#triangle downtowner magazine

[fitsofgloom]

The Vampire & The Ballerina

[kitweewoos]

The Artist

Tommy Kinard spent his childhood being terrified of the idea of soulmates, hearing his father's drunken rants about how unnatural it is, how horrible, how absolutely disgusting it was that soulmates thought they were real and special. Then, when he was just about to turn thirteen, it appeared on his hip, a triangle that faded towards the bottom edge, right against his skin. He tried to hide it, and he almost managed it, until he was changing one night and his father stumbles into his room, drunk off his ass, trying to find the bathroom. He tried to cover it up, but his father had already seen it, and he was pissed. He dragged Tommy into a clinic downtown where a doctor put him under anesthesia and cut his soul mark out of his skin, leaving behind a small scar instead. When he was old enough to get out of his small town, he did, signing up for the army and signing up to learn to be a pilot. When he got out, though, his body hurt and he had nightmares. Instead, he turns to using his body in other ways, modeling for fashion magazines at first, then on fashion runways, in music videos, and fitness magazines once they realize he's physically fit. When he finally retires, he has enough money to follow his dreams of being an artist, a skill he's hidden for years and years, but now, he gets to put his work on display loudly and proudly.

The Model

Evan Buckley has wondered what his soulmate is going to be like since the small triangle appeared on his hip. His mother was overjoyed for him and started talking about having a daughter-in-law someday, and he let her celebrate however she wanted, because at least she was paying attention to him. His father was less thrilled but let Evan live his life regardless. He imagined, though, what his life would be like when he finally met them. After he escaped Hershey, he floated through life, trying to find a place to belong. He drew what he saw, and he sold paintings wherever he went, and he really just wanted to pursue a life made up of artists and gallery events. He finds his way to Los Angeles, and makes friends with a group that keeps him focused and calls him Buck. Art doesn't pay the bills so he takes the first modeling job offered to him by a friend, which leads him to another, and another, and another job, and he can finally pay his rent, and make his art without worrying about if this painting will pay for his next meal.

The Soulmates

It's a favor to his friend and now his brother-in-law to be, that he shows up to a stranger's studio to be a model for their new series. He's "perfect for it," according to Chimney, and this friend is a genius, Buck is going to want to be a part of it. So, Buck shows up to a studio with minimal info and finds the most gorgeous man he's ever seen waiting in a pair of paint-stained jeans and a smock over a blue Henley, with a square jaw and a cleft in his chin, and Buck immediately wants to know more.

"Hi, I'm Evan, Evan Buckley, or Buck, whatever you want to call me. Chimney said you needed a model?" "I do, yeah. I'm Tommy, and it's nice to meet you, Evan. Did Howie happen to tell you anything about what I'm looking for?" "He mentioned it involved nudity, but that's all." "Well, that's part of it, that's certainly a big part of it, but I'm doing a study on soul marks and how they move with the body." "Oh! That's awesome! Mine's not in a very malleable position, it's on my hip right here, so if that's not helpful, I get it." "Let me see?"

He doesn't expect the slight gasp as he lifts his shirt and tugs down his pants so that Tommy can see it. He doesn't expect Tommy to be drawn into him, to reach out and ask permission before tentatively brushing the dark triangle on his hip. He doesn't expect Tommy's soft little breath as he touches him. He doesn't expect Tommy to say, under his breath, that he never expected to find him, that he's given up on it.

"I'm sorry, are you saying that we're soulmates? Prove it."

Tommy takes off the smock and then draws up his shirt to reveal a long, harsh surgical scar in the same spot that Buck's mark sits.

"I can't. My father had it cut away when he found out. I can't prove it, I don't even have photos of me as a kid with it because of that, but - we are. Your mark, it's exactly what mine was before it was removed."

Buck wants to believe him, so he strips off his shirt, and tells him they'll start with one session for Tommy to work on his series and then they can get some drinks, some dinner, and if they're soulmates, they won't ever want to stop. Tommy smiles, and agrees, and sits down at his easel while Buck strips off the rest of his clothes and sits on a stool in Tommy's view. He turns the way Tommy tells him to, and sits well even when he wants to move, and Tommy praises him for how good he's doing, and how well he follows direction. The praise seems to be easy and free-flowing for Tommy, and Buck does want to stay here forever, listening to Tommy hum as he sketches and lets his eyes linger. He doesn't need to go to drinks or to dinner, he already knows that Tommy's it for him. This is forever, and he smiles to himself knowing that he's finally found his home, even if no one else will believe them when they say they're soulmates. It doesn't matter, because they know. They know that this is their fate, and they've found it together.

[jbaileyfansite]

Interview with the Los Angeles Times (2024)

“This is where all the cruising happened.”

Jonathan Bailey and I are standing in Pershing Square on a bright, blustery spring afternoon, nearing the end of a homemade queer history tour of downtown L.A.: One Magazine, Cooper Do-Nuts/Nancy Valverde Square, the Dover bathhouse, the Biltmore Hotel and this, the city’s former Central Park, a haven, since before World War I, for “fairies” and “sissy boys,” servicemen on leave and beatniks on the road.

“Is it still happening now?” he asks.

“Probably not as much,” I venture.

“Well, you let me know if it’s happening,” he teases, a mischievous smile lighting up his face.

Bailey understands the uses of the charm offensive. As Sam, the handsome Lothario of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s delightful pre-”Fleabag” curio, “Crashing”; Anthony, the romantic hero of “Bridgerton’s” second season; and John, the jerk of a protagonist in Mike Bartlett’s love triangle play “Cock,” the English actor, 36, has swaggered up to the precipice of superstardom. With roles in such studio tentpoles as “Wicked” and “Jurassic World” on the horizon, he may just break through. Yet he delivers career-best work in Showtime’s queer melodrama “Fellow Travelers,” as anti-Communist crusader-turned-gay rights activist Tim Laughlin, by leaving behind the self-assured rakes and tapping a new wellspring: soft power.

Tim may be, as Bailey puts it, “an open nerve,” but as it turns out, the devout Catholic and political naïf — who falls for suave State Department operative Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Matt Bomer) just as Sen. Joseph McCarthy tries to purge the federal government of LGBTQ people — is formidable indeed.

Stretching from the Lavender Scare to the depths of the AIDS crisis, in scenes of tenderness, cruelty and toe-curling sex, Bailey’s performance communicates that little-spoken truth of relationships: It takes more strength to submit than it does to control. The former demands discipline, courage, trust; the latter requires only force.

“In ‘Bridgerton,’ [Bailey] is like a Hawkins Fuller character — he is very sexy and has lots of power, has that kind of confident charisma that absolutely is not Tim at all,” says “Fellow Travelers” creator Ron Nyswaner.

But any doubt about Bailey’s ability to mesh with Bomer, who boarded the project early in development, was put to bed with the actors’ virtual rehearsal of a meeting on a park bench in the pilot. “‘Well, that’s a first,’” Nyswaner recalls an executive texting him. “I cried in a chemistry read.”

‘Am I inviting people in?’

Bailey grew up in a musical family in the Oxfordshire countryside outside London, and this, coupled with an appreciation for the morning prayers, choir practice and Mass he attended as a scholarship student at the local Catholic school, fed his precocious talents. (“I loved the performance of it,” he laughs. “Not to diminish the celebration of religious process, but I did love the idea of wearing a gown.”) By age 10, he’d appeared in the West End, playing Gavroche in a production of “Les Misérables,” an experience he now recognizes as an encounter with a queer found family — albeit one shadowed by the toll of the AIDS crisis, which peaked in the U.K. in the mid-1990s.

“When I’m asked about my childhood, there’s so much I don’t remember, and I think that’s true of anyone who’s been in fight or flight for 20 years,” he says. “I would have been in a cast of people whose friends would have died in the last seven years. I think of where I was seven years ago. I had all my gay friends then. It’s only retrospectively that I can retrofit a real gay community around me [in the theater], that I just wasn’t aware of [then].”

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, American and British culture presented queer adolescents with a bewildering array of mixed signals. As beloved celebrities came out in growing numbers, and the battle for marriage equality became a central locus of LGBTQ political organizing, the media continued to propagate harmful stereotypes of gay men as miserable, lonely, perverted or worse — and, Bailey remembers, callously turned George Michael, arrested on suspicion of cruising in a Beverly Hills restroom in 1998, and Irish pop star Stephen Gately, who revealed his sexuality in 1999, fearful he was about to be outed, into tabloid spectacles.

No wonder Bailey, like many LGBTQ people of his generation, should feel the “chemical” thrill of “validation and acceptance” during London Pride at age 18, then embark on a two-year relationship with a woman in his 20s.

“Dangerously, if you’re not exposed to people who can show you other examples of happiness, you think that’s the easiest way to live,” Bailey says. “It’s funny. You look back and you can tell the story in one way, which is that I always knew who I was and my sexuality and my identity within that. But obviously at times, it was really tough. I compromised my own happiness, for sure. And compromised other people’s happiness.”

Disclosures about his personal life have become particularly thorny for the actor since the premiere of “Bridgerton,” the blockbuster bodice-ripper from executive producer Shonda Rhimes.

“The Netflix effect does knock you off center completely,” he says, recalling the experience of finding a paparazzo waiting outside his new flat before he’d even moved in. “Suddenly, you do start having nightmares about people climbing in your windows... Even now, talking about it makes me feel like, ‘Am I inviting people in?’”

He is also critical of the media for churning out headlines about the smallest details of celebrities’ private lives, often detached from their original context. In an interview with the London Evening Standard published in December, Bailey described a harrowing encounter in a Washington, D.C., coffee shop in which a man threatened his life for being queer — and, in recounting the experience, offhandedly mentioned the “lovely man” he’d called, shaken, after it happened. Although Bailey acknowledges that the original story handled the subject with aplomb, he felt dismayed that more attention wasn’t paid to the intended warning about rising anti-LGBTQ sentiment: “The only thing that got syndicated from that story was that I had a boyfriend, and it wasn’t true,” he sighs. “It was kind of depressing, if I’m honest.”

Still, Bailey, who once turned down a role in a queer-themed TV series because it would have required him to speed along revelations about his personal life he wasn’t ready to make, is prepared to embrace the power of vulnerability when it feeds the work. Although a member of his inner circle expressed doubts about “Fellow Travelers’” steamy sex scenes, for instance, the actor intuited that they were what made the project worth doing: ���I was like, ‘I’m telling you, they are the reason why this is going to be brilliant.’”

