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no-reply95 · 3 years

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Jealous Guys

Something I’ve been thinking about for a while now is the different ways jealousy manifested for John and Paul over the course of their friendship.

I’m going to look at John and Paul in turn and have a look at some of the key ways jealousy appeared, before, during and after the Beatles period. This will be a looooong post so if you want to go on deep dive keep reading below.

John

Jealousy was something that John acknowledged as a big part of his personality, as far as I’m aware, he only acknowledged his jealousy publicly in terms of his relationship with Yoko but I believe jealousy was a feature of all of John’s major relationships. John’s first real partnership was with Pete Shotton, his childhood best friend, and Pete has outlined how John’s jealousy and possessiveness was a feature in their friendship with them falling out when Pete first started showing interest in girls and with John acting out when Pete started to spend more time with other friends, instead of him, here Pete recounts John’s reflection on this period of their friendship:

“Years later John confessed to having felt acutely jealous throughout that interlude: “I was scared shitless I’d lost you after our fight in science class, when you starting playing with David Jones. I really thought I’d gone too far with you that time.“

Pete Shotton, John Lennon: In My Life , 1983

Pete’s recollections establish a pattern in John’s life of acting out due to a fear of abandonment and losing those who are closest to him so it’s not surprising that once John had formed a strong bond with Paul that would stir similar fears in him.

Below I’ve categorised the groups of people that were the focus of John’s jealousy and have picked one person from each group as an example:

Family - Jim McCartney

Paul’s family was and continues to be a big part of his life. From the outset of their friendship, John was made aware of how important Jim was to Paul and vice versa. John and Paul had to skip school to hang out together because Jim wouldn’t have John in their house initially and John confessed his resentment of Jim’s influence over Paul’s life. It appears that after some time John grew tired of having to contend with Jim for the position of the most important person in Paul’s life, and this culminated in John giving Paul a pseudo ultimatum as John discussed in 1971:

“But Paul would always give in to his dad. His dad told him to get a job, he fucking dropped the group and started working on the fucking lorries, saying, "I need a steady career." We couldn't believe it… “So I told him on the phone, "Either come or you're out." So he had to make a decision between me and his dad then, and in the end he chose me”

St. Regis Hotel interview, Sept. 5, 1971

Friends - Mal Evans

Throughout the active years of the band it was typical of them to refer to each other as their best friends and, given the lives they led, I think the simple fact that no one else could understand what it was like to be a Beatle would have meant they all shared a special bond. However, they all had friendships outside of the band and this was something that could cause issues for John when it came to Paul.

According to Tune In, Mal initially became friends with Paul during the band's initial shows at the Cavern Club then, after a suggestion from George, Mal became a part of the Beatles entourage thereafter. Mal had friendships with all the Beatles, as part of their inner circle, but from his comments it appears John took umbrage with the closeness of Mal’s friendship with Paul:

“Paul would suddenly come in with this circle saying, “This is Magical Mystery Tour, will you write that bit?” And I was choked that he’d arranged it all with Mal anyway, for a kickoff, and had all this idea going”

St. Regis Hotel interview, Sept. 5, 1971

Mal also comes up when John discusses his recollections of the writing of Eleanor Rigby:

“So rather than ask me, “John, do these lyrics—” Because by that period, he didn’t want to say that – to me. Okay? So what he would say was, “Hey, you guys, finish off the lyrics,”... “ Now, I sat there with Mal Evans, a road manager who was a telephone installer, and Neil Aspinall, who was a not-completed student accountant who became our road manager. And I was insulted and hurt that he’d thrown it out in the air”...” There might be a version that they contributed, but there isn’t a line in there that they put in.“

Playboy interview, David Sheff 1980

John’s discomfort with the closeness of Paul’s relationship with Mal was something that wasn’t lost on Mal’s wife Lil:

“He was always at their beck and call. He was a nice fella to have around, so much so that it could provoke little jealousies within the band. When I met Yoko years after Mal died, she said John had told her he’d been very jealous at one point of Mal’s relationship with Paul.”

Lil Evans interview with Ray Connolly, 2005

Love interests - Linda McCartney

Throughout their friendship both John and Paul had quite a few love interests, which (to varying degrees) prompted jealousy between them.

Although John displayed jealousy of a few of Paul’s love interests this was no more apparent than with Paul’s first wife Linda McCartney, which is confirmed by both John’s words and actions regarding Linda and her partnership with Paul:

“"Then Klein informed Lennon that McCartney had secretly been increasing his stake in Northern Songs. ‘John flew into a rage,’ recalled Apple executive Peter Brown. ‘At one point I thought he was really going to hit Paul, but he managed to calm himself down.’ One unconfirmed report of this meeting had Lennon leaping towards Linda McCartney, his fists raised in her face"

Peter Doggett, You Never Give Me Your Money

"Int: When did you first meet her [Linda]? John: The first time I saw her was after that press conference to announce Apple in America. We were just going back to the airport and she was in the car with us. I didn't think she was particularly attractive, I wondered what he was bothering having her in the car for. A bit too tweedy, you know. But she sat in the car and took photographs and that was it. And the next minute she's married him."

St. Regis Hotel interview, Sept. 5, 1971

“I was reading your letter and wondering what middle aged cranky Beatle fan wrote it... "What the hell—it’s Linda! . . . Linda— if you don’t care what I say—shut up!—let Paul write—or whatever.”

"Of course, the money angle is important—to all of us—especially after all the petty shit that came from your insane family/in laws—and GOD HELP YOU OUT, PAUL—see you in two years—I reckon you’ll be out then"

Draft letter from John Lennon to Linda McCartney, circa 1971

"The presumption is a) the Beatles would get together again or are even thinking about it and b) if they got together, John and Yoko split, Paul and Linda split"

John (with Yoko) talks to John Fielding on Weekend World, 1973

"John often speculated on why Paul and Linda remained married while, at the same time, resenting their evident happiness, to the extent that he had Green do a tarot reading to ensure him that Paul and Linda were really secretly miserable and were going to divorce within a year"

According to Fred Seaman and John Green, source

Paul

Of course jealousy wasn't a one-way street in the Lennon-McCartney relationship. Unlike with John, for Paul I'm focusing more on the key people I believe his jealousy, regarding John, was directed to:

Stuart Sutcliffe

John met Stu at Art College and struck up a really close friendship with him. At the point that John met Stu, John had already become friends with Paul so Paul felt threatened when Stu entered the picture:

"When he [Stu] came into the band, around Christmas of 1959, we were a little jealous of him; it was something I didn’t deal with very well. We were always slightly jealous of John’s other friendships.

When Stuart came in, it felt as if he was taking the position away from George and me. We had to take a bit of a back seat."

Paul McCartney, Anthology 2000

"Paul was saying something about Stu’s girl – he was jealous because she was a great girl, and Stu hit him, on stage. And Stu wasn’t a violent guy at all."

John Lennon, 1967 Anthology 2000

"I looked up to Stu. I depended on him to tell me the truth. Stu would tell me if something was good and I’d believe him. We were awful to him sometimes. Especially Paul, always picking on him. I used to explain afterwards that we didn’t dislike him, really."

John Lennon, The Beatles Hunter Davies 1968

Yoko Ono

Of all the relationships I've already discussed, the relationship and jealousy displayed from Paul towards Yoko is probably the most widely discussed in Beatles historiography and general discourse. From the official start of Yoko's relationship with John in 1968 it was clear that Paul resented her presence in John's life and her proximity to the band:

"He even sent them [John and Yoko] a hate letter once, unsigned, typed. I brought it in with the morning mail. Paul put most of his fan mail in a big basket and let it sit for weeks, but John and Yoko opened every piece. When they got to the anonymous note, they looked puzzled, looking at each other with genuine pain in their eyes. ‘You and your Jap tart think you’re hot shit’, it said."

Francie Schwartz, Body Count 1972

"Cause she’s [Yoko] very much to do with it from John’s angle, that’s the thing, you know. And I – the thing is that I – there’s— Again, like, there’s always only two answers. One is to fight it, and fight her, and try and get The Beatles back to four people without Yoko, and sort of ask her to sit down at the board meetings. Or else, the other thing is to just realize that she’s there, you know. And he’s not gonna sort of – split with her, just for our sakes."

Paul McCartney, Let It Be Sessions, 1969

"I told John on the phone the other day that at the beginning of last year I was annoyed with him. I was jealous because of Yoko, and afraid about the break-up of a great musical partnership. It’s taken me a year to realise that they were in love. Just like Linda and me."

Paul McCartney, interview with Ray Connolly, 1970

What are the similarities and differences in the way jealousy manifested for John and Paul?

I think it's obvious but bears repeating that both John and Paul displayed jealousy towards other people who they felt would threaten their relationship so that's central to all the instances I have flagged, Jim, Mal, Linda, Stu, Yoko all posed real or imagined threats to John and Paul's partnership.

