Sophianotloren

A Native activist and organizer is claiming that a group of students at the California College of the Arts stole her work for a project that received a monetary award from the school’s Center for Art and Public Life.

Lauren Chief Elk is the co-founder, along with criminologist Laura M. Madison, of the Save Wįyąbi Project, an advocacy group centered around an online database and mapping project that tracks disappearances and murders of indigenous women in Canada and the United States (“Wįyąbi” is Assiniboine for “women”). With the help of hacktivist group Anonymous, Chief Elk and Madison launched Save Wįyąbi in 2012 under the original moniker of Operation Thunderbird; they did so in the wake of the hate-rape of an indigenous woman in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and an unsatisfactory response by local police. Save Wįyąbi crowdsources its data, allowing anyone to submit a report by tweeting or filling out an online form.

Earlier this month, a project called Cohere: Mapping Voices Across the Silence successfully funded its campaign on Kickstarter. Cohere is, according to that campaign page, “a [sic] oral history workshop and multimedia archive for the families and friends of Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women.” The multimedia archive component is “an interactive online map that will visually link the stories to the sites of disappearance and serve as an archive that they can add to over time.” Cohere’s website is listed as under construction, having been taken offline sometime in the last two weeks. A cached version from July 14 identifies the organizers as five alumni and current graduate students of CCA: Dani Neitzelt, Natalie Catasús, Jorge Torres, Hachem Mahfoud, and Marissa Bergmann.

Cohere’s map isn’t yet operational, but Chief Elk alleges plagiarism based on the language of the project — particularly their identification of the media as failing indigenous women and their communities, an issue she wrote about earlier this year for Salon — and the design and function of the map as shown in the Kickstarter video. “The whole design and layout is exactly the same,” Chief Elk told Hyperallergic. “They took language — that it’s specifically created outside of the government because that has been identified as a problem in terms of tracking all of this — even them saying what their purpose is, they took directly from us. All this language, it’s almost word for word.”

Earlier this year, the students behind Cohere entered their project into the running for the CCA Center for Art and Public Life’s 2014 Impact Social Entrepreneurship Awards. According to an official blog post, they received an honorable mention; according to their cached site, they won an award. Chris Bliss, CCA’s vice president for communications, explained to Hyperallergic that Impact Awards are typically $10,000 grants that go to three organizations. This year, because one of the winning groups requested less funding than expected, a prize was split between Cohere and another project, with each group receiving $5,000.

On July 13 Chief Elk wrote to the president, provost, and other staff members of CCA detailing her claims of plagiarism against Cohere. They responded to her email and organized a conference call, during which Chief Elk again laid out her case. According to Chief Elk, during that call CCA representatives finally admitted to her that the Cohere students had tried contacting her, but claimed they couldn’t get through because the link to her email was “broken.” She also says she was told “at least five times” to “put plagiarism aside.” The conversation ended with CCA promising to investigate the accusations.

Over the next week, an investigation “was conduced by the provost’s office, and the Cohere team submitted a report as well,” Bliss told Hyperallergic, adding that this kind of internal investigation is standard for academia. “They [Cohere] supplied a report to the provost’s office basically defending the points raised and giving illustrations.”

On July 22, the college called Chief Elk to tell her their finding, which they then made public in a statement the following day: “In examining the visual and written material and the ideas expressed, the college has determined that the students did not plagiarize.”

In a phone call last week, Bliss confirmed to Hyperallergic that the Cohere students were aware of and had attempted to contact Chief Elk. “I think the students who were working on the project had heard about [Save Wįyąbi] and had seen the website and had tried to contact them and were not able to connect because there were dead links on the website,” she said. “They were made aware of that project and tried to reach out and were not successful because the links were dead.”

The Save Wįyąbi website contains a note at the bottom that states:

If you duplicate our work for academic credit or paid projects where you receive private (foundations, crowdfunding etc) or government money or grants for your work you MUST request direct permission from Save Wįyąbi academic researchers to duplicate or re-map these works in any form. This entire database and works herein are considered academia. Referencing and appropriate citation is required to avoid academic plagiarism.

The cached Cohere page does cite a host of other organizations, among them two now-defunct groups, the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry and Sisters In Spirit, but Save Wįyąbi is not listed or linked anywhere, including in the sections labeled “Other Organizations Addressing this Issue” and “Inspiration.” Hyperallergic reached out to a member of Cohere (four of the organizers have websites listed; three were set to private last Thursday, while the fourth has gone private sometime since then) but has not received a response.

One of the stated criteria for the Impact Awards is “Innovation”: “Illustrate how the project offers a unique or expanded solution to a need.” Asked whether the revelation of a project similar in nature to Cohere would affect its receipt of the Impact grant based on this criteria, Bliss stated:

While both projects deal with the same subject, the actual content is significantly different. The Cohere project was envisioned as a storytelling/archive project that would use a website to share oral histories and other content. Storytelling and mapping are two tools that they are using; these methods are ubiquitous in academia.

Chief Elk has now launched a campaign on Twitter using the hashtag #GiveItUpCCA. There she’s mentioned protests and demonstrations planned for next month in front of CCA and “all collaborating institutions.” Her goal is “for them to take the money back, cancel the project, and apologize,” she said. “Really, that’s it.”

“This blog post made me look ridiculous!  And a Chief Justice of the United States cannot afford to be made to look ridiculous!”

Not that I can blame Halbig defenders from wanting to create diversions from the argument on the merits, but really:

Little did I know that within hours of the D.C. Circuit’s decision, Ezra Klein voxsplained how the Chief Justice would not rule in Halbig’s favor because horrible things would happen. Or did Ezra voxtimidate the Chief Justice Justice not to rule in Halbig’s favor because horrible things would happen…

There is a blurred line between voxsplaining and voxtimidating, that pundits walked delicately in the runup to NFIB v. Sebelius. Now, it is a well-worn path. And there is one key difference. We know the Chief blinked in 2012. Why should we think he will act any differently in 2015. Whether the full court press on the Chief  worked in 2012, it is certainly worth a shot again.

McArdle has tried a similar technique of preemption (“This is the Washington equivalent of the old lady in the movies who puffs out her bosom, settles her pince-nez higher up on her nose, and huffs, ‘You wouldn’t DARE!’”)   And we saw similar arguments in the run up to Sebelius.

But this is all silly, and is also irritating because it implies bad faith on the part of people making both predictive and normative arguments that do not conform to the preferences of the 25% of federal judges who have so far bought the most recent ad hoc challenge to the ACA.  As it happens, I disagree with Ezra about the likelihood that the Supreme Court will uphold Halbig (or, more likely, reverses the D.C. Circuit once it hears the case en banc and laughs the argument out of court.)  I think Trende and Yglesias have a much more accurate read on the chances that the Court would destroy the private exchanges in a majority of states.  Nonetheless, I see no reason to believe that Ezra isn’t arguing what he really thinks, and his expressing his views on the matter does not constitute “intimidation” or “Voxtimidation” or even “Kleintimidation.”   Fatally absent from such arguments are identifications of what precise form of leverage pundits have over Supreme Court decision-making.  (There’s the additional problem that the theory fails to explain the vast majority of Roberts’s jurisprudence.)

I suppose another implication here is that some critics of Hilbig have been a bit shrill.  (I certainly plead guilty.)  But this isn’t “intimidation”; it’s “people who strongly disagree for obvious reasons.”  The consequences of Halbig, as the majority conceded, would be serious and dire if it is upheld.  The IRS, which is by law owed deference over reasonable judgments, has interpreted the law as making the subsidies available on federally-established state exchanges.  The majority had a high burden of proof to overcome, and yet Halbig‘s reading of the statute is nonsensical on its face.

And, again, there’s the striking absence of people involved in the legislation who agree with the court’s ruling.  The fact that no supporters of the law were persuaded by the commerce clause arguments against the ACA doesn’t mean much in itself; supporters of the ACA didn’t write or ratify the relevant constitutional provision, and it was theoretically possible that they were construing it too broadly.  But Halbig is a statutory interpretation case — the text in question was written and enacted exclusively by supporters of the law. It was by people who wanted it to work, not by the people inventing one legal argument after another to try to make it fail.  If the statute unambiguously denied subsidies to people obtaining insurance on the federally-established exchanges — and this is the standard Chevron requires — don’t you think this reading would have, at a minimum, a substantial constituency among those involved in drafting and ratifying the ACA?  But, once, again, here is an exhaustive list of this highly relevant group who have ever expressed anything that could be construed as agreeing with the Halbig reading:

• Jonathan Gruber in two YouTube clips from 2010 2012.