‘He’s changed my trajectory in my own life’

To those who would complain about the state of sex in film and TV, “Fellow Travelers” is the perfect riposte. All of it matters, from Tim’s first flirtation with Hawk to the finale’s closing minutes, because the series, at its core, is about the importance of soft power: the strength required to bend, but not break; to adapt, but not abandon oneself; to survive without shrinking to nothing in the process.And depicting that through sex, specifically gay sex, makes “Fellow Travelers” radical indeed.

Bailey understands that baring so much comes with certain risks. When I tell him that research for the story has filled my algorithmic “For You” feed on X (formerly Twitter) with speculation that his onscreen relationship with Bomer has a real-life element, he notes that “shipping” fictional couples and costars alike has long been part of Hollywood fantasy. But he bristles at the implication that he and Bomer are anything but skilled actors at work.

“I would love for people to know that the success of our chemistry isn’t based on us f—. It’s actually about us leaning into the craft,” he says. “It’s a vulnerable situation to be in, talking about it on record. I don’t want to rob people of their thoughts. But I do have a set of values, and as an artist, you don’t need to be f— to tell that love story.”

Underlying that craft, Bailey adds, is the confidence to speak up, as with one scene in “Fellow Travelers” that was adjusted because he said, “I don’t want to be naked today.” He learned to use his voice the hard way: In his early 20s, he recalls, he was once “bullied” on set when “someone was threatened” by him and vowed to himself, “I’m never going to do that to someone. I’m never going to allow that to happen.”

This impulse to direct his influence in support of others has blossomed further with “Fellow Travelers.” On the day of our interview, Bailey enthuses about an upcoming meeting with legendary gay rights activist Cleve Jones and shares his idea for a docuseries recording the stories of elders in the LGBTQ+ community while they are still here to tell them. He describes lying in a hospital bed on set on World AIDS Day, in character as Tim, surrounded by gay men who had lost friends and lovers during the crisis, and finding himself thinking, “What do I want to leave behind?”

“I think he’s changed my trajectory in my own life,” Bailey says.

This is, perhaps, the most common reaction I know to diving deep into queer history — the understanding that we, like our forerunners, are responsible for shaping the queer future, whether in politics, society or art. No one is going to do it on our behalf.

As we stand on the nondescript corner now named for her, I relate the story of the late queer activist Nancy Valverde, who was arrested repeatedly while a barber school student in the 1950s on suspicion of “masquerading” because of her preference for short hair and men’s clothing, and later successfully challenged her harassment by the police in court.

“What a hero!” Bailey exclaims, wondering at Valverde’s bravery. “The thing that’s so interesting with power battles is, ultimately, identity is the thing that gives you the most strength and power in your life, isn’t it?

“Because that’s one thing people can’t take away from you: who you are and how you express yourself.”

Source

[temp-check]

Thursday's temperature check (procès-verbaux of 5-30)

Have you ever been on the Bourbon Trail in Louisville, Kentucky?  After spending a few days in middle-America (i.e. ‘Merica!), I can be easily convinced to drive a hundred miles to get to the pathway of distilled ambrosia of ‘Merica(!).  A short distance from this detour to intoxication is beautiful Columbus, Indiana, just off the varicose vein of the interstate system, I-65.  Now, Columbus is an honest-to-god city.  Hustling and bustling in the Mid-West.  It sits right in the middle of the ‘Merica!’ Cultural Triangle of Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Louisville – and by the way, if you add Lexington, KY it becomes a Cultural Quadrilateral (who said I wouldn’t need Geometry after highschool?).  Columbus even has a website!  If you’re wondering what led GQ magazine in their July 2005 issue to list Columbus as one of the “62 Reasons to Love Your Country”, it’s not because it is the birthplace of Mike Pence.  Columbus is the home to the World’s Largest Toilet (no, not Mike Pence!).  So, if you’re driving away from Louisville with a little too much bourbon under your belt (please don’t drink and drive), don’t expect me to hold your hair while you kneel in front of the world’s largest toilet, it’s just too big.  Tom, you’re being awfully hard on Columbus, Indiana, aren’t you?  First off, I’m not and Columbus knows why.  Secondly, have you ever heard of this town before this paragraph?  Well, I was reading one of many things in my inbox about quirky road stops in ‘Merica!, and the Mars Cheese Castle was listed.  It’s in Wisconsin and it sells cheese; it’s not made of cheese.  This is a much better road-trip diversion than the world’s largest toilet on many levels.  The least of which is that their website is much better.  You can get every type of Wisconsin cheese produced there.  It’s the Bubba-Gump of the cheese world. It’s also just down the road from the Bong Recreation Area (it’s not what you 420 fans are thinking).  But, if you’re going to spend the time looking for a spectacular tourist trap, the Bloodstained Tomb of Nina Craigmiles in (another city named for a city in Ohio) Cleveland, Tennessee.  Nina Craigmiles was seven years old when a buggy in which she was riding – or possibly driving – was hit by a locomotive in downtown Cleveland, Tennessee. Nina was crushed beneath the engine wheels.  It's unclear when crimson blotches began to appear above the entrance to the Craigmiles mausoleum -- as well as on Nina's sarcophagus blanket and crown -- but local legend says that it began after a child's cry was heard coming from inside.  Creepy mausoleum not enough of a reason to pull over in Cleveland?  Have the kids play in the children's playground just behind Nina's tomb.

Now that your Summer trips are planned, feel free to check out these ‘Merican! places along the way.

Stay safe!

Tom

A triptych for your summer trip-tic.  From left to right: Toilet, Castle, Bong, Mausoleum Repeat those later in order for your dementia exam

[qnewsau]

Butch lesbian trailblazer Nancy Valverde, dies at 92

New Post has been published on https://qnews.com.au/butch-lesbian-trailblazer-nancy-valverde-dies-at-92/

Butch lesbian trailblazer Nancy Valverde, dies at 92

Chicana lesbian, activist and gender-nonconformist Nancy Valverde died at her Los Angeles home on Monday. She was 92.

In the 1950s, Valverde was was routinely arrested for violating L.A.’s ‘masquerading’ laws.

These laws were commonly used by law enforcement to to target drag queens, transgender people and butch lesbians.

She was detained multiple times at Lincoln Heights jail in a section known as the Daddy Tank.

The Daddy Tank was a private wing where transgender men and butch lesbians were held

However, at the age of 17 she was credited with helping overturn masquerading laws.

During one stint in jail,  Valverde enlisted the help of a clerk at the L.A. County Law Library to search for rulings that showed wearing men’s clothing was a crime.

After proving that it was legally not a crime, Valverde was never arrested again.

Valverde went on to start her own Barber shop and lived with the same woman for 25 years, raising four children together.

Nancy Valverde. Image: Los Angeles LGBT Centre

Los Angeles LGBT Centre honours Nancy Valverde

“Valverde, an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, was celebrated as a beacon of light and a relentless advocate for equality and justice,” the Los Angeles LGBT Center said in a statement.

“Valverde’s journey as an activist began at the age of 17 when she bravely confronted the systems of prejudice in Los Angeles by unapologetically embracing her authentic identity. A fixture in L.A.’s queer community since the 1950s, she faced routine harassment and arrest by police for wearing men’s clothing in public. Arrested dozens of times under the city ordinance of “masquerading,” which targeted individuals for clothing associated with a different gender, Valverde remained steadfast in her refusal to conform.”

“They wanted me to be someone else,” she recounted in the PBS documentary L.A.: A Queer History.

“I could not be someone else. This is me.”

“Despite the challenges, Valverde became a respected figure in Los Angeles. She built connections within her local community and provided haircuts at her barbershop. Affectionately known as “Nancy from East Side Clover,” she left an indelible mark on the city.”

“Valverde’s legacy continued as she joined the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Senior Services department upon moving to Triangle Square, the nation’s first LGBTQ+-friendly affordable housing for older adults.

“Last year, the city honored her with the designation of “Cooper Do-nuts/Nancy Valverde Square” at the intersection of 2nd St. and Main St. in downtown Los Angeles.

“Cooper Do-nuts, a safe space for LGBTQ+ individuals in the 1950s, was the site of one of the earliest LGBTQ+ uprisings in the country.”

Read More:

Trixie Laumonte: photos from a 50-year career

Tributes for acclaimed lesbian author & activist Elana Dykewomon

‘Paris Is Burning’ star Carmen Xtravaganza dies at 62

Steve Ostrow OAM’s memorial to be held on April 13

For the latest LGBTIQA+ Sister Girl and Brother Boy news, entertainment, community stories in Australia, visit qnews.com.au. Check out our latest magazines or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

[musings-from-mars]

Freelance Love Triangle AU

Summary: Modern AU, Blake and Cinder are rival writers for a magazine who are always fighting to get the cover story for the next issue. As if their rivalry needed anymore fuel, the new photographer, Ruby, has caught their eyes. Not only is Ruby a skilled photographer, but her cheerfulness and earnest spirit is infectious. Now Blake and Cinder have even more to fight over, while Ruby is pretty sure these two reporters just need to kiss. Time for her to play matchmaker!

Ruby x Blake x Cinder, aka Pawling Petals, inspired by @bridgyrose

(Expect alcohol use in future skits)

Part 1

Knock knock knock

Blake looked up from her laptop to see someone standing just outside her cubicle. “Yes?” She asked.

Standing there was a short young woman with reddish black hair and shiny silver eyes. “Uhm, hi!” She greeted her. Blake was already smiling in return. “My name is Ruby Rose and I’m a new photographer here! Uhm...I’m just introducing myself to the writers here and... Oh!” She extended a manila folder to Blake, who took it. “Here’s some of my work, so if you need me for a story just call, rain or shine!” She then paused awkwardly, shuffling her boots on the carpet floor. “Uhm, yeah.”

Blake already liked her. “Hi Ruby, I’m Blake. Actually, I was starting to work on a story about the street art around town,” she explained. “So I could definitely use your help with something like that. Would you like to talk more at lunch?”

Ruby grinned, hopping up and down on her toes. “I would love to!” But then she hesitated, fidgeting with her hands. “But, I kinda already have plans at lunch with another writer here.”

“Oh? Who?”

“Cinder Fall,” Ruby answered, immediately putting a damper on Blake’s good mood. “I talked to her earlier, and-”

“I think we’re gonna be great partners,” came Cinder’s voice, the woman peering over the divider between hers and Blake’s cubicles. She smirked down at Blake. “You’ve seen this one’s work, right?”