However, you'll note that I included more sources to display John's jealousy regarding Paul and that I categorised John's jealousy targets whereas I only pulled out two key individuals for Paul, this isn't to say that John was more jealous than Paul was, as jealousy isn't something you can quantify, but to highlight my opinion that Paul's jealousy regarding John was more targeted than John's jealousy regarding Paul. I think what stands out to me is that, I think generally Stu and Yoko are held up as the prime examples of Paul's jealousy of other people getting close to John, as far as we know, Paul never had significant issues with other people who formed close relationships with John like Pete Shotton, Cynthia Lennon, Magic Alex etc., why was that? I think that Paul was more threatened when he felt that John was replacing him so by bringing Stu into the band (even though he wasn't a musician) and Yoko into the studio (one instance where Paul was especially hurt was when John gave Paul's line in The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill to Yoko to sing), Paul perhaps felt that his place as John's primary collaborator was in jeopardy and that he could lose a partnership that had become central to his self-worth as a person - that, I believe, was when his jealousy was most likely to rise to the fore. John, on the other hand, had a much wider range of targets when it came to jealousy regarding Paul, why was John jealous of Linda? Linda wasn't trying to replace John as Paul's collaborator, if anything she wanted the Lennon-McCartney partnership to be stronger. Why was John jealous of Mal? Mal wasn't a musician, Mal was a huge fan of the band and constantly worked to fulfil their requests, so why was John so threatened by his friendship with Paul? For me, John's jealousy regarding Paul was more than just a fear of directly being replaced, I believe John's jealousy was fundamentally triggered by a fear of abandonment. I think the childhood trauma John experienced, of being left by both his parents, meant that whenever any of his close friendships and relationships were threatened, or he felt that someone close to him may leave him, he would act out. John fell out with his childhood best friend Pete when he got a girlfriend, John hit Cynthia when he saw her dancing with Stu, John was rude to several of Paul's love interests and ultimately John never fully accepted Paul's relationship with Linda because, although he could see that she could offer Paul the family life he always wanted, John didn't want Linda to take Paul away and give him a family that meant that Paul would no longer be able to prioritise John in his life as he had in the past.

Ultimately, we'll never know all the ways that jealousy factored into John and Paul's relationship with each other and those around them, as I'm sure it impacted several relationships in more complex ways than I can articulate (i.e. I suspect jealousy played a part in Paul's initial resentment of Brian but they grew closer over time so maybe Paul's jealousy lessened over time or Brian became less of a threat?). I do think it's important to consider that jealousy was present on both sides and was likely a factor in the breakdown of John and Paul's relationship, the breakdown of the Beatles and was a continued factor in disrupting reconciliations between John and Paul into the 70s and 1980.

#the beatles #john lennon #paul mccartney #john and paul #paul and linda #john and yoko #jealous guy #linda mccartney #yoko ono #stuart sutcliffe #mal evans #jim mccartney #brian epstein #long post #thoughts

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minervas-sandwich · 4 years

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Overturning Roe v. Wade has a direct impact on shit like Elon Musk's Neuralink

Roe v. Wade (1973) is famous for being a pioneer in women's right to choose if they want an abortion, but it built on a previous case called Griswold v. Connecticut from 1965. The case was about a doctor who met privately with married couples to discuss birth control options, which was illegal in Connecticut due to a law that had been passed in 1879 that banned the use of contraceptives.

Griswold v. Connecticut made it all the way to the Supreme Court because the question of the Connecticut law's validity was raised. Was it legal for the state to regulate the medical decisions of married couples? The court decided that it was not, due to the implied right to privacy.

This idea comes from a reoccurring theme throughout the Consitution- the best example is the 4th Amendment, which says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, in particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." In other words, you have a right to your privacy which prevents the police from barging into your home and taking whatever they like. The 3rd Amendmen: "No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law." Once again, you have a right to privacy that keeps strangers, even heavil-armed and government-backed strangers, from entering your household. The 1st Amendment freedom of religion is a right to practice your religion with a certain amount of guaranteed privacy from the government.

Griswold v. Connecticut firmly established the implied right to privacy which Roe v. Wade later used to argue that women have an implied right to privacy of their own bodies. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, so is the precedent that says people have a RIGHT to control what happens with their own bodies.

With the creation of a device like the neuralink, this has become more than and issue over abortion. If someone were to have the neuralink installed and we no longer have this clearly established right to bodily privacy- and by extension, mental privacy- Elon Musk can put whatever he wants in your head. He said himself, "All of your senses, your sight, hearing, feeling, pain — these are all electrical signals sent by neurons to your brain. And if you can correct these signals, you can correct everything from hearing loss [to the other issues listed above and more.]"

Obviously, this has amazing potential, especially in helping people with these kinds of disabilities! But there is one terrifying issue with this, which is that whoever controls the computer then has unfiltered access to your brain and body.

As of right now, the only barrier between Elon Musk and you is your right to privacy and control over your own body. Do not let them overturn Roe v. Wade, no matter your stance on abortion.

#elon musk #abortion #roe v wade #neuralink

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bunny95 · 4 years

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A love letter to valak.

Walking into the movie I had high hopes since The Conjuring 2 was great installment of the first one and overall the best one of the conjuring franchise and... valak😍 it was love at first sight.

The Nun opens with one of the best opening sequences of the past decade, two nuns running from a mysterious presence one of them gets dragged in a dark room while the other one commits suicide by hanging herself from the window of the abbey now that's dope scene and.... from there on the entire narrative morphed into a pile of fecal matter, with little to no investment in character development, over emphasis on valak for money shots that were filled with bad cgi, cheap jump scares that one can in 2018 easily predict as soon as the sound drains out or sudden movements from characters, unnecessary one liner jokes during the finale (some one should beat the Disney out of the director and the supporting staff before they proceed to make a horror movie) and in the end valak makes frenchie (Jonas Bloquet)swallow a snake because we have to connect it to The Conjuring 2 😒... fuck. After the movie ended akash aka sky asked me kaisi thi I was like ya it was ok...... but my inner grammatically challenged vegan LA female protester🙍‍♀️ went:- Oh my god are u like 4 realll, are u like kidding me,wtf.. like literally happened like wtf this is like literally offensive on like a lot of way like literally....... 🦗🦗

Drunk texas cowboy:- BEAT IT BOY quit bitching around yapping around like the rest of em, you ain't no different boy you got none but none constructive to say do ya...

🤓well Mr.Sir man let me construct...

The movie is set in the year 1952 in romania which is not very long from the time when the second world war ended that is in 1945 and most of the European countries are recovering from it, almost everyone was hit hard because of the war, people lost their loved ones, their families and are will to do anything to get there lives back on track, moving back to the narrative sister irene (taissa farmiga) is one of those people, this movie should have kept its main focus on her and play around that idea of demon nun also valak should be just a demon presence in the abbey not a demonic nun, there should be a proper transition to it because as far as the facts go regarding the real Lorraine Warren, she saw a black long shadow in front of her in one of her visions and James Wan (director of conjuring 2) came up with the idea of valak the demonic nun so moving forward, irene is young and in those days young girls were encouraged or sometimes forced to join the church and become a nun, and here she looks pretty comfortable with being a nun since she is playing JURRASIC PARK with kids in school but from there on when she is asked to tag along with father burke on a case regarding the investigation of the suicide and also to ensure the integrity of the abbey she seems a bit hesitant because she hasn't even taken her final vows. Also they must have casted bonnie aaron(who plays valak) as one of the superior nun in the abbey who would act as one of the main character of the movie and as the movie progresses there should have been a demonic possession of one of the nuns in the abbey and father burke must lose here leading to a failed exorcism (now don't give this sequence more than 5mins because now there is so much originality one can provide to an exorcism scene since the best one was done in 1973 the exorcist😍) now this would break the moral of father and would completely shatter the faith of irene (taissa farmiga) this is the moment when shit starts getting real for her she would start questioning herself, her faith and is she really fit to become a nun, then from there she starts having conversations with Bonnie Aaron's regarding faith what's real evil and other matters.Bonnie's characters should be warm and welcoming and not a stuck up this would ease irene a bit but later on as the conversation keeps moving and starts getting personal it should getting ugly as at that moment bonnie is taken over by valak and valak is speaking through her this would be a good scare and would completely break irene of whatever is left of it, this would pave way for some good built up original sacres like the ones in conjuring 2, also I would keep the sequence when irene is tilted infront of the sack covered nuns that was a good sequence and then she should run towards the compound of the abbey (that compound should be the place where valak was first summoned not that underground room, you are shooting a movie in Romania for fucks sake exploit the surroundings) for the finale it should be a complete slaughter house she should receive complete stigmata from possessed bonnie who would talk to irene while she is tortured brutally and would quickly turn her upside down like a cross and she should collapse right there and then, and that is the time she should have a vision which would restore her faith and then she fights back bonnie of course dies but that's how bonnie becomes the demonic nun or valak gets fully transformed into a demonic nun. Now all this makes sense to me.

Vegan LA protestor:- that's all good but like what about this being a prequel to the conjuring like how would like that happen like....

OK fuck let valak make frenchie swallow a snake😒

Fucking snakes hate them.