Here is everyone in that category who disagrees:

• Jonathan Gruber in his contemporaneous data calculations
• Jonathan Gruber in 2014
• Everyone else

Given this context, it is not exactly surprising that the assertion that the ACA unambiguously established a federal fallback that was designed to fail has met with strong resistance.  This intense disagreement is not strategic; it’s genuine, and it’s not some kind of bad form to express it.  If supporters of this lawsuit think that they can attempt to deny health insurance to millions of people with a remarkably feeble argument and have it treated as a clever legal puzzle, they’re going to be very disappointed.

 Young ladies are being grabbed off bus stops and forced into prostitution…and it’s happening in our own back yard.  –  Sharee Sanders Gordon

Acting and Activism 

Another entry in the clueless celebrity division of “sex trafficking” fetishism:

Hollywood actress Gillian Anderson says the growing problem of human trafficking must no longer be ignored, and hopes her new film [Sold] about a young Nepali girl sold as a sex slave will highlight the horrors of the trade…Anderson…rose to fame playing Agent Dana Scully in The X-Files…

Remember, kids, an actor doesn’t actually have to be skeptical or rational to play a rational, skeptical character on TV.  But really, Anderson’s right at home in a story based on ridiculous, exaggerated conspiracy theories, so I guess it makes sense.

A Tale That Grew in the Telling

This otherwise-typical collection of “sex trafficking” tropes contains an interesting inflation; prohibitionist politician Jeffrey Chiesa claimed that his favorite masturbatory fantasy “is most likely to occur at large stadiums or arenas with a steady stream of events”…in other words, he’s claiming that the so-called “trafficking” occurs at the stadium itself, merely than in the host city.  It’ll be interesting to see if this particular absurdity catches on.

Law of the Instrument

The need to see all transactional sex as coercive is a mental illness:

The Gucci handbag often gives her away.  Along with the expensive lingerie, the sex toys, the designer watch and the multiple iPhones.  But the dead giveaway is the tattoo, often of the pimp’s street name, marked on the back of her neck or the inside of her wrist.*  Sometimes, there is another woman in the hotel room known as the “bottom bitch” who is in charge of…ensuring the working girl hustles seven days a week and has sex with up to 15 men a day…young girls…are being trafficked by pimps…having sex with countless men and never seeing a dollar of their earnings**.  Everyone agrees they are victims…The girls are often beaten to keep them in line and some are fed drugs to get them addicted…[usually they] are hostile and refuse help, often suffering from Stockholm syndrome…

**See “The Widening Gyre” below.
*Except for the money they use to buy the Gucci handbags, expensive lingerie, designer watches and multiple iPhones, of course.

Maier’s Law

When the facts don’t fit the theory…

…South Carolina…investigators are looking…for…indicators that [arrested masseuses] were involved in a larger-scale human-trafficking operation…the women…specifically told authorities they weren’t [coerced].  One…drove a BMW and another a Mercedes, and each explained to authorities that “this was just their job”…but the…case does share some similarities with many recent cases…that have been described as human trafficking.  From Colorado to Michigan and from Alabama to the Carolinas, dozens of…trafficking rings have been uncovered.  Many times, the businesses are masquerading as…massage parlors, but they offer no licensed therapists…

The obtuseness of both cops and reporter is almost Pythonesque.

The Law of Averages 

This particular myth-element has grown so large, it has become a cultic totem:

April Bentley…stood alongside more than 50 volunteers …on the steps of the Milwaukee Central Library to promote the campaign dubbed  “Unlucky Thirteen,” which…is meant to call attention to sex trafficking …through the number 13 — the average age a person starts being trafficked for sex…

As is typical, Bentley’s experiences supposedly took place decades in the past…much too long ago to actually check on.

Profit from Panic

Notice that none of those supposed activities actually produce any concrete, measurable results that might have to be reported to investors:

Through EPCAT USA, the leading anti-trafficking policy organization…the travel industry is taking an active role against sex tourism…with continued support ECPAT USA can continue fighting for these child victims of exploitation. A gift of $50, $100, $250 or any amount will be used to…advocate for improved…laws…Raise awareness that children are being commercially sexually exploited…Equip…students to fight this problem…[and] collaborate with ECPAT affiliates around the world…

The Widening Gyre

There’s a PhD dissertation in examining the absurdities people will believe without any proof whatsoever if they’re part of a moral panic:

Sharee Sanders Gordon…an…attorney in Los Angeles, said…One middle school…is having a serious problem with prostitution…“Young ladies are being grabbed off bus stops and forced into prostitution…and it’s happening in our own back yard”…According to Gordon, a pimp in San Diego County brands his girls with tattoos inside their mouths, as if they were property.  The branding is all part of the pimps’ indoctrination process…

Worse Than I Thought

However horrible a fad law is already, Louisiana politicians can figure out a way to make their version worse:

Governor Jindal signed four bills into law that will crack down on human trafficking in Louisiana…HB 1025…[creates] the crime of “unlawful purchase of commercial sexual activity” and…expands the definition of “racketeering activity” to include pornography involving juveniles [and] computer-aided [violation of any prostitution law]…It…[also permits] the court to seize…personal property…HB 569…[establishes]…human trafficking courts…HB 1105 …requires posting of the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline in outpatient abortion facilities.  Often perpetrators of human trafficking force women and children to undergo abortions so that the victims can continue working in the industry…HB 1262…requires that, prior to undergoing an…abortion, a woman must be provided with information on coerced abortions and human trafficking…

Yes, the first law defines any sex worker who advertises on the internet and any client who contacts her via the internet as a gangster.  Note also the increasing connection between “sex trafficking” hysteria and abortion restrictions, which activists have been predicting for several years now.

Thought Control 

…Grosse Pointe Park [Michigan] residents demanded that the Metro Times be banned in the city and in libraries…[the excuses] went beyond typical complaints about obscenity when some charged the…tabloid’s advertisers with promoting human trafficking…the editor…countered that [sex work] ads are no more sexually explicit than many of the books on public library shelves.  And she said that complaints about sex trafficking should be taken to police, not to librarians…officials…[insisted] that constitutional freedom-of-speech guarantees would trigger a lawsuit…The…Library Board…then voted…to stack the Metro Times out of sight…Patrons…will have to ask for copies from now on…

King of the Hill

Forget about states or even cities; a New York politician claims he can place the “epicenter” of “sex trafficking” on one particular street:

…Sen. Jose Peralta…said…“Roosevelt Avenue is a mecca of human trafficking in Queens and throughout the five boroughs…[gangs] are participating in bringing women from all over the world…right to Roosevelt Avenue…It’s really a hub and epicenter of human trafficking”…

Checklist

This article includes the following telltale indicators of “sex trafficking”:

Warning signs include sleeping bags in nail salons…or workers who appear exceptionally young…a young girl might refer to an older man as her…”daddy”…Other signs might be security measures…[such as] barbed wire inside a fence or bars covering the insides of windows…

The Widening Gyre (TW3 #314) 

A young woman leaves home after telling friends that she was in some kind of trouble; naturally, all possible explanations are instantly discarded in favor of the panic du jour:

A 17-year-old Washington girl missing for the last [month] left a chilling message in her journal…”If you’re reading this, I’m either missing or dead”…Authorities fear she’s become a victim of human trafficking…The blue-eyed brunette left behind her cellphone, ID, bank cards and the eyeglasses she needs to see…”She had been telling some people for a while that she was involved in something, that she was in over her head, that she was scared. But they couldn’t get any more information than that out of her,” [said] her…mother, Lynda Jorgenson…

Dysphemisms Galore

Cops and prosecutors do their best here to make a perfectly ordinary escort service, much like the one I owned, seem like a sinister and nefarious criminal conspiracy; of course, any sex worker or client can tell this was written by a pompous clown:

Investigators say [Amber Batts, who is] accused of sex trafficking to roughly 800 clients in [Alaska] maintained a slick website and multiple payment methods — which led straight to her bank account [as opposed to where?]…“The website advertises for escort services…and is organized into different sections, including a…‘providers’ (listing the women being trafficked)…the Blog section… describes a sexual encounter for money.”  The material on the website also included advice for patrons of the sex trafficking ring…

Profit from Panic (TW3 #321)

Other countries teach their young people math and science; we indoctrinate ours in ridiculous myths and teach boys to demonize their own sexuality:

…20 [high school] seniors…watched a documentary about child sex trafficking and wanted to do something about it…The students…visited with a [cop] who specializes in [persecuting sex workers] and talked with [a politician]…”Harsher punishments for johns,” said Ben Prewitt.  “If there were harsher punishments, the demand would go down”…Prewitt wanted [paying for sex] to be a felony with a requirement to be registered as a sex offender…the average age of a victim is 16 with some as young as 8…Jeff Goode said he used to live behind three strip clubs…and saw some of the ugliness surrounding the places…

That “as young as 8″ is popping up often now; look for the focus to shift to that number soon.