Blake furrowed her brow up at Cinder, then turned her attention back to the folder Ruby had handed to her. She opened it and flipped through some of the prints. They were each phenomenal, perfectly lit and touched up, more than ready to print. “Okay, yeah, this is pretty great,” she said, wanting to compliment Ruby without outright agreeing with Cinder.

Ruby’s face was flushed, detecting the tension between the two writers. “Y-yeah! I’m really good with editing software, too, so I handle all of that as well.”

“She’s gonna help make my,” Cinder started, then stopped. “Sorry, our feature on the new outdoor gallery downtown look perfect.” She smiled at Ruby. “We’ll make the cover for sure.”

Blake gritted her teeth, but smiled. Just like how Cinder has made the cover three months in a row now, she thought bitterly. “Sure, maybe that chi-chi gallery downtown would look nice on the cover, but I’m sure Ruby hasn’t seen some of the street art that I’ve already written about.” Blake smiled at Ruby. “I’ve already interviewed several artists, there’s a lot of different locations. It would be a great chance to show your skill in different areas and environments.”

“Maybe after she’d done helping me, hon,” Cinder told Blake.

Stop fucking calling me “hon,” Blake desperately wanted to say, but she kept a smile on for Ruby’s sake.

Ruby, meanwhile, looked very, very nervous. “I’m sure I could help you both out. Two columns my first month here...lucky me, right?”

“Yeah!” Blake agreed.

Cinder glared down at Blake for a moment, then nodded to Ruby. “Sure, sweetheart. But you and I are still on for lunch, right?”

Ruby nodded. “Yeah, but uhm...” She pointed, no, did finger guns at Blake. “Would you want to go to coffee this afternoon?”

Blake nodded with enthusiasm. “Sure! I know the perfect place.”

“Sweet!” Ruby said, pumping her fist. “Thank you both so much! I’ll go start getting some equipment ready!” She then turned away, hurrying to the lobby.

Blake and Cinder both smiled and waved as Ruby left, then turned to glare at each other. “Poaching my photographer, Belladonna?” Cinder asked.

“Poaching?” Blake asked, standing from her seat to look her rival in the face. “You heard her, she’s fine with working with both of us. Can’t say she’ll actually enjoy working with you, though.”

Cinder rolled her eye, sweeping her long bangs aside over her eye patch in that infuriatingly sexy way she always does. “I bet she’ll enjoy getting that cover bonus, though.”

Blake scoffed. “You’re not getting cover again. I’ve been talking with Robyn all week and she really likes my street art story, says it’s ‘exactly what this publication is about.’ I’m making that cover, just you wait.”

Cinder simply chuckled. “Someday, hon, but not this month. For one, I’ve already gotten several pages down. How much have you finished? A paragraph or two?”

“I’ve done six interviews,” Blake shot back. “Sure, you can fill your column with fluff, but if you’re not talking to the actual artists or the organizers, it’s all just a glorified Yelp review.”

“I must be one hell of a Yelp review writer then,” Cinder said with a chuckle. “And Ruby is definitely going to see that whenever she works with me, she’s getting her photos on the cover. She’s going to love me.”

Blake scoffed. “Oh, I see what’s going on. You like her, don’t you?”

Cinder frowned. “Hon, I watched that girl’s eyes when she talked to me. She likes me. She wants a gig with benefits, obviously,” she said with delight.

Blake growled, jealousy beginning to bubble up. “For fucks sake, stop calling me ‘hon!’”

Cinder giggled. Blake wished she could slap that gorgeous smile off of Cinder’s face. “You’re so cute, Belladonna.”

Blake was about to respond to that patronizing comment with another outburst, but opted to take a breath. Once she had steadied herself, she looked Cinder in the face, calm and collected. “Alright, you know what? I have an idea.”

Cinder cocked her head to the side. “What’s that?”

“A collab,” Blake said, smiling mischievously. “Between you, me, and Ruby.”

Cinder blinked. “What kind of collab, exactly?”

“We can discuss it more later,” Blake said. “Or perhaps at lunch, if I might join you two?”

((Feel free to request more by sending me an ask! Be sure to send the name of the AU with it!))

[worldwanderers]

Nobility and novelty

Downtown Abbey —the British historical television drama— not only shows us how the aristocracy lived in the early twentieth century; it also shows that a “spicy” comment or a piece of malicious gossip it is better received if it is said with class.

The main characters of the show achieve this with no effort: sitting in a marvelous sewing room, with a cute little hat on their heads and a footman serving them tea. One of them could even insult someone's mother and, along with the clink of the spoon in the porcelain cup and the music in the background, even the worst of words would sound charming. In the real world the wronged could come to blows, but in a room with a flowered tapestry they only might wrinkle their noses.

Since we saw that TV show, my boyfriend (X) and I were fascinated with all European mansions and palaces. When we read that the Liria Palace in Madrid —private home of the Dukes and Duchesses of Alba among centuries— would be open to the public for a few months, we bought the tickets right away. There is nothing more fun than sneaking around a place still inhabited by its owners. And if they are from the nobility, it is even better.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, we had to make an appointment to visit the palace. To arrive there we walked about 15 blocks from our hotel in the city center, which gave me the idea that this was where the city used to end when the palace was built. The first thing we did on the guided tour was watching a video that confirmed my theory; in the XVII century, a palace so big could only be built in the outskirts of an already crowded city like Madrid.

In the video they also mentioned the best-known inhabitant of the palace, the late Duchess of Alba: Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart. She was a “socialite” very well known in the magazines and very parodied for the excess of surgeries on her face and her flamboyant style. But, of course, in the introductory video she was shown as cute little blond girl riding her favorite horse. An image quite distant from the one so widely known of her. It was like a preamble that, by visiting her palace, we would see things the way she wanted us to see them.

Although the façade has more than three centuries, the interior is relatively new, as a fire destroyed almost everything at the beginning of the 20th century. The reconstruction of the palace embodies the tastes of the last two heirs of the Duchy of Alba; Cayetana's father and herself. The sobriety and refinement of the salons contrasts with the caricatured image of the Duchess, with the hair white as a dandelion and a small triangle instead of a nose.

All the rooms are organized in the way of a French palace, with one room connected to the next to display the abundance of furniture and works of art. The guided tour spoke about the Rubens, the Goyas and other masterpieces decorated the palace`s walls, but we were more interested in the photos that were display discreetly on top of the many desks and tables, where the Duchess appeared with royal figures such as Queen Elizabeth II, who had written a personal dedication to her “dearest Cayetana”.

And of course —as in any other palace or museum in Spain— photos weren`t allowed inside. So, we had to conformed ourselves with our weak memory or pay 25 Euro for the book with the photos and stories of the Liria Palace, that we just heard but we would probably forget in a couple of weeks. It is also the perfect kind of memorabilia that we love to collect from all the places we visit. Not so much for the novelty: for us it is the equivalent of writing in one of the Duchess’s walls: “X and L were here”.

[itsjackgilbert]

Situation Comedy

INSCRUTABLE MUSIC-VIDEO GENIUS MAKES MOVIE. IT'S VERY GOOD. INSCRUTABLE FILMMAKER DOES MAGAZINE INTERVIEW. IT'S VERY BIZARRE. A VERY SMALL GLIMPSE INTO THE INSULAR WORLD OF SPIKE JONZE, WHERE MAKING AWESOMELY STRANGE FILMS, WEARING FAKE PENISES, AND GETTING BEAT UP (SORT OF) ALL ARE PART OF THE SCENERY

BY ZEV BOROW

"He came to visit me once and when he first arrived I got a phone call that I had to come pick him up because his car had been impounded because he'd been chased by, like, ten cops on bikes after he drove his car onto these little fairgrounds and did a bunch of doughnuts. So, then I had to drive him around all weekend." — Three Kings director David O. Russell

"Actors are more consistent. They tend to land their tricks." — filmmaker Spike Jonze, on who is easier to direct, actors or skaters.

"He wanted his brother to be in Three Kings, so he shot an audition tape with his brother doing the Sharon Stone role in Basic Instinct, crossing and uncrossing his legs. It was the weirdest fucking thing I've ever seen." — David O. Russell

I meet Spike Jonze at the production offices of his new movie, Being John Malkovich, which is a bizarre comedy about a love triangle between three people who find a secret portal into John Malkovich's head behind a file cabinet in an office building where the ceilings are four feet high. John Cusack and Cameron Diaz and Catherine Keener are in it. So is John Malkovich. It's really good and weird and funny, though not always in that order. Spike Jonze directed it.

Jonze is 29 years old and sort of famous for directing some of the best music videos ever made: the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage"; Fatboy Slim's "Praise You"; Weezer's "Buddy Holly"; Björk's "It's Oh So Quiet"; and other really good ones, too. He's also made some excellent commercials and two interesting short films. However, mostly because of the exceedingly cool videos he's done for, mostly, exceedingly cool people, Jonze has also become famous for being exceedingly cool. A wide and deep selection of the hippest people alive dig Jonze. They are his friends. This past July Jonze married actress, filmmaker, and fellow sort-of-famous person Sofia Coppola. Tom Waits sang at their wedding. Tom fucking Waits.

Jonze is small and wiry, with the body and demeanor of a skateboarder, which he is. He is relaxed, unfailingly polite, and has a voice suggesting a 15-year-old boy. When we meet he is wearing a T-shirt and scuffed-up $350 Marc Jacobs shoes. He tells me he's supposed to meet with Knox, an as-yet-unknown guitar player, to discuss ideas for his video and invites me along. But first we go to buy a big bag of cat food for his cat.

Jonze says Knox plays "sort of country-funkabilly-Prince-like music...really beautiful stuff." A friend gave him a tape, he says, and he fell in love with it. We get lost trying to find Knox's house.

When we finally arrive, Knox says he was asleep because Jonze was supposed to arrive hours ago. Jonze says he's sorry, that it must have been his assistant's fault. Knox is tall, with short, dark hair styled vaguely pompadour-ish. His apartment is small. Neil Young in on the CD player. An acoustic guitar rests in the corner.