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everythingtimeless · 7 years

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Historical Hour With Hilary: 1x06

As ever, catch up on any installments you missed or want to re-read here (or if you just need more of my Historian Facepalms of Despair in your life). Otherwise, I swear the time machine worked, and we headed to Washington D.C. in June 1972, rather than, say, August 2017. Join us as our team investigates... uh.... Watergate. That’s definitely it. Watergate.

We already touched a bit on the weird, weird world of the sixties in our investigation of the real-life history of Atomic City, but hold on, it gets weirder. Almost fifty years ago might not seem like that much in the scheme of things, but it’s still half a century, and if you want a microcosm of just how much the early twenty-first sees things differently from the late twentieth, and how much our collective mindset has changed, try this on for size: between 1968 and 1972, airplane hijackings were at an all-time high. Over 130 planes were commandeered in just under five years, a rate of one hijacking on average every 13 days, and usually ordered to divert to Cuba, where the hijackers hoped the new Castro regime would receive them favorably (they were very wrong). Did the airlines immediately pull together and try to stop this scourge? At a July 1968 hearing to address the problem, a Federal Aviation Administration representative, Irving Ripp, thought it was impossible to fix:

Senator George Smathers of Florida countered Ripp’s gloom by raising the possibility of using metal detectors or X-ray machines to screen all passengers. He noted that these relatively new technologies were already in place at several maximum-security prisons and sensitive military facilities, where they were performing admirably. “I see no reason why similar devices couldn’t be installed at airport check-in gates to determine whether passengers are carrying guns or other weapons just prior to emplaning,” Smathers said. But Ripp dismissed the senator’s suggestion as certain to have “a bad psychological effect on passengers … It would scare the pants off people. Plus people would complain about invasion of privacy.” None of the senators made any further inquiries about electronic screening.

Yep. The government figured it was way too much trouble to set up metal detectors and screen everyone, and worried about invading passenger privacy (ha), so they... just let them go on. They equipped planes with Spanish translation books to communicate with presumably Spanish-speaking hijackers, maps of Cuba and landing protocols for Jose Marti International Airport, and figured they’d get any ransom money back when the plane and passengers were released. One hijacking these days is major news. Now imagine that happening every two weeks and that every time you got on a plane, there was as much chance that a wacko with a gun would order you to go to Cuba, as you would get to your destination, and nobody giving that much of a shit about it. Funnily enough, all these procedures to make hijackings as easy and painless as possible did squat to stop hijackings, and it finally took the November 1972 hijacking of Southern Airways Flight 49, where the hijackers threatened to crash the plane into the Oak Ridge nuclear reactor in Tennessee if their demands weren’t met, to impel American airports to implement large-scale passenger screening in January 1973.

So. Something to think about next time you complain about having to take off your shoes and throw away your water bottles at the airport.

Of course, if you weren’t shrugging off the constant hijackings, you were probably shrugging off the constant pipe bombings. Protest bombings in cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco were completely common, done by groups such as Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front and the Symbionese Liberation Army, and between 1971-1972, there were up to 2,500 bombings on American soil. Since most of these took place late at night and with few injuries or casualties (the biggest attack killed four people), America just... kind of ignored them and went about their day. This was well before the internet and social media, of course, so there was no instant publicity, but imagine if this happened today. We’d be living under martial law and convinced the end times were at hand. Between the hijackings and bombings, the 1970s represented a golden age of domestic terrorism, and one which is not considered that much of an issue today. It’s a miracle we survived the 60s or the 70s, apparently (and yes, I’m aware the present doesn’t have much room to point fingers).

Which brings us to... Watergate.

The break-in of June 17, 1972 (you can read the FBI’s full vault of Watergate documents here) was in of itself, not that major of an event. It was quickly dismissed as a “third-rate burglary” and not given much play, but two young reporters at the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward (if you’re wondering why the Post goes so hard at Captain Cheeto, they have practice with this) felt that something wasn’t quite right. They started to dig deeper, and the result of their investigation meant that Nixon.... won one of the most overwhelming presidential re-election victories of all time against Democratic challenger George McGovern in November 1972, taking 49 of 50 states and 520 electoral votes. Welp?

(Patience, grasshopper.)

As the investigation continued into 1973, it began to put more and more pressure on the White House, and in case you’re wondering, yes, Nixon was also a crackpot about nuclear weapons. He is reported to have once said at a party, “I could leave this room, and in 25 minutes, 70 million people would be dead.” Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, second-in-command on the nuclear hierarchy, was so worried about Nixon in this regard that anyone who received “unusual orders” from the president was supposed to check with him first before they carried them out. The investigation was also complicated by the fact that the FBI was run by one of the biggest bastards in American political history, J. Edgar Hoover, who Nixon was (probably rightfully) afraid of, and the wiretap files reveal that Nixon and his associates felt that Hoover would “pull down the temple” (see page 7) if they tried to remove him. (Hoover died in May 1972, before the scandal broke, but fear of him had been a major influence in their planning of the operation.) Finally, the “smoking gun” tape, released in July 1974, proved Nixon’s guilt beyond all doubt, and led to the drafting of the articles of impeachment. They included:

1. making false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States;

2. withholding relevant and material evidence or information from lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States;

3. approving, condoning, acquiescing in, and counselling witnesses with respect to the giving of false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States and false or misleading testimony...

4. interfering or endeavouring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and Congressional Committees;

5. approving, condoning, and acquiescing in, the surreptitious payment of substantial sums of money for the purpose of obtaining the silence or influencing the testimony of witnesses, potential witnesses or individuals who participated in such unlawful entry and other illegal activities;

6. endeavouring to misuse the Central Intelligence Agency, an agency of the United States;

7. disseminating information received from officers of the Department of Justice of the United States [...] for the purpose of aiding and assisting such subjects in their attempts to avoid criminal liability;

8. making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a thorough and complete investigation had been conducted with respect to allegations of misconduct....

9. endeavouring to cause prospective defendants, and individuals duly tried and convicted, to expect favoured treatment and consideration in return for their silence or false testimony...

Oh yeah, and Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew, had resigned in October 1973 to avoid charges of corruption and... wait for it... tax evasion.

I’m sorry, can we take a quick break? My neck is getting sore from all this staring into the camera as if I’m on The Office.

Anyway. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, rather than be almost certainly found guilty (you can read the full procedures of the House Judiciary Committee here). (And I haven’t even mentioned the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre, where he fired the special prosecutor investigating the case). The archive for the 1974 booklet outlining constitutional grounds for the impeachment of a president notes that it is “suddenly of possible relevance again.” I see no connection here. None.

In any event, the Time Team (and Rufus) also meet up with the Black Panthers, which major props to Timeless for a) including in a mainstream television episode, and b) not treating them immediately as the “bad” black people in the civil rights struggle. The group, founded in 1966, wrote a ten-point program in October of that year that makes for frankly depressing reading, because we’re fighting the exact battle today, over forty years later. Among the Panthers’ demands included really terrible, outrageous things like equitable access to housing, employment, healthcare, accurate historical education (all together now: HA) and an exemption for black men from having to serve in the military. (It’s no surprise that Hoover fucking hated them and labeled them the “greatest threat to internal security in the country,” promising to stamp them out by 1969.) Remember, 1972 was only four years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and while we think simplistically of the 1960s as the “civil rights decade,” this was very much an ongoing, live-wire issue. So in sum: terrorism, a crazy president guilty of high treason, and rampant racial tension and discrimination.

/looks back into the camera as if I’m on The Office

/keeps looking

/KEEPS LOOKING

Okay, I think you get it.

Next week: The team gets stuck in 1754, and we take another long, hard look at something else this country doesn’t want to talk about, when we meet the real-life Shawnee chieftainess Nonhelema.

#nbc timeless #timeless #timeless rewatch #timeless meta #historical hour with hilary #1x06

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bulbsanta06-blog · 5 years

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Art in Chicago may not be able to distill 150 years of history into one volume, but it sure looks good trying

Can 150 years of art be distilled into a single book? Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now is being marketed as the first single-volume history of the art of this town. It is neither exhaustive nor comprehensive; instead it lets six writers take 20- to 40-year chunks of history and focus on their own interests to stitch together a messy crazy quilt before ceding the stitching to a series of contemporary artists and writers who add the ribbons and bows. The result is sometimes baffling, sometimes insightful, but ultimately too open-ended to be definitive.

Published as a companion piece to the Terra Foundation's year-long Art Design Chicago initiative, a series of exhibits meant to celebrate Chicago's history of art and design, the book gives plenty of attention to the Hairy Who, yet barely pays lip service to important artists like Francis Chapin and Todros Geller, both of whom were the subjects of exhibitions included in Terra's program). The book's most striking feature is its bold purple cover with embossed lettering.

Wendy Greenhouse tackles 1871 to 1912 in the first chapter, touching on the first artists who settled or, more often, passed through the city, and on the formation of the cultural institutions that preside over its art world to this day. The Art Institute, originally an art school, quickly became the locus around which virtually every other visual-art entity in the city revolved. But the patrons who bought the art that filled its galleries took their cues from the east coast and Europe; thus the museum has always been known the world over as a great repository of art from out of town.

The most insightful (and depressing) part of Greenhouse's chapter is her insight that the tendency of artists to flee Chicago for more supportive or lucrative locales to grow their careers has been a key phenomenon from the start. Samuel Marsden Brookes, purportedly Chicago's first resident professional artist, disposed of all his unsold stock by lottery and went abroad in 1845, only a dozen years after the city was founded. Artists have been fleeing ever since. The reasons the city has never been able to adequately support and sustain its creative class are many, but one interesting theory Greenhouse offers is that, obsessed as the city's leaders have always been with pragmatic ways of making a buck, art's nebulous qualities—such as reckoning with the human condition—have always been a tough sell here. Nevertheless, proven and sometimes risque work from elsewhere has always found champions here.The Art Institute hosted the first Claude Monet museum show in 1895.

Jennifer Jason Marshall covers 1913 to 1943 in the second chapter. It is by far the most lucidly-written and persuasively argued part of the entire book. In 1913 the city hosted a touring version of the Armory Show, which introduced many of of the most important European modernists to America; local art students staged a mock trial of "Henry Hair Mattress" on the last day of the show in a fit of provincialism and frustration at being left out of the exhibit. But an Arts Club of Chicago show of Picasso's drawings—his first museum show anywhere—was a big influence on a young Leon Golub, one of the progenitors of Chicago's homegrown mongrel version of figurative art. Other painters like Aaron Bohrod and Archibald Motley took inspiration from writers such as Theodore Dreiser and the art of New York's Ashcan School to create a lively, warts-and-all portrait of the city.

Maggie Taft, one of the lead editors of the book, tackles 1933 to 1956 next, and echoes some of the concerns from Greenhouse's section. One hundred years after its founding, Chicago was still searching for its own identity. "It is no culture yet, just a million beginnings," observed László Moholy-Nagy, a recent transplant from the Bauhaus in Berlin, in TK YEAR. The city was still more often a way station or a place to start a career rather than a destination.

Still, as Taft's coeditor Robert Cozzolino points out in the fourth chapter, which covers 1948 through 1973, artists kept coming here. "It was like you could run free because there was no place to run to, so to speak," Golub said. This was the period during which the city's most enduring art style, broadly called Chicago Imagism, sprang up and was quickly codified. It was a visual art inspired by artifacts found at the Field Museum, by self-taught artists, and by ephemera such as ads and comic books. It was an emphatic rebuke to both European modernism and the abstract expressionists who held sway on the east and west coasts at the time.

Rebecca Zorach writes about the Wall of Respect and other city murals in the next chapter and also the formation of the DuSable Museum and other cultural institutions in the city's African-American and Latino communities between 1961 and 1976. The tensions between the various local modes of expression and the international artwork favored by city leaders came to a head with the installation of the Picasso statue in Daley Plaza in 1967. The reaction from the neighborhoods was summed up by poet Don L. Lee (later known as Haki Madhubuti): "Picasso ain't got shit on us, send him back to art school."

Jenni Sorkin focuses on the long tradition of alternative and feminist art spaces in chapter six, which covers 1973 to 1993. The question of why these places often close after a decade or less is broached but not answered. Her argument that it's part of the natural life cycle of an artist-run space to disappear once its members leave for better opportunities sounds like putting a happy spin on an intractable problem.

The rest of the book is devoted to a grab bag of short essays and interviews with local luminaries. Comics artist Chris Ware offers a typically eloquent and self-deprecating evocation of Chicago: "Our city could arguably be considered the nation's heart—or at least its large intestine." And gallerist and historian John Corbett reveals a bit of how the sausage is made in a vignette about how he tricked a local junk dealer into parting with a hidden treasure.

Taft, Cozzolino, et al have assembled their version of a historical survey of Chicago's art. To anyone involved in any way in that history, there will be gaps and omissions, which will vary according to their own interests. But can a single book give an accurate overview of such a heterogenous thing as the art of a city? My bet is that this book will be best remembered as a handsome design object, which is the fate of most coffee-table art books, many of which have much less attractive covers than this one. v

Source: https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/art-in-chicago-terra-foundation-art-design-chicago/Content?oid=62022291

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

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thewebofslime · 5 years

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Venezuela - Three Total Blackouts In Three Days - Government Presumes U.S. Cyberattack Venezuela currently experiences multiple total outages of its electricity network. It is quite possible or even likely that the U.S. is causing these incidents. But it is not certain. Shit happens and so do long blackouts: The Northeast blackout of 2003 was a widespread power outage throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States and the Canadian province of Ontario on August 14, 2003, beginning just after 4:10 p.m. EDT. Some power was restored by 11 p.m. Most did not get their power back until two days later. In other areas, it took nearly a week or two for power to be restored. [...] The outage, which was much more widespread than the Northeast Blackout of 1965, affected an estimated 10 million people in Ontario and 45 million people in eight U.S. states. The blackout's primary cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, causing operators to remain unaware of the need to re-distribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into collapse of the entire electric grid. When the northeast blackout happened no one blamed President Bush or socialism for the outage. Bringing an electricity grid back into full and balanced operation is quite difficult because power generation and consumption must always be balanced. Restoration can only be done gradually. It is a complicate process and takes time. The Guri Dam hydro electric power station produces up to 10,235 megawatt. It provides 70-80% of all electricity used in Venezuela. bigger On Thursday afternoon local time the Guri Dam system failed: NetBlocks.org @netblocks - 22:04 utc - 7 Mar 2019 Urgent: Network measurements show extraordinary nationwide impact as #Venezuela is knocked offline amid power outages from 8:55 PM UTC (4:55 PM VET); incident ongoing #7Mar #SinLuz netblocks.org/reports/ven ... The blackout affected 18 out of 23 states in Venezuela with some 25 million people. It took 24 hours for some power to come back. It would have taken another day or two for the network to again reach full capacity. But today another total outage happened: NetBlocks.org @netblocks - 16:10 utc - 9 Mar 2019 Urgent: Second national power outage detected across #Venezuela; real-time data shows 96% of country now offline #SinLuz #ApagonNacional #9Mar netblocks.org/reports/second .. The internet connectivity of a country if often an excellent indicator for power outages. Mobile towers, routers and switches need electricity. bigger The graph shows a total of three outages over now three days. The last incident might have been caused as a side effect of a previous outage, by recovery attempts or by a separate sabotage act: Reports and videos of an explosion at the SIDOR steel company hydroelectric sub-station in Puerto Ordaz, Guayana started to circulate on social media shortly after the latest disruption was detected, indicating a cause for the new outage. Unverified videos show a burning transformer at a larger substation. When the first outage happened U.S. Senator Marco Rubio eagerly mocked the government of Venezuela. He also mentioned that some backup generators failed: Marco Rubio @marcorubio - 22:18 utc - 7 Mar 2019 ALERT: Reports of a complete power outage all across #Venezuela at this moment. 18 of 23 states & the capital district are currently facing complete blackouts. Main airport also without power & backup generators have failed. #MaduroRegime is a complete disaster. After the first outage the government of Venezuela said that it was caused by a cyberattack on the automated control system but gave no further details: Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez said Maduro's government planned to bring "proof" of US involvement in the blackout to a UN Human Rights envoy who is set to visit the country in the coming days. Rodriguez pointed to the Rubio tweet: 'How did Marco Rubio know that backup generators had failed? At that time, no one knew that,' the Bolivarian government official asked. The Venezuelan government should contact the Russian cybersecurity specialists at Kaspersky Lab who are well known for detecting U.S. produced malware like the one used for the Stuxnet attack on Iran's uranium enrichment plant. Kaspersky is highly respected in the international cybersecurity scene. Should it confirm that a U.S. attack malware caused the problem the U.S. will find it difficult to deny. Elliot Abrams, convicted for lying to Congress in two cases and Trump's current henchmen for 'regime change' in Venezuela, denied U.S. responsibility: “This is a multiyear decline in Venezuela,” Mr. Abrams said. “The situation there, due to the mismanagement, the economic policies and the sheer corruption of this regime, are the cause of those problems.” In 2003, during the northeast blackout, Mr. Abrams was a special assistant to President G.W. Bush. He did not blame "the mismanagement, the economic policies and the sheer corruption" the Bush regime when that much larger outage happened. It is quite possible that the U.S. is causing the outages in Venezuela's network. The second total outage yesterday and the third today could be explained by a malware hidden within the control system of the whole network or in some important side components. It took the Iranian government months to find the malware that again and again crashed its uranium centrifuges. Simply restarting the control systems did not help. The U.S. is well know for cyberattacks as well as for attacks on electricity networks. In 2012 it knocked Syria off the internet when it 'bricked' the central router in Syria while attempting to install malware. In 2015 it systematically bombed Syria's power plants. The CIA and other U.S. agencies have been quite active in Venezuela for a long time. In 2017 then CIA director Mike Pompeo admitted that he was tying to get others on board for 'regime change': In one of the clearest clues yet about Washington’s latest meddling in the politics of Latin America, CIA director Mike Pompeo said he was “hopeful that there can be a transition in Venezuela and we the CIA is doing its best to understand the dynamic there”. He added: “I was just down in Mexico City and in Bogota a week before last talking about this very issue, trying to help them understand the things they might do so that they can get a better outcome for their part of the world and our part of the world.” In preparation for the 1973 coup against Allende in Chile the U.S. also caused blackouts. Back then the New York Times reported: SANTIAGO, Chile, Aug. 13 — A power cut brought a total blackout here as President Salvador Allende Gossens was in the middle of a nationwide address on the country's political crisis. ... The electricity went off at 10:15 P.M., 35 minutes after President Allende had begun to speak, citing long list of recent acts of terrorism and sabotage that he attributed to “fascist opposition.” He went back on the air, The Associated Press reported, as power was beginning to be restored in some areas, and said that the blackout could have been either “a technically explicable failure or a fascist attack.” The news agency said that unidentified saboteurs blew up an electric‐power transmission line outside the city, attributing the information to Fernando Figueroa, general manager of the state power system. It wasn't just the "fascist opposition" but the CIA behind it that caused the chaos: As described in the Church Committee report, the CIA was involved in multiple plots designed to remove Allende .. [...] [T]he CIA, with the approval of the 40 Committee, attempted to bribe the Chilean legislature, tried to influence public opinion against Allende, and provided funding to strikes designed to coerce him into resigning. [...] In addition, the CIA gave extensive support for black propaganda against Allende, channeled mostly through El Mercurio. Financial assistance was also given to Allende's political opponents, and for organizing strikes and unrest to destabilize the government. On February 24, after the 'humanitarian aid' stunt at the Colombian border failed, we foresaw that such incidents would happen: U.S. Vice President Mike Pence will arrive in Colombia tomorrow to tell Guaido how to proceed. The focus will most likely be on how to start a sabotage campaign and a low level guerrilla war within Venezuela. Both will certainly hurt the country and its people but they are unlikely to achieve the larger "regime change" aim. A U.S. cyberattack on Venezuela's power grid will have taken some time to implement. One first has to understand a system before one can sabotage it without leaving obvious fingerprints. If the U.S. is involved in these incidents, it is likely that it prepared for this months if not years ago. Attacks on electricity networks affect the civilian population. Hospitals are hard to run without electricity. Lives are endangered. Both , the Obama and the Trump administration, rejected international attempts to ban cyberattacks that "indiscriminate or systemic harm to individuals and critical infrastructure": All members of the European Union signed the agreement. Australia and Turkey joined the United States in declining. ... Israel, which along with the United States conducted the most sophisticated cyberattack in history, the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, also declined to sign. The U.S. also rejected an agreement that would ban cyber manipulation of elections. The given reasons are of interest: [T]he United States has interfered in foreign elections before, including Italy in the 1940s and Iran and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s, and some officials say that no American president should be forced to give up that tool if it could prevent a war. Similarly, the Pentagon worries about commitments to avoid using cyberattacks as a prelude to military action. The United States had a secret program, code-named “Nitro Zeus,” which called for turning off the power grid in much of Iran if the two countries had found themselves in a conflict over Iran’s nuclear program. Such a use of cyberweapons is now a key element in war planning by all of the major world powers. It will take a cyberattack on vital U.S. systems with long lasting effects to change its malicious standpoint and behavior.