Schadenfreude (TW3 #322) 

More of this, please:

…Tim Taylor of the Metro Atlanta Human Trafficking Task Force…isn’t Tim Taylor.  His real name is Paul Michael Libri.  He has a criminal record and currently faces trial for impersonating a police officer…Libri…is seen as a pest by police officers – someone in the way when they are trying to solve trafficking cases…

Long Spoon

These people are NOT allies!

…anti-human-trafficking advocates raised concern about the arrests of adult females [in FBI raids]…even adult women in the sex trade likely began as trafficked children…“The vast majority of those people…are currently victims, or they have been victims,” said Lauren Hersh…Traffickers and pimps subject their victims to a process called  “seasoning,” involving rape and forced drug use to break down the woman who is to be sold…

Lauren Hersh is a prosecutor who resigned in disgrace for railroading men for rape; she’s a sleazy prohibitionist whose most recent scheme involved trying to set up fake sex worker organizations to lobby for imposition of the Swedish model.  Also note the latest “trafficking” fantasy-term no actual sex worker ever heard of.

Vendetta

There’s never a shortage of politicians willing to lick Swanee Hunt’s arse:

The city of Boston has launched an initiative to reduce demand for prostitution…by going after the men who buy sex…Mayor Martin J. Walsh announced the program…at a [prohibitionist circle-jerk]…Boston…is partnering with Demand Abolition…to develop and implement campaigns…to disrupt the commercial sex industry…

A Mound of Filth

It’s hard to imagine how this article could be more fellatory:

…Young women who used to be dismissed as bad-girl prostitutes are now recognized as victims…That’s where Arizona is now, as police, prosecutors and courts look for realistic ways to deal with people whose histories left wounds and unspeakable scars…Making the effort to identify victims of sexual trafficking among minors arrested for…other crimes is part of the new paradigm…Gov. Jan Brewer gets credit for naming a task force…to look into how little girls become merchandise in the sex trade…Take a moment to savor this shining example of public officials doing absolutely the right thing.

Nice While It Lasted

How can the perpetrators of this violent GFE “circuit” hope to outwit a genius who can violate the Law of Conservation of Energy at will?

In an effort to combat prostitution and sex trafficking, California’s Oakland police department is engaging in…public humiliation…On a new website, the department lists the mug shots of alleged pimps and johns, along with their names, dates of birth and charges…Kevin Wiley…describes Oakland as “the hub of the West for child prostitution.”  Oakland and Eastern counterpart Atlanta, he says, tend to be entry points into “the circuit,” a human-trafficking ring that cycles victims around the country…Prostitution is becoming more…closely associated with shootings, homicides and the illegal drug market…“We don’t have a lot of resources,” he says. “But the ones we have, we dedicate 110%”…

I ended last time with a description of how the News of the World had published a misleading photograph, in which I appeared naked with a young boy. My original narrative, written in 2001, continues below. It is not just “more of the same”, I promise you, so do stick with it. If you don’t find this intriguing, then intrigue just isn’t your thing.

With photos like this one it could hardly be more apt that “Hannah”, if that was her name, kept referring to her “boyfriend” as “Con”. Con artist he certainly was. But it seems he could also have been a very naughty boy in another way too, a theme I’ll return to shortly.

But first I must take the scene back to my caravan at the naturist resort, where the truth of “Perry’s” identity dawned on me. He was the infamous Fake Sheikh. This told me a News of the World story would surely be on its way, probably in the next edition, a few days ahead. So the question arose as to what would happen next. I had visions of the NOTW posse reporting their “findings” to the camp management so they could get a picture of me being frog-marched off the site by the security guards. They could then run the picture under the headline “WE SEND PERVERT PACKING”. Not nice. So, should I pack up and leave immediately?

On balance, I thought not. I still had three days of hard-earned holiday left and resented the idea of giving way to those bastards. I would stick around, and carry on soaking up the sun regardless.

To my surprise I saw nothing of the NOTW team the next day and heard nothing from the camp management either. Then, on the Thursday, I had a very strange encounter outside the swimming pool café. Hannah was there but not Perry or Con. Suddenly I saw the opportunity to do a bit of investigative work of my own, because it seemed to me that Hannah probably truly was Conrad’s girlfriend not a journalist. She was surely too young to be on the regular staff of NOTW. Maybe if I bought her a Coke and had a chat I would find out a bit more about how the land lay. She seemed very relaxed and chirpy ¬– much more so than at the restaurant when the guys were around – and perfectly willing to talk.

“So, what’s become of Perry and Conrad?” I asked. “I didn’t see any of you yesterday and now the guys seem to have deserted you. Will they be coming here soon?”

“No,” she said, “No chance. They’re off on business, doing their thing. I don’t know what they’re up to. They never tell me nothing. Pisses me off it does. They just go off and leave me for hours and hours. I mean, it’s nice here but when you’ve got friends with you, they shouldn’t just clear off like that, should they?”

“You’ve no idea what their agenda is for today then?”

“The airport, I think. Checking it out. I don’t know for sure though. In one way it’s better without them around, mind you. At least I don’t get Perry lording it all the time and bossing me around.”

“Oh, he’s like that, is he?”

“You’re not kidding. Arrogant sod. Can’t you tell? He works for royalty and he thinks he’s bloody royalty himself. He’s so flash with all his money, he thinks he can do anything. Mind you, they’re as bad as each other when they’re together. Con gets it from Perry. Rubs off on him, I suppose. They both treat me like dirt when they’re together.”

“But Con’s OK on his own?”

“Oh yeah, no problem, he’s fine.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Oh ages.” She giggled.

I was trying to figure out whether she knew about Con’s real job.

“Ages?” I queried. “But you’re still in your teens, aren’t you? You mean you’ve been having a relationship for ages?”

“You’re right, I’m 18. And we’ve had a long ‘relationship’ all right.” More giggling and I could positively hear the innuendo as she said that word “relationship”.

“You mean a sexual relationship?”

“Yeah, right.”

“What, from way back, from before you reached the age of consent?”

This time she laughed out loud. “Yeah, ages before. I was 12 when I met him.”

“And it was a full sexual relationship right from then?”

“Yeah, more or less from the start.”

I was staggered she was just coming out with all this, as you may imagine, and I’m sure I must have looked a bit stunned.

“But what about your parents? Did they know? What did they think? Con must have been about thirty.”

“Yeah, me mum and dad knew, but they could see I was fond of Con, so they didn’t do nothing to stop it.”

“So will you marry him?”

“No,” she laughed, “no chance.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to get married. Anyway, there’s too much age difference between us. Me dad wouldn’t let us.”

This time I was the one to laugh. Her dad seemed to have a most unusual sense of priorities and to my mind was quite right in making a much bigger deal of marriage than of sex.

But this was all very confusing. Was it real? Was this girl just spinning me a pre-arranged line to get me talking about underage sex? If so, it is perhaps strange that she only gave information without asking anything at all about me. And everything she had said was in response to my questions. If it had all been a plot, how could the plotters have known I would ask the right questions? And how come she was so relaxed? There was not the slightest hint of nervousness about her. She unhesitatingly responded to all my probing even, as will be seen, some much trickier questions I had not yet come to. She was either a brilliant performer or exactly what she seemed to be, a very ordinary teenager who had left school at 16 without significant qualifications and, thanks to being supported by Con, had yet to get her first job.

“What about Con’s job?” I said. “You’ve been around him so long you must know all about what he does.”

“Not really. It’s like I said, they don’t tell me nothing. It’s like it’s none of my business, state secrets and that. Mostly it’s just they think I’m a nobody. I’m not important enough to be told anything.”

The time had come, I decided, to show my hand.

“You see, Hannah, to be honest I’m not at all sure that Con and Perry are what they say they are. They say they’re working for Dubai royalty but that doesn’t seem very likely to me. Why would a sheikh come to a place like this, a public place where he could be discovered? Someone with his kind of money could buy his own estate in France with a nice stretch of river and sunbathe naked in privacy. He could have any number of gorgeous naked girls at his side as well.”

“So what do you mean then? What are you saying?”

“Well,” I said, “there’s another possibility that seems to me to make more sense. Con and Perry could be working for a paper like the Sun or the News of the World. They could be here to do some sort of exposé article about naturism.”

“Oh, no” she laughed, “I’m sure it’s nothing like that. No.” She paused, apparently wrapped in thought. “For one thing,” she went on, “Perry’s always on the phone to Dubai. Talking in Arabic. And that pisses me off because I can’t understand a word he’s on about.”

“Umm, yeah, I don’t doubt his Arabian connections, but I’ll tell you what makes me suspicious.”

I told her about the Duchess of Wessex story, trying to read her face for signs of alarm as I did so. There were none. None at all.

“Yeah,” she said, quite calmly, “I see what you mean about the Fake Sheikh story. It does sound very similar but I don’t think that guy’s the same as Perry. No, I can’t see it.”

“All the same,” I persisted, “I think I’d like to talk to Perry and Con about it. I’d like to have it out with them straight. If they are from the press I’d be happy to give them an interview about naturism. I don’t see why everything has to be so underhand.”

Now, for the first time, Hannah looked a bit alarmed.

“I’d rather you didn’t do that,” she said.

“Why not?”

“It could get me into trouble. Perry would be mad at me.”

“Why?”

“He’d probably think I’d given you that idea. He’s really proud of working for royalty. If he thought I’d been saying maybe he worked for a paper it would be like, well, as though I was trying to put him down. It would be like saying he was just a lavatory attendant or something.”

The comparison amused me. If Hannah was not genuine she was an utter genius of cool improvisation. Anyway, I promised to keep my suspicions to myself but in the event I never saw Perry, Con or Hannah again.

Here ends my original narrative, written all those years ago.

A couple of illuminating details have emerged since then. One is that “Hannah” must have been lying when she said “Perry’s always on the phone to Dubai. Talking in Arabic.” He might well have had occasion to phone Dubai quite a lot: the sheikh was fictitious but Mahmood’s detailed knowledge of Dubai was genuine. For all I knew, he might have been born there and perhaps had relations in that part of the world. However, in 2008 he revealed in a rare interview that he does not speak Arabic, or at least not fluently. He said he very nearly had his cover blown in his Fake Sheikh role when a British army officer spoke to him in Arabic.

It has also become clear that a woman whose real name was Anna, not Hannah, was working for the News of the World with Mahmood and Brown at the time in question. This was a certain Anna Gekoski. At that point she had only recently joined the paper’s staff. In later years this “bimbo” would gain a doctorate in forensic psychology and become an academic. Prior to this she already had a first degree in philosophy from York University and an MPhil in Criminology from Cambridge University. She was the ghost-writer of the bestselling Sara Payne: A Mother’s Story and also the author of Murder by Numbers, a psychological analysis of the childhoods of British serial killers.

Could this Anna conceivably be one and the same person as the know-nothing, put-upon Hannah I had encountered? Anna Gekoski was born in 1974. She would thus have been around 27 when I met “Hannah”, not 18. Did she just happen to look very young? Could she have passed herself off as a teenager?

And what about Hannah’s story that she had been having a sexual relationship with Conrad Brown from the age of 12? If she really had been a rather aimless and somewhat put-upon NEET youngster (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) and had been Brown’s sexual partner from an early age, could there be any greater hypocrisy in the tabloid team’s attack on paedophiles? But it’s possible Mahmood didn’t even know the sex had started before she was 16. Brown might have sworn her to silence on that score. If he could have heard her blabbing away to me he might have been furious – and scared.

Mahmood could soon find himself in the dock for perjury. Might Brown also have reason to worry about charges (under the old law) of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under 16? Or even under 13? His dangerous liaisons, if any, might become an issue now that Mahmood’s whole career is likely to face intense scrutiny.

Brown’s fate, in these circumstances, could depend on Hannah. Much as I would like to see the odious snapper get his comeuppance, I would not wish it to be brought about over a consensual relationship, even a less than exemplary one, with a minor.

 

UPDATE: Dr Anna Gekoski has contacted Heretic TOC and denied that she was “Hannah”. She offered no alternative account of who Hannah actually was. While I would not expect Dr Gekoski to give an actual name, or detailed information from which an actual name could be deduced (newspapers are traditionally unforthcoming about their sources, often for good reasons, and I have no quarrel with that), it seems to me she might be in a position to tell us in general terms what happened. If she were to give us a plausible alternative to the Anna = Hannah theory it would at least give her denial some credibility. Otherwise, why believe a former member of a tabloid reporting team that has become notorious for telling lies and undertaking deceptions in order to discredit people falsely?

Several more children are likely to die waiting for New York to implement its medical marijuana program.  –  Judy Netherland

I apologize for today’s column being unfinished when it posted earlier; this is the sort of thing that will inevitably happen from time to time while I’m on the road, and I suppose I should be glad it didn’t happen prior to today.  Since Radley Balko had a slight lead over the other contributors I put his links before the first video, which was sent to me by my friend Phil; the second video is from Nun Ya, and the links between the two from Grace (“fiction”), Rick Horowitz (“curfew” and “animals”), Mike Siegel (“laws”), Jesse Walker (“lizards”), and Walter Olson  (“together”).

• Cops can now use shopping at garden store as “probable cause” for home invasion.
• Man claims he didn’t know jumping through glass was dangerous.
• Welcome to our world, teenagers.

• Stranger than fiction.
• Curfews keep teens safe!
• Security theater of the absurd.
• Laws are more important than people.
• Would full lizard person rule really be much worse?
• Government is just a word for the things we choose to do together.
• Always deal with cops as though they were dangerous wild animals.

From the Archives

• Dogs & cats, cops, horror, Christianity, sexting, UK, Russia, propaganda, false memories and marijuana.
• A 17-year-old journalism intern’s impressions of the Desiree Conference.
• When one with unusual interests commits a crime, cops blame interest.
• Another “victim” caged to force cooperation in the state’s morality play.
• What should I do before, during and after a client intends to rape me?
• Protests vs the criminalization that killed Dora Oezer & Petite Jasmine.
• “Objectification”, blah blah blah.  ”Sending messages”, simper simper.
• Soi-disant “ally” belches up the “average debut at 13” myth to media.
• Yet another religious “diversion program” packed with prohibitionism.
• Charlotte Shane’s essay on the myth of rape as uniquely destructive.
• A new video game featuring a cartoonish, stereotyped streetwalker.
• A brief respite from a criminalization campaign in Western Australia.
• LA billboard companies refuse sex worker rights ad, but allow this.
• Another comedian’s career destroyed by busybodies with badges.
• A prison with a swimming pool and volleyball court is still a prison.
• You won’t often see a judge side with a sex worker against cops.
• Why clients need to be as scrupulous about condom use as pros.
• Anthony Weiner found himself caught in another sexting scandal.
• “End demand” policies turn innocent whores into unwilling traps.
• What common disease symptoms should I be on the lookout for?
• A Greek example of the “first they came for the…” phenomenon.
• Save the children and the poor, innocent men from evil harlots!
• Cops sabotage sex workers’ means of keeping ourselves safe.
• Mitt Romney promised to work hard to increase the rape rate.
• Nestle Corporation proves it’s almost as clueless as cops are.
• Is birth control essential, or are condoms okay on their own?
• Magdalene laundry nuns refuse to apologize to their victims.
• Why do some downscale hookers insult and demean clients?
• UK cops grudgingly admit that stripping doesn’t cause rape.
• Kristin Davis reaffirms her membership in the Hall of Shame.
• Scottish cops set out to destroy Edinburgh sauna system.
• What should I expect from an agency regarding security?
• A moronic op-ed on the “hookernomics” of Chattanooga.
• I despise toilet-cleaning, but I don’t want it criminalized.
• Politicians speak out against “anti-prostitution pledge”.
• What’s the best way to figure out what a client wants?
• Skinhead murders a “sex offender” chosen at random.
• In which I discover that I’ve become a minor celebrity.
• Thoughts about St. Mary Magdalene on her feast day.
• More ridiculous anti-whore propaganda from Nevada.
• More proof that “sex addiction” is not a real disorder.
• Another example of the inanity of prostitution laws.
• Unlearning Liberty, Absolutely Mad and Blak and Blu.
• Finland is exposed to the Swedish disease.
• How common are difficult or creepy clients?
• Disruptive sex worker protests at IAC.
• Are scars a big obstacle for an escort?
• Coerced oaths as a tool of tyranny.
• The myth of the omnipresent pimp.
• An early form of the links column.
• Is kissing clients unavoidable?
• Rapist cop of the week.
• My favorite musicals.
• A kissing drone.

Having coined Fagen’s First Law of Live Rock Performance, which states that any concert without people wearing Ramones paraphernalia in the audience is a concert barely worth attending, I tested my theory out at the Pitchfork Music Festival last weekend in Chicago’s Union Park, where Kendrick Lamar’s arena-rap and especially Schoolboy Q’s explosive crunk-hop really got the party going. There were Ramones fans there, of course; there always are. But more common by far were those baggy, hideous Yeezus tour jerseys and, to my surprise, a number of shirts advertising Los Pollos Hermanos. Viva el Fring!

Lana Del Rey: Ultraviolence

(Interscope, 2014) [BUY]

Owner of the most pretentious pseudonym in the world, Lizzie Grant/Lana Del Rey has heretofore inspired controversy by playing the classic sad-little-rich girl act over pricey, shallow electrobeats, with special emphasis given to the rich part. Here, she smoothes out the music, focuses more on the songwriting, goes crazy on the vocals, and takes her act to a magical, erotic, irresistible place.

While I enjoy her two 2012 albums more in retrospect, especially “Summertime Sadness” and her “Blue Velvet” cover, both Born to Die and Paradise remain somewhat questionable. Altogether too coy in the way they evoke a ritzy tinseltown world and then declare this world an empty, fatalistic lie, they go deep enough in neither thematic content nor musical momentum. But I seriously love this album, the way I love The Nightfly, the way I love Goldfinger, maybe even the way I love Blue Velvet. In an incredible show of formal imagination and conceptual command, mixing shameless ‘50s Hollywood nostalgia with the playful melancholy of a natural Bond girl, she would achieve chewy, bittersweet pop magnificence on the passion of her performance alone, and a performance it definitely is. With tempos slowed to a deliberate yet somehow captivating crawl, the swelling keyboard gloss, minimalist guitar playing, and dark atmosphere that define these eleven slinky, flirtatious, poignant, perverse cabaret ballads create a convincing illusion of glamour heightened and dramatized by Grant’s singing. Sighing and moaning, shrieking and giggling, juxtaposing verses sung in her moody contralto with choruses squealed in her high soprano when she’s not seamlessly tripping between both modes, she really lets her voice loose. And because her themes this time around are more sexual than fiscal, she gets to bask in wicked hedonism, in euphoric and absolute submission to physical pleasure, in breathless, unabashed femininity.

Those who demand a redeeming message from their art or insist on a certain level of integrity will find this record too candid and too ironic all at once. But anyone with ears for the subtle hook and the brash statement will hear a remarkably unified aesthetic vision. Her redeeming message, for what it’s worth, is that artifice is beautiful.

Sam Smith: In the Lonely Hour

(Capitol, 2014) [BUY]

Having become a star by guesting on other artists’ singles, London R&B hero Sam Smith makes his big debut statement with an album consisting entirely of narcissistic unrequited-love laments. He has his touching moments, and sometimes sounds so heartbroken even I want to give him a hug, but for the most part his songwriting remains somewhat generic.

In 2013, Smith scored his breakthrough hit as the guest singer on fellow English techno duo Disclosure’s “Latch.” The song was rather brilliant, a neurotic bundle of mechanized drum machines and mellow yet hyperactive keyboard crackle. As with many Disclosure songs, the idea was that it deconstructed its subject, with the detached electrobeats poking fun at Smith’s voice. The lyrics, too, were intentionally creepy, as a way of subverting his sensitive guy persona. You got the sense that the Lawrence brothers were having a laugh at Smith’s expense when they made the song, and by extension at the expense of every white-soul poseur ever to make such a melodramatic show of their emotions. Well, Smith obviously didn’t pick up on the irony, because this album is exactly the sort of grotesquerie that “Latch” was mocking. The smoky, gospel-tinted falsetto he became famous for contains mannerism after insufferable mannerism, especially when he makes the back of his throat quiver a little bit in the middle of a word to make it sound like he might suddenly burst into tears. The precious, intricate acoustic guitar/electric piano arrangements match his style of dejected sorrow, as do the thick overlays of Mantovani strings.

“I had a dream I was mugged outside your house/I had a dream in a panic you came running out/For a moment you were sure I’d die on you/For a moment I believed you loved me too,” he sniffles. Perhaps he should rethink his methods of seduction.

Indian Ocean: Tandanu

(Times, 2014) [BUY]

This long-running Indian crossover band specializes in marathon improvisatory sessions that speak directly to musos obsessed with instrumental dexterity, but they’re also rather friendly to casual listeners. However skeptical one might be of their aspirations toward technical finesse, their inclusive and unaffected tone opens up their groove for anyone to enjoy.

Musically, this earns the term fusion like few other rock-inflected jazz bands; it’s genuinely syncretic. Over light, hammered percussion, including both a drum kit and a rapidly tapped tabla set, liquid basslines and spiky guitar licks weave in between more traditional Indian elements, sarangi and various woodwinds and rippling waves of drone. Like a lot of Indian music, it means to be hypnotic, saturated with a warm, sunny glow, yet it also drives forward on a straightahead Western rock beat where Indian classical follows the swoops and turns of a solo virtuoso. Although the players are hardly above kitschy smooth-jazz orchestration, mostly they aim for mellow peace, everywhere finding little pockets of calm in their constant rhythmic pulse. Oddly, the result is milder than one would expect, reduced to bland, satisfying background music unless fully concentrated on. But it’s the kind of bland, satisfying background music that invites concentration, commanding a panoply of fascinating aural details that flow and drift.

Since this album’s pleasures require more focus than most people have in them, you likely won’t play it very often. With repeated exposure, however, it conjures up a sustained, relaxed, engaging mood. It turns therapeutic.

Kitten: Kitten

(Elektra, 2014) [BUY]

Bouncing in from nowhere like a barrel of monkeys, these Los Angeles romantics seem to blend in fairly unobtrusively at first with the national alternarock scene. In fact, they’ve crafted a rather amazing bubblegum debut, defining their own tasty, unique style. Equally beholden to synthpop and power pop, they’re destined to dominate college radio.

The strong personality that drives this record belongs to frontwoman wunderkind Chloe Chaidez, who at nineteen commands a powerful yet still girlish screech with which she roars every arena-scale anthem here. As dynamic as her voice is, though, the basic band sound is even more exciting. If it weren’t for their insistent, youthful energy, the album could easily pass for a retrospective 1984 period piece, complete with big, banging drums, high, clear keyboards, glittering electronic arpeggios, sharp funk-derived rhythm guitar, that sour, bell-like jangle nobody can pin down as either a guitar or a synthesizer, and even a saxophone solo on “Cathedral.” Then they plaster the whole package with fuzzy, glowing distortion, achieving a chaotic density that simultaneously amplifies and undercuts their interlocking pop technique. My only regret is that they didn’t hire Elliot Easton to play lead guitar.

“I’ll Be Your Girl” could warm the heart of any nostalgic new waver, “Kill the Light” brings everything over the top like the giant climax it is, and “Like a Stranger” might be the most confident single I’ve heard all year. Since when is a great new pop band also a great new guitar band? Since when do these bands write such upbeat, bracingly catchy relationship songs?