"I'm the only one in the band, so I do the whole gig," Knox says. "My old man was a guitarist and my mother was, like...well, she was a capable pianist, not great. I'm from Tenness–Knoxville–that's why I go by Knox. My mother ahd a baby two years before me, a little boy, and it died at birth, and I am, like, the copy of that kid. And my little brother almost died at birth 'cause of me, so it's kind of all cyclical. But I'm still tweaking it. So, uh, what kind of ideas do you have?"

Jonze talks about making a video that's not very commercial, about something that's cool in and of itself.

Knox: "I just don't want it to be cute. Don't take this as an affront, but some of your videos are...cute. The 'Buddy Holly' thing was little fucking cute. I was thinking more of an early John Cugar-type of thing. Like 'Jack and Diane.' Maybe with some of the words on the bottom of the screen."

Jonze: "Uh, cool.... But it’s also cool to do something maybe not as literal.” He asks Knox if he wants to be in the video. Knox says maybe just his face, as a child.

Jonze says he could come over with a video camera and they could try some stuff out.

Knox: “Like what?”

Jonze: “Well, I don’t want to just throw stuff out.”

Knox: “Well, I’m not going to steal your stuff.”

Jonze laughs, sort of. There is an awkward silence.

Jonze: “How about a video with Xeroxes, just as a cool medium?”

Knox: “Yeah, well, that sounds schticky. Xeroxes are schticky.”

Jonze tries to say something about form. Knox says he likes “the Jazzercize” video Jonze did.

Jonze: “‘Praise you.’ Cool.”

Knox turns toward me and says he doesn’t think Spike looks very into it. Jonze says he doesn’t want to do anything he’s done already. He asks Knox if he saw the video he did for Sean Lennon.

Knox: “Nah. That guy’s too fuckin’ avant garde for me.”

Jonze: “No, I’m not saying that. It’s just I don’t want to make something silly out of your song, but at the same time....” He trails off.

There’s a tense silence, then Knox turns to me and asks if I have any ideas for videos. I tell him I don’t. Knox says “fuck,” loudly.

Jonze: “Look, I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do, and if you don’t really like my stuff maybe we shouldn’t work together. I like working with people who are....”

Knox: “Yeah, well...fuck.... Well, if you come up with some ideas, any ideas, call, but I just...shit.”

Jonze: “I should go.”

Jonze gets up. Knox begins to pace. Then he screams, “Fuck!” and throws a small wooden chair Jonze had been sitting on against the wall. It shatters.

Jonze: “Dude, chill.”

Knox: “I think you better leave!”

Jonze: “I was just....”

Knox: “Just fucking leave!”

Then Knox pushes Jonze into a wall, hard. I think to myself: Spike Jonze is about to get his ass kicked. Then, like a panther (or jaguar), Jonze jumps at Knox. They hit the floor. Jonze is on top of Knox, throwing punches at his head. After about 15 seconds, I pull them apart. Knox gets up and screams, “Wait right fucking there!” and runs into a back room. Jonze looks at me and says, “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” and runs out the door, fast.

Knox jumps out from the back room, glowering and holding a baseball bat.

DRIVING AWAY, JONZE MUSES ABOUT HOW “HECTIC” things got with Knox. He repeatedly pushes his face toward the rearview mirror and asks if I think his eye looks swollen. It doesn’t. He says nothing like that has ever happened to him before, except once “with Everlast, but it never got physical.” We pull into a 7-Eleven and he gets a juice and some Advil.

I try to ask some more questions about the movie. “I’m apprehensive about talking about it at all,” he says, “because I feel like it’s going to cloud someone’s opinion. You think about all the movies you had preconceived notions about, about all the ones you read stuff about until you were sick of them before you even saw them.

SPIKE JONZE’S REAL NAME IS ADAM SPIEGEL. He isn’t interested in talking about why, or when, he started going by Spike Jonze, or how much it has to do with Spike Jones, the 1940s band leader, but it’s probably related to the fact he grew up hanging out with a lot of competitive BMX bikers similarly fond of pseudonyms and alter egos. He was raised in Bethesda, Maryland, a well-heeled suburb of Washington, D.C., where his mother enjoyed photography and his father enjoyed being the scion of an extremely successful family-owned catalog company. Jonze is the middle child (younger brother; older sister) and was into skateboarding, photography, lots of Dischord-era punk rock, and, most of all, BMX.

In the mid-’80s, BMXing’s popularity was exploding, and Jonze was spending much of his time at Rockville BMX, a legendary retail and mail-order BMX shop in nearby Rockville, Maryland. At age 15, he accompanied the Haro pro-BMX team on a summer tour of the U.S., serving as part-time roadie, contest announcer, T-shirt salesperson, and using an old 35-millimeter camera, team photographer. By the time he was 16, he was writing and taking pictures for skate and bike magazines. At 17, immediately after finishing high school, he moved to Torrance, California, to work at Freestylin’, the sport’s preeminent glossy. There, he met Mark Lewman and Andy Jenkins, two kindred spirits.

“We were all living together in this apartment across the street from the magazine’s offices, in the Valley, which was like the epicenter of the skateboarding and BMX world,” says Lewman, who was 18 at the time and is now a creative director at Lambesis, a San Diego–based advertising agency that deciphers youth culture. “We’d skate to work, ride ramps, listen to Black Flag and Eric B. and Rakim, and get into adventures drinking Night Train, being weird, and stomping around downtown L.A.”

They’d also make zines. First, in 1991, Homeboy, then, two years later, Dirt. Clever and funny, they became popular with the 25-and-under, proto-extreme-sport, punk/rap-inclined hipster set. During this time, Jonze also started getting hired to take photos for magazines such as Details and Interview. And he began filming skateboarding videos, including one particular deft collaboration with ‘80s skate god Mark Gonzales titled Blind Skateboard Video.

One night, backstage at a Sonic Youth concert, Gonzales gave a copy of that tape to his friend Kim Gordon, who dug it so much that she asked Tamra Davis–who had just directed her first film, Gun Crazy, and had yet to become the wife of Beastie Boy Mike D.–to work with Jonze on shooting some skateboarding segments for Sonic Youth’s video for the song “100%.” He was 21.

Jonze has always lived in something of a rarefied world inhabited by bikers, skaters, emerging rock icons, and movie stars. Even so, he notes, he first met the Beastie Boys through his sister. She and Adam Yauch met in traffic school. The Beasties and Jonze share an appreciation for the absurd. Yauch and Jonze used to do things like rent police uniforms so they could direct traffic in Manhattan.

A few short years after “100%,” Jonze was established as America’s preeminent director of unusual music videos. This fact seemed to bore him. In 1998′s Fatboy Slim “Praise You” video, the one with the dancers in front of Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Jonze credited the direction to Richard Koufey and the Torrance Community Dancers. To this day, Jonze denies having been a part of it. Earlier this year, a typed letter arrived at the Spin offices vehemently demanding Spin retract its report that Jonze directed the video. It was signed Richard Koufey and included a detailed résumé for Koufey that stated he was a dancer in the “Thriller” video, the “Love Shack” video, the film Dirty Dancing, and something called “Dancextravaganza” at the opening of a Dellamo Fashion Center.

IN ADDITION TO BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, Jonze has another movie coming out, one in which he acts. It’s called Three Kings and was written and directed by David O’Russell. The two met when Jonze hired Russell to help him write a script for Harold and the Purple Crayon, which was to be a partially animated adaption of the children’s book, and Jonze’s feature-film debut, but never made it into production. Jonze costars in Three Kings with George Clooney, Ice Cube, and Mark Wahlberg. They play four U.S. soldiers who try to steal a secret cache of Kuwaiti gold at the end of the Gulf War. It’s a different, very sharp war-genre picture. Jonze plays a redneck private who is the sidekick of Wahlberg’s more seasoned soldier.

“I’d never really acted before,” Jonze says. “A few little things with friends, but nothing serious. And it’s not like I really want to get into acting. But David was really into me doing it, and Mark was especially supportive. In some ways I feel like I had no right to do it. But it was a lot of fun.”

Russell recalls Jonze’s commitment to the project. “He stayed in character a lot on set, and I think he eventually regretted it because Mark started beating the shit out of him as if Spike was really his tagalong sidekick. We tried telling Mark to go easy on him, but he was in character too. I think Spike was upset that that was happening.

AMONG THOSE IMMERSED IN THE CULT of Spike Jonze, the Weird Al prank is infamous. As partially recounted in an issue of the Beastie Boys’ zine, Grand Royal, Mike D. and Russell Simins, the drummer for Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, interviewed by Weird Al. During the interview, they got the conversation to come around to the Beatles. Precisely at that moment, they had Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono walk by and staged something weird and funny. No one at Grand Royal can remember exactly what happened, but it included Spike Jonze dressed up as a waiter.

I didn’t know of the Weird Al prank until weeks after meeting Jonze. As such, I spent a good portion of my evening immediately following the Knox vs. Jonze incident breathlessly telling friends all about their fight, until a friend, a longtime skater, looked at me and matter-of-factly said: “He staged it.”

Two days after the fight I go to meet Jonze for lunch, and, even though I’m not sure, I tell him I now that the afternoon with Knox was staged. Jonze demurs. “That would be gnarly” he says. “Maybe we should come back to this topic after lunch.

We pull into a Carl’s Jr. Things between us are slightly tense. I keep pressing him on the issue as we walk into the restaurant. Jonze doesn’t say anything until he’s just about to order at the counter, then he says we should walk outside. I follow him into the parking lot toward a parked black sedan. There is a guy in dark sunglasses sitting there, sipping on a Coke.

“Dude, it’s off,” Jonze says. “We’re busted.”

Jonze then reveals that he’d “planned something” for right there, right then, at the Carl’s Jr. We all had back inside the restaurant, where Jonze begins walking around the seating area and tapping on what appear to be lonely Carl’s Jr. diners on the shoulder. There are four of them, strategically placed; two have video cameras hidden on them, on has a regular camera. Two of them, including the guy from the car, who is Jeff Tremaine, the art director of the skateboarding magazine Big Brother, are wearing hidden microphones.

“This was going to be an all-out assault,” Tremaine says. “I was going to walk by and bump into Spike and my drink was going to fall all over me. And then I was going to get all jacked at Spike and knock some shit on him and get into a fight.”

“I was actually going to take a punch this time,” Jonze says, “but I was also going to bite down on some blood pellets.” He shows me two small capsules of fake blood. “I wanted the whole article to be about how I keep getting my ass kicked.”

“I was going to knock over the salad bar,” Tremaine says. “We were going to have the whole thing on tape. I twas going to be a turkey shoot, like Kennedy.”

“You are all extremely fucked up,” I tell them.

Jonze says he started planning for it late last night and tells everyone he’s sorry he didn’t go through with it. Tremaine tells Jonze that he was excited to punch him. Then, everyone tells me some stories of previous pranks, the best of which is described as simply the Hard-On One. It goes something like this:

The guy who played Knox yesterday–a friend of Jonze’s who also pulls stunts like getting himself hit by a car (for a Big Brother photo shoot) and shooting himself with a gun while wearing a bulletproof vest (for fun)–puts on a pair of flimsy gym shorts, out of which sticks a large, fake rubber penis. Then, he goes out and gets into a pickup basketball game. Next, he walks into a guitar store, where, when a salesman hands him a cord to plug in, the salesman is pulled toward the fake rubber penis. After that, he makes a quick stop at a karate studio, from which he is quickly removed. Finally, he goes to get measured for a tux, where, according to Jonze, the tailor exclaims [in a thick Indian accent], “What? You always run around with your dick sticking out?”

“It’s amazing,” Jonze says. “We’ve got the whole thing on tape.”

After Carl’s Jr., Spike lobbies me to concoct a wild, made-up story with him, one I could submit in lieu of the article. He’s got some funny, clever ideas for it, too.

“SPIKE DIDN’T GROW UP WATCHING A TON OF FILMS or even TV,” says Kim Gordon, who has known Spike ever since he worked on “100%.” “So he’s not tied to any sense of history image-wise, the way most people are. He just has a real instinctual feel for what people like. And he’s willing to try absolutely anything.”

“I think he kind of looks at everything like it’s a chance to take a golf cart and make it go 60 miles per hour,” says his old friend Lewman. “It’s always been about having a really good time.” Even so, by all accounts Jonze is meticulous, tireless even, whether it concerns a feature film, or taking down a Carl’s Jr. salad bar. His willingness to go to almost any lengths to maintain the integrity of any project–no matter how seemingly small, trivial, or twisted–is nothing short of spectacular. It is probably the one quality that best portends him making very good movies for a long time. A vast portion of Jonze’s creative energies are consumed by these tiny, hysterical performances that will never make any money, that are solely for the benefit of himself and his like-minded friends.

“But it’s not about being weird for weird’s sake,” Lewman says. “I mean, Malkovich is a movie that, at its heart, is about something everyone can relate to–desperately wanting to be someone else.... I think a lot of how [Jonze] looks at the world might come from skating and biking. You do that as a kid and you don’t look at things normally. You look at a hockey rink and see a place to skateboard. You look at a bench as a thing to do tricks off of.”

I SEE JONZE ONE MORE TIME. HE MAKES IT OBVIOUS he’d rather I not write about the Knox and Carl’s Jr. pranks. Further, he mostly turns off my tape recorder any time I start to ask him anything. He tells me he doesn’t know what to do because he doesn’t want to come off as a guy who is lucky enough to make cool movies with big stars but is all petulant about talking to the press. He tells me again how anything he says as far as explanation of his own work is less interesting than someone’s own interpretation of his, or any, movie. About an hour passes. I ask him to name some of his favorite movies and filmmakers.

“I like stuff that is unpredictable in terms of tone,” he says. “I like Tim Burton, The World According to Garp, Being There, all the Coen brothers’ stuff. I feel really lucky to even have the opportunity to try to make those kinds of movies.”

I ask about his movie, about what Malkovich was like.

“He’s just amazing. Really genuinely eccentric. He heard about the script and contacted us, loved the idea. It was weird because he plays himself in the movie, but it’s not really him, it’s the script’s idea of him. Whenever I see him do the Dance of Despair and Disillusionment, I’m like, this guy is my hero.”

The Dance of Despair and Disillusionment is reason alone to see Being John Malkovich. In the movie, John Cusack plays a puppeteer who enters the body of John Malkovich and forces him to give up acting for puppeteering. At one point, Malkovich acts out the dance he wants to be his ultimate master-puppeteer work, the Dance of Despair and Disillusionment. Just out of the shower, he acts it out in a towel. David Fincher, the director of Seven and Fight Club, fellow former music-video director, and close friend of Jonze, calls it “up there with Butch and Sundance jumping off the cliff, as far as greatest movie moments ever go.”

I try to get Jonze to talk about other things, videos, his commercial work. (Jonze often shoots commercials, the most recent being Lee Jeans’ “Buddy Lee” spots.) He won’t. A few days later, we talk on the phone. He asks how I’ve decided to “handle” the article, says he knows I’ll write “something good.” The next day, I call him back, ask him to clear up some factual stuff, dates he worked on things, how he first met certain people. He’s not into it. But, before we get off the phone, he does answer one question.

Me: Where did the idea for the “Sabotage” video come from?

Jonze: “Australia.”

[anadvanceddegreeinquiet]

What, Me Pandemic? A Boho Crowd Stakes Its Claim (and Claims Its $48 Steaks)

Fricasse Dubois, 21, lamented the decision to pull her latest concrete poem from The Codswalloped Pisspot as she passed one of the whimsical “Maine-ducks-in-flight” mailboxes that serve as newspaper bins for the red-hot downtown rag. But her friend and intern, Banshee Fitzgerald, 33, had made a good point: The Pisspot had been flirting with questionable taste for months now. 

First there was the ironic opera libretto by Steve Bannon, which cast Leo “KIDS” Fitzpatrick as a Muslim refugee in a Copenhagen no-go zone. Then there was the edgy faux-memoir from Terry Richardson, modeled on O.J. Simpson’s unpublished “If I Did It,” and accompanied by a portfolio of Juergen Teller ass-Xeroxes.

But now, the Pisspot hype was growing, and Dubois realized that she might miss the proverbial boat. Interest in the nascent publishing venture was at fever pitch; a SPAC had been formed by laid-off Gagosian and Perrotin directors eager to stage a hostile takeover of the irregularly published ‘zine. 

And a dash of infamy certainly helped—the paper’s co-editor, Stizzy Fugger, had just launched a Tumblr in which she tallied the number of people she had inadvertently infected with Covid-19, updated in real-time (12,617 at press time, if you’re keeping score, more than the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally).

Anyone who has witnessed a “Pisspot drop” in the Dimes Square neighborhood of Manhattan knows to expect pandemonium. But nothing could have prepared this reporter for the foamy-mouthed jubilee and ecstatic violence of the occasion. 

It was 11am on a Tuesday, and the editors appeared at the corner of Seward Park, bearing several cardboard boxes of the paper. They were trailed by the usual suspects: Pimple-necked sadcore rappers, sex-positive Zoom therapists, former Artforum critic’s pickers who now run content for Chipotle, and middle-aged men who really shouldn’t skateboard.  

It’s a truism that an issue of Pisspot isn’t really read so much as it is imbibed, absorbed via the osmosis of social media’s orgiastic frenzy. In fact, the Times had a great deal of difficulty locating anyone who had physically held a copy of the paper in their smooth, unlined hands; many preferred to experience it as a series of fuzzy, thumbnail-sized images posted ironically on MySpace. 

“People used to say they read Playboy for the ads,” said Kit Murano, a fish-eyed, forty-something member of a downtown-based Adderall (™) street team. “Pisspot doesn’t have ads. And no one who knows anything would be caught, like, just sitting there and flipping through the thing. It’s an attitude. It’s an essence. It’s a lifestyle.”

Okay, sure—but what about the actual content actually published in each issue? Imagine an early iteration of Vice cross-pollinated with Tiger Beat, and then add a splash of sexual-harassment-era Paris Review. It’s a bit silly, and a bit loose. Bret Easton Ellis contributes a crossword puzzle in which every answer is just another reason why millennials suck. A party report—‘Reamed & Furred’—diligently transcribes the coke-addled bon mots of the same group of six people all eating at the same restaurant every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evening. 

If there’s an ethos gluing all of this together, it’s a passing-of-the-torch from an older bohemian guard to a younger demographic, with their laissez-faire attitudes about sex, drugs, and global pandemics. “It’s, like, we can all still party together, and age isn’t really ‘a thing’,” explains Murano, leaning out the window of a Mini Cooper wrapped in shiny SunGen Pharma adverts.

The entire scene revolves around the lopsided triangle known as “Dimes Square,” which borrows its moniker from the culinary hotspot Dimes. (The name derives from Cockney rhyming slang for ‘elongated pinky nail.’). Every New York story is also, of course, a story about real estate. In this case, that means the Connecticut country houses that this cohort has Airbnbed out while remaining to weather the storm in lower Manhattan. 

Parts of this scene are “white, but probably ambisexual-adjacent; they’re members of the creative class, but they possess enough self-hatred to seem authentic,” says Dash Johnson, a Dimes Square hanger-on who many suspect of running the Steak-Umms social media accounts. “Most of them used to work for galleries, or websites, or Garage magazine, but when those jobs dried up, they woke up one morning and said: Fuck it. Let’s stop pretending. Let’s just tweet.”

One essential element of any good scene is a gossip column to keep track—and to keep score. ArtWet’s “Wet Ass Pigment” plays that role for the Dimes Square cognoscenti. It’s a bleeding-edge social diary written by an anonymous, Gossip Girl-style correspondent who communicates solely via Signal, using a vocal transformer. 

“I was sick of trying to break into this world,” they said. “I was sick of meeting Anthony Haden-Guest at a dinner, for the 387th time, and having him introduce himself all over again, like we hadn’t both thrown up in the same toilet less than three days before. Fuck gatekeepers. I built my own gate, and then I started keeping it.” 

It was a Wet Ass Pigment column, in fact, which broke the season’s buzziest news: semi-disgraced first son Hunter Biden had bought an octoplex apartment directly above Dimes, where he’ll be staying as he prepares for a September solo exhibition that will open concurrently across Andrew Kreps, 56 Henry, Shoot the Lobster, and a pop-up space for Recess CBD seltzer. Unlike the gentle, “meditative” paintings that Biden had been making in recovery, the new work is brash and rudely vulgar—the product of an unexpected friendship Biden had struck up with Bjarne Melgaard and Jordan Wolfson. 

Meanwhile, the group’s literary face remains 29-year-old Katarina Klaus, whose razor-sharp prose skewers her surroundings with the acidic wit of a young Evelyn Waugh. “I’ll be honest, I fucking hate writing,” Klaus admitted, blowing her nose into a Telfar bag. “I’m both super motivated and super lazy. Sometimes I’ll just copy-paste random chunks of Speedboat into a column and no one will even notice.”

So what’s next for this ragtag crew? “Dimes Square will probably be over by the time this fucking article comes out,” Klaus laments. “You’re going to have, like, some TikTok influencer house on the corner of Canal and Essex, and all the coke will have fentanyl in it again because idiots from New Jersey just have no nose. You know what? I’m regretting this already. This is all off the record.”

Meanwhile, Klaus is already rethinking her involvement in Pisspot. With a current print run of 250 copies, the instantly iconic newspaper suddenly seems a bit too exposed. She’s in discussions with a new, unnamed venture that would distribute articles and essays in a serialized format, via fortunes randomly inserted into cookies at various Chinese restaurants within a three-block radius of the Square. “It’s all about ephemerality,” she says, sucking on a DMT vape she brought back from Mexico City. “It’s all about staying relevant.”

This article was lovingly rewritten from the original by Scott Indrisek.

CORRECTION: The above edition of this story mistakenly cites Kit Murano’s age as “forty-something,” based on our reporter’s visual guesstimation. She is actually 19.   

CORRECTION: ‘Dimes’ is in fact Cockney prison rhyming slang for the expression, “a bent knob is straight twice a day.”

CORRECTION: An earlier online version of this story mistakenly identified The Codswalloped Pisspot as The Duct-Taped Shitberg.

CORRECTION: An earlier, subscribers-only post of this story mislabeled the gossip blog Wet Ass Pigment as being a Spotify podcast called Wank ‘n Pose.

CORRECTION: Jordan Wolfson died in 2014. 

CORRECTION: An earlier Google Doc of this story referenced a non-existent ‘hardcore maternity diary’ by Chloe Sevigny, which most likely did not appear in issue 4 of the Codtaped Shitpot. 

CORRECTION: A version of this story that was sent to hapless print subscribers in Texas and Connecticut wrongly identified the geographic boundaries of “Dimes Square” as being East 45th Street, Central Park West, Freeman’s Alley, and Bedford Avenue.

[tellittasha]

Artesha Stewart Allegedly Planned the Murders of Danielle and Kennedy Hoyle!

After listening to the interview of Artesha Stewart on Youtube it is plain to see that she orchestrated the murders and was there giving directions to Brandon Isabelle every step of the way.  

Here is what she revealed:

1. She was not at home during the time of the murders Tuesday night, Feb. 1, as confessed by Brandon Isabelle.

2. She developed an alaibi by stating she had gone downtown to get her nails done at 10:30pm Tuesday night, as she knew her cell phone would ping downtown when she and Brandon where there throwing Kennedy Hoyle in the Mississippi River.

3. Here home is less than 5 minutes from where Danielle was shot and killed and less than 2 mins away from the Walmart where the police found Baby Kennedy’s car seat.

4. She admitted that Brandon came to her home to shower at midnight (Tuesday night/Wed. morning).

5. She admitted that the police took magazines to Brandon’s gun as well as latex gloves from her bedroom at her parents home. 

6. She admitted that she has two abortions by Brandon with the last one being a month ago. 

7. She followed Danielle on several occasions in her car. 

8. She admited to being in a love triangle with Brandon and Danielle.

9. She is reportely on the Walmart camera with Brandon as they left the baby’s car seat there. 

10.  She has many posts on FB that were meant for Brandon, encouraging him to commit the murders. 

[artbeacondsm]

Week of 7/13

via DSM Magazine “A Monumental Journey” uses the form of African “talking drums” to raise awareness of cultural communications through history. (source)

a monumental journey

via DSM Magazine “A Monumental Journey,” the new downtown art installation commemorating the 1925 organizers of the National Bar Association in Des Moines, will be dedicated in ceremonies at 11 a.m. Thursday, July 12, on Hansen Triangle, at the corner of Grand and Second avenues. The monument honors the determination of a dozen African-American lawyers who created an independent bar association after being denied membership in the American Bar Association. The Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation commissioned Chicago-based sculptor Kerry James Marshall to create the work. He will discuss his career and the creation of this piece in a lecture at 6 p.m. Thursday in Drake University’s Sheslow Auditorium, 2507 University Ave. Admission is free, but seating is limited, so register here to be included. Learn the history behind the monument in this article from the current issue of dsm magazine.

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thursday 11 AM Public Dedication and Celebration of A Monumental Journey Hansen Triangle 6 PM Artist Lecture with Kerry James Marshall Sheslow Auditorium 6:30 PM Feminist Film Series: She's Beautiful When She's Angry Des Moines Art Center 7:00 PM Suitcase Series #2 Public Space One

friday 4th Annual Waukee Arts Festival 11:30 AM First Friday with Susan Watts of Olson-Larsen Galleries Iowa Center for Economic Success

saturday 4th Annual Waukee Arts Festival 5 PM Mahalaga Opening Reception The Basement at Des Moines Social Club

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opportunities

**new**

Phenix School, Affordable Artist Apartments Valley Junction APPLY NOW

**Call for Poetry Submissions: The Politics of Shelter Deadline July 15**

Aperture: The Biennial Juried Photography Exhibit 2018 Deadline July 20

Call for Filmmakers: 48 Hour Film Festival Happening July 20 - 22, 2018

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[youbusiness2025]

If you are trying to find the best audit company in Pittsburgh for your local business, the Best Accounting Firm in Pittsburgh for Your Small Business below are five definitive realities about the city and five excellent methods to find the audit company there that ideal satisfies your local business demands.

Pittsburgh-- The Most Comfortable City In The U.S. Pittsburgh is Pennsylvania's second-biggest city, a populace of 311,647. The 7 county area bordering the city boasts a populace of 2,354,957.

Allegheny Area, which includes Pittsburgh, is without a doubt the largest and most flourishing.

In these seven regions, there are over 1,000 audit companies, 40% of which remain in Pittsburgh. Over half of them cater to small businesses.

In 2005 and again in 2009, The Economic expert placed Pittsburgh the leading most livable city in the USA.

In 2007, Pittsburgh asserted the primary area in the Places Rated Almanac.

In 2010, both Forbes Magazine as well as Yahoo! had Pittsburgh at the top of their listings. Entrepreneur Magazine placed Pittsburgh as one of the very best for business owners.

Pittsburgh-- The City Of Bridges.

Pittsburgh is the globe record owner for bridges with 446 of them included entirely within the city limits.

These bridges go across the Allegheny River from the northeast and also the Monongahela River from the southeast to form the Ohio River and the Midtown location of the city referred to as the Golden Triangle.

They link the city to the four locations bordering it, namely the North Side/North Hills, the South Side/South Hills, the East End and also the West End.

4 interstates (I-376, I-279, i-579 and also i-79), recognized to Pittsburghers as the Parkway East, the Parkway West, the Parkway North and also Crosstown as well as two major expressways (Route 28 and Course 22) connect 237 boroughs as well as 202 areas with each other and with Downtown Pittsburgh.

The majority of the larger audit firms serving Pittsburgh's significant companies remain in Midtown Pittsburgh.

Nonetheless, practically all of the audit companies serving the city's ever-growing local business population lie in the locations north, south, eastern and also west of the city.

These companies offer small businesses in Pittsburgh and Allegheny Region as well as likewise supply their services to the various other six counties that compose the Greater Pittsburgh Area.

The local business bookkeeping firms in these areas have deep-seated connections to the area, the people and the businesses living there.

Best Accounting Firm in Pittsburgh for Your Small Business

Pittsburgh-- A City Transformed. Thirty years back, Pittsburgh was an unclean, smoky steel town, called the Steel City, due to its predominance as a mighty steel-making center.

When that industry fell down and also Pittsburgh shed its manufacturing base, its blue-collar workers, and business titans like Westinghouse, Gulf Oil, Koppers and also Rockwell International, the city encountered its initial recession in more than a century.

To its debt, though, the city transformed like none other in the country and also emerged twenty years later on as a growing white-collar city.

Today, Pittsburgh is still a steel city.

United States Steel, the 10th largest steel business in the world, is headquartered there.

Allegheny Technologies, a world-class steel maker, has 8 manufacturing plants in the area.

The city still employs 7,000 steel employees as well as one more 12,000 in the primary metals market. Though the area shed 100,000 manufacturing tasks in the last three decades, that sector is still among the greatest factors to the region's economic situation.

What altered is just how diversified that market is currently.

Sophisticated businesses in life sciences, robotics, information technology and study have actually signed up with ranks with 8 Fortune 500 businesses.

Healthcare, education, research, monetary solutions and entertainment/tourism are the recently arising sectors that are driving earnings and work for the region.

One of the fastest-growing areas supporting the city's change to a white-collar economy is accounting.

This is particularly real as the city remains to move far from sector to solution as well as modern technology.

Much of the recently arising companies across all fields of the regional economy are small businesses.

Though there are already over 400 accounting companies in Pittsburgh as well as Allegheny Area alone servicing those services, that number raises drastically as you move into the various other 7 regions bordering the city.

Pittsburgh-- A City Of Growth. The local economic situation mirrors the country's economy as it remains to battle the recession.

Nonetheless, the area has gotten on much better than the majority of areas in the country and is positioned for substantive development in 2011.

Economists from the city's largest financial institutions anticipate that the Greater Pittsburgh Area will include 13,000 new jobs this year.

Unemployment is anticipated to drop listed below 8 percent as larger companies begin to work with and also newly established businesses begin to expand. Added hiring will certainly also appear as brand-new companies situate there.

New IT companies to support the growing research activity

The College of Pittsburgh Medical Facility, the city's biggest employer, is presently in a hiring mode. Retail titans like Cock's Sporting Product and also General Nutrition Facility (GNC) are growing. Google now runs a 40,000 square foot office in Pittsburgh and just recently announced plans for expansion.

Marcellus Shale natural gas will be a significant factor to the neighborhood's economic situation.

The Cultural Arts, consisting of movie manufacturing, continues to blossom and dozens of new information technology firms are emerging to support the growing research activity at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University.

Most of the new companies being created in the area are small businesses supporting these major industries remains to bloom as well as lots companies arising College

business location small companies.

As the location grows, these organizations will certainly expand too and also their requirement for more specialized accounting services will become significantly evident.

Presently, accounting professional companies in the Pittsburgh area deal 18 various kinds of accounting to small businesses, income tax obligation accountancy and project accounting to name a few.

Pittsburgh-- The City Of Champions. Pittsburgh is house to 3 major league franchises-- the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Pittsburgh Steelers as well as the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Two of those teams have enhanced the city with championships, the Steelers winning six Super Dish titles and also the Penguins winning three Stanley Cups.

Thanks to the inventive idea of a cherished Pittsburgh sportscaster and also his Awful Towel, the Steelers have actually given Pittsburgh fans the factor to proclaim their hometown satisfaction by just waving their Terrible Towel.

This marketing icon singlehandedly created Steeler Nation, a brotherhood of loyal fans across the country that has quietly and selflessly raised millions of dollars for a local charity in Pittsburgh.

This hometown pride, this brotherhood, this spirit of generosity is championed in almost advertising and marketing symbol developed Country devoted followers nation and also elevated numerous bucks regional home town league kindness nearly every community and community in the Greater Pittsburgh area.

Pittsburghers are proud, laborious, charitable as well as friendly people.

Many of them have actually stayed in their hometown for years and also have developed numerous small companies to support their households, their neighborhoods and also the city they call home. Accounting companies throughout the area have their origins in these exact same areas as well as have actually handled to successfully assist and sustain these organizations as well as the local communities and also organizations they offer.

These small organizations continue to thrive since of their efforts.

With the excellent working expertise of the city, its economic climate as well as its people, you can quickly locate the accounting firm in Pittsburgh that ideal satisfies your small company demands. Right here are 5 sure-fire means to assist you do that.

Pay attention to your area and the location of the accounting office you choose to work with

Pay attention to your area and the place of the bookkeeping firm with whom you select to work. Pittsburgh is a big urban city with over 400 neighborhoods and areas as diverse as the people living there. These neighborhoods and communities are what make Pittsburgh unique and it is important that you find an accounting firm that knows these places and the businesses that reside there. Pittsburgh is also a city area as well as a community distinct and also is essential audit company recognizes and also live , like several various other huge cities in the country, tormented with traffic jams, building delays and also negative weather condition. These problems cause mayhem when driving in and out of the city at any time throughout a normal service day. Don't waste time driving completely across the community to meet with your accounting professional. Besides, if your audit company is close to you, they should be willing ahead to your place of business.

[divulgacion-alternativa]

Ben Ful Links | August 2/2021:

Source: benjaminfulford.net

This newsletter does not contain links.

Getting To Know The North Koreans

Notice to readers.  So that I may take my annual sabbatical in the Canadian wilderness, the next several reports will be pre-written.  They will focus on the history of how I got involved in fighting the Khazarian Mafia.  Hopefully, this will help readers get a better understanding of what is happening now. Of course, if something really big happens, we will issue an emergency report.

The assassination attempts against me and the murder of many of my colleagues were part of a Nazi coup d’etat that took place in the U.S. after 9.11.2001.  This Nazi faction, led by Fuhrer George Bush Sr., was a sub-group of the Khazarian Mafia.  They were killing journalists as a part of an attempt to control the narrative, the story by which Western society was led.  However, I did not figure that out until a North Korean princess showed me the evidence.

Here is how it happened.  I was running into serious censorship at Forbes.  This started after I had run the story about the murder of the banker, that I detailed in last week’s report, brought me to the attention of the people who gave orders to the Forbes family.

For example, a story about Citibank (a Rockefeller company) being kicked out of Japan because it was money laundering for gangsters was killed even though my source was the Japanese Finance Ministry speaking on the record.  The last straw for me came when I found out that an anti-virus software company was making viruses.  Forbes killed the story, telling me I was “unreliable,” when in fact the story was killed because Steve Forbes had been given $500,000 by the anti-virus company, according to a Forbes whistleblower.

In any case, I was sick of writing business pornography and decided my next career move was to shift to writing books.  The hope was to have them made into Hollywood movies.  So, I sent two chapters and an outline of a planned book to my agent in the U.S.  The book would have described a systematic pattern of the murder of politicians, journalists, industrialists, etc. by politicians and gangsters who were part of the corrupt secret government that really ran Japan.

The day after I sent the book proposal, I got a call from Kaoru Nakamaru, who said she was a princess and a first cousin of Emperor Hirohito.  She told me it would be a bad idea to publish the book.  Obviously she was connected to people who were reading my mail, so I decided to meet her.  When I asked her how she knew what was in my book proposal she said, “A Goddess told me.”  (That Goddess would be Amaterasu the reigning deity of the Japanese security police).

When I met Nakamaru she said, “You understand all about the corruption in Japan but you know nothing about the real source, which is in the West.”  She then gave me a 9.11 truth video.  At the time, I thought “Oh my God, this is one of those anti-Semitic movies about 9.11 that I read about in the New York Times.”  I had no intention of watching it but she kept pestering me until I did.  That was the real red pill for me.  It did not take a lot of fact-checking to realize 9.11 was an inside job.  From a missile hitting the Pentagon without breaking the second-floor windows and leaving no plane debris, to a BBC reporter with Building #7 visible in the background saying it had already collapsed, 20 minutes before it actually did at freefall speed, the evidence was undeniable.

The real problem was wrapping my mind around how incredibly large a group would be needed to carry out a campaign like this.  The implications were truly mind-boggling.  It was only by looking at historical events that I realized such false flags were being commonly used as excuses to start wars.

For example, the sinking of the “innocent passenger vessel” Lusitania in 1914 was used as an excuse to demonize the Germans and get the Americans to join the British in World War I.  It was not until a hundred years later in 2014 that the British admitted publicly the Lusitania was transporting arms and was, therefore, a legitimate military target.  Historians note that ads in newspapers warned passengers prior to the ship being sent into the vicinity of German U-boats as a sacrifice.

In 2001, the people who controlled the U.S. were using 9.11 as an excuse to invade the Middle East (yet again).

In my still naïve worldview I figured that if people found out the truth, there would be a revolution.  After I published front-page articles for major Japanese magazines listing evidence that 9.11 was an inside job, I held a press conference at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan to present the evidence to the international media.

It was only when none of them (with a few minor exceptions like rural Australian newspapers) reported the evidence did I realize that freedom of the press had been extinguished from the Western media.

Nobody at the FCCJ or in the Western press debated me or presented evidence showing I was wrong.  Instead, all sorts of people I never knew suddenly started a systematic campaign of character assassination against me.  The general story was that I was taking drugs, believed in UFOs, and had lost my mind.  I was put on a black list and nobody in the English language press would work with me.  Many editors told me they had been ordered by their bosses not to publish my stories.

Fortunately, I had published books in Japanese that sold well and provided me with an income.  I was also introduced to a Japanese author by the name of Ohta Ryu.  He explained to me that he had been approached by a group of Japanese who had studied Western power structures before and during World War II.  He used the material they had provided to publish his books.

What Ohta said was mind-boggling at the time.  It was talking about how the West had a secret government run by families like the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers.  This may be common knowledge now but, at the time (around 2005-6) when I did an internet search about the Rothschilds, I found exactly one sentence about them on the entire web.  It was from an Israeli chat room where one participant mentioned a rumor that the Rothschilds were involved in the formation of Israel.

As far as our reputed overlord David Rockefeller was concerned, he was number 300 or so on the Forbes richest list and considered to be a person of the past.  I had to go back to the 1918 edition of Forbes to find out the real story.  It turns out John Rockefeller the first had suddenly become poor overnight by donating all of his fortune (around $300 billion in today’s money) to a foundation.  Once the money was in a foundation, the owners did not pay inheritance tax and did not have to disclose much information.

A paper trail led to over 200 foundations controlled by the Rockefellers that in turn controlled most of the Fortune 500 companies.

What I started to realize was that all the murders of Japanese politicians etc. were part of a Rockefeller & Co. hostile take-over of Japan Inc.  One key man they used to carry out this operation was Heizo Takenaka, who was the Finance and Economy Minister from 2002-2005.  While he was in this job, he dismantled the system of cross-shareholding where banks and companies owned each others’ shares.  Takenaka forced all the banks to sell off their shares in Japan’s listed companies to foreign funds such as Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street & Banking.  When I confronted him about handing over all of Japan’s listed companies to the Rockefellers etc., he squirmed visibly in his chair and was evasive.

However, the day after the interview, I got a phone call from an official at the Japan development bank who told me there was someone Heizo Takenaka wanted me to meet.  So, I went to a downtown Tokyo hotel room where I met a person by the name of Shiramine who called himself a Ninja.

I recorded with his permission a conversation in which he offered me the job of Finance Minister of Japan as long as I went along with a plan to kill 90% of humanity.  He said it was necessary in order to “save the environment.”  Since war did not kill enough people the plan was to use disease and starvation to kill everyone off, he said.  Shiramine added that if I refused the offer I would be killed.

To his credit when Shiramine met me and gave me this proposal, he also handed me a tape and told me to listen to it somewhere private.  In this tape, he said the problem was the “elders of Zion.”  I was also told by another Takenaka envoy that he handed over control of all the country’s corporations because Japan had been “threatened with an earthquake machine.”

The next day another person called me and said he wanted to meet me.  Again, the meeting took place inside a downtown hotel room.  This time it was someone from an Asian secret society known as The Red and The Green.  He said they had 8 million members including 200,000 assassins who could help.  This group also knew about the plan to kill 90% of humanity because they had secretly recorded a meeting at the Bohemian Grove where they discussed all of this.

Members of this group had long worked with Western secret societies, for example by supplying them with heroin from the golden triangle.  However, it was the attempt to kill them off with SARS, a bio-weapon designed to kill Asians, that finally put them on a war footing.

You can imagine my shock and disorientation in running into all of this over the space of just a week.  As someone who had lived his whole life in the official open world as seen in the public record, this was mind-boggling, to say the least.  In any case, since I could not agree with a plan to kill 90% of humanity, I decided to go along with the Asian secret society.

At first, being a peace-loving journalist, I thought of ideas like maybe the Asian secret society could show 9.11 truth movies in Chinatown movie theaters.  However, eventually, I had what I call my “Kill Bill” moment.  In the movie Kill Bill, there is a scene where a female assassin (played by Uma Thurman) is in a desperate fight for her life with a one-eyed opponent.  When Thurman plucks out her opponent’s eye, suddenly the fight is over.

What I realized was that most Westerners (like me) had no idea what their secret leaders were up to and would be appalled if they found out.  The flaw of the secret Western government was that it was highly centralized.  So, I advised the Asian secret society to “pluck out the eye.”  I gave them a list of all the people who were members of the Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.  I said if you target them, you can stop the planned genocide.

Later when the earthquake machine threat was made directly to me I responded that “you can’t stop assassinations with an earthquake machine.”

The other thing I suggested to the Asian Secret Society was that buying U.S. government bonds was worse than buying opium. “At least opium gives you pleasure but now you are paying them to kill you,” is what I told a top adviser to the Chinese Politburo.

In any case, the Asian Secret Society became mobilized.  They threatened to kill the Western elite and also stopped buying U.S. government bonds.  Thus the attempt to kill off 90% of humanity was stalled.  This was the real background to the so-called “Lehman shock,” financial crisis of 2008, and the birth of the Obama administration.

However, the secret war had only begun.  A lot of new players emerged from the shadows following these events.

Next week I will talk about how I met David Rockefeller.  I will also discuss meeting such groups as the Black Sun, the Illuminati (in two flavors), the secret space program Nazis, the Russian FSB, and former MI6 head Dr. Michael Van de Meer.

Please stay tuned…

-----------------------------------------------------------

[davebuckleslefthand]

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X’s for Eyes

October 9, 2014

 · 

X’s for Eyes

 BY THE TIME 1992 RLLED BSIDE US, WE WERE SET ON DIFFERENT PATHS; but thanks to Lee Davila REMEMBERING:

October 9, 2014

 · 

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X’s for Eyes

October 3, 2014

 · 

undersrtand people: i felt it is was the best thing to do, waya

part from becoming a Marine, to “get the word out; to exorcize 

such stuff at my destined position. doubt i created any homepage’s attracted a large "fanbase"which had bee n the intent; since creating this conglomeration of talent (musical) in 1990-1 (i just can’t recall) which was my 1985-1989 trumpet instucter’s alma-mater, and things did a working out to provide this 24 year old intent. As teenager; wasn' t very happy about the way things were headed political wise, bu had no voice to express my views. Then the IUMA: Int3rnetUndergroundMusicArchive arrived in my life. Todd Rundgren 

just might have a thin sort of memory, database, spread thingy where 26            years old mind and idea did emote "only from the mind of Dave’s shouts with an initial ability: OUR www Thought to myself: “Well… i had this idea my junior year to create a magazine, or "zine”... much like my friend Dean and Joe from their music act, THE DEAD MILKMEN. Who were at PowerToolsLive off of Buffolo Bayou, downtown Houston. 

So, the hope to "make a band” in SHSU as to make my 1989 hope of being on a stage... just like them; at the very stage as a matter of fact, so it was: only on the direct opposite half of PTL and that was a neat thing, by age 21, to actually do something like that. BUT as the years came and went the 'business’ side of “being in a band” had a bad taste; to me. Feeling blessed to direct you all to where my ideas about music did form from: THE POINTER SISTERS Ruth -Venice, THE DEAD KENNEDYS, THE DEAD MILKMEN, MAYNARD FERGSON, THE THE, THE GO-GO’s, SPRAWL, THE BANGLES, CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN- CRACKER, HERB ALPERT, CHUCK MAGIONE,   A               1995-7 WEB-CONTACT, TODD RUNDGREN.

NEVER MAD, MAYBE WE DID TRY TO 

EVER MAKE GET MONEY OFF MUSIC. 

THEY’RE MIGHT BE A BOOK IN THIS; 

MIGHT REQUIRE THAT MUCH SPACE 

TO GET THE GIST.

THERE’S NO MONEY IN MUSIC, UNLESS 

YOU SELL YOUR SOUL TO IT. GET A GRIP 

ON THAT TRUTH. Barring talent that jumped

onto COMMERCIAL radio pre 90′s...

laterX’s for Eyes see; i told you, Tiffany, you’d brush it off…

6y

X’s for Eyes

October 2, 2014

 · 

Martial LAW ??? LOGISTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.. 

there are not enough troops in the USA to implement 

Martial law all over AMERICA.

June 30, 2013 at 4:06am

EVEN IF THE RUSSIANS AND THE CHINESE AND THE 

WHOLE UN MILITARY FORCE SHOWED UP!!

So many of you have been fed disinformation that the cabal 

are waiting for us to act so they can declare Martial Law. This

then becomes the reason you use to permit ourselves  to be in 

bondage now. Its like a slave who says “ I cannot rise …

     33

X’s for Eyes what does this tell U.S.A.?

  X’s for Eyes

September 30, 2014

 · 

frogboyworld sold out, yo no se’ attempting, with my pal, JohnB being fine replacement for my non-useful right hand present.

dig - WELL… let us say dug.

[musings-from-mars]

I need more freelance love triangle au now. Cant wait to see how Blake and Cinder try to butter ruby up a bit

((I’m doing this one immediately because I’m fixated on it and I love it adsfgfdhgj))

Freelance Love Triangle AU - part 2

Once it was lunch time, Blake and Cinder met up with Ruby in the lobby of their building. Ruby had brought bagels and smoothies for the three of them, and they sat at a table by the front windows, snow falling on the busy street outside.

Blake explained her idea for a collaboration to Ruby and Cinder. They would combine her story about street art with Cinder’s story about the new gallery and make a big feature about the various art cultures in the city, with Ruby handling the photography for the whole thing. When Blake finished explaining the idea, she was satisfied with the excited look on Ruby’s face, and the begrudgingly content look on Cinder’s. “So,” Blake said. “How does that sound?”

“I love it!” Ruby said. She was sat on the edge of her seat, still with her maroon beanie on that forced her bangs lower on her face which made her look really cute. Everything about her was adorable, in Blake’s eyes. Her bright smile, her pretty eyes, how good she looked in her red skirt and black leggings...

“Yeah,” Cinder agreed, smiling because of Ruby despite her obvious contempt for Blake having a good idea that she couldn’t refuse. “A big project like that would definitely make the cover, but that also means you and I have to split the bonus, Blake.”

“Not if we talk to Robyn about making it a big special feature,” Blake proposed. “I bet she’d be totally on board with her two best writers working together.”

Cinder narrowed her eye at her, then shrugged. “Okay, good point.”

“This is great!” Ruby said. “I didn’t expect to land a project like this on my first day.”

“Where else have you done work for?” Cinder asked.

“Uhm...” Ruby chuckled nervously. “My university newspaper.”

“Did you just graduate?” Blake asked.

“I have a blog too!” Ruby added. “That’s...kinda how I got this job. Robyn was a fan of my blog and hired me right out of college.”

Wish having a blog was all I needed to get this job, Blake thought. Then again, she would not want Robyn or anyone to see her blog.

“Can’t blame her,” Cinder said. “Your work is breathtaking.”

Ruby blushed, waving her hand bashfully. “Oh, shush.”

Breathtaking. What a journalist word to use, Blake thought with annoyance. “Well, I hope this project really helps elevate you,“ Blake told Ruby. “Before you know it, you’ll be onboard with a big magazine or newspaper.”

“Actually, I really like this sort of small local thing,” Ruby admitted. Urban Valean wasn’t exactly small, but Blake understood where Ruby was coming from. “I guess I’m kind of an indie darling.”

Blake and Cinder looked at each other and giggled, then both frowned and looked away from each other. “Well, I’m certainly glad you’re here,” Cinder told Ruby.

“We both are,” Blake added pointedly.

Pride swelled in Ruby’s chest. “Gosh, I just...this has been my dream for so long and it’s happening. Like, right now, actually happening!” She came around the table and hugged them both by the neck. “Thank you both so much for this chance!”

Blake’s face heated up as she hugged Ruby back. She smelled like rosewater. Like, not in the young adult romance novel sense, she actually smelled like that. Blake felt her heart hammer in her chest. Ruby pulled away from her all too soon.

“So what next?” Ruby asked as she returned to her seat.

Blake looked at Cinder and immediately noticed her flushed cheeks. Cinder had to clear her throat before speaking. “This afternoon we should talk to Robyn, then this evening head out to the gallery downtown?”

Blake nodded. “Sounds good. I’ll also try to contact some of the artists with works on display at the gallery, see if I can ask them some questions.” Since somebody didn’t bother interviewing anyone, she wanted to add.

“And tonight, the three of us and head downtown to look over the gallery,” Cinder added. “It’s open air and well lit, so nighttime viewing would be a unique time for photos.”

Ruby nodded. “Sounds like a plan!”

[hyaenagallery]

Dr. Haing S. Ngor part 2 Ngor was not initially interested in the role of Dith Pran, but interviews with the filmmakers changed his mind, as he recalled that he promised his late wife to tell Cambodia’s story to the world. After appearing in The Killing Fields he told People magazine, “I wanted to show the world how deep starvation is in Cambodia, how many people die under communist regime. My heart is satisfied. I have done something perfect.” In 1988, he wrote Haing Ngor: A Cambodian Odyssey, describing his life under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Ngor went on to appear in various other onscreen projects, most memorably in Oliver Stone's Heaven & Earth (1993) and the Vanishing Son miniseries. He also appeared in the Hong Kong film Eastern Condors (1987), which was directed by and starred Sammo Hung. He then had a supporting role in the 1989 Vietnam War drama The Iron Triangle. He guest-starred in a two-episode storyline on the acclaimed series China Beach (episodes “How to Stay Alive in Vietnam 1 & 2”) as a wounded Cambodian POW who befriends Colleen McMurphy while under her care. He also guest-starred in an episode of Miami Vice called “The Savage / Duty and Honor”. Next to The Killing Fields, Ngor’s most prominent feature film role was in My Life (1993), the directorial debut of Academy Award-winning screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin. Ngor portrayed a spiritual healer, Mr. Ho, who provides guidance for protagonist Bob Jones (Michael Keaton) and his wife Gail (Nicole Kidman) after Bob is diagnosed with terminal cancer, months before the birth of his and Gail’s first child. On February 25, 1996, Ngor was shot dead outside his home in Chinatown, in downtown Los Angeles, California. Many Cambodians claimed that they had a stake in his estate, with one woman claiming that he had married her after coming to the United States. Most of Ngor’s Cambodian assets went to his brother, Chan Sarun, while his American assets were used up in legal fees staving off claims to his estate. He was buried at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, California. #destroytheday https://www.instagram.com/p/CCbNRmbhksq/?igshid=1ucz4czfll5zg