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bruceeves · 7 years

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“Work # 978: Chronicle of a Life Retold”

In my opinion, the late 1970s was the last gasp of true artistic freedom. I initially got involved with the precursor to the CEAC (Centre for Experimental Art and Communication), the Kensington Arts Association right after school in ’75, because there was an involvement with the gay liberation movement and they seemed to be doing interesting things other than simply just slapping paintings on a wall. As an art student I was very interested in conceptual art and the KAA was very much on the same wavelength with me, so it seemed a natural fit. It’s hard to imagine today, but by comparison there was very little activity in the art world at the time. Discounting the commercial secondary market places in and around Yorkville, there was only the Isaac’s and Lamanna galleries, at Yonge and Bloor, that were presenting current work; and the alternative artist-run places were only beginning to pop up – KAA and A Space opened in the very early ‘70s, Art Metropole around 1975, and all the others were later.

In 1970 a loose grouping of people (read commune) living in a vernacular Toronto house at 4 Kensington Avenue (just north of Dundas) in the Kensington market neighbourhood formed what would become by 1973 the Body Politic newspaper and the Glad Day bookstore, which would have been at the beginning of the second wave of the gay liberation movement in Toronto. I was still a starry-eyed art student so this was a little before my time, but gay issues were central to my art practice from that time onward.

The work I was doing at the time was certainly encouraged by KAA and in truth there were limited venues at the time that would have welcomes unabashedly gay-themed work. General Idea was dancing around the edges and being euphemistic about it for commercial careerist reasons, but they grew increasingly conservative and opportunistic as time went on. While its nostalgic today to talk about ‘liberation’ against a backdrop that positions any gay person as being as controversial as being a blond, at that time in the early to mid ‘70s there was a current of activity among groups and individuals who were like the grandchildren of Warhol working parallel to conceptual artists – the Cockettes, John Waters, Gilbert and George, Charles Ludlam, Jack Smith (and me). We were Warhol plus gay liberation. Even as late as the mid-70s society was very harsh in dealing with gay people – lack of job protection, the relationship with the police was fraught, but more interestingly, the art world was notoriously homophobic (I’d venture to say it still is) – so for anyone to make gay issues a central part of their art practice was quite radical at the time. I remember being asked by our Canada Council officer, Brenda Wallace, “why was so much hostility between A Space and the CEAC – is it because their gay?” How could I possibly answer that without laughing in her face?

The issues today are different, and in a way more challenging, because with tolerance comes blandness . . . (Being tolerated is, in essence, merely being allowed to exist, akin to the Irish novelist/playwright Sebastian Barry claim that “people talk about tolerance, but it’s not really about tolerance. It should also be about emulation and reverence and learning from.”)

My involvement with KAA was gradually increasing over the course of 1976 and at the time I was making a series of theoretical drawings for proposed environmental installations involving bodily fluid such as shit walls, cum floors . . . The only one actually realized was a room-sized floor-installation of cum – “Work # 059: Semen Floor” (1976) at the same time I participated in a KAA project in cooperation with Ryerson University to produce a series of multi-camera broadcast quality videotapes with the goal of having artist-made videos shown on television. My project was intended to be an S/M fashion show but the camera crew stormed out in protest at the appearance on camera of a man naked except for boots, leather vest and chaps. The screen shot here is from the couple of minutes that was taped.

It was at the new John Street location that I became much more directly involved, and that space was needed because the programming required it the Kensington location was merely the narrow ground floor of a not very large house; 86 John Street by comparison was two floors of quasi-industrial space that could easily accommodate large events and elaborate programming. It was here that the CEAC name began to appear alongside KAA. I’m unsure when the move actually happened but I surmise that it was in late ’75 because in January 1976 an exhibition of Body Art opened and in April, following my fiasco at Ryerson, I curated a performance art festival, “Work # 042: Bound, Bent, and Determined (a Look at Sado-Masochism)” with works about S/M by Andy Fabo, Wendy Knox-Leet Paul Dempsey, and Ron Gillespie (now Giii). It’s the only time in living memory I’d seen an audience of Leathermen in full regalia (outside of the Opera). This was also the beginning of our international exchanges and performance art tours. In total, there were three European tours with multiple stops at venues from Aalst to Zagreb; one-offs throughout southern Ontario and the northeastern United States; international conferences; and representation at Documenta. The John Street location only operated until September 1976 when the 15 Duncan Street flagship location opened and the CEAC was officially born. This was a ground-breaking event in the history of Canadian art – it was the first time in history that an artist-run centre (and queer-Marxist-dominated one at that) in Canada purchased a permanent home thanks to a $55,000 grant from Wintario. The four story building, located at the north east corner of Duncan and Pearl streets, was a substantial one indeed and CEAC occupied the top and bottom floors with the middle occupied by pre-existing tenants, one of which was the Ontario Liberal Party. Aside from museum spaces, the main performance area on the top floor was easily the largest gallery in the city, and the basement level was similarly large and open, and would eventually become the homes of the Crash ‘n Burn, Toronto’s first permanent punk rock venue, followed by the Funnel, Toronto’s first permanent venue for experimental film.

It was at this time that I was hired as assistant programming director and a few months later, in the late spring of 1977 participated in the second performance art tour of Europe with work presented in Amsterdam, Aalst, Warsaw, Lublin, Bologna, and Ferrara and participation in conferences in Warsaw and Paris. This was followed by an invited to participate in the Free International University’s Violence and Behaviour workshop at Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany.

During every iteration of Documenta, a survey of the best in cutting-edge art that happens roughly every five years in eastern Germany, Joseph Beuys would install himself for one hundred days in the Fridericianum, a lavish 18th century palace and one of the oldest museums in Europe, and become Headmaster of Free International University. Its program at Documenta VI dealt with a range of contemporary social themes and issues where radical and creative new thinking was needed to overcome existing problems, including human rights, urban decay, nuclear energy, refugees, the Third World, violence, manipulation by mass communications media, and labour issues. These topics were discussed in an interdisciplinary way by a changing stream of international politicians, lawyers, economists, trade unionists, journalists, community workers, sociologists, actors, musicians, and artists. The participants invited to participate in the “Violence and Behaviour” workshop included a contingent from Toronto’s CEAC, a group from South Africa, the British behavioural performance team Reindeer Werk, and a contingent of the Polish contextualists. While Beuys maintained a commanding presence in the museum for the entire run of the exhibition, the “Violence and Behaviour Workshop” was only a small part of his programme and lasted at most a week to ten days. “Work # 971-(02): Dossier # 02 (Violence and Behaviour Work-shop, Documenta VI)” (2016) is a trio of archival documents from those workshops. I am next to Beuys at the far left, videotaping the proceedings. While unrecorded, my lecture on homoeroticism and the simulacra of violence in punk and leather/S&M, while widely praised afterwards, aroused much hostility from the audience in attendance. At the after party when the workshop had finished Beuys launched into a series of demeaning and contemptuous impersonations of his invited guests and ended his thanks by sticking his tongue down my throat. I’m probably one of a dwindling number of men that had been aggressively kissed by an actual card-carrying Nazi (As far as I know he’d never shown any contrition for his wartime exploits). Beuys thought of us as his students; we came to think of ourselves as props. He was a HORRIBLE man, and when he died in 1986 I didn’t shed a tear (crocodile or otherwise).

“Work # 954: Then and Now (Parkside Story)” (2016) brings together two works created thirty-eight years apart which, when united in marriage, question some of our most basic assumptions. The first work, written not long before being sexual assaulted by Joseph Beuys, consists of a grumpy and waspish account of two evenings on the town at the legendary Parkside tavern in 1977 – on its own not of insignificant historical interest – but combined with the second more politically provocative work from 2016 the paradox of present realities in conflict with nostalgic longing comes to the fore. The intent of embedding the incendiary position that “things were better when everyone hated us” on top of a murky and confrontational image is not to malign the magnificence that a certain degree of normality has been allowed to envelop our lives, it is about mourning some of the things we’ve sacrificed in achieving our state of grace. This shift back and forth in time illustrates that, in Luc Sante’s words “utopias last five minutes, to the extent that they happen at all. There will never be a time when the wish for security does not lead to unconditional surrender.” We have allowed, welcomed even, the wholesale corporate sponsorship of our existence – the benevolence of which doesn’t lead to more freedom and creativity, it leads to less. I remember hearing stories, after the gay liberation movement went mainstream in the late 1970s, of single straight men becoming fretful (the poor delicate things) of lunching alone with other men because of, shall we say, appearances. Such was our power to terrify.

The text reads:

“January 14, 1977. Arrived at the Parkside at about 10:00 p.m.; sat down and scanned the room. Not yet full to capacity but quite crowded nonetheless. “The Look” is as it always has been – that of a pseudo-working class dress: flannel shirts, denim; some leather, but not much tonight. Generally everyone takes care of their bodies, physical fitness abounds. I seem oddly out of place – the clothes are right but the body is all wrong. I’m really a wreck tonight, more so than usual. Soon we are invaded by two groups. The first being a pair who’s fantasies lie in the Vogue/Gentleman’s Quarterly life-style; one tells me with relish that they’re going to New York in March and asked if I’d ever been. I said regularly, he said, no seriously . . . I said, regularly. We devised a plan to get them to leave saying we will meet them later at another bar. Lies of course; it worked. The second group was of four fitting the stereotype of the room. They too seemed devoid of intellect. We changed tables to sit with two friends and a third who was a diminutive version of Karl Beveredge; I told him so but, of course, he didn’t know what I was talking about. Conversation was very pleasant. These two have finely-tuned sensibilities; certainly a rarity. Around closing-time we all decided to go dancing. I went only as a treat to myself because I worked hard all week and was pleased with my progress.

“The situation there was similar – many of the same people, same general look. The atmosphere in the Parkside is very casual; no obvious sexual searching exists. The disco was the opposite – people standing, wandering around; waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. Maybe the next one will be . . . waiting, waiting. As always I seem to arouse no interest, for I’ve never really fit into the stereotype. I began fantasizing them all masturbating into mirrors. This situation inhibits me to the point of being afraid to ask anyone to dance. A rejection tonight would be heart-breaking.

“I left; 4:00 a.m., went home.

“February 12, 1977. Got to the Parkside about 9:30 to meet David there but he didn’t show up until 10:15. The crowd was the same as usual; didn’t know a soul. Everyone dressed alike. Everyone very butch but I could only pick out one person that didn’t have his lumberjack shirt ironed. I wore black police boots, green work pants (dirty) black t-shirt inside out with the right armpit torn, hair all over, the beginnings of a Hitler moustache. A much raunchier version of the rest of the room; the Xerox machine was broken, I guess. David arrived, we had couple. Changed tables for a more central location because our view of the landscape was blocked by pillars. Had a couple more, discussed Robert Handforth’s looks, too bad he’s the enemy. Went down the road for a couple after much debate but David wouldn’t be served. So we went back. Sat with a friend of David’s I remember him from the march but can’t recall his name. Went to another table, I can’t remember why; had a couple more. Conversation was about commercial films. Ended up God-knows-where in the East end. David getting the attention of two while I sat like a lump. All went back downtown for a burger at Fran’s – typical service. Got a ride home at about 4:30. Ron was up, had some tea and went to bed.”

I stumbled upon this text entirely by accident. After a health scare forced me to get my affairs in order I began researching my own career at the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University, which houses the CEAC archive. When I found this long forgotten hand-written document my brain screamed “what the fuck . . . !” Having never been a diarist, what I find perplexing is why did I begin with this account of a couple of nights on the town, and why did I stop after only two entries? Had I been disciplined enough to continue one can only imagine the shock and horror that would have been provoked by firsthand accounts of the crises our community faced with the AIDS epidemic and beyond.

To say that the Parkside Tavern was ugly would be an understatement. Attracting the leather/levis cohort of the community and located at 530 Yonge Street, this exclusively male enclave in the back room of the tavern was a brightly lit and minimally furnished dive. It was a room that style forgot. The Parkside had all the charm of a backwoods Legion Hall. But this would be an insult to every Legion Hall in the country.

It was absolutely my favourite place.

“Work # 954: Then and Now (Parkside Story)” has only ever been shown twice; as part of a mini-career survey at the Robert Kananaj Gallery in Toronto in early 2017 and, more significantly, for one day at the 519 Community Centre as part of the 2016 Nuit Rose festival. I stood in the corner of the room when it was displayed like a nosy spider and was stunned by the reaction to the work. Aside from the idiots that can’t pry themselves away from their phones, the text was devoured and tempers were flaring. I remember in particular an older woman and her much younger friend heatedly arguing – the young woman would have none of it, the very idea that gay life before her birth may have had anything to offer was not only an absurdity, it was an insulting dismissal of her world-view. Her much wiser companion disagreed. Loudly. The work was constantly surrounded by a crowd. At another moment a man turned away in tears; not old enough to have been to that marvelous dump but perhaps in silent agreement with the older woman that contemporary urban gay life is a bit . . . sterile and over-designed?

At the end of 1978 I moved to New York City and I simply detested it there. The filth, the segregation, the expense, the pretentiousness, the provincialism . . . I was ready to come back after six months, but then I me someone who would turn out to be the man of my dreams, John Hammond. At the time I thought “ok, I’ll give it a shot. But if it’s not perfection I’m out of here.” Twenty-one years later John came around to my way of thinking and agreed that New York was indeed a shit hole and acknowledged it was time to move on. So we sold our house (in the slums of Brooklyn) and headed north in the spring of 2001. Had we waited six months, current events would have rendered our house worthless and we’d have been stuck there. But let me digress . . .

Art was completely on the backburner. I’d come to the conclusion that by the end of the 1970s art had hit a brick wall; that the very idea of an artist as innovator had played itself out, that the narrative of art history had come to an end. This was bolstered by the rise of the post-this and neo-that’s and all of their attendant derivativeness. Aside from all of these theoretical questions, given the health crisis gay men were beginning to face, art seemed kind of pointless when everyone around you was dropping like flies. It was not until the early 1990s, once I’d been able to digest the horrors of the previous 15 years, that I made tentative steps to revive a long dormant art practice. As a consequence, during this period my time was occupied with jobs as the art director of Christopher Street magazine and the New York Native newspaper. Concurrent with this, for a time, I was also an on-call page designer and night art director at the Village Voice. In my spare time I was the co-founder and chief archivist of the International Gay History Archive (now housed as part of the Rare Books and Manuscript division of the New York Public Library). At the end of this period saw my archival collection providing the backbone for the landmark 1994 exhibition at the New York Public Library “Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall” and publication of the accompanying book “Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth-Century America” (Penguin/Putnam 1998).

Instigated by Carlos Gutierrez-Solana, director of the New York non-profit Artists Space, the gallery would dedicate an area near the front entrance as an “AIDS Forum”, to be in place until a cure was found and showing work by a different artist each month that had been inspired by the epidemic. It was a noble idea, but most of the work was sentimental claptrap. In early 1993 Carlos commissioned me to create a site-specific installation directly on their walls (Sol Lewitt-style) as part of a multi-artist, gallery-wide project evocatively titled “Activated Walls”. During their fund-raising period, the artists worked in the gallery during regular business hours, supposedly allowing the public to witness the mythical “artist process” as it unfolded. After the opening with the standard bad wine the exhibition would remain for the also standard three weeks and them be painted over and destroyed. Based on previous work, Gutierrez-Solana knew I would in all likelihood create an inflammatory polemic and thus increasing the profile of the gallery. I was being groomed as the next sortie in the on-going culture war.

“Work # 163: Interrogation (An AIDS Forum)” (1993) was designed in the blunt, take-no-prisoners style of Russian constructivism and was completely at odds with all the variations of lyrical abstraction being vomited onto the other walls of the gallery. The walls were painted the colour of dried blood and a row of ten Xerox enlargements of prominent government scientists, journalists, and movement spokespeople were glued to the wall near the floor. Above these images was a stenciled (and carefully footnoted) text which declared in part that “these collaborators maintain their positions of authority through theft, questionable research, conflict of interest, fabricated data, bogus medications, lucrative publishing deals, and star-studded fund-raising scams. Along with their AIDS movement flunkies and media cheerleaders, they have conspired to stifle any research that does not centre on HIV theory”. Brightly coloured chalk lines, like laser beams against the red background, connected the individual charges with the heads of the accused. Very high up on the wall was stenciled “AZT=Death” parodying and implicating the “Silence=Death” slogan of the then fashionable ACT UP.

That the text was incendiary was beside the point; it was the calling into question the depth of the liberal pieties paraded around by the red-ribboned Chanel and Armani set that was going a step too far, and would prove to be explosive – leading to unintended consequences. Being photographed at the opening by Vanity Fair was no insulation against the social death caused by tossing a bomb into the middle of that year’s trendy cause. Even though the installation was described as being the best of the entire series so far, a week later the director was fired by the Board of Directors (which at that time included Cindy Sherman) and his replacement unilaterally cancelled the AIDS Forum project quicker than an executive order from Donald J. Trump.

As I’ve said, I simply detested New York City. Throughout this whole period I’d felt neither comfortable nor particularly welcomed there, but the feelings for my man so far outweighed my feelings for the city that we bought a little broken down house in the slums of Brooklyn in 1984 we spent the next several years transforming it into our home, playing host to an ever expanding network of artists, activists, actors and writers from around the world. Throughout the 1990s we were both becoming increasingly disenchanted and our trips to Canada increasing in frequency. The decision to leave was in many ways a no-brainer, John’s final years in the States were frustrating and unfulfilled, and all of our friends had either died or had already left, so by Christmas 2000 we were ready to leave New York.

After the grueling closing/packing/getting-out-for-good that any real estate transaction entails, the trauma of our final escape to Canada at the end of May 2001 was complete when we were nearly arrested. We were lost somewhere in the middle of New Jersey, driving in the wrong direction on a one way street into the oncoming headlights of a police cruiser. The cops had their flash lights out and their guns at the ready and were none-too-quick in concluding that these two pieces of human wreckage were not running the guns, or drugs, or white slaves, or weapons of mass destruction they had been hoping to find. I’d left Canada 22 years before with a small knapsack and was returning with the contents of a three storey house, plus a man and a large dog in tow; the onus was on my paltry shoulders to cross an international border and not screw up. I’d worked myself into a paranoid frenzy by the time we got to Niagara Falls, only to discover that the Customs and Immigration staff looked like they had pot parties after work and were actually excited with the prospect of a returning Canadian.

When I was approved as John’s sponsor and he had received conditional approval from Immigration through the family class category in April of 2003, he took to wearing a maple leaf pin in his lapel. I found this slightly cringe-inducing. But the depth of John’s growing animosity toward his own country peaked when he confessed a wish that he had been born a Canadian; this I found truly shocking.

We were partners in the truest sense of the word, with an avid interest in whatever projects each of us was pursuing at the time. We would help one another through our frequent bouts of self-doubt, and soldier on it the face of those financial crises that only seem to occur at the most inopportune of times. We would find ourselves both happily unemployed after getting out of particularly soul-destroying jobs only to discover that our house had termites; or in 2001 when we finally did the adult thing and invested all of our extra money in mutual funds on September 10th . . . In March 2004, after much toing and froing, we got married when it became possible at City Hall on our twenty-fifth anniversary. And then cancer paid a visit . . .

While John’s health had been fragile for some time, it seemed to have improved dramatically; he no longer needed to use an inhaler and he was for the first time in years relaxed and stress-free. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer, surgery was planned then aborted after a second test revealed that the cancer had spread to his pancreas and liver and the prognosis was very negative – 3-12 months. In August John complained of shortness of breath and was taken to the emergency room, his cancer had spread quite rapidly and was beginning to affect his kidneys. Plans were arranged for him to die at home but he passed away in the early morning of September 12, 2004 a few hours before the delivery of his deathbed. February 6, 2017

Bruce Eves creates conceptually-driven photo-based works that explore the shifting nature of time, focus, and perception, as well as the ever-changing relationship between image versus interpretation and memory versus present-day reality. He co-founded and was chief archivist for the International Gay History Archive (now part of the Rare Books and Manuscript division of the New York Public Library). His work is represented in a diverse number of public collections from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Tom of Finland Foundation.

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octolevi · 7 years

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u talked in the tags something about a socialist president i didnt understand i don't know anything about history i was just curious

my favourite topic.

well, i’m from chile, and in 1970 was the first time a socialist candidate was ever democratically elected as president, which was pretty iconic for a number of reasons: a) it was literally in the middle of the cold war. b) it was in south america, in a tiny western country supposedly under the influence of USA and c) he was in fact, democratically elected, there was no revolution, violence, hate crimes, etc involved. shit even more than that, the U.S payed actual money to have the election tainted but it didn’t work lol

to all of this and like much of southamerican countries, we all go by producing and exploting natural resources, such as wood from forests, wine, fruits, coffee, etc, which means that by installing a socialist economy could damage international business who profit off our resources, and therefore that we had democratically chosen a socialist president was a direct thread to the economy and also could influence our neighbour countries, and that’s one of the least things USA wanted.

So they economically blocked us, american business started threatening to not invest in our country, some of them even stopped working in the country at all, which meant there was a decrease in employement, there was inflation and shortage of products in stores, which was all blamed on the incapacity of the goverment to manage the country, but was in fact later revealed in some declassified files from the 2000′s that president nixon and kissinger did in fact manage to mess with our economy to bring chaos and get the government off power.

later on in ‘73, the military of our country, backed up with american officials and ideological influence from the U.S, did a coup d’etat in which not only was the president salvador allende killed and the house of government bombarded, but thousands of people were detained, all left-wing parties were banned and everyone who even was remotely connected to the movements got either exiled to europe (countries such as sweden got lots of chileans for this reason), or killed.

after the coup d’etat, a military group lead by Pinochet took power from 1973 up until 1990, and for the whole time, people were still being detained and never coming back home, there were lots of concentration camps, workers, students, mums and children were killed, raped, tortured and there’s so much stuff i’ve read that happened that i can’t even write it here because it’s just disturbing.

in 1980, pinochet and some other conservative academics, wrote and officialed a new constitution, which hasn’t been changed to this day and has made it hard to get rid of conservative laws and forms, such as divorce (which we only got in 2004), abortion (which you can still go to jail for in all cases, even if you’re raped and get pregnant, it’s just straight up illegal), equal marriage, etc.

Also the U.S gave schollarship to a bunch of economy students from a conservative university, which developed with their mentor Milton Freeman, the neoliberalist economic model, which they brought back here and tried it out as an experiment :-) which is the reason why health, education, public transport, water, electricity & many other services are privitazed & owned by externals / international business.

the u.s not only did this in chile, i only know more in depth because i live here and everyone faces the consequences of dictatorship everyday, because they shaped this country the way they wanted and made sure, we could never do much about it. the u.s took down many governments in south america, and installed military conservative groups all around it during cold war and on.

thats why the thing i reblogged is ironic. Wow so russia fucked with your democratic election? Wowie. WOWIE. I wonder what that’s like.

#Anonymous

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janiklandre-blog · 7 years

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Wednesday, March 22, 2017

9:25 a.m. - 37 now to drop by night into the 20's - strange weather - strange angry people - my experiences with Israelis - born there called Sabras - which I think is a thorny tree - they are citizens of such an unfortunate country - combative - yes, nasty - I remember Israelis in Geneva to whom I gave a floor polisher that I had bought when we came there by mistake - I understood it was for a trial period but then the salesman clasimed I had bought it and my lawyer friend advised me, not worth fighting about - very occasionally it was used to bring our lovely parquet floors to a high buff - and when we were leaving I offered it as a gift to Israeles, who gruffly said, bring it, I had a car, I brought it to them, only to get a couple days later a nasty call - this is a piece of shit, come and get it. I did go and get it. Obviously remember it 60 years later.

So this latest Israeli - probably a menace - I will not even mention him by initials - did something really nasty that I will not take the time to detail - I did get angry with him and said a few words a lady might not have said, wrote a letter of apology - today I meet him - we look at each other and finally he says: I will never forget. I just wrote to him, reminding him of my letter of apology and saying - never forgive - and so be it.

Our first encounter was years ago when he remarked on the sandals I was wearing on a chilly day - later we met again - he never had much time for me but rushed up to the young waitressed to hold them in long, loving embraces - I did comment occasionally, but they told me they loved it. Well, when I was a waitress at 21 I would not have tolerated being squeezed at length by customers - though I did succumb to the charms of the young man who had started at the hotel as a dish washer and risen to the rank of assistant manager. Three years later he married me - a story I have written about. Also did succumb to the charms of the much older Alex in Paris. Never accepted casual squeezes from men. Some of me is a feminist. Women don't go up to men and casually squeeze them - or perhaps there are some who do. Enough of the topic. I never have.

Once again a proof how words can effect people - obviously his few unpleasant words - revenge! - effected me - glad for my blog to deal with it.

I had wanted to mention yesterday my feat of the day - reaching within a couple of minutes a very pleasant represantative at Verizon - this phone company that is fleecing us and loathe to do repairs, telling us the copper wring has become too expensive and we should soon forget land lines. In my pocket my cell phone - trying to get used toit before I get too old and also before landlines will be declared obsolete like so much else. I feel obsolete. For my cell phone and ipad that I still have not learned how to use - now AT & T is fleecing me - who, when I moved in with Paco in 1973 charged for his wall phone that he used very little - $12 a month.

I don't study bills often enough - did study my Verizon bill - unbelievable how many charges there are - had contracted with them when they offered for $17 a month forever permanent wi-fi connection (my sons in Massachusetts pay a small fortune for their connections that are not even reliable) - and I was reluctant to disconnect until I got a new computer - still working on it - because I might not be able to get it again - look at my bill and suddenly it is $24.99 - then I see two $8 charges that are nebulous - look at the five pages of the bill, no phone number to call. Find one in an old address book. Of course get a machine - by the time I say payment I get: I don't understand you - machines cannot deal with accents - I keep pressing 0 and lo and behold on comes a polite Jerry - tells tme the phone company noticed their error in billing me for wi-fi and will give me credit in two installments - one $3 and one $5 (they don't let go of money easily) - one $8 charge unnecxessary - the other were I to stop paying it would block my phone for long distance calls - now I mostly use the cell phone with unlimited calling in the U.S. (don't know about Canada) - and when I call Europe I use a prefix - but still want to be able to use phone for the occasional long distance call - like when cell phone says: call cannot be completed. Still, the amoiunt of money I pay every month for "communication" is absurd, many many many times the $12 a month we paid for the phone on the wall in 1973.

I try to explain to the anti-blog friends why I need a blog - last not least - they never answer their cell phones - in no way willing to listen to my trivia of the day, as this here computer is. I decided one great virtue of French Christine was answering calls promptly - the Aristocrat - yes, Christine I do miss you and if calling a cell phone in Paris would not be ridiculously expensive, I would enjoy talking to you. Hope you are doing well. And if you were to send me a snail mail letter - it seems you have given up on the computer - I might answer. Does not seem to occur to you. I am quite sick and tired of the answering machines that promise a prompt reply - a reply that never comes - and also of so many people who anser calls and messages with great delays. I do answer calls and messages promptly - also most emails - part of the aristocratic me. Not always there, alas.

I have come to realize, the longer I make these messages, the less response I get - and I understand. When I used to write long letters people often told me I overwhelm them - they feel they must write a long letter back and so they never write. When I would happen to meet them they told me how much they anjoyed my letter and how sorry they are never to have answered. Of course many of them would write drafts for letters, find writing difficult, only send out a perfect letter - that never came to be. In French: Vive la difference - long live difference, we all are different and that is what makes life interesting - no clones yet.

Today 40 miles an hour wind gusts are predicted - once again - making me reluctant to go out - last not least they make loose - air conditioners? - and what not, fall. I see the sun is shining - yesterday I did enjoy my outing to the Polish church - where first one of the many Poles who like other foreigners have spent their lives in their communities - often happier than I am - and barely learned any English - a not very happy looking woman - immediately vehemently waved me off when I tried sitting down next to her, she was alone at a big round table. My Czech friends in Prague told me I look like an "Americhanka" - that was what I must have looked to her - still of the generation when women got their hair set once a week and carefully kept every strand in place. Later an English woman came - of Slovak background, also every hair in place and she sat down next to her but started talking to me in English. The pay there is $1.25 - a small container of skim milk, a slice of bread with a pat of butter, canned fruit, soup, yesterday 5 pierogi with cole slaw - I took the milk, to use with a canned soup I bought that suggests skimmed milk - the bread and butter and three pierogi and most of the cole slaw home - the woman next to me had a container - I used the dishes it had come in.

It was from the squatters I learned going to churches for meals - I remember being in Vermont, excellent food and being welcomed - so many people love cooking - my friend! - and they do need appreciative eaters. It was my Polish neighbor here who died who first took me to that church - East 7th Street, between 1st Avenue and Avenue A - and yesterday I glimpsed a sign saying that some fund for the elderly is supporting this (Trump will look to it that it gets cut) - these Catholic churches do have quite extensive properties, Parish housing and extensive basements with full kitchens (the food I ate yesterday comes from some Polish restaurant in Brooklyn) - there are I believe ten large round tables and they are not filled. Mostly Polish is spoken. There are many activities, twice a week Tai Chi - I may check that out.

At the Catholic Worker a lot of food comes from donations and is not as fresh as the food in the church. It is free and "the ladies" are mostly homeless women and some assistance with their problems is also provided - I would have enjoyed helping with that but it was clearly indicasted - not my domaine. Once I visited a woman in a hospital and was severly rebuked by a Suzette - this woman is my territory, you have no business visiting her. I took the strong hint - though I had askwd Jane for permission and gotten it. More about this some other time.

At the CW there are proper dishes and silver - at the church all is plastic and thrown away - no dishes to be washed. At a Protestant church on 2nd Ave and 7th Street there were dishes and silver ware - an excellent dish washer - dishes on a belt going through it - no endless washing by hand as at the cw - work to be done by people like me.

From the church I took enough food home for my dinner. Then I passed by Weill Cornell where I had gone for physical therapy - so strongly recommended by my fried who has medicaid that pays for it - I got a $93 bill for a useless examination of my feet, neuropathy had already earlier been found - and yesterday I asked, what would co pay be on my physical therpay sessions - and was told the hospital charged medicare $400 for a 30 minute session - I still cannot believe that - sadly Trump does have some points - and since I had no supplemental, as I should - I would be charged 20% - this could come to $80 per session - thank God I've only gone for two and already had cancelled the ones scheduled - no one had warned me - this may cost me $160 plus 93 - 253? - for something totally useless - I cannot believe it - have not paid bills before and gotten endless call from collection agencies and threats and my bank told me I had lousy credit rating - infuriating. I'm glad my GP - who had told me physiotherapy in my case was useless, but my friend who did on medicaid get it for free is such anthusiast for it - it helps some people but I also met a few who have been hurt - I am stunned.

I came home and fell asleep. Too much. Then headed for Washington Square Park - beautiful warm weather, called my sweet grandson who works nearby and who came promptly - he so enlightens my day and is so aware of all the - let's call it bullshit - going on - needs n o explanations - one of the very few people who understands me and treets me kindly - makes up for all the slights and indignities I encounter as the old and somewhat weird old woman that I am - alas he did not have very much time, but every minute was a pleasure - then I handwrote an essay - about anger, rage, becoming a favorite topic - stopped at an exhibit at Grey Galleries, Inventing Downtown - I had stopped there earlier, called my Grandson to tell him about it - it's about the artists who turned the Lower East Side - a poor looked down upon slum into today's East Village - my friend Paco had been one of them and while I sadly never got into visual arts - yesterday read about the great teachers Bush had who now is an artist - also never learned about music, dance - my childhood under Hitler robbed me of a lot - still, I recommedned to him to see it.

Came home to my shot of espresso, some cake I had left, what I had brought from the church - messages to my friend unanswered - read, read, a lot of it interesting - at last an interesting phone call - phantastic things happening - slept fairly well - in the morning my healthy muesli, nyt, coffe and cake for $2.75 at Moishe's bakery, brief talk with Yougoslav woman - and hereI am - 11:15 decision - go to the church - perhaps adios Marianne:

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