This week, defining “public,” the Mona Lisa of digital art, the most modern curator, Baffler online, white flags over Brooklyn, the Chinese role in WWI, Americans eligible for Man Booker prize for the first time, and more.

 A seemingly simple question by Anil Dash, “What Is Public?” is anything but:

There’s no real restriction preventing Google from popping up your home address, likely place of work, a recent photo, and accurate political donation data when someone searches for your name. Public data is public.

… Public is not simply defined. Public is not just what can be viewed by others, but a fragile set of social conventions about what behaviors are acceptable and appropriate. There are people determined to profit from expanding and redefining what’s public, working to treat nearly everything we say or do as a public work they can exploit. They may succeed before we even put up a fight.

 What is the Mona Lisa of digital art? I contributed my opinion to this article by Rob Walker for Yahoo Tech, and yes, I agree that the notion of a “Mona Lisa” isn’t really a good fit for digital art, but nonetheless I think it is useful to discuss:

Fittingly, however, given the endlessness of the Internet, there was no real consensus. Maybe, then, the whole idea of the iconic work has been, as techno-enthusiasts like to say, disrupted: In the future, we’ll all have our own personal “Mona Lisa.”

 Two troubling articles from Jewish writers about the state of Israel and its current invasion of Gaza:

Gabor Maté, “Beautiful dream of Israel has become a nightmare” in The Toronto Star (July 22, 2014)

In Israel-Palestine the powerful party has succeeded in painting itself as the victim, while the ones being killed and maimed become the perpetrators. “They don’t care about life,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, abetted by the Obamas and Harpers of this world, “we do.” Netanyahu, you who with surgical precision slaughter innocents, the young and the old, you who have cruelly blockaded Gaza for years, starving it of necessities, you who deprive Palestinians of more and more of their land, their water, their crops, their trees — you care about life?

Etgar Keret, “Israel’s Other War” in The New Yorker (July 25, 2014)

In 2014, in Israel, the definition of legitimate discourse has changed entirely. Discussion is divided between those who are “pro-I.D.F.” and those who are against it. Right-wing thugs chanting “death to Arabs” and “death to leftists” on the streets of Jerusalem or Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s call to boycott Arab-Israeli businesses protesting the operation in Gaza are considered patriotic, while demands to stop the operation or mere expressions of empathy about the deaths of women and children in Gaza are perceived as a betrayal against flag and country. We are faced with the false, anti-democratic equation that argues that aggression, racism, and lack of empathy mean love of the homeland, while any other opinion—especially one that does not encourage the use of power and the loss of soldiers’ lives—is nothing less than an attempt to destroy Israel as we know it.

 The Atlantic calls the Museum of Modern Art’s Paola Antonelli, the “most modern curator,” and they’re right:

You don’t bring Minecraft to MoMA, however, without provoking some “whither culture?” chattering among the art-world elite. Pac-Man so close to Picasso! As The Guardian sniffed in late 2012, months before the exhibit opened: “Sorry MoMA, Video Games Are Not Art.”

Antonelli dismisses such dismissals. She is, as an operative in the field of cultural curation, progressive. And she is, in this, part of a long tradition at MoMA. During the museum’s early days, in 1934, the architect and curator Philip Johnson put on an exhibition he called, simply, Machine Art. It took familiar industrial objects—a cash register, a propeller, a microscope—and, by displaying them outside of their normal contexts, called attention to their form. Antonelli aims to do something similar with her own acquisitions: to remove them from their familiar settings and encourage us to see them differently. She likes objects that are a bit dirty, a bit messy. (On the one hand, Apple’s Bauhaus-inflected products have “had an amazing influence,” she says, encouraging “people toward this purist, perfect design.” On the other hand, she confesses: “I think that a little dirt is good.”) She puts a vial of sweat on a pedestal at MoMA, and dares us to draw our own conclusions.

 You should know that The Baffler magazine, “The Journal that Blunts the Cutting Edge,” has made its archive available online for free. Some notable items:

• Steve Albini, “The Problem With Music” (1994), an attack on major record labels
• Daniel Harris, “The Money Shot” (1995), about gay porn in the age of AIDS
• Jim Frederick, “Internment Camp: The Intern Economy and the Culture Trust” (1997), which was an early shot in the unpaid internship wars
• David Berman, “Clip-On Tie: The Diary of a New York Art Museum Secuity Guard” (1994), about the life of a Metropolitan Museum security guard
• Eugenia Williamson, “The Alternative Press in Retrospect” (2014), considers alt-weeklies when they still mattered and how they adapted

And while some people and publications have been trumpeting the news that the New Yorker archive is also free, in fact it isn’t, though they are making some collections of favorite works available for free online.

 LA Times art critic Christopher Knight reviews the Huntington Library’s new art galleries:

The American collection still needs powerful examples of Spanish Colonial painting or sculpture. The story of American art was once told only in nationalist terms, starting in the East and moving West, as if an aesthetic version of Manifest Destiny. But history isn’t that linear or neat: When Duncanson was on his first sketching tour of the Hudson River Valley, the American Southwest was part of Mexico.

 For the first time, the prestigious Man Booker literary prize has included Americans for consideration:

The 13-book longlist, which was revealed on Wednesday, features American authors for the first time; last year, the prize rules were amended to allow entries from authors of any nationality, so long as the novel was originally written in English and published in the UK. Previously, only writers from the UK and the Commonwealth were eligible for the prize.

 The South China Morning Post published the incredible story of how hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers, the largest non-European labour contingent, played a role in World War I:

Britain shipped more than 84,000 Chinese labourers through Canada in a campaign kept secret for years in the then British dominion.

“In view of the suspicion that certain Chinese are being used as a medium of communication by enemy agents”, Canada banned news outlets from reporting on the train convoys that crossed the country on their way to France.

Six weeks after the Athos sank, the first contingent of Chinese workers arrived in Vancouver on board the RMS Empress of Russia. There, they boarded trains, journeying more than 6,000 kilometres to Montreal, St John or Halifax on Canada’s Atlantic coast. “They were herded like so much cattle in cars, forbidden to leave the train and guarded like criminals,” the Halifax Herald reported in 1920, when transports had ended and Canada’s censors allowed coverage.

Once in France, 140,000 workers went to ports, mines, farms and munitions factories. They repaired roads, transported supplies and dug trenches near the front lines, risking German artillery shells.

 A video by HipHopGamer that discusses the issue of racism in video game journalism (h/t @Fengxii):

 A global “I Stand With Palestine” meme has been emerging around the world:

 

While a few celebrities offer their social media support for Israel.

 The Eater blog has created this mock up of what almost every hip restaurant menu in NYC looks like, and I have to say it is rather accurate:

 If you’ve ever been confused by Manhattan neighborhoods and where one begins and ends, then this map should be useful, though I have to say I’ve never heard of Rose Hill, Radio Row, or Ansonia — though I never hang out in these areas either (via Shannon Leslie’s Facebook profile page):

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning EST, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

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Dear S.

I gather there has been another ‘incident’. I am not too sure of the details, but I understand it has something to do with alcohol, being up all night and a beach party and then being not too straight with the truth. Or some such matter. Anyway, it has rather upset your mother. So, since you are over in the States, and I am here in the UK, I can’t come over and talk to you about it. I thought I would write this letter to you.

Whilst this is not the end of the world, it is becoming part of a pattern. There was, of course, the incident where you managed to get yourself in hospital after drinking too much vodka. That’s impressive, in a way. Even I have never managed that. And there was the unfortunate matter of nearly getting arrested for shoplifting whilst I was over visiting at your place. I did try to have a chat after that, but I may have had too much Shiraz to make sense, so here goes another time. 

First of all, this is not intended as a telling off. Neither is it intended to send you on a guilt trip; in fact quite the opposite. Coming from a Catholic background, as you and I both do, I am often concerned that the Catholic faith can, when misunderstood, instil feelings of guilt which are not helpful or psychologically sound. Guilt has nothing to do with any of it. Rather it is a letter of advice, or recommendation. Apparently, some people consider my advice rather good, both professionally and personally. Trust me on that.      

Where to start? Let’s start with some straight talking and get that bit out of the way. I am told that you have complained that you feel under pressure and stress, what with High School and whatever, and that you need someone to talk to. I believe ‘counselling’ may have been mentioned. Well, we all need someone to talk to, but I am afraid that doesn’t cut much ice with me. You have a privileged lifestyle in which you have the protection of two loving parents (and rather too few young men and women can say that). You have the looks and the brains (I know your grades are excellent; oh, your genetic make up has given you a winning ticket in the lottery of life). You have the guts and talent to ride and you do it well, and you have the beautiful warm blood gelding to use it with. In short you have the talent and a lifestyle which would be inaccessible to all but 0.0000001% of the planet’s population if that. Now, if you really are stressed by school, you might want to consider packing it all in and spending your time gainfully employed stacking shelves in Wal-Mart for the rest of your life. This is the preachy part. Pressure is being a single parent with a horrible boss, or needing a job. Pressure is being a surgeon when there has been a train crash, or a child needs a transplant. Pressure is when your father flies on business to pay for your lifestyle and has to make the right decisions for the company and the workforce. Your mother feels pressure when she is ferrying you to your shows at weekend when she is bloody tired and trying to run a family and do her work as well. Either what you say is bullshit (pardon my language) or just get grow up and get over it. Right now, whatever you may feel, is the least ‘pressure’ you will ever feel, whether you believe that or not. I think you’re just playing a card, and it doesn’t impress. 

And whilst we are on the subject, if you are really subject to ‘peer pressure’, get over that too. The person whose true approval you need is looking back at you from the mirror and it is your own sense of integrity and value and worth that matters. If you can’t wise up on that one you will be a victim of unhelpful people all your life, and never be happy. If you can’t walk your own path and let everyone else be damned, you’re not the person I think you can be, and you will never be the person you deserve to be.  

Okay, what’s next? Well, some rather gentler advice. I think you should re-evaluate your relationship with your father and mother. In the intense and glittering world that was Cambridge in the mid-1980’s they were the two outstanding souls I met, and I was part of a remarkable generation. Or that I have ever met, come to that. You might like to read that again. I said ‘souls’, not ‘people’. That is deliberate. They were the multi-talented: both were and are brilliant, not just academically, but fierce competitors at sport. Did you know that? But their goodness shone through, and still does. Have you ever stopped to watch your mother doing her vet stuff, and really looked? It is not just a job, or even just a vocation. It is an expression of the highest spiritual value, and the animals know it. And observe your father’s manner when he has to deal with his demanding brood squabbling around the dinner table. How he rules so calmly I don’t know, because I would have quite possibly have taken a baseball bat to you and your siblings within about 2 minutes (note: see further below). And why they put up with me I don’t know, but they do. They are the only two people on God’s earth for whom I would willingly and calmly walk in front of a train tomorrow, if needs be. That is why you should listen to them. They are special. And they are wise.       

Now, this is the most important thing for you to know, and it is a rare gift to have – something I didn’t have when I was your age. You must understand that your parents love you unconditionally for who you are, not what you are or what you do. I know the grades are excellent, you are gifted at riding and so forth, and these are brilliant treats on the banquet of life. They are important, of course they are. They are wonderful. Keep excelling! But they are not ultimately what it is all about. Their love is not dependant on your grades, or your success in riding, or your college. It is simple and unconditionally about you. They would love you no more and no less with or without them. They love you, the person, for who you are. That takes all the pressure off, right there.  By the way, that is actually the nature of God. Simple, unconditional love. Just thought I’d drop that one in there, for future reference.  

That is why I expect your mother has given you such a rollicking. By the way, I am not against a little devilment. I have that in me too, and the spirit that gives you the ‘balls’ to jump those fences when you ride – which you do very well – will express itself in other ways, I am sure. But be careful how you manage it. Be careful it does not become self destructive – I have that streak in me and it needs to be carefully controlled. But then I didn’t have a wise mother and father, or a proxy uncle to advise me. Your mother’s anger is only love by another name. Have you ever seen a lioness when her cub does something stupid, like approaching a cobra? The cub gets a whack from a paw, and then some. It is just a natural instinct, and it is there for a good reason. Don’t be resentful.                

It is now time for you to think more seriously about your life. You are growing up now. It is time for you to think: what is your goal? Well, you can stop thinking, because I will tell you. Your goal is joy, peace, energy, love, and fulfilment. In what forms you choose to manifest it is up to you. There is another way to put it. There was a philosopher and psychologist called Abraham Maslow. One of the things he wrote about was becoming the ‘self actualising’ person. What he meant by that was someone who manifested themselves at their peak in the world, who realised their divine potential. One who developed their talents in all areas and became the best they could be. Perhaps you could look him up. That is not about pressure, by the way. It is about discovery, joy, and adventure. You are well on the way. The prize is there for you. But will you take a step off the road when the prize is just ahead of you? Only you can choose.        

How you get there is your choice, but your present choices are not serving you well.   

Keep your faith. It will serve you well in hard times, and there will be hard times, because that is the way of the world. 

Who am I to say such things, and give you such advice? It may surprise you to know that this mildly eccentric (to say the least) and a bit overweight middle aged English man who likes cooking and wine was not and is not always so silly or meek and mild. Indeed, I was a troubled young man with a quick temper and I wasn’t afraid to let it out. There was a wonderful fight one night when a ‘toff’ from Magdalene pissed in the corner of our college bar and insulted my friend Mark. I put his arm up his back and frog marched him to the door and then launched him into space, then it all got a bit heated. And I do recall nearly killing some big guy who started picking on me at the boat club dinner one night; he didn’t think my girlfriend was worthy of me, it appeared.  Fortunately I was dragged off him whilst in the process of strangling him with his tie. I still have that temper. The ghastly man who started leaching over the woman I loved at the Millennium New Years Eve party would affirm that; a broken wrist can be a very bad thing for a guitarist. In fact, when I am not pottering about making bad dinners or pretending to be a monk on the internet, my day time job can sometimes best be described as the disciplined application of extreme intellectual violence. I have seen as much of the world as I would like to really; sorrow, triumph, true love, betrayal and disappointment, grief and bereavement. I have made a lot of mistakes, and done a lot of things right. Do you think I have not raved (and more) on a beach till dawn, or embraced my true love at the pinnacle of the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State building, or encountered evil in many forms, and done battle with it? I suppose I am telling you these things because I want you to understand that I am not saying I haven’t done things that are wrong, or lived it up a bit, but I can see things from a certain perspective. It means only I would spare you from making mistakes where possible, although a certain number of mistakes are inevitable and probably good for you. And to tell you that I will therefore always be here for you, in whatever capacity I can, as long as I can drawn breath. Unconditional and fairly un-shockable.  

Do you remember the gift I gave you when I first came to stay with your mother and father? It was the silver topped riding crop, and I believe you still use it at shows and competitions, which pleases me. I don’t know if you are aware, but it is extremely valuable. But I hope you find this letter more valuable still one day.

Take care. 

©Gildas the Monk      

                  

To paraphrase Charlie Crist, running against Rick Scott for governor of Florida, “I’m not a shrink but I can use my brain and talk to one” and mine prescribed a few days of R&R from my peculiar, soul-sucking fixation on American politics.

So it is that I’m unplugging, packing up my lovely bride and striking out for the territories in the All-American pursuit of happiness known as the VACAY!

Mind you, we’re only talking three days here, in which I’ll endeavor to clear my brain and heal my soul with gut-busting quantities of artisanal beer and otherwise forbidden fruit of the deep fried and sugar-laden variety.  I’m hoping that a severely time-limited period of indulgence will prevent me from ending up like this:

In the words of Church Lady:  Isn’t that special?

Ta, Roasters.  Back Thursday—when the House Oversight Committee’s “Senator Joseph R. McCarthy Memorial Truth Pond” should be fully operational.  Meanwhile, snark amongst yourselves . . .

There were many annoying things about the news media’s recent re-discovery of the new conservative intellectuals – among them, the argument from Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry and his ilk that the reformicons are too the vanguard of the new party of ideas because “the current Democratic agenda…[is] so tired. Raising the minimum wage, raising taxes on high earners, tightening environmental regulation — these are all ideas from the ’60s.”

To begin with, there’s Krugman’s rejoinder that all of the reformicon’s ideas are basically warmed-over Reagan era policies, with perhaps a soupçon of maybe going forward, we ought to give a smidge more tax cuts to the middle class rather than to the 1%. (An accurate assessment, I would add.)  There’s also the fact that, well, the conditions that justified those policies then have come around again: the minimum wage was allowed to stagnate for over a decade under Republican rule, so we need to raise it so it can actually reduce working poverty; inequality has reached heights not seen since the Great Depression, so we may need the kinds of tax rates that brought it back down between the 30s and the 70s.  Environmental regulation is needed, not for retro cool, but because we’re facing a climate change crisis that requires it.

On the other hand, I do think there is something to a different argument, sometimes made from the left of the Democratic Party (and from within the Democratic Party’s left), that the Democratic agenda falls a bit short of a full-fledged weltanschauung. In general, the Democratic Party offers worthy solutions – the minimum wage , for example – to an important problem (working poverty), but without thinking in a detailed fashion about what we want the world to look like, how we get from here to there, and how wage policy fits into the larger objective of an egalitarian economy.

And it’s in these kind of gaps that the policy imagination matters.

By “policy imagination,” I mean the both the scope and variety of ideas available to policymakers, activists, and pundits, and their own intellectual horizons – whether they can envision a world different from today, and how different they can get. Policy imaginations can help us move beyond slapping Band-Aids on social ills that may require more profound treatment, and inspire us to think about long-term, big picture problems in creative ways. Or they can condemn us to prescribing the same solution to every problem, regardless of whether that makes sense.

As a policy historian, I’ve spent a good deal of time studying the policy imagination of 20th century liberal Democrats, especially the New Dealers. And contrary their reputation as either pure pragmatists (a la Arthur Schlesinger Jr.) or weak-kneed liberals intent on nothing more than rescuing capitalism (a la the New Left historians), one of the things that really struck me was the sheer breadth and ambition of their policy imagination. To give a visual example:

This is my favorite primary source I’ve ever found in the archives. It’s a model of the economy as seen as a figure eight intertwining public and private sectors (the left- and right-hand loops, respectively) and sits on top of a back board that holds figures for all of the different holes; as you slide the back board up and down (simulating increasing and decreasing the Federal budget relative to the present), the values for the different currents of the American economy shift.

It was designed by an economic analyst named Lewis Baxter, who worked for “Economic Security Associates,” a private sector Broadway firm of analysts I’ve never been able to track down, on behalf of a bunch of Harry Hopkins’ aides who had been detailed to the Committee on Economic Security (the same community that designed the Social Security system that many see as the accomplishment of New Deal liberalism) in 1933. I stumbled upon it purely by chance in the over-sized exhibits section of the CES’ records in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

The assumptions behind the chart tell us an enormous amount about the policy imagination of the New Dealers. First, right at the bottom is the assumption that the Federal government can and should provide “assured jobs in public service for all potential producers otherwise unemployed” – also known as a jobs guarantee. This is a hugely ambitious stance to take, and it demonstrates that the New Dealers, especially those who had worked for Harry Hopkins in the Civil Works Administration, Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and Works Progress Administration, had a policy ambition that went far beyond a limited, pragmatic rescue of capitalism that would be abandoned once the emergency was past. Indeed, in the accompanying “Explanation of Chart,” Baxter describes his chart as describing a state of “permanently stabilized national prosperity,” in which any decrease in private employment would be matched by an increase in public employment. (The substance of my dissertation research was tracing the intellectual construction of this proposed system throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and the extent to which it survived into the post-war era.)

Second, we can see that, for a group of liberal Democrats, these thinkers were surprisingly willing to look beyond the norms of capitalism. This chart depicts the public and private sectors of the economy, not as two distinct entities with distinct missions or the former as a parasitic growth on the latter, as inherently intertwined. Not only were their fates linked, but the supposed differences between the two didn’t exist. As Baxter writes, “governmental activities constitute, in effect, an auxiliary industry, which might always utilize advantageously the entire current labor surplus; and that such “industry” differs from the others only with reference to the nature of its “products” and the method of marketing them.” Increase public workers from 8% of the workforce to 30% of the workforce, and “total income remains constant. The average personal income remains constant. The sole change is that the average producer is buying less individually and more co-operatively!”

Democratic socialism on a sliding scale! And yet the person who designed this chart and the people who commissioned it and used its arguments in internal memos within the Committee on Economic Security, all thought of themselves as liberal Democrats. Crucially, their policy imagination allowed them to look beyond the status quo of their day and imagine the reinvention of the entire economic and social order of the United States, without running for the hills at the utterance of the dreaded “s” word. And while this vision didn’t quite reach fruition, I would argue its spirit inspired the creation (and rapid expansion) of the Works Progress Administration from 1935 on, which (as I will argue in later posts) ended the Great Depression. Kind of a big deal.

So what does this have to do with the Democratic Party today, and our original topic, the reformicons? Just this: policy imaginations matter. The fact that the policy imagination of the New Deal has lasted to the present day is nothing to be ashamed of, but rather to be celebrated. The Democratic Party should build on our rich intellectual heritage to develop a more robust policy imagination equal to the challenges we face today.

And our friends, the reformicons? I think their problem is they’re caught between two increasingly unstable and mutually exclusive policy imaginations – the neo-feudal vision of the Tea Party, and the neoliberal world of the money men. And the problem is that a large and growing demographic has seen both and doesn’t like either.

I saw a couple of friends today when I got to work. A few years ago, a nice woman of about sixty brought her adult son with Down Syndrome to our scary Halloween-themed fall fundraiser. When her son, Danny, caught a glimpse of one of the ensemble cast, dressed as a vampire, he got cold feet. His poor mother rolled her eyes and said, "I really wish he wouldn't do this, he wanted to come and I don't want the ticket cost to be wasted." I assured her that I would endeavor to talk her son out of his reluctance, and assured him that, if he were genuinely scared, he could always look for a staff member so he could be whisked out to "safety" quickly. Needless to say, by the end of the night, it took an effort on his mother's part to get him to leave. The two of them have attended the event every year since then, and Danny actually comes twice- once on the opening night, and once on his birthday, in late October. For the latter event, he makes sure he comes to the last show- the "darkest, scariest" time is his preferred time.

Besides being a "horror" aficianado, Danny is also a competitor in the Special Olympics. After my initial hello, I asked him how he had fared in competition. Without missing a beat, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the gold medal that he had one. His mother gave me a quizzical look and said, "I didn't know he was carrying it around." I told Danny, "If you've got it, flaunt it, and you've got it!"

I have to say, the guy has got star quality. Sure, he's got a disability, but he is a a great conversationalist and he has got charisma. In the course of our conversation, he reminded me that he knows an extensive repertoire of traditional Irish music, so I requested Wild Colonial Boy. Without missing a beat, he serenaded me with a version that would make the Clancy Brothers proud. The guy is on the ball.

His mother told me that she was working closer to my workplace and she was looking for a place closer to work. I immediately suggested the Southeast Yonkers/Woodlawn section of the Bronx as a place to look. She's a Bronx gal and her son would be in his glory in a neighborhood where his musical talents would be appreciated.

Having gotten to know mother and son, I have to say that it's heartwarming to see a man who would have been locked away a couple of generations ago living a happy, productive life- a life in which he has achieved splendid goals. I was in a great mood all day at work, and I look forward to seeing them again this coming October.

I deal with the public quite a bit on the job, and there are certain people you become friendly with. Danny and his mom are two of my favorite regulars.

While it's not my favorite trad song, I'm sure that Danny could have belted this one out with gusto:

…give us a listicle of the 40 instances of plagiarism you must read now? or maybe a quiz to find out which plagiarist you are?Filed under: Apologies, Death of the Media Tagged: plagiarism

He wants it to be easy. He wants it to be quick and quiet and to feel nothing but the urges of his body following their predestined path. He wants simplicity – a bit of friendly fun. Perhaps a reenactment of some two-minute video he used for last week’s wank.

Why can’t it be that way? Why do women always need to complicate everything? Why can’t she be thrilled at the dexterity of his fingers or the self-less task to which he’s willingly applied his tongue? She’s going to get her orgasm. What more does she need? He’s measured his cock. It’s almost seven inches long.

He’s told her she’s hot. Isn’t that enough? But no, she wants more – they always want more.  No matter how he’s laboured over her. No matter that he’s sweat-drenched and has held off coming three times already and his balls are taut and stinging with tension, her face is a passive plane of disappointment, of boredom, