an Amazon Studios film starring Joseph Gordon Levitt. I’ll admit, my hopes weren’t high, but after taking the time to watch this film I was truly blown away. And who KNEW Joseph Gordon Levitt could be so deep and in tune with his emotions on screen. He plays a pilot whose plane gets hijacked mid flight. There. Enough said. I could hardly BREATHE throughout this film in apprehension of what was going to happen next.

15. Kajilionaire directed by Miranda July

2020 thus far has been the best year for female filmmakers. From Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Josephine Decker’s Shirley, Rose Glass’ Saint Maud and Miranda July’s Kajilionaire, a clear cut foundation has been carved effortlessly for female filmmakers this year. Miranda July’s Kajilionaire especially rocked my senses a little as I saw so much unfamiliarity yet beauty within this film. A simple storyline that follows Old Dolio (Evan Rachael Wood), a young woman trying to feel more connected with her parents. A certainly bittersweet tale that has this rose tinted like vibe to it that attaches itself to the visuals and music of the film, that make everything feel light and playful. This contrasts well with the story itself as being sad and melancholy, further proving the fact this film is more than face value. Face value films have never gotten us anywhere and its films that go beyond entertainment that truly last in the industry.

14. Bombshell directed by Jay Roach

Bombshell is a PERFECT title for this film; a film that left me angry, sad and questioning the immorality that is still prevalent in the mostly male dominant society we live in. Charlize Theron, Margot Robbie and Nicole Kidman (best trio ever) star as three news anchors on Fox news whose lives are brutally torn apart when the Head of Fox News, Roger Ailes is accused of sexual harassment on many different occasions by female members of the workplace. Despite the silence being now broken, these three women still face a whole load of other problems that come in speaking up against a powerful, white and rich male. Threats of permanent job losses, victim blaming and a weak image are the consequence of speaking up about sexual assault as a member of Fox news. The brand itself has an incredibly misogynistic view of women and continues to have an idealised image of how women should be on the news with those working at Fox actually admitting it brings in viewers. Women with tons of makeup and dresses shorter than is comfortable is Fox news and Bombshell went above and beyond exposing this scandal that truly shook American broadcasting forever.

13. Borat Subsequent Movie Film directed by Jason Woliner

Borat Subsequent Movie Film wins the award for Most Jaw Dropping Film of the Year, as its protagonist and creator Sacha Baron Cohen, went above and beyond to show us the true dark depths of America. Ballsy, outrageous, jaw dropping, scandalous; every bold word can be used to describe this film and the lengths it went to get right to the heart of American society. The ugly heart. By now you should be aware that the ex president’s attorney was shoved right into the firing line after he was taken into a hotel bedroom by a reporter who happened to be an actor. Rudi Gulliani was left red faced after Borat bursts into the hotel room proclaiming the young reporter is his daughter, with Gulliani still unaware the entire outrageous event had been caught on camera. And not just any camera. A MOVIE camera. A true triumph in free speech and comedy, Borat Subsequent Movie Film will live on forever as the most outlandish film there is.

12. Miss Juneteenth directed by Channing Godfrey-Peoples

A real eye opener into current American society using a touching story between mother and daughter as a backdrop. Turquoise is a single mother struggling to get by and support her daughter Kai through the Miss Juneteenth pageant, held annually in Fort Worth, Texas. A real competition, the Miss Juneteenth pageant promises one lucky young woman of colour a full scholarship to a black historical college of their choosing. Turquoise desperately wants this for her daughter as it’ll give her the opportunities in life she never had. A truly moving and authentic film, this scored 100% on Rotten Tomatoes which is a highly impressive and deserving score.

11. The Trial of the Chicago Seven directed by Aaron Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin’s lyricism in words was again brought to us on screen this year with his depiction of the Chicago 7 (eight if you count Bobby Seale); seven men who were accused and put on trial for eliciting the Chicago riots of 1968. When in actuality, the police themselves had more to do with riling up the protestors than anyone else, even pushing a crowd of protestors through the front window of a restaurant to make it seem like they had vandalised the property. If anyone was going to make such a film, Sorkin would be the one to do it as with any event or idea he covers, Sorkin’s words as a writer MAKE YOU CARE. Even when you had no recollection or understanding of something, the way Sorkin depicts these events on screen has you absorbed into the story till the last second. An incredible and powerful story and a film that I could constantly go back to in order to learn about the injustices of American politics.

10. The Devil All the Time directed by Antonio Campos

I feel like The Devil All the Time still hasn’t got the recognition it deserves. There is something incredibly powerful and priceless about having a group of exceptionally talented people come together to create something for screen. This film wins Best Casting of the Year (if you don’t count Dune) as the likes of Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Eliza Scanlen, Sebastian Stan, Bill Skarsgård, Mia Wasikowska, Harry Melling, Riley Keogh, Jason Clarke and Haley Bennett graced our screens in this dark and ominous tale. Any story that is set in a small town and is about stories interweaving is bound to be interesting and thought provoking in it’s telling, with this adaptation being no different. The star of the show was Robert Pattinson’s thick Tennessee accent along with his clean yet filthy character interpretation of a perverted priest. Not one line in this film was thrown away and every single moment held a weighty tension, further confirming to us each character’s downfall by the end. An amazing adaptation and something you will reeeeeally enjoy.

9. Soul directed by Pete Docter

What was supposed to be Pixar’s second release of the year, Soul is Pixar’s most highly executed film to date. The amount of detail and care the animators and creators of Soul had taken to this picture is INSANE; insanely beautiful. With the black community going through so much this year, having something like Soul be put out to audiences shows support of this ever changing and growing movement. Even though having black representation on screen isn’t on the top of everyone’s priority list, it’s still important that the effort is there in order to really show what the world is like on screen and to cater to more audiences. Soul itself had everything; diverse, three dimensional characters, a clear and heart warming story and comedic, uplifting points that only strengthened the important message of this movie; life itself.

8. The Lighthouse directed by Robert Eggers

Again, another film that came out right at the beginning of the year, Robert Egger’s The Lighthouse was a whole new world that we had never seen before. Shot on a Panavision Millennium XL2 using a lense from the 1930s and black and white film, The Lighthouse was a decrepit, eerie and brilliant movie to watch throughout. It just makes me satisfied as a viewer when a director not only creates a film, but creates one that is so beyond anything we’ve ever seen and could likely have been made in an entirely different era altogether. Robert Pattinson KILLED IT in his role as a surly drunken sailor alongside Willem Dafoe, whose Irish accent was enviable. Overall a highly executed film that exudes brilliance and a creative mind.

7. The Hater directed by Jan Komasa

I would say The Hater is the second wildcard on this list. It’s a Polish drama that hasn’t had a lot of rep in the media, however, this doesn’t detract from the film’s execution and drama. A real downfall story that sees a jealous ridden man go from a media intern into illicting terrorism. Like, HELLO how does one go to such an extreme? The only way to find out would be watching the film...The film really spoke to the dangers of social media and the ease of getting someone to insight violence onto someone else, all through a computer. My mouth was hanging on the floor during several moments of this film and I can 100% guarantee the Netflix film will have the same affect on you.

6. La Belle Époque directed by Nicolas Bedos

La Belle Époque (or “The Good Times”) wins the award for Most Heart Warming Film of the Year. A surprisingly unique concept that follows a man trying to relive the best moments of his past after his wife wishes to divorce him. A company that specialises in creating your past memories offers him the opportunity to go back to the time when he and his wife first met, using actors, set design and music to recreate the moment. The French film emits a strong sense of nostalgia throughout with brilliant music and set design. It’s just one of those films that heavily expresses the idea of “what if” within a film whilst answering it boldly through its unique story.

5. Ema directed by Pablo Larraín

Ema took me a few days to fully absorb and appreciate as an experimental film, rather than one with a clear cut narrative. It's a film that expresses an idea, a feeling as opposed to a story which is completely okay and doable in this day and age. Ema is a liberating, freeing and psychedelic world of a film, with the message of the film being wrapped up in Ema’s attitude as a woman and the way she sets fires to things wherever she goes. Literally, as the opening sequence is of her setting alight a basketball hoop. There is some strong, vivid imagery within this and the MUSIC...definitely the best sound track I’ve heard this year. Ema’s in my top five for its uniqueness, rawness and the weird sense of liberation it gave me after watching it.

4. Saint Maud directed by Rose Glass

Probably the biggest breakthrough film of the year and despite the pandemic, Saint Maud certainly got the rep it deserved. An entirely new perspective of horror was brought to use in troves in the form of this Irish film created by first time director Rose Glass. I cannot express how brilliant and revolutionary Saint Maud was for its simplicity, story and filmmaking techniques. An ambitious and all round brilliant film that sits prettily in my top five films of the year.

3. Portrait of a Lady on Fire directed by Céline Sciamma

Portrait of a Lady on Fire wins the award for Best Foreign Language Film and it still hurts to think it never even made it to the Academy Awards this year. One of the most moving and earthy films that I’ve seen this year, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a slow, sensual and ambiguous picture that shows a love story between two women through the form of art. I became quite obsessed with the music of Antonio Vivaldi after seeing this as the time period and music intertwined really well in this film. Exceptionally made and incredibly raw, Portrait of a Lady on Fire went straight for the heart in this film by also putting the grievances of love at the forefront of this film.

2. Parasite directed by Bong Joon Ho

You are probably extremely bored and tired of hearing of the success of Parasite as a breakthrough picture, however there are an abundance of reasons for it! Winner of Six Academy Awards including Best Picture, Parasite really pulled the rug beneath the Academy Awards feet and certainly proved that no matter your race, it's the story that sells and that will bank you an Academy Award. A wonderfully crafted story, one that could have been found in theatre or even opera and those sort of structured narratives are what really grab people’s attention.

1. Another Round (Druk) directed by Thomas Vinterberg

And finally, my favourite, Most Enjoyable Film of the Year had to be without a doubt, Thomas Vinterburg’s Druk, which I had the pleasure of seeing at the BFI London Film Festival this year. The theatre-like structure of a narrative has been implemented seamlessly into this film and even if structure means nothing to you, you can feel when a film has been crafted differently to bring about a dynamic and earthy narrative. I’ve previously watched two films of Vinterberg’s; Festen and The Hunt and even though those two films hold a high rating, Druk is definitely Vinterberg’s best film yet. Extremely entertaining whilst also carrying a rather dark side to it, Vinterberg sells you the best and worst of two worlds whilst exposing the effects of alcohol consumption.

And that’s it! 2020 in films! If you agreed or disagreed with anything on this list or think something else should’ve made the list that came out this year, be sure to leave me a comment on this post or via instagram on @ratingtheframe. It’s crazy to think that this obsession of mine turns two years old next year and there are still so many amazing pictures to be seen! And as always, you will find each and every one of them right here on @ratingtheframe.tumblr.

Bring on 2021!

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daydreamrry · 3 years

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Anon, do you know why Harry always does the same interviews with the same people? Yes, one part is because he feels comfortable with “friends” but the main reason is: they can control the narrative. We all know how private Harry is, they protect Harry so much, they are going to avoid all the intrusive questions about his personal life. I hate this because his interviews are getting boring and repetitive. But I hate even more the manipulation. Let’s not forget that Nick was the one who introduced Camille (I’m sorry, but in my opinion hamille was fake and just for Fine Line background), Zane Lowe was the one asking him about WS and Cherry, how convenient. James Corden, Ellen all of them are Full Stop buddies/clients. I was very impressed for the Howard Stern Interview because WOW, that man has not filter but if we delete the last 20 minutes, that interview was good and we learnt more about Harry than any other interview with his full stop friends. So, yes he is comfortable with them but there is a reason for those staged interviews *cough Zane Lowe cough* and it feels more false. They are the ones asking him about his “girlfriends and meaning of songs” meanwhile if you watch the buzzfeed interviews, those are funny and light, they ask funny and cute questions and never uncomfortable questions. That’s why I don’t understand why Harry and his team keep giving us the most boring part of promo and not cute interviews. It’s a shame because this could help Harry with his image for those people who hate him because those kind of interviews are the ones who go viral and not the boring ones, he is so charm and funny, let him be free and open, and we will see how those haters finally can see his personality and not the one who is always reaching hits and charts every week… idk it’s like they want to pretend he is private but at the same time all the promo revolves around his private life, ohhh and never with straight answers because they need to leave the interpretation for the media and public.

Thankgod! I am not the only one who noticed this. Anon you are absolutely correct his every move is so planned and careful, that it is painful to watch now. At first I thought, I am thinking way too much, but he comes out and interact with fans only when he has to sell something. The whole privacy thing, now seems like sorry excuse of a cover in which he always hide. The lack of communication from his side, is actually frustrating a lot of fans. I don't know man he seems so selfish in his part. And truth be told, it's his looks,marketing strategy and connections that still kept him live in this music industry, otherwise people would've forgotten him.

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gershwinn · 5 years

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GLAMOUR’s November coverstar Lili Reinhart: A powerful interview on anxiety, depression, therapy and body image.

“Depression has affected me in so many ways. It’s something that never goes away,” Lili Reinhart confides to me over the phone. She’s in Vancouver, I’m in LA, but the distance doesn’t stop us having one of the most open and honest interviews of my career.

Many interviews with Lili seek to get the lowdown on her relationship with her Riverdale co-star, Cole Sprouse, who she’s been officially dating since 2018. Indeed, after much talk of a break-up over the summer, Lili notably uploaded a series of photobooth PDA shots with Cole, leading to an internet meltdown and more than seven million Instagram likes. But it’s the conversation around her other, more long-term relationship – with anxiety and depression – that she wants to talk about today.

“I’ve experienced depression and anxiety. Not constantly, but I’m still experiencing it,” she shares. “I have spells of time where I feel completely unmotivated, I don’t want to do anything and I question myself. I don’t know how to handle stress very well. I find that talking about it and sharing my experience with other people, and reminding myself that I’m not alone has been incredibly therapeutic.” At 23 years old, she has found an open and honest voice on social media, sharing everything from body image to her acne with her 20.8 million Instagram followers. It’s an outlet that has no doubt empowered others, but has also helped herself -no wonder Lili was just named as one of Time Magazine's 100.

Speaking openly is something Lili believes strongly in, since attending therapy in her teens. “When I first started going to therapy, it was out of my incredible social anxiety. I was having trouble going to school every day. I was crying before school. I would fake being sick so my mom would let me stay home. When you hear the term ‘crippling anxiety’, that’s what I had when I was 14 years old.

“Seeing the therapist allowed me to be understood. The goal for me has been to always leave therapy feeling a couple of inches taller. Feeling like I’ve alleviated myself of a problem by learning how to solve it. Not everything has a straight answer – it’s not just going to take one session – but I start to think, ‘I’ve grown, I’ve done this, I’ve figured this out, now can I go off into the world and try to put what I’ve learned into action.’ That’s how I look at therapy. I am not crazy, and I am not problematic. I am just a human who’s feeling something in a different way than some other people would.”

Having battled with anxiety for nearly a decade and actively seeking help for it, I wonder what Lili’s relationship with anxiety is like now? “Frustrating. It’s something that I’ve accepted, but I don’t understand it,” she sighs.

“Sometimes I wake up and I’m like, ‘OK, I have anxiety today.’ I’m not really sure why, I’m more irritable than usual. It’s like an undercurrent that lives within me, and certain social situations can obviously trigger my anxiety. I work a lot of hours, sometimes I don’t get a lot of sleep, and that makes me anxious. I’ve found a way to talk myself down when I’m getting super anxious.”

The small act of writing a list to help rationalise her big issues has helped. “I will take a pen to paper and write out a list of everything that I’m feeling anxious about, then when I step back and look at my list of things I’m like, ‘That’s really not that much to be worried about and there’s really no need for it to be causing you this much turmoil.’ That’s how I’ve learned to put things into perspective.”

When Lili isn’t hustling to deal with her mental health, she’s negotiating the greasy pole of Hollywood, which is apt given her recent big screen role in strip club drama Hustlers, alongside Jennifer Lopez. Jenny from the Block herself has taught Lili a lot about the power of hustling. “Jennifer Lopez has said about herself, ‘I’m always the hardest worker in the room and I never stop,’” says Lili. “I admire that and that’s what I’ve been doing. At least this past year has been trying to take advantage of where I am in my life. I don’t have kids, I’m young, in my 20s – I can take the time and energy to put into my career.”

Lili is booked and busy. Aside from Riverdale, she has just landed a coveted CoverGirl beauty campaign, finished her first producing role on the Amazon movie Chemical Hearts, and recently put the final touches to her book of poetry, Swimming Lessons, both of which will drop in 2020.

She says poetry has helped her to understand herself. “It’s therapeutic,” she adds. “I would rather feel too much, than feel nothing at all. Poetry gives me that feeling that my feelings are normal, justified. That other people have felt heartache and grief. I know that the things I’ve written are what 99% of human beings have felt, when they read my book.”

It’s this knowledge of struggle that meant playing strip club worker Annabelle in Hustlers really spoke to her. “I love how Annabelle doesn’t have her sh*t together, because that’s very real. There’s been a large amount of times in my life – like when I first moved to LA, away from my parents’ house and living on my own for the first time, I almost felt like a baby bird jumping out of a nest. You’re just told to fly, without being taught how to fly. You can learn how to balance your cheque book in school, learn how to pay taxes, but no one teaches you how to live on your own, how to take care of yourself, and how to be an adult. It’s very much a trial by fire.”

Meanwhile, alongside her rise to fame, Lili was managing her well documented issue with body dysmorphia – something Lili attributes to acne and to social media, which both contributed to it, but also helped her to manage it by connecting her to a like-minded community of people.

“Even today, I see myself in the mirror and think, this doesn’t look the way the world tells me it should. I don’t have a cinched, minuscule waist. I do have curves, I have cellulite, my arms aren't stick thin,” she says. “This is my body and we’re told that it should fit certain proportions. There’s such a disgusting problem right now with people photoshopping their bodies. Obviously, there’s a reason why people do it, they’re insecure, they feel like they’re not good enough, and that’s incredibly sad. When I see someone who’s authentically themselves, like models Charli Howard or Ashley Graham, who promote healthy, real body images, I think that is so refreshing and important. Our community values need to reflect that.”

She adds: “Charli’s messaging talks to me on social media. She makes me feel like my body doesn’t need to fit these impossible standards, and she’s a model, my body will never look like that. It just won’t, and 90% of women’s bodies will never look like that, but we are still only used to seeing one body on the runway and in magazines. It’s an incredibly stupid and confusing thing for that to be shoved down young men and women’s throats. Being told: ‘This is what beautiful is.’ And it’s often unachievable to regular people.”

Lili has equally been very vocal about airbrushing – having once taken a magazine to task after they photoshopped her waist. “I would love to see a world where people who are already thin don’t need to photoshop their waist even more, to make young girls, like me, when I was 14 or 16 years old go, ‘I thought I was skinny, but maybe I’m not. Maybe I need to have an eating disorder to make my body look like that.’ Life is not a FaceTune app.” Can we get an amen up in here?

One body insecurity Lili has been conditioned into dealing with and won’t tolerate any longer is “this idea of cellulite”, as she angrily put it. “It really pisses me off. It’s this weird thing where people think that it’s unnatural or a symbol of being fat. It’s so f*cked up because cellulite is just a part of the human body. It’s just genetic, it’s like having freckles on your face. It’s something that is there, you’re born with it, and it’s become this disgusting thing. We’re told: ‘We need to laser this away, no one wants to see that.’ There's nothing more beautiful than when I see stretch marks, or cellulite, and people’s real skin.”

Taking a new healthy mindset into the gym has also helped Lili overcome her body insecurities. “I’ve started to go to the gym out of the want to feel strong. I’m not going into the gym thinking, ‘I want to be skinny, or I need to lose 10 pounds, or I need to not have cellulite, or my arms need to be thinner.’ There’s so much power in feeling strong and physically healthy. It’s badass to be strong.”

Having overcome so many self-confidence issues while simultaneously rising to fame, I wonder what message she would want to give to that insecure girl who was sleeping on a mattress only three years ago. Without hesitating, Lili replies, “You’ve done good! But also, the struggle that you’re going through right now only makes your success so much more profound. There are people who have been given fame and fortune on a silver platter, but I don’t think there’s anything inspirational about those people.

“I was from a small town in Ohio, from a middle-class family, I knew no one in the acting business. I didn’t have a baton passed down to me from an actor in my family. I did it on my own from sheer passion and knowing that this is what I was good at, and this is what I wanted to do. There truly is a lot of power in struggle and survival, and that’s what makes you a strong person,” she finishes, defiantly.

People don’t come much stronger or more honest than Lili Reinhart. As we hang up the phone so she can fly to LA – the place where, she says, “I want to settle down and have a home” – I only hope she finds a happy ever after with her own mind.

Source: Glamour

#I know this is long okay #BUT #I really LOVED this entire interview #So GOOD #just from the topics to her eloquent as always views to everything!#so yeah #y'all getting long lmao #only cut a little bit of side info stuff #lr #lr glamour

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ammapreker · 5 years

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CELIA ST. CLEMENT 19 / theater actress

[ content warning for alcoholism ]

an inescapable need for more ∘ blurry memories ∘ waking up inexplicably bruised ∘ forgetting yesterday ∘ tangled limbs ∘ stage lights spilling across an empty stage ∘ crumbling flower petals ∘ shakespeare’s words caressing careful tongues ∘ empty wine bottles rolling against hardwood floors » a dramatic creature with a mercurial temperament / some days, her jovial moods can conjure only the bright beam she makes herself into; others, the shadows hang closer, shrouding her in darkness / her sister’s mirror image, only just noticing the spidery cracks crawling through the glass / widely considered the dark shadow to clara’s gleaming light, but perhaps it was always the other way around (or, better yet, maybe neither of them could ever have made a claim at innocence) / drowns her traumas in alcohol even before scarlet floods her palms, a symbol of her guilt that can’t be washed away / sobs harden in her throat, echoes of how could we have— silenced roughly before she speaks the final words, makes them real / life, she begins to believe, woozy with alcohol and drugs as her feet drag across a stage, has lost all sense of reality / regret seeps into her bones, flooding her senses until only two artifacts of her former life remain: the flask hidden within her pockets and the lie that keeps them safe—for now.

connections » clara st. clement [twin sister] / shiloh spencer [co-actor]

needs » the rest of the murder crew / theater actors for the shakespeare festival / former (and/or current) lovers / drinking buddies

DAWSON HUGO 35 / songwriter

piano notes spilling from a dark room ∘ whispered temptations ∘ subtle humor ∘ hidden desires ∘ script-filled notebooks ∘ creeping loneliness ∘ a toe stepped carefully over the line ∘ secrets locked behind sealed lips ∘ slipping into the darkening night » a lesson on monetizing the thoughts swirling in his mind, the temptations beating in his heart / a man who came from just above nothing and now has everything he’s ever wanted—or does he? / a former keyboardist in a band that never made it who’s risen on the back of his own penned verses / doesn’t feel pity for the bandmates whose lives he once knew as well as his own, rarely seeing them after their fall / he knows he’s gifted, talented, creative—perhaps too well / even so, he feels safer in the shadows—unremembered by crowds, sought by artists wishing to give voice to his scrawls / a dreamer who plucked his dreams and thrust them into reality before finding they’d lost their glimmer / unsatisfied, and reconciled with it (or so he thinks) / jumps from girl to girl and song to song so often, throwing himself into each before his interest wanes / finds a girl for keeps, or so he thinks until another comes his way / pleas of just this once slowly burning away every line he’s never crossed / he steps, and steps, and steps (he thought he was better than this) / he’s drunk on a girl he shouldn’t be, losing himself to the toxicity / addiction’s never felt so sweet.

connections » birdie barnes [roommate & songwriting partner] / daisy howard [girlfriend]

needs » his former bandmates who may or may not hate him for ending up with a songwriting deal even after they crashed and burned (he was the keyboardist) / a brother who never quite got over living in his shadow / exes he’s fooled around with and inevitably left due to prolonged disinterest / friends in the record industry / friends in general / singers he might have worked with in the past

FRANCESCA MANCINI 21 / croupier

[ content warning for murder, hit & run ]

a bookcase filled with whodunnits ∘ expired contacts littering the trash can ∘ waking to an early dawn ∘ fervent “i told you so”’s ∘ a tendency to over-prepare ∘ stepford smiles finally loosening their grip ∘ a desperation for salvation ∘ crippling paranoia ∘ a sudden recklessness ∘ too smart for your own good » the clever girl gone sour, gone cold, gone fearful / once, she might have convinced herself that the bright future she saw before her could remain as it was—true, pure, incapable of being tarnished by any deed she might commit / (she hadn’t known, then, what she’d be capable of) / one moment, they’d been light as air, flooded with victory; the next, a crash had left them plummeting to the ground with no safety net / they keep the secret, cover their tracks—they know how, after all / she thinks, then, of all the crimes she’s witnessed, solved; what would i have done, she’d wondered, to not get caught / perhaps she’d always known that she’d find herself on the opposing side, another criminal aching to bury her secrets / they don’t bury them deep enough; i know what you did, the letters say, promising retribution with words unspoken / all she can think: what will i do to not get caught.

connections » ludovica mancini [sister] / audrey astor, luna graves & the rest of mystery inc. [best friends]

needs » scooby doo-inspired request / co-workers for the illegal gambling den she’s currently working undercover at (with plans to expose them) to feel less guilty / exes galore / friends outside of the scooby gang who she’s likely distanced herself from as a result of what happened / literally anything, she’s completely open!

LIAM HANLON 31 / paralegal

[ content warning for death ]

newspaper pages tossed aside in a flurry ∘ clenched jaws ∘ pulsing migraines ∘ eyes glued to a phone screen ∘ a life passing by, unnoticed ∘ grasping to self-assurance as the world collapses into ruins ∘ burnt coffee ∘ time ticking endlessly away on a watch face ∘ brisk strides ∘ this cannot go on » a man consumed with a future that’s not his own / wants and dreams glisten upon the ladder he’s thrust himself upon, certain that the top will provide everything he wants—a name, a position, a surge of support swelling beneath him as he makes his own political strides / if he ever reaches the top; if he ever manages to pull himself from the outskirts of history into its center / currently a paralegal with dreams of a brighter future that’ll never come to fruition / driving himself mad with impatience and jealousy / stares at the ring on his fiancée’s hand and wonders if it would be better to leave, better to break up the monotony with a complete abandonment of his current life / the death of her sister dismantles any actions he might have taken; their inheritance of a two year old with only an aunt left to claim her submits them to mere fantasies never to be made real / the pressure mounts—the baby’s cries, zara’s grief, his mother’s new book—until the cracks begin to show / it’s only a matter of time before he breaks.

connections » zara şensoy [fiancée]

needs » siblings who are equally f*cked up with a mother whose parenting books delved a little too deeply into their childhoods / exes galore / friends. he’s a lot but he needs them / especially friends with children because he somehow has a baby now???

ROSCOE RYAN 21 / student

unquenchable curiosity ∘ obedient tongues ∘ 20/20 peripheral vision ∘ whispers quieting after stepping foot into a room ∘ a diary full of words unspoken ∘ burying a past with dulcet lies ∘ unrelenting pride ∘ a villain casting himself in the role of the observer, nothing more ∘ imminent betrayal » a boy born to trailer parks and unappeasable parents no, let’s rewrite the story, shall we? / a boy born beneath the glistening stars of los angeles (true) with parents unaffected by his presence (true) and consumed by the monotony of their daily lives (true) as heirs to a fortune passed down from his grandfather (lie) / the moment he steps within the bounded gates of ucla, he reinvents himself, sprinkling importance and wealth into a past bereft of both / the collections of photographs that hang upon his walls impress upon the viewer two facts / the first: the frat he’s grown in, thrived in, means everything to him / the second: his life, as he’d prefer it, began three years prior with his steps upon the college lawns / perfection blooms in every scene, every pose, even as whispers threaten to tarnish the gilded legacy he’s built / did you hear? the students gasp amongst each other, their gazes sliding across every boy decked in the letters of sigma chi / the rumors—hazing, terror, oh my god, is he—spread like wildfire / still, the kid won’t speak / still, guilt hovers above them all, awaiting a place to rest.

connections » pierce griffin [fraternity brother] / bambi wheeler [former friend & neighbor]

needs » frat boy crew (request to come!) / miscellaneous hook ups / old trailer park acquaintances he’ll pretend not to know / someone to tell him his frat almost put the blame on him for the hazing incident

SILAS GRAVES 24 / vampire bartender

last night’s glitter clinging to your skin ∘ hollow laughter ∘ cheshire grins ∘ jumping into pools fully clothed ∘ fake blood recipes ∘ coffins are rather comfy, you know ∘ locking memories away ∘ empty wine bottles cluttered around sinks ∘ gathering fog ∘ dark streets slick with rain ∘ sink your teeth in » a boy who glorifies in bringing the traits of the undead into the land of the living / is it all real, or just an act? that’s a secret sealed behind reddened lips, one he’ll take to his grave / you can only guess as rants regarding edward cullen spill between the would-be vampire and his audience, compelled—by curiosity, by magic, who can say?—to listen the dulcet tones of his voice uninhibited by the fangs curling around his teeth / believes himself untouchable, untethered—free / still, his past clings to him, pulling him backwards at every turn even as he crushes the memories that seek to undo him / he’s nothing more than this—a glitter-clad man longing to be a monster known from fables / untouchable, untethered to the reality that everyone else finds themselves bound to / that, there, is true freedom.

connections » oskar björk [employer] / fleur zhao [being catfished by her]

needs » additional coworkers for the horror bar / exes, currents (flings and flirts) / people for him to argue with about the merits of edward cullen’s popularity amongst vampires / more people for the adoptive graves fam / friends who either embrace or ignore his weirdnesses / literally anything else

SPENCER LINDSAY 23 / con artist

ghosting™ ∘ sharp stilettos clacking on a subway car ∘ longing for a stranger’s touch ∘ swollen lips ∘ empty houses ∘ discarded half-smoked cigarettes ∘ strawberry milkshakes ∘ silent screams ∘ hope lingering just out of reach ∘ a crunch of glass underfoot ∘ never look back » a ghost, haunting the remnants of her former life / past spencer lindsay: beautiful, popular, a bright future gleaming in her eager palms / current spencer lindsay: beautiful, nameless, stolen money and jewelry sparkling against the bright gleam of a street lamp / the division: a fortune nearly lost, a mother’s desperate act, a stepfather’s final breath / her father’s fraud charges and subsequent rush out of the us barely merited a recollection outside her social circle; her mother’s murder trial, however, summoned the attention of los angeles and it held her captive / her mother loses; she disappears in the night—door left open, a broken wine glass scattered in pieces on the living room floor, a closet full of clothes she couldn’t carry with her / no investigation can cease the steady stream of rumors even now—dead, killed, gone / she waits in the wings, knowing she should never have come back, unable to keep herself away.

connections » nicholas hawthorne [ex-boyfriend] / benji wyatt [ex-boyfriend] / chloe valentine [con besties] / willa de witte [former best friend]

needs » the o.c. crew (request coming shortly) / people to steal from / the bling ring crew (request to come!) / exes from her high school days / people to hook up with while she pines away / people she f*cked over back in the day / people she’s f*cking over now / someone who knows her by one of her other aliases and who she may or may not have stolen from (oops) / people who/whose families her dad stole from back in the day who might be holding a grudge

TRISTAN BENNET 22 / runaway

crooked smiles ∘ unspoken desperation ∘ dreams warring against doubt ∘ ripping away old skins ∘ the growing ease of a lie ∘ worn sneakers ∘ festering distrust ∘ crumpled bills stuffed into pockets ∘ rush of adrenaline ∘ being watched ∘ shoes pounding against asphalt » formerly a texas boy, he’s since shed his accent, his history, his very own name—the only truth he’s maintained is his sister / they stole away in the night on the eve of the wedding their parents had forced upon her, giving up their lives as they knew them for a chance at freedom / freedom is: devouring every matt damon and ben affleck movie they can get their hands on, learning the twists of the boston accents they’ve affected; bringing their sister back from the dead as their “connection” to los angeles, forcing their memories of her into the role of hopeful young actress dreaming of the big screen; learning to force smiles upon his lips as nerves eat away at the blessed happiness that had encompassed him upon their escape / it’s terrifying in its splendor, in its ephemerality / he thinks: if they find out. he thinks: they can’t. / spends his nights waking to every footstep outside the motel door and his days jumping at each and every craigslist ad he can get his hands on / the money he’d stolen as a second thought dwindles in his palms and he’s starved for safety, for survival / he thinks: what might i do, for that.

connections » juliet bennet [sister] / the shakespeare theatre crew [he works part-time backstage]

needs » friends are likely in short supply since he tends to keep himself ~under the radar~, but he should have some anyway / maybe a drug dealer for him to get involved with to make more $$$ / people with some fun craigslist requests for interesting threads / potential make outs now that he’s ~free~ and able to explore his sexuality (he’s a virgin, please be gentle) before he ghosts them

#throwshaderp #m: development #please kill me if i make any more.

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hanzi83 · 5 years

Text

Suspended from Twitter Again from Organized Harassment

The thought of catching up scares me and it keeps me going back to check what happens on reddit etc and then I fucking just don’t want to write even though I am acting irrational on twitter more than usual. I then start commenting on twitter more than focus on my personal journal and I am prompted with people trying to trigger me because they sense vulnerability in me, and I feel these people are employed to do this kind of behavior, as you can tell from my plethora of videos, blogs, tweets, instagram posts etc. I have angered so many people in this world, where there is a team dedicated to fucking with me and tarnishing my image, and instilling paranoia in me, and since the Stern Show, I feel is responsible, even though I cannot confirm 100 percent, they have dedicated an obscure subreddit dedicated to me claiming they are working to get me banned from twitter, and other social media outlets, hinting my family and friends are in connection with government agents, because I am technically on a watch list, or at least that is how I see it, and they have limited my movements and since I have angered people in my life with jabs because I feel a lot of them are in connection with people behind the scenes. I know it sounds crazy that this type or organization is going on for an individual, but there are teams dedicated to doing this to others. People in the system, mostly public figures, have been targeted, and some of them behind the scenes are organizing teams for employed fandom to take over the internet, depending if that person is supposed to be popping.

I have been pointing out this for the last several years how this is going down or at least putting theories, that have not been officially backed up specifically, but there are plenty of articles in prominent news and media outlets that have shown you what the capabilities are based off what has happened in the past, and because I am not partaking in sports tribalism, and people knowing it might bother me because this type of pretentiousness bothers me when people make these sporting events seem like some great moment for history, as we are currently becoming America light, and since a lot of this is predetermined and is supposed to propel this city into the upper echelon, I feel like people are blinded by this, and not focusing on the political shit involved with all of this. I am glad Toronto is in the championship, it is cool, despite me being irrational and wanting to hate it because people who love it have contributed into hurting me behind the scenes and stumping my growth, and have stolen everything from me.

I am not allowed to even express any of my irrational behavior to help me to cope because by letting me speak out, people see me as a threat because I bring transparency into the system, and even though the people in charge, hypothetically, have tarnished my image from being credible, and being seen as someone in his mom’s basement who spews out conspiracies and is obsessed with pro wrestling, and he doesn’t want to get laid because he feels he is not mentally capable to satisfy women, and also believing some of them could be agents, but they will label me an incel, when the people they work for in the upper echelon are the ones who treat women horribly and basically bribe them to give them good PR and then when they are allowed to disclose a horrible scenario involving one of those men, then they are seen as crazy. These people have been entitled, and hell they don’t put men or women on a big stage unless they had to compromise themselves physically and mentally. I point that out and I am seen as the bad guy, and now that people are still tuning into seeing me, even by suppressing the views, so people can watch it by other means, in a group setting, because a lot of people online are a part of groups that gossip how to fuck with people, because they are given incentive, the system has bribed these people with perks and access and makes their lives a lot more comfortable, when they can’t suppress my views they will actively cut short some of my periscope sessions. I will do 20 plus minutes and these people will somehow make it 4 minutes or something.

More Whack Packers are dying and the ones alive are dealing with harassment are prompted to kill themselves and being harassed with the worst type of shit imaginable, and threats of doxing and instilling fear that Howard is going to kill me or that Vince McMahon will kill me, because I speak out on horrible things they may be accountable for even though they will never take accountability and they are protected, and so are the people who are attached to them, and now I feel they have constantly being fucked with me because they want me to be put in a hospital or they want me to attempt suicide, and the movements and transparency in my life seems people who are supposed to be close to me help in that regard, and it is much more important to be connected to what everyone else is doing that is popular, and stick by the official narratives, they would do it at the expense as someone who is supposed to be their friend. Social Justice Warriors, who claim to stand up for injustice, and some of them put their money where their mouth is, but others are just there for the limited narrative and they act outraged when they are told to, so it looks like they are speaking out against racism, when they ignore the larger chunk that is going on systemically. I spoken out how other Whack Packers could be sacrificed for their fame or what they contributed to the system, and Tan Mom and Marfan Mike are hospitalized, and people capitalize on that conspiracy and hint that I am the next Whack Packer who will die.

I have one asshole who is clearly obsessed with every move and speech I make and talks about it nonstop and misrepresents it and if I don’t give this dude and his group of people the entertainment, and for me to take the barrage of harassment about where I am in my life and how everything I am saying is delusion, but then I analyze them and this person in particular about what his life must be like, because he has made grand announcements he was done watching anything I do on periscope, but then constantly does it and then hints that people are after me, and it is clear this person is bought off because I can’t imagine anyone being this obsessed with me for fun. He is obviously protected and he makes claims that people in my life had people look into him for harassing me, just to make it seem like he is dealing with some harassment to take the fact off that I am dealing with the real deal.

No one with a platform is allowed to speak, and even anything that I write, this particular agent just takes everything I say and misrepresents it as delusion grandeur when I am not the only one going through this and the ones that are, are too afraid to address it because it makes them look crazy and I am a bigger target because I was on of the biggest radio shows in the history of radio. I got active mob bosses in this system trying to silence me, and they know by suspending my social media, I will implode, and I know people in my life are probably hoping for that too since everyone fucking hates me.

I know when I write this blog, barely anyone will care because people are only invested when I am mentally breaking down and not being able to fucking handle any of the backlash and it becomes great entertainment for them to get to interact with a whack packer from the Stern Show because they are more invested in harassing me or harassing Wendy because it does not have to focus on their shitty lives so they attack people within the system, even wrestlers go through this targeted shit, but I don’t know if they realize they system they are emboldened to, are probably the ones organizing it since the people in charge exploit anything while pretending they care about these social issues and mental issues, while helping perpetuate the harassment, and when people like me speak out, and even as irrelevant I seem to be, I still anger a good chunk of them and they are constantly coming for me. and they will not stop until I am completely self destructive and kill myself, and the fact that people in my life could be helping with that just so they can have access to these institutions and all the industry sex workers they could ask for because they are that easily compromised, but they are doing it at my expense, when me being a public joke for the Stern Universe and the Wrestling Universe to get a hold of, they have profited off of it behind the scenes more than anyone and will never admit anything.

They will never stop and it is fine if 10 people read this, I hope that some people who do read this actually know what is going on and please let it be known that this is happening as no media outlet will fucking care about this, because they are told when they can start going after stories, even as truthful some of the leftist ones are, they have to be compromised a little bit, even with the conspiracies, you would think someone on the Stern Show would attract these people to see what I am thinking right, but even they are limited. Only when some vindication occurs, or if I implode and something horrible happens, then after the fact they will care, they will not see my growth and exposing the way the system has manipulated us into hating each other and being more racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and presented it as the cool thing to do because I bought into it for a good portion of my life, but these people who have the chance to do it, don’t because they would limit their discussion and not have nuance and pretend they are speaking out on something big and powerful, when it is merely just calling out one person in the system who said something racist, and people behind the scenes don’t care, it is meant for a limited narrative and because I am sick of the status quo, and have constantly spoken out on shit that I have to say are theories, because I can’t prove a lot of it, they still see me as a threat and will continue.

Normally I write down my thoughts privately but even that is not 100 percent private, it is constantly hacked and people move my cursor around when I spew some venom just to get it off my chest and since I have not written down anything it is getting difficult to know what is in my fucking mind. They will keep fucking with my mental health and it will never stop. I am clearly not high on anyone’s list to help out, even though I have taken on big wigs like Stern. I don’t care how irrelevant he seems to be to the culture, he has pull behind the scenes, even the negative he still controls I think, he can easily have it seen as the people who hate him are the republican Trump supporters, while also being a secret Trump supporting, but somehow on this endearment tour he is going out on, he has convinced people he has secret information about Trump not wanting to be the president, which would beg the question, why did he not say anything before the election? He is in bed with Trump, and he is protected as long as Trump is in power, but no one can see this and the ones who can, are not allowed to say anything. They have managed to censor me during the Raptors game, because it hurts people locally to know that I point out that this is all predetermined, and maybe it is my irrationality and insecurity that I did not connect with my city, and someone who has sold their souls have more respect in this city than someone like me, who did not want to partake in rituals that compromised another life, and then later on have a rabid fan base attack those people and make them seem crazy. Maybe with all my flaws, I still have a fucking soul and actually don’t want people to be discriminated against or oppressed.

People will sacrifice their own loved ones to be part of the upper echelon and it makes me not want to be part of this world, because as far as I am concerned I was never loved, all through my life they have made it known how they treat me, even back in high school or now because Stern has allowed them to be trolls in the system who can put me down because they resent me for being someone who blew up and I can see what their intention is, and when they got what they needed, they sold me out and exclude me from anything that does not benefit them because they secretly hate me. So why don’t you just end me, you won’t though, because I have been told I am needed here, I need to be mentally tortured and limited, as long as pretentious people in the system and in my life prosper and can control me. I don’t want any part of it. Let me die. Come on Howard, sacrifice me, like you supposedly sacrifice other Whack Packers, and then your sick fan base can claim “HE GAVE THEM FAME AND WITHOUT STERN THEY WOULDN’T BE KNOWN” while allowing a sick fan base to treat us like shit and then you make all the fucking profits. Fuck you.

Anything I have said I don’t have factual proof. I will never have it, and if I did they would certainly fucking kill me, and until then they are hoping they fucking I fucking kill myself because it would fit into their narrative better, maybe pat themselves on their back for feeling bad for this torture while they helped create it. They torture everyone in the fucking whack pack and no one cares. We are all lower than filth to these pretentious snobs. Fuck each and every one of you that have allowed this to happen. I hope you catch and become riddled with herpes from all the orgies you sold your souls for. I hope everything around you crumbles, and even if I will never become vindicated from any of this and continuously be mocked by an obsessive troll who is showing off the harassment he can do under the guise of “calling me out on my bullshit” since I did not embrace him, because these sick people want to be producers of mine for a podcast or be a co host, and I don’t want to be with anyone, because I think you are all government agents. Fuck each and every one of you for doing this to me. It makes no difference because you will be coddled within your group chats, where you sick fucks are taking bets on which whack packer is going to die next. Fuck you all.

#Hanzi Stern Howard Show Sternshow Zionist Illuminati WWE Vince McMahon trolls paid subservient shills racism sexism harassment misogyny #secrecy transparency assholes NBA raptors toronto tribalism irrational hatred associates friends loved ones #media outlets mainstream leftist right wing power limited narrative

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venussinclair3 · 3 years

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Fun While It Lasted

Disclaimer? I haven’t written in a long time so I’m a little rusty but yeah this is just something short that I kind of liked. Would really appreciate constructive feedback (please be nice I’m sensitive)! Should I continue this? Should I put it on Wattpad? Anyway, enjoy!

"You live next door yet you somehow always take forever to get here." She was laying in bed in a pink oversized shirt when he snuck through her window.

"Sorry, I was looking for my crayons." His hands were empty, "Couldn't find them. Can I use yours?" He plastered a large smile on his face because who could say no to such a cute face?

"This was your idea you know. How are you going to propose we draw each other and have no supplies whatsoever?" She said as she walked to the bookcase that stood in the back of her room. The third shelf was riddled with paintbrushes, sharpies, and crayons. She had meant to clean it last week but never found the time. Maybe she'll get to it next week.

"Because I knew my good friend Oasis would have my back." He jumped on her bed and took off his green converses before grabbing Bimbo.

Bimbo was as old as their friendship. Oasis had received the teddy bear on her fifth birthday, the same day he knocked down her birthday cake because he was running recklessly. She clung on to Bimbo as she cried herself to sleep that night and swore to hate him for as long as she lived.

There was a cake on the table when she went downstairs the next morning, "Blue's mom made it as a way of saying sorry about what happened yesterday." Her mother cut her a slice and gave it to her. It was better than she could have ever imagined. The chocolate cake covered in pink fondant danced in her mouth as the richness of the chocolate chips exploded. She hugged Bimbo tight while devouring the cake, deciding that maybe the little boy wasn't as bad as she thought.

Oasis dumped the supplies on her bed and sat across from Blue, her legs crossed, sketchbook in hand, "My drawing is going to be better than yours."

"Doubt it. I'm a genius." And he was. Straight A student since fifth grade, Blue was the smartest boy in his class. He won the science fair three times in a row and lied his way out of trouble all the time. He lied Oasis out of trouble too because she could never do it herself.

They both got to work, each with a different method: Oasis lightly drew an outline; Blue began working on her left eye. The sounds of the TV downstairs leaked into her bedroom. The Property Brothers were debating over which color they should paint the kitchen of a Nashville home they were working on. "I think the kitchen should be white" mumbled Blue, having started the right eye.

"What?" asked Oasis as she looked up from her sketch.

"Nothing. Where are your speakers? I wanna play some music." She pointed to the bookcase, second shelf.

"Don't play anything stupid."

"Why are your parents home?"

"No, I just don't want to listen to anything stupid."

He chuckled. Bringing the speaker onto the bed and connecting it to his phone, I Wanna Be Yours by Artic Monkeys enveloped them. They both began bobbing their heads.

They played this song when they snuck out for the first time. Oasis jumped out her window and was pretty sure she had broken something, but the adrenaline of defying her parents rushed through her body to numb the pain. By the time she reached the park and met up with Blue, the only thing on her mind was how much fun they were going to have at Mielle's party. And they did have fun. They danced, ate, and drank. She successfully snuck back home with Blue's help and fell asleep the second her head hit her pillow. What she had failed to consider was that the party was on a Thursday night, that her parents would never let her miss a day of school and she was a shit actress. She went to school hungover and was grounded for a month. Blue was company during her punishment.

"You have a really sharp jawline" Oasis stated. She had finally finished with the outline of his face. He looked at her and grinned, taking it as a compliment rather than an observation.

"Thank you, princess." Nothing got under her skin more than that nickname. They fell silent again, a silence she was comfortable with, but he wasn't. As he drew her nose, he begged for her to say something. Anything to convince him that she wasn't mad at him, that they were still friends, that she wasn't just tolerating him.

"Have you seen the new house yet?" Thank god. His prayers were answered when she raised the question so he spoke without thinking, "Yeah the new house is great! My room is way bigger and we even have a dishwasher, although I doubt my mom will even want to use it. She'll probably still make me wash them by hand because that woman hates me. Oh and the neighborhood is super nice and I met the girl next door. She's really cool. We've been texting and stuff.” His enthusiasm stung. Blue was moving to Chicago. He was moving 11 hours and 54 minutes away. And he was excited about it. And maybe she shouldn't take it so personally, but when her best friend was rambling about how cool his neighbor is and how he's been talking to her for a while, she couldn't help but feel as if she was about to be replaced. She faked a smile and said, "That sounds exciting. Can't wait to visit you in the summer." Oasis was a shit actress. None of what he said sounded exciting to her, "I'll miss you."

She added another hair stroke to his thick, straight eyebrows and refused to look up because she couldn't promise herself she won't cry. Blue didn't take her eyes off of her for a while. He stared at the way the corners of her round lips curved downward, making it look like she was always sad about something. "I just think it's stupid to move the summer before your senior year." He sighed, "Oasis." The tip of her ears got red as her name escaped from his lips.

The last time he had called her “Oasis” was two weeks ago. She had snuck into his room after he blew up her phone, crying that it was urgent. Each time he had told her that it was urgent, it never was. She hopped through his window to find him at his desk, two Surfer Cooler Capri Sun in front of him. "Oasis, I'm moving in two months." She stopped mid sip. Her brown eyes ran across his face, scanning it for any sign that could give away this sick joke. There was no sign. He was serious. Blue was leaving New York.

It wasn't fair to be mad at him for moving. It's not like he could say no. But she had to be mad at someone. She decided the universe was to blame. "Have you made your college list yet?" he asked in a weak attempt to change the subject. She looked at the way his red lips were slightly open as he anticipated her answer, " Not really. Community college or NYU or Howard. I don't know. You?"

"No idea either. Maybe an Ivy?" He knew he was Dartmouth material but he still sought her approval. He always had.

He went shopping with her right before the eighth-grade dance. They both didn't have dates so they decided to go together as friends. They walked into the Old Navy with "Sale" signs plastered in the front. She thought the signs were useless at this point because when were they not having a sale of some kind? He walked into the dressing room with several shirts out of his $20 budget, and once he had tried them all on, Blue marched to where she was sitting, impatiently waiting for him.

"You are not wearing that purple button up."

"Why?" He cried.

"It's going to clash with my dress and it's literally hideous." She walked back to the rack of button-ups and picked out a green dress shirt for him. "You look so much better in green." Green was his favorite color ever since. They dominated the dance floor at the event and she won a raffle for a Bosse speaker. They spent the next weeks dismantling rumors that they were dating.

"I already picture you thriving at MIT." They both chuckled. He reached for the black to start coloring in the curls of her afro; she reached for the orange to recreate his buzzcut. They fell silent again. "I'll miss you too." She offered him a small smile but that couldn't mask the sadness of her eyes. "We can still facetime and text every day," Blue offered.

"You know it won't be the same." He did know that but his hope lied in the fact that if he never said it out loud, it would be less true. "I take that back. You're more of a Cornell type." Another weak attempt at changing the subject but he went along with it, " I think NYU might be good for you. You'll get to stay close to your sister."

Moya was a prodigy. She began piano lessons at three, and seven years later she played at their aunt's wedding during the bridal entrance. "I think Moya will be fine without me. She'll get even more attention from my parents if I'm gone." The red of his lips was hard to replicate. It lay somewhere between crimson and cherry. "I'll miss that little devil. She promised she was going to compose me a song but never did."

"Pretty sure she had a crush on you." Blue burst into laughter so loud, Oasis barely realized that the album had started all over again and I Wanna Be Yours was playing. "Seriously?" He was in disbelief.

"Yeah, she would always ask when you were coming over and would try to hang out with us all the time."

He wiped the tear from the corner of his eye, "That's adorable." He added the finishing touches to her face: the scar on her chin that she got after he pushed her a little too hard and she fell, the beauty mark right above her lip, the curl at the top of her hair which she complained never behaved like the rest. "Finished." She said. She ripped the page from her sketchbook and walked to the bookcase once more. She grabbed two sheet protectors that were tucked between stacks of books and slipped the drawing inside. He did the same. She stared at the image of Blue, afraid that if she didn't memorize the details of his visage, he would walk out of her room and she would forget him. Forget the memories they created together. The secrets they shared together. She was afraid to forget how much she loved him.

He handed her his drawing and as she saw how he had captured her beauty with nothing but her color pencils, she said, "I'm coming to terms with the fact that we weren't meant to be in each other's lives forever. But it was fun while it lasted...right?"

#storytelling #fiction #writing dialogue #teenagers #love #painting #music #neighbours #ran out of tags

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theliberaltony · 7 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

n the year since President Trump pulled off his stunning upset of Hillary Clinton, Democrats have blamed the result on all kinds of factors: James Comey’s letter, Russian hackers, voter suppression, Jill Stein’s candidacy and depressed African-American turnout, to name a few. The truth? In an election decided by fractions of percentage points, it’s easy to call just about anything a difference-maker.

But none of that gets at the heart of why so many people who cast a ballot for former president Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 — and who saw Trump as unqualified to be president — nonetheless voted for him. Although it’s far from a microcosm of the nation, there’s one place that I believe illustrates what happened in 2016 better than anything else.

In a nation increasingly composed of landslide counties — places that voted for one side or the other by at least 20 percentage points — Howard County, Iowa (population 9,332), stands out as the only one of America’s 3,141 counties that voted by more than 20 percentage points for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. Democrats can’t credibly blame Howard County’s enormous 41-point swing in just four years on a last-minute letter to Congress, voter ID laws or Russia-sponsored Facebook ads.

Howard County, about 150 miles northeast of Des Moines along the state’s border with Minnesota, is 98 percent white. Only 13 percent of residents age 25 and over hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Median household income in the county in 2015 was $49,869. The largest employers in Cresco, the county seat, include the Donaldson Company, an air filter manufacturer whose local workers belong to the United Auto Workers union, and Featherlite, which makes aluminum livestock and utility trailers.

Barack Obama speaks to members of the United Auto Workers union during a presidential campaign stop in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2007.

AP IMAGES

Contrary to the “Trump Country” stereotype, Howard County isn’t drowning in manufacturing job losses, high unemployment or an opioid crisis. In fact, its unemployment rate the month before the election was just 2.9 percent. The main gripe? Stagnant wages — and a gnawing feeling that people have been working harder and for longer hours while other parts of the country reaped much bigger rewards during the recovery from the Great Recession.

“When Trump said, ‘What the hell do you have to lose?’ a lot more people heard it than just African-Americans,” said Pat Murray, a Democrat who worked 29 years as a press brake operator at Donaldson and now serves on the Howard County Board of Supervisors. “Our wages have been stagnant, and our insurance has gone backwards,” he told me, citing the union-sponsored health plan’s surging deductibles. “We work 50, 60 hours a week because there’s no one to hire.”

“[Obama] saved us from another Great Depression, but it never really got back to the working class,” said Murray, who calls himself “as anti-Trump as they come” but says Clinton’s campaign took places like Howard County for granted in the November election. “The average Joe Blow isn’t hung up on the stock market. Democrats always say we’re going to fight for the working people. The last few elections, we haven’t shown that at all.”

Howard County, Iowa, encompasses a number of small towns like Lime Springs (left), Cresco (center) and Chester.

Bill Whittaker / Jon Roanhaus / Bobak Ha’Eri

Autopsies of the Clinton campaign frequently cite her inattention to Michigan and Wisconsin as a cause of her loss. But her failure to connect in places like Howard County probably had less to do with which states she visited — after all, she spent plenty of time in Iowa — and more to do with her image and message.

Clinton came to be seen as establishment and dishonest in a year when a plurality of voters wanted change. But in a baffling display of obliviousness, she spent much of the fall jetting between big-city rallies, which were often followed by closed-door, high-dollar fundraisers. She spent precious little time making her economic case before people in midsize cities or small towns like Cresco. And even though she outspent Trump $6.5 million to $2.2 million on Iowa’s airwaves, her ads were more about Trump’s antics than about how she would raise voters’ wages or how Trump might lower them — effectively ceding that ground to Trump’s utopian jobs promises and inescapable slogan.

Neil Shaffer, a farmer and watershed conservation official who chairs the county GOP, credits Trump with flipping the party’s script on trade. “We’re skeptical of career politicians,” he said, likening Trump’s outsider appeal in the so-called Driftless Region to that of former-wrestler-turned-Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura. “For however many years, Democrats and union leaders denounced NAFTA. All of a sudden, you had a Republican candidate saying that it’s all for big business. The average working person said, ‘Hey, here’s someone who’s not going by the party book, he’s breaking the mold.'”

As for Clinton? “She was elitist, was what I kept hearing,” said Laura Hubka, a Navy veteran and ultrasound technician who chaired the county’s Democratic party and knocked on doors for Clinton. “We’re a blue-collar town.”

Voters in Iowa show their support for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump during the 2016 election.

GETTY IMAGES

Last month, Hubka resigned her post as chair and published a scathing blog post about Democrats’ aloofness to voters in places like Howard County and the party’s failure to come to grips with the election result. “Can we just stop and admit we’re part of the problem?” she vented to me. “People who were longtime supporters didn’t want to hear what we had to say anymore.”

Holly Rasmussen was one of those who had reached a breaking point. An Obama voter, Rasmussen cited the way that ill-tailored new federal rules applied to her tiny Cresco cosmetology school as a driving factor in her defection to Trump. “Honestly, when we founded the school, I got to teach. But the last few years, I had to spend all day in my office because I’ve had to file campus crime reports,” she said. “And if we had two people who didn’t repay their loans out of the eight students we had, [the Department of Education] made it tougher for us to get financial aid. Because of the regulations, we had to close. Now, we’re just a salon and spa.”

So why did Rasmussen vote for Obama and Trump? “Just to shake up Washington, to be honest. We’ve been in a rut for so long. People here don’t want to be multi-gajillionaires. They just want to get paid a decent wage,” she said, noting that her 2016 choice “might have been different” had Bernie Sanders won the nomination.

Howard County wasn’t always a train wreck for Clinton. Ironically, in the epic 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Clinton ran as the candidate of labor and small-town America, rallying union halls, downing whiskey and beer for the cameras, and blasting Obama’s speeches as “elitist and out of touch.” She came in third place statewide and only carried 22 of Iowa’s 99 counties in that year’s caucuses. But Howard was one of the 22 she won.

By 2016, however, Howard County morphed into Sanders territory. The Vermont senator struck a nerve with his calls for a working-class revolution and his attacks on Clinton’s Wall Street ties and shifting rhetoric on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“I was shocked. I didn’t think a person would show up for Bernie,” said Murray, who chaired his precinct’s caucus. “But when I showed up, it was full of Bernie people.”

One such Bernie-crat was Mike Bigley, who spent 30 years as a Donaldson machinist and worked his way up from shop steward to president of UAW Local 120.1 “I liked his ideas on healthcare and free tuition,” said Bigley. “On caucus night, we had a majority for Bernie. Some of the union guys thought Clinton did crooked stuff to win [the nomination]. You hear a lot of things around the factory floor.”

“The Bernie people thought Hillary stole it,” concedes Murray, who said those voters’ distrust of Clinton carried over to November. “I’d say probably two-thirds of them went to Trump,” Murray said. Bigley, a self-described die-hard Democrat, said he wasn’t among them.

A Clinton supporter, left, and the candidate herself in Iowa in 2016.

GETTY IMAGES

By the fall, anti-Clinton fervor in the community had reached a crescendo. The week before the election, emboldened Trump supporters took out a full-page newspaper ad and rented out the historic, city-owned Cresco Theatre and Opera House — a long-ago vaudeville haunt — for screenings of conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary “Hillary’s America” and the Benghazi film “13 Hours.” To Democrats’ dismay, the theater was packed.

For years to come, pundits and political scientists will debate whether working-class white voters’ sharp turn towards Trump had more to do with economic or racial resentment. Incidentally, despite its nearly all-white population, Howard County occupies a unique place in the history of America’s attitudes on race.

Riceville, on the western edge of Howard County, happens to be where, in 1968, elementary school teacher Jane Elliott pioneered the famous “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” classroom exercise that’s still used in diversity training courses today. Elliott’s exercise caused an uproar in the tiny town, made her an outcast in the teacher’s lounge and even resulted in violence and racial epithets aimed at her family. Now 83 and living a few miles down the road in Osage, Elliott told me she blames Trump’s election on a backlash against “eight years of a black man in the White House.”

But neither Howard County’s party chairs nor its left-leaning labor leaders cited racial resentment as a driving force behind the community’s seismic shift to Trump in 2016. “That pail doesn’t hold water,” said Shaffer, the GOP chairman, who eagerly points out that the county voted overwhelmingly for the nation’s first African-American president — twice.

The idea that voters who previously cast a ballot for Obama could not have been motivated, at least in part, by race when they made their 2016 choice has been disputed extensively in academic studies. But in my conversations with Howard County voters of both parties, the common thread of support for Obama and for Trump was resounding: anti-elitism.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives to speak at an Iowa campaign event in 2016.

GETTY IMAGES

Democrats’ next path to 270 Electoral College votes may not run through Iowa. After all, Trump prevailed by a slightly larger margin in the Hawkeye State than he did in Texas. But Democrats don’t have the luxury of simply writing off voters like the ones they lost in Howard County.

If Democrats want to retake the House in 2018, they’ll need to win congressional districts like Iowa’s 1st, which includes Howard County.2 The 1st District narrowly re-elected rough-around-the-edges GOP Rep. Rod Blum last November. More importantly, Howard County’s Trump-curious Democrats have countless analogs in states that will decide the 2020 election: not just in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but in Minnesota and Maine as well.

One year later, Rasmussen, the cosmetology school owner who previously voted for Obama, doesn’t have “massive regrets” about her vote for Trump. “For the most part, he’s doing a good job. I wish sometimes he’d stifle his Twitter account, but I’m not surprised by any of it. If you watched it, that’s kind of how he was,” she shrugged.

To rebuild lost trust and win support, future Democrats face the twin challenges of, first, persuading voters that Trump is on track to negatively affect their livelihoods and, second, reclaiming the mantle of working-class hero that every successful Democratic nominee has embraced since vaudeville ruled the stage at the Cresco Theatre.

“My dad told me, ‘You’ll never be rich enough to be a true-blue Republican,’” Bigley recalled. “Now there’s too much darn money in politics, on both sides.” His advice to his party? “Get out here in the sticks and roll around with us common folks for a week or two.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #David Wasserman

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cloverorgan83-blog · 5 years

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QUEENS 1930s

I’ve begun to think about “stuff” lately.

Forgotten New York celebrated its 20th anniversary this year, and I didn’t start on it until 1998, when I was 40 years old. This was just a few years after the World Wide Web started getting really popular; had the internet been around in the 1970s, think of how large Forgotten NY would be by now. If you’re keeping score there are 3,715 separate posts, which consist of tens of thousands of images, if you estimate ten images per page (many posts have one image but many have 100!) To cut to the chase, I’m thinking about legacy. In the immediate offing, I’m covered by the Greater Astoria Historical Society, which will continue the hosting if I’m run over by a streetcar or something. Long-term? I’m 61 now (in 2019), and hope to do this as long as I’m physically able. My energy levels are still as good as ever — I do a lot of walking and bicycling, though I can’t walk 20+ miles a day like some friends (to my frustration).

How will Forgotten New York be remembered when it ceases everyday production? Well, as a photographer and chronicler of New York city infrastructure, I’d be honored to be whispered about in the same breath as photographers Percy Loomis Sperr, Eugene Armbruster, Edgar “E.E.” Rutter, and the anonymous photographers who shot every property in New York City for tax purposes; their work can be found in the New York Public Library archives and in the NYC Municipal Archives. Their photography was primarily documentarian over esthetic: there wasn’t a budding Ansel Adams in the bunch. For esthetics, you’d be advised to turn to Berenice Abbott, who deftly managed to combine both everyday chronicling and beautiful photography, having been influenced by the great Parisian art photographer Eugene Atget and by artists Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. I don’t aspire to Abbott’s artistry, but I certainly aspire to the great documentary powers the other photographers I mentioned were able to achieve.

Remember, photography was an expensive, cumbersome business for all mentioned above. I have a camera with a small, thin chip in it that can record over 1,000 pictures depending on its setting, as well as a portable telephone that has an excellent camera almost as an afterthought. Street photography has never been easier. As far as modern work goes there’s Matt Weber, one of the best New York street photographers, and for night photography the best I’ve seen is Mitch Waxman, who sticks mainly to western Queens, especially the Newtown Creek area.

A few years ago, I got my mitts on nearly 1,000 photographs taken all over Queens between 1929 and 1940 primarily as a method of recording recent street paving jobs. Thus, the focus is on roadways, either those recently repaved or are about to be repaved. Everything else seemed to be done as a sidelight though, as you’ll see, some fascinating building interiors were also recorded as part of the project. I have a somewhat busy weekend with a tour scheduled, so I thought I would take a few of these and scribble something about what I’m seeing in each.

164th Street at Jewel Avenue, looking north, July 7, 1936

In the late 19th and early 20th Century, a trolley line connected Flushing and Jamaica, running originally through the farms and fields of Fresh Meadows. The above image was captured at 164th Street and Jewel Avenue in 1936, just a few months before service ended in 1937. In short order, the tracks were pulled up, the weeds paved over, a center median added, and 164th Street became the fast and furious stretch we know it as today between Flushing Cemetery and the Grand Central Parkway.

South of Grand Central Parkway the trolley line veered off 164th and rode on its own right of way to a terminal on Jamaica Avenue at about 160th Street. In the decades since, most of this trolley route has been either eliminated or hidden pretty well, but the four-lane width of 164th Street is a legacy of the route. As you can se there was one lane of traffic on the east side of the street, with the rest taken up by trolley tracks. This photo was about a year before service ended, and the line seems to be in decline, with plants and weeds sprouting between the tracks. For more information see Stephen Meyers’ book, Lost Trolleys of Queens and Long Island.

In the photo, the lengthy building seen on the right distance is still there in 2019.

Jewel Avenue is an unusual named street that runs from Forest Hills across Flushing Meadows-Corona Park all the way to Fresh Meadows. It’s the only remnant of a group of streets east of Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills named in alphabetical order that turn up on maps from the early 20th Century. The streets in sequence were named Atom, Balfour, Chittenden, DeKoven, Euclid, Fife, Gown, Harvest, Ibis, Jewel, Kelvin, Livingston, Meteor, Nome, Occident, Pilgrim, Quality, Ruskin, Sample, Thurman, Uriu, Verona, Webb, and Zuni; it’s likely the streets were only on the planning boards till they were built mid-century, by which time they carried the numbers (68th Road, 68th Drive etc) they do today. I don’t know why the Jewel Avenue name was kept; it’s one of the few non-numbered streets, along with Northern Blvd. and Roosevelt Avenue, that cross Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

The above photo was taken by the Somach Photographic Company, which also did a large amount of work recording what NYC streets looked like in the 1930s.

Ocean Promenade (Rockaway Beach Boardwalk) at Beach 101 Street

I cropped out the date on this photo to get my optimum width, but again, it’s sometime in the mid-1930s in late April. The season is just getting started at Gobel’s hot dog and hamburger stand. Note the barrel that was used to dispense Hires’ Root Beer. Silex coffeemakers debuted in 1915 and merged with Proctor Electric in 1960, creating the Proctor Silex company, which merged with Hamilton Beach in 1990.

The photos have largely yet to see the light, but in October 2018 I walked the length of the Rockaway Beach boardwalk, which aside from a short section by Riis Park near the Marine Parkway (Gil Hodges) Bridge, runs continuously from Beach 126th to Beach 9th Street (numbered streets on the peninsula get bigger from east to west). In 2012, Hurricane Sandy did a number on the old wooden boardwalk and it needed to be rebuilt virtually for its entire length. It’s now a state of the art seaside walk, but at the loss of the old “boardwalk” feel as synthetic materials were used instead of good old wood planks.

What is also missing are boardwalk-side vendors like this; I have a wealth of photos depicting these stands which numbered in the dozens. What happened to them? The closure of the Rockaway Playland amusement park in the early 1980s didn’t help, and today, not one remains. Also: “Specifically [Robert Moses’] 1939 road to nowhere called Shore Front Parkway. As part of the construction, no businesses or dwellings were allowed within 200′ of the boardwalk and a lot of homes, businesses and about half of Playland.

Capitol Diner, Lawrence Street, February 18, 1932

This E.E. Rutter photo of a roadside railroad-car style diner was taken in an era when fast food franchises such as Starbucks and McDonalds did not exist. Yet it can be said that the Dunkin’ Donuts of the world are the direct descendants of such road food stands, which evolved into steel and chrome diners. Such diners are now themselves dying out, as their owners retire and developers prefer to build multistory buildings in their footprints.

Yet, these small diners, the earliest of which were located in decommissioned railroad cars, were nearly ubiquitous even in downtown areas in the 1930s and 1940s; they’re all over scenes in the Municipal Archives linked above.

In 1969, the Department of Traffic (now Transportation) decided to rename 122nd Street, College Point Causeway, Lawrence Street, and Rodman Street under the single moniker College Point Boulevard. a short stub still bears the name Lawrence Street in Queensboro Hill. You have to be a little careful with the labeling on these photos; the “College Point Causeway” moniker only applied to the current stretch of College Point Boulevard on the diagonal stretch between 26th Avenue and the Whitestone Expressway; south of that, the bulk of the road was called Lawrence Street and that’s where this photo was likely taken.

On the ads, the Willys-Knight Company produced autos between 1915 and 1933. Willys, named for John Willys, developed one of the first “jeeps” used in World War II and the brand name survived until the late 1950s and a series of mergers. The Whippet was a popular model named for the racing dogs, in production between 1926 and 1931. And,

The Scranton & Lehigh Coal Company was one of Pennsylvania’s large coal companies, supplying the Northeast with anthracite and other coal products. The engines that powered Brooklyn ran on coal; everything from heating homes and apartments, to heating the offices, schools, and churches of the borough, to the huge boilers that powered the many factories in the city. Coal was the fuel that kept it all going until well after World War II. Even today, a coal furnace still turns up here and there; they were long lasting, powerful, but simple heat producers. [Brownstoner]

“Theater building,” Lawrence Street, February 19, 1932

Another Rutter photo from the same period, also labeled College Point Causeway, shows a former domicile that has been turned into a billboard for several local movie theaters and the features playing at the time.

On the top floor are bills advertising the Taft Theatre, opened on Main Street in 1917 Flushing and renamed after President William Howard Taft, who passed away in 1930. It was a first run theater, but could not compete with the nearby RKO Keiths and Prospect Theatres, and closed in 1955. Both the Keiths and the Prospect survived until the mid-1980s: the RKO Keiths shell building is still on Main and Roosevelt Avenue, awaiting redevelopment. The Loew’s Valencia in Jamaica has been a church for several decades, but its near-phantamagorical detail has been preserved.

As far as the features go, The Champ was a 1931 film directed by King Vidor about a broken-down boxer played by Wallace Beery (who won the Best Actor Academy Award) and his son, played by Jackie Cooper, who had a lengthy career: he played Daily Planet editor Perry White 47 years later in the first Christopher Reeve Superman. Little-remembered today, Marie Dressler earned a Best Actress nomination in Emma.

Newsstand, Cross Island Boulevard, July 22, 1938

This photo is slugged “Cross Island Boulevard” which is the former name of Francis Lewis Boulevard; when the Cross Island Parkway was built in the late 1930s, Cross Island Boulevard was renamed shortly afterward to avoid confusion.

Depicted is a typical newsstand of the period. The top shelf is full of romance and movie magazines, few of which survive today. Titles such as Popular Science, Better Homes and Gardens and Good Housekeeping are still in business today, but none of the newspapers shown, The Long Island Daily Star, The New York Sun, and the North Shore Daily Journal, are. The New York Sun was revived as a daily in the 2000s and still exists in online form.

Laurel Hill Boulevard and 47th Street, March 28, 1938

Nothing in this photo remains; the buildings on both sides have long been razed, and Laurel Hill Boulevard is now the service road on either side of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Changes were soon to come to this placid scene as the first Kosciuszko Bridge was spanning over Newtown Creek and the BQE was planned to connect Brooklyn and Queens. Once in Queens, the BQE was slated to follow the diagonal route of Laurel Hill Boulevard between the creek and Queens Boulevard, whereupon it would turn north to fork into two sections at Grand Central Parkway.

Laurel Hill Boulevard, named for a small neighborhood in Queens between Calvary Cemetery and 50th Street north of the LIRR Montauk tracks, dates back to the colonial era when it was paved with shells and known as Shell Road. It skirts the right end of Calvary Cemetery before following the BQE to Queens Boulevard.

James Gilder Bar & Grill, March 30, 1938

The James Gilder bar was located in one of the buildings depicted in 1938 that would soon give way to BQE construction.

Interborough Parkway, Cypress Hills Cemetery, January 27, 1932

The Jackie Robinson Parkway along with the Grand Central were the first of NYC’s “parkways” providing express (more or less) auto through-routing built within New York City. The “Jackie” unusually begins at the confluence of Jamaica and Pennsylvania Avenues in East New York, twisting through a convoluted route through the “cemetery belt” and Forest Park at the Brooklyn-Queens border, meeting the Grand Central at Flushing Meadows.

Here it is pictured as it was constructed in Cypress Hills Cemetery on January 27, 1932 in an E.E. Rutter photograph. Rutter chronicled the “Jackie,” which was called the Interboro Parkway until 1997 when it was renamed in honor of the first African American major league baseball player, who himself is interred in Cypress Hills. The parkway was rebuilt to handle modern traffic volumes from 1987-1992, eliminating the last traces of the original railings and overpasses seen here.

Metropolitan Beer Gardens, Metropolitan Avenue at Union Turnpike, June 28, 1933

Before the Interborough Parkway opened in 1935, narrow, two-lane Metropolitan Avenue was one of the main traffic routes connecting the Brooklyn waterfront and Jamaica. It was constructed as the Williamsburg and Jamaica Turnpike during the James Madison presidential administration in the 1810s and renamed Metropolitan Avenue after the Civil War. Union Turnpike (its name suggests it was originally tolled, as Metropolitan avenue had been) is a somewhat newer route and remained incomplete until the early 20th Century as an extension of Union Avenue, originally a short route in Glendale.

In the early 1930s, the Interborough Parkway was under construction, paralleling Union Turnpike for a portion of its route. No trace of the Metropolitan Beer Gardens exists today, and either the parkway construction or Prohibition (repealed in December 1933) may have done it in; beer gardens around town either went the speakeasy route or sold “near-beer” containing less than 0.5% alcohol by volume.

PS 63, October 30, 1929

Public School 63, which still exists today in a newer building (a massive edifice at Sutter Avenue between 90th and 91st Streets in Ozone Park) is pictured in a 1929 photo by E.E. Rutter. Though it’s slugged “Linden Boulevard” I can’t be sure it was located on that street as in the early 20th Century, Linden Boulevard, which has its origins miles to the west in Flatbush, was extended east through Queens in a halfhearted fashion; today Linden Boulevard exists in a number of separate pieces in Ozone Park, regaining traction for good in South Jamaica, where it runs continuously into Elmont in Nassau County along the former route of Central Avenue.

I suspect this photo was taken on Old South Road which decades ago was renamed in sections as Pitkin Avenue and Albert Road. Indeed, the present PS 63 is called the Old South School, which might cement it for you.

Soda Candy, Rockaway Beach Boulevard, April 26, 1938

Though Rockaway Beach Boulevard was rerouted in the 1970s a block north of this location and given extra lanes, a short, one-block stretch was left over and actually this portion of the road still exists. One thing you notice about this corner grocery is the Meadow Gold Ice Cream “privilege sign” in which a company would pay for a sidewalk sign, provided its product was prominently shown on the sign (several Coca-Cola signs around town in this category still exist. Meadow Gold, which also distributes other dairy products, is still found in several parts of the country.

Smith Brothers Ice Cream, Ditmars Boulevard and 23rd Avenue, East Elmhurst

One such Coca-Cola “privilege sign” can be found at this roadside grocery at Ditmars Boulevard and 23rd Avenue near Glenn Curtiss Airport, now LaGuardia Airport. In the forefront is a placard for Smith Brothers Ice Cream, a popular brand in the early 20th Century. This brand was not originated by the bearded fellows on the cough drop boxes, but company scion Richard Smith developed the Früsen-Gladjé, Chipwich, Eskimo Pie and other dessert brands.

Van Wyck Expressway at 95th Avenue, September 7, 1934

The furiously mustachioed Robert Anderson Van Wyck was the first mayor of Greater New York, serving from 1898-1901. His involvement with American Ice, a monopoly in the necessary commodity before the age of universal refrigeration, cost him his political career. Nonetheless when a major route was built between Jamaica Avenue and Rockaway Boulevard in the early 20th Century it received his name, Van Wyck Boulevard.

In the early 1950s, NYC traffic czar Robert Moses built the Van Wyck Expressway along this route from Flushing Meadows south to Idlewild, now JFK Airport. The west side of Van Wyck Boulevard was retained, while everything on the east side was demolished; the buildings ween on the right side of the photo at 95th Avenue still stand. Since hundreds of residences were retained this is one of the few Expressways in NYC that have numbered addresses.

Van Wyck likely pronounced his name with a long “why” but today, most locals use the WICK pronunciation.

Lawrence Street (College Point Boulevard) at 36th Avenue, February 18, 1932

The Flushing Main Street station is so-called because there used to be a Flushing Bridge Street station located on the Long Island Rail Road Whitestone Branch, which operated from the mid-1800s to 1932, branching from the Port Washington line at Flushing Meadows and running north and east to Whitestone Landing at the East River at 152nd Street. After the LIRR unsuccessfully tried selling the line to NYC to operate as a subway line (presumably a connection would be made to the Flushing Line, today’s #7 train) the LIRR shut it down for nonridership.

This photo shows the branch as it crossed Lawrence Street, now College Point Boulevard; the Flushing Bridge Street station was just east of here. When the tracks and signals were cleared away, the one-block stretch of King Road would replace them.

Gas station, Whitestone Parkway, July 27, 1937

Among the items seen are a coin-operated public telephone, a Gulf calendar, and an ad for the upcoming World’s Fair to be held in Flushing Meadows in 1939. The Parkway gained expressway status some years after the Whitestone Bridge opened in the mid-1930s.

I’ll get back to recent photos — but from time to time, I’ll be showing some of these classics to indicate how much has changed and how much has stayed the same. You can find much more in the book I wrote with GAHS, Forgotten Queens.

Check out the ForgottenBook, take a look at the gift shop, and as always, “comment…as you see fit.”

5/19/19

Source: https://forgotten-ny.com/2019/05/queens-1930s/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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fitnesshealthyoga-blog · 6 years

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New Post has been published on https://fitnesshealthyoga.com/yoga-poses-for-the-pelvis-reduce-pain-and-discomfort/

Yoga Poses for the Pelvis | Reduce pain and discomfort

Are you feeling pain or discomfort in your pelvis? These poses can help.

Christopher Dougherty

If you are plagued by pain or discomfort down there, these exploratory tools and yoga sequences (no, we’re not talking Kegels) can help you either tone or release tension. You won’t believe the benefits—from better sex to walking through the world with more freedom.

As girls, we are exposed to relentless conditioning. We will be told to walk, sit, stand, move, and behave in ways that are appropriate, sexy, ladylike, and motherly. We will even be told which bathroom to use. By adulthood, each of us will carry these ways of being women throughout our body, but we will feel them particularly in the pelvic region, the part of our bodies most deeply associated with our gender. The pelvic region becomes a complex, multilayered storage unit—I call it the original 1-800-MINI-STORAGE—the place where we store the things we can’t let go of but don’t want to deal with right now.

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This can lead to health issues that are both emotional and physical in nature. We need to explore and liberate this terrain and take charge of ourselves—openly acknowledge and understand our issues—and skillfully tune in to the healing power of our own bodies. I believe it’s time to liberate your pelvis.

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See also Discover the Connection Between Your Head and Pelvis

Every Pelvis Has a Story

“Every pelvis has a story” is what I tell my students. My story is this: In 2005, I had already been a yoga teacher for 20 years, so I thought I knew the anatomy and mechanics of “down there” fairly well. But around that time, I began to experience pain and discomfort in this nether region. And then as I worked to figure out why, I realized that much of my knowledge about the pelvic area was abstract, generic, and derived mostly from anatomy books. I didn’t understand the specifics—the muscles housed within it and that entire region’s relationship to the rest of my body, mind, and life history.

I began experimenting with yoga poses and breathing practices to familiarize myself with, and ultimately explore, the many layers of trauma, held emotion, and pain that lay hidden between my hip bones. The more I understood how the intricacies of my pelvis intersected with personal history, cultural conditioning, sexism, anatomy, and symptoms of ill health, the more I began to see how my pelvis was tied to my general well-being—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It turned out that my pelvic floor muscles were way too tight, but I had no idea why or how that had happened. My exploration turned into an investigation of the factors that shaped me, such as my postural, sexual, and medical histories; my struggles with body image; and the influence of relationships, family, advertising, media, and movies. Bringing the story of my pelvis to light became a key component of my evolution as a human being. From there, I eventually developed a yoga protocol that formed the cornerstone of the pelvic-floor workshops I now teach around the world.

Learn how yoga can help with pelvic issues.

Christopher Dougherty

Why Yoga?

Many people with pelvic issues attend my workshops after having tried a number of different approaches to deal with them, often consulting first with their general practitioner, then a gynecologist, then a urologist. They may have tried Kegels, other muscle-building exercises, or even antidepressants. Some have reached a point where they are considering surgery. Let’s look at this scenario: A woman in her mid-40s starts feeling pain during intercourse. Her doctor recommends using more lubricant, but that doesn’t help. She visits a gynecologist who can’t diagnose a reason for her painful intercourse. She starts to read about the issue on the Internet, which offers exercises that may solve the problem. She does the exercises but they don’t help. She starts to wonder if her symptoms are psychosomatic and seeks a psychotherapist . . . The list goes on.

See also Why Balancing Your Pelvis Is Key to Good Posture

Each of the approaches above (allopathic medicine, exercise, counseling) has its merits. But for many women, yoga is the last resort. I’ve worked as a pelvic-floor yoga teacher for over 12 years, so I say this with absolute certainty: Yoga should be the first resort. Here’s why. Practicing yoga cultivates self-awareness and sensitivity toward your body; it isn’t just another set of exercises you do. Yoga fosters subtle observation and awareness of your body’s mechanics and energetics. It gives you experiential insight into the unique form and shape of your individual embodiment. It allows you to understand what is happening as it is happening, and it gives you the tools to adjust your practice to constantly fluctuating conditions, moment by moment. It is one thing to have a general conceptual understanding of the anatomy of muscles; it’s something else to be able to locate, sense, and work with the individual muscles in your own body.

Body awareness is key to properly diagnosing ailments. No doctor in the world will be able to tell you what it’s like for you to feel pain or tension or relief or any other sensation; this is information only you can access. This type of insight is critical to making a proper diagnosis. Yoga combines external conceptual knowledge with the internal experiential understanding that only you can access. Yoga is empowering. It empowers you to take an active role in your own healing rather than handing over responsibility to a doctor or someone else. It encourages and supports you to see for yourself. After all, it is your body, and you should not blindly give up control. You hold primary authority over your body, and you need to exercise that authority by exploring, observing, and learning about yourself. Yoga helps you shed your self-imposed states and empowers you to emerge, to mature, and to take responsibility for yourself.

Find out if your pelvic floor is hypertonic or hypotonic.

Christopher Dougherty

Is Your Pelvic Floor Hypertonic or Hypotonic?

These are two conditions that can cause a fair amount of pelvic pain and discomfort. To assess if you are dealing with either, here are some informal diagnostic tools.

See also Not ALL Hips Need Opening: 3 Moves for Hip Stability

A little sitting-bone massage is an ideal way to develop greater awareness of this area. In any seated position, lean onto your left buttock so that the right sitting bone is easily accessible (you can also do this lying on your side). With one hand, find the tip of your right ischial tuberosity, a.k.a. sitting bone. Using the sitting bone as your landmark, begin to massage the muscles just on the inner edge of the sitting bone, toward the vulva. Massage a little toward the front and a little toward the back. Are there are any tender or tight spots in the corridor between your vulva and the bone? Is there any pain? Take note of the density of the muscle around the bone. Is it firm, hard, squishy, tense? Does the area have any “give”? Continue for one full minute.

Now sit back on both sitting bones and observe the difference between the right and the left sides.

• Has anything changed as a result of releasing muscular tension on one side?

• Does the right sitting bone feel lower on the seat? Is there a sense of more space around the bone?

Now take a few deep breaths and shift your attention to breathing sensations.

• Does the right side of your body feel more spacious as you inhale?

Repeat on the left side and notice any differences.

Where you notice tightness and soreness is where you might be hypertonic.

Basic symptoms of a hypertonic Pelvic floor

• Pelvic pain

• Urge incontinence: strong immediate feelings of needing to urinate, without leakage

Basic symptoms of a hypotonic Pelvic floor

• Stress incontinence: leakage that often happens without any forewarning

See also A Pelvic Floor Sequence for an Easier Labor + Delivery

Yoga can help ease pain or discomfort with a hypertonic or hypotonic pelvic floor.

Christopher Dougherty

Both a hypertonic and hypotonic pelvic floor can often be effectively remedied with yoga.

Yoga provides a complex and nuanced set of tools you can fine-tune to address your specific circumstances in a noninvasive, holistic way. As you practice the poses on the following pages, I encourage you to pay attention to the specific energy each of them carries. Poses are often experienced as calming, invigorating, focusing, heating, cooling, and so on. When you understand the energy of different poses and how they affect you, you can use this knowledge to energize, balance, and calm your life; to challenge yourself; to cultivate greater sensitivity and compassion; or to simply enjoy a richer and much more complex range of sensations and emotions.

Excerpted from Pelvic Liberation: Using Yoga, Self-Inquiry, and Breath Awareness for Pelvic Health, by Leslie Howard, 2017. Reprinted with permission.

Some of the poses in the sequences build strength and help you find and contract muscles. Some lengthen muscles, while others soften muscles. Some focus on the breath. I have separated the poses into two categories to address hypertonicity and hypotonicity. The poses are presented from easiest to more challenging, but not in a specific sequence for a particular symptom. Hopefully you have done some exploration and you know whether you need to do the poses for a hypertonic or hypotonic pelvic floor. Remember, if you are a combination of both hyper- and hypotonic, you need to address the tight muscles first. Getting chronically tight muscles to let go can sometimes happen rather quickly or in some cases may take up to a year (that is how long it took mine to let go).

See also Soften Your Middle for a Stronger Core

Practicing alone and in a quiet space can open you up to continual inquiry: What am I feeling? How is my breath? Where do I feel movement created by the breath in each pose? Remember that some yoga postures are more difficult to maintain than others. Be patient with yourself. If you are feeling tired after practicing some of the more challenging postures, switch to practicing supported Viparita Karani (Legs-Up-the-Wall Pose) or supported Supta Baddha Konasana (Reclining Bound Angle Pose) for 10 minutes. With practice, you should find it easier and more relaxing to assume and maintain all of these postures. The heart of practicing yoga postures is to train your nervous system to be calmer, even in a physically challenging pose. Your breath will always let you know if you are doing too much.

Hypertonic Pelvic-Floor Sequence

Relaxation Pose with Weight

Props: 4 blankets—1 folded under your head, 1 rolled under your knees, and 1 under the ankles (bolsters under your legs work too), 1 folded across your thighs; one or two 8- to 10-pound sandbags or weights; optional eye pillow

Set up the props as pictured and lie on your back with your legs extended and arms at your sides, palms up. Close your eyes and invite your breath to travel into your belly and lower back. Deep breathing in this pose helps the pelvic floor stretch on the inhale and contract on the exhale. Imagine your body releasing toward the ground. Stay in the pose for 5–20 minutes.

See also Tap into Your Authentic Voice with this Sequence From Jessamyn Stanley

After a week, gradually add these poses

Dynamic tabletop

Props: 1 blanket folded under your knees

First, come to hands and knees with a neutral pelvis, tops of your feet on the floor. Inhale and lift your head and tailbone toward the ceiling, lengthening your pelvic floor. Exhale and move your head and tail toward one another, shortening your pelvic-floor muscles. Move between Cow Pose and Cat Pose, doing 3–5 rounds with your breath. Return to Tabletop. Next, move your pelvis from side to side to lengthen muscle fibers from center to left and right. Tail-wag for 1 minute. Return to Tabletop. Then move your hips in slow motion as if you had a hula hoop around them. Move in one direction for a minute, and then reverse the direction for another minute.

See also 5 Poses to Practice in a Cramped Airplane Seat

See also Understanding Your Sacroiliac Joint

Hypotonic Pelvic-Floor Sequence

Relaxation Pose with Weight

Props: 4 blankets—1 folded under your head, 1 rolled under your knees, and 1 under the ankles (bolsters under your legs work too), and 1 folded across your thighs; one or two 8- to 10-pound weights; optional eye pillow

See also 10 Yoga Sequences for Strong Feet and Better Balance

After a week, gradually add these poses

Triangle Pose (Utthita Trikonasana), with block

Prop: 1 block

From Warrior Pose II, straighten your front (right) leg. Again, squeeze your heels toward each other and draw energy up your inner legs into your perineum. Raise your arms parallel to the floor. Anchoring the inner and outer heel of your left foot, extend your torso to the right, directly over the plane of your right leg. Place your right hand on the support. Stretch your left arm toward the ceiling. Bring your right-leg sitting bone toward your perineum. Hold 1 minute, then switch sides.

See also Baptiste Yoga: 9 Poses for Strong, Toned Glutes

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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Warren confronts ghost of Howard Dean

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/warren-confronts-ghost-of-howard-dean/

Warren confronts ghost of Howard Dean

Sen. Elizabeth Warren. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Liberals swooned. The Democratic establishment was on its heels. Powered by small donors and grassroots energy, in late 2003Iowa seemed Howard Dean’s for the taking.

But then came the attacks — from both the center and the left. The surge became a stall. On caucus day, the Vermont governor came in third and never recovered.

Elizabeth Warren is trying to avoid the same fate.

While the Warren campaign has stuck to its corruption-centric message, it has noticeably shifted tactics in recent weeks. The Massachusetts senator changed her stump speech and is now taking many more audience questions. She’s drawing sharper contrasts with opponents after months of trying to stay above the fray. There are more big, thematic campaign speeches, and more off the record chats with reporters.

The third such speech in recent weeks will be Tuesday in Boston at the Old South Meeting House, a key organizing place for the Boston Tea Party and American revolutionaries in the 18th century. Warren will highlight the work and poetry of Phillis Wheatley — a member of the Meeting House’s congregation. Wheatley was kidnapped from Africa and enslaved before becoming one of the first black women poets in America.

“She penned ideals of a better America….Her imagination is woven into the tapestry of America’s story,�� Warren will say of Wheatley, according to pre-released excerpts of the speech. Warren will also be joined Tuesday by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, the Boston congresswoman and highest-profile black woman lawmaker who has endorsed the Massachusetts senator.

Warren campaign officials often refer back to that video as something of a thesis statement — evidence of the consistency of her reason for running.

“Our government is supposed to work for all of us, but instead, it has become a tool for the wealthy and well-connected,” she said in the video, a sentiment she frequently echoes on the trail.

Warren’s moves come as she has been squeezed by a resurgent Bernie Sanders on her left and an insurgent Pete Buttigieg on her right. Her attempts to straddle the ideological divides in the party — and potentially unify its factions — have left her open to attacks from both sides. EvenSanders has taken subtle shots at her commitment to Medicare for All, digswhich have been amplified by many of his allies.

Buttigieg and Joe Biden, meanwhile, hit Warren for weeks for her “fighting” or “angry” approach to politics, along with her support for Medicare for All.

After weeks of trying to blunt the attacks, Warren has begun drawing more explicit contrasts with Biden and especially Buttigieg. She has focused most on their fundraising practices.

“Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States,” Warren posted on Instagram after the last primary debate, in reference to a recent Buttigieg fundraiser.

Buttigieg has pushed back by highlighting Warren’s past fundraising during her Senate runs. “Senator, your presidential campaign right now as we speak is funded in part by money you transferred, having raised it at those exact same big-ticket fundraisers you now denounce,” Buttigieg said at the debate. “Did it corrupt you, senator? Of course not.”

Warren will implicitly respond to Buttigieg in Tuesday’s speech. “The billionaires, the corporate executives and their favorite presidential candidates have one clear goal: To convince you that everything you imagine is impossible. To convince you that reform is hopeless. To convince you that because no one can be pure, it’s pointless to try to make anything better,” she will say.

In her most recent speech in New Hampshire, she also characterizedother Democratic candidates as “naive” and criticizedBiden and Buttigieg without explicitly naming them.

“Unlike some candidates for the Democratic nomination, I’m not betting my agenda on the naive hope that if Democrats adopt Republican critiques of progressive policies or make vague calls for unity that somehow the wealthy and well-connected will stand down,” Warren said.

But the new offensive could also backfire — as it did for Dean in 2004, when he attacked Gephardt over the Iraq War and Gephardt responded by hitting him from the left on trade and Social Security. The crossfire ultimately wounded them both, allowing John Kerry and John Edwards to finish ahead of them in Iowa.

“I think the Warren-Pete fight in Iowa is probably going to hurt them in the way that Dean-Gephardt ‘murder-suicide pact’ did,” Joe Trippi, a top strategist on Dean’s campaign, said ruefully.

At the same time, the Warren campaign has been trying to lower expectations in the final days of the fourth quarter as its grassroots fundraising slows. In several emails to supporters over the past week, the campaign has set a goal of raising $20 million, less than the $24.6 million she raised last quarter. Many staffers have tried to gin up extra donations with promises to sing songs, make memes, and write poems for donors that give a bit more.

Yetas it moves into its second year, Warren’s campaign is beginning to cast its gaze beyond the first four contests in preparation for a potentially long primary slog — building out field staff ahead of most of her rivals in post-Super Tuesday states such as Washington, Ohio, Illinois, and even Pennsylvania, which doesn’t hold its contest until April 28.

“She’s run the most disciplined campaign by far but they are finding out it’s not as easy as it looks,” said Trippi, who also worked with Joe Rospars, Warren’s chief strategist, during the Dean campaign. “Putting staff in Pennsylvania, if you get 4th in Iowa, is not going to matter.”

#Foreign #ghost #Howard #Politics

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totalrockhounder · 5 years

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the compelete opinion series

Part one

In Utah many people enjoy recreational activities ranging from skiing to fishing and from rock climbing to boating. To ensure the safety of not only the people, but also the environmental impacts that would result from said activities many regulation are put in place to prohibit the dangerous or damaging effects that human could impose on the environment. but sometimes there are instances where people choose not to obey such laws. At these moments fines are often put in place to repair the damaged area.

However often those who are charged for the damages cannot afford to pay them or the payment goes to the city or state government where it gets lost within the politics of said government. From this stage the money often is put on hold for too long and if it does get to the affected area often the money doesn’t do enough to repair said area.

During times like this special interest groups are formed in hopes of redirecting said money to effected areas, or sometimes even put up their own money in hope to repair the damaged areas. One of these groups is the Sierra Club their mission statement is as follows :

“To explore, enjoy and protect the planet. To practice and promote the responsible use of the earth's ecosystems and resources; to educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment; and to use all lawful means to carry out those objectives.”

This mission statement reflects my own in a way, I love exploring the outdoors fishing, hiking, camping and backpacking. But lately I have not been able to enjoy the out doors to the fullest. Pollutants and trash left behind by camper are often clogging the beauty of the outdoors leaving an atrocious scab on the earth tails and waterways.

The Sierra Club is a forefront in this aspect, at least once a month I receive an email informing me of projects and petitions. They also have a monthly newsletter showcasing project that are underway or finished. However this doesn’t mean that everyone supports their actions on May 19 2019 the Texas state government brought to light a new law which included a protest free zone around infrastructure projects. This is understandable due to the fact many people when the feel passionately about the environment sometimes go a little over board.

There are also some instances where the club speaks a word of reason, in Arizona a new section of I11 is being built in the sense of development the road will pass through miles of undisturbed land. Those who oppose the extension of the freeway says it is nothing more than a way for those who own the land surrounding the freeway planned route to make a quick buck. They are afraid that the wildlife would be disturbed and mass pollution will spread along the route.

By raising awareness of the potential out comes of such project is a valiant effort. I hope that other groups will take a look at what is going on and take a step forward to not only clean up areas effected by pollutants, but also prevent future pollution form happening and thereby ensuring the survival of not only our species but the planet as well.

“Policies.” Sierra Club, Sierra Club, 7 Oct. 2019, https://www.sierraclub.org/policy. Date accessed 10/14/2019

SHEA, JACOB. “States Crack Down on Environmental Activists.” Sierra Club, Sierra Club, 20 May 2019, https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/states-crack-down-environmental-activists.

Howard Fischer Capitol Media Services. “Proposed Interstate 11 Opposition Varies, but Support Focuses on Economic Benefits.” Arizona Daily Star, 12 Oct. 2019, https://tucson.com/news/local/proposed-interstate-opposition-varies-but-support-focuses-on-economic-benefits/article_6a246176-aacb-5fec-96a1-f40e3fcff61d.html.

Part two

Utah Valley University is located in the heart of Utah county. on the campus student enjoy view of snowcapped mountains and the water of the beautiful Utah lake. The academics are excellent only to be matched by the NCAA ranked sports teams. The students who attend this school often are drawn to the school for its affordability , but finding themselves later to be enthralled in the schools study abroad programs or sometime they might head over to the outdoor center to meet up with other student to go on adventures in the local mountains or deserts.

But an aspect of the school I would like to bring up is the student body and the participation in clubs and also in the community. At UVU there is many clubs like the Geo and Botany clubs who are focused on the sciences, there are also other club such as the Off Road Adventure Club which encourages student to explore the world around them. There is also a service center for student who wish to sever in the community.

Now one may wonder where I am going with this. Well in Utah county this is a massive problem that one person can take on. This problem has been growing of late and is not only in Utah, during summer months the weather in Utah can hit extreme highs. Because if this the local bodies of water oxygen levels drop dramatically, not only that but around the lakes shores are cover in trash. One way students help in this aspect is researching the algal blooms and what is the cause of said algal blooms. However the trash that is polluting the lake is often forget about walking around the lake one will see a varying degree of trash ranging from fishing line and beer bottles to sofas and twin beds.

To help reduce the amount of trash is put an official petition to start a multi- university club focusing on cleaning up the trash that is found throughout Utah county. The first big project that the club would take on is the trail way along the Provo river. From there the project will go from spot to spot collecting trash along the way. Working in cooperation with local cities we could go to troubled areas quicker that if we where to try finding the areas by ourselves. In a short amount of time the effects of the efforts made by the club will change the environment and improve the surrounding areas.

Hopefully when the club has had a chance to become solidified it will continue for many years and not only improve the lake, but also the image of Utah Valley in general. So I make a plea to the student body to help me move forward with the Environmental clubs founding and push for a better future of Utah.

“Volunteer and Service Learning Center.” Volunteer and Service Learning Center, UVU, https://www.uvu.edu/catalog/2018-19/departments/center-for-volunteer-and-service-learning/.

Metcalfe, Tom. “As the World Warms, Harmful Algal Blooms Are on the Rise.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 17 Oct. 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/world-warms-dangerous-algal-blooms-are-rise-ncna1067526.

in the local community.

Part three

The environmental clubs mission is to inform student of current environmental issues, provided ideas and tools to better the environment, and also give students the ability to explore the world around them. This Utah Valley club will focus on the issues that directly effect the quality of life in Utah county. These issues range from water and air quality to recycling and renewable energy.

The clubs will have different multiple meetings and varying meeting times to ensure all of it members can participate in activities, there will also be a standard day once a month for members to volunteer in the local communities, this time will be spent not only in the outdoor but also in shelters and schools. The intension of such services is to show the community that it doesn’t take much to change the environment and that small changes in one’s life can make a big impact.

The environmental club will also reach out to other clubs and services not only from UVU, But from many different universities, colleges and community outreach programs. Together the club will take up projects to restore natural habitats, reduce carbon emission, increase recycling practices, and educate the community.

The club will be open to all who seek to join there will be no discrimination against race, sex, gender identity, religion, political party or affiliation. However criminal practices are forbidden within the club any member who endangers the club or its members through criminal actions or malicious intent will face expulsion, however members who have a criminal history will be allowed to joint as long as they do not commit any further crimes while in the club.

If the club produces any information on a subject the information will be reviewed to ensure that is it correct. No information will be released publicly released without review any information that is released without review is hearsay until confirmed of its factuality. The review board will be made of a five member counsel which also will be the head of the club. there will be one at least professor present to ensure that the counsel is within school regulations on its decisions. The will be gender equality on the board if possible.

The board will included at least one science major to ensure the research aspect of the club. One member will be overseer of activities all activities will be brought to the counsel for a majority vote. If possible a member of the board will be either an LGBQ ally or be LGTBQ themselves. This is to ensure fairness and comfortability for any members for have are so themselves. It is encouraged that the board be diverse in economical and ethical backgrounds by have such diversity the connections within the members of the club will be strengthened and the outreach with in the community will be more readily accepted by those who receive it.

Funding for the club will come through a club fee of 5 dollars, also fund raising with in the club is permitted as long as with in university regulations. The club will actively seek for ways to improve the community and using the extra funds to go towards such projects. Funds may be used for activities sponsored by the club such activities will be decided by the board. The board will be voted in at the beginning of every term. This is a popular vote to an extent it is only restrained by the positions as mentioned above.

Work Citation

• “Contact Us.” Contact Us - Clubs | Clubs | Utah Valley University, Utah Valley University , https://www.uvu.edu/clubs/info/contact.html.

• Collingwood. “10 Key Factors of Being a Good Leader.” Collingwood Executive Search, 5 Nov. 2019, https://www.collingwoodsearch.co.uk/our-insights/board-insights/10-key-factors-of-being-a-good-leader/.

• Cobb, Evan, et al. “6 Utah County Environmental Issues to Pay Attention to in Celebration of Earth Day.” Daily Herald, 22 Apr. 2018, https://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/utah-county-environmental-issues-to-pay-attention-to-in-celebration/collection_7e275d8f-a0b7-592d-894f-fe8fd2fe003e.html.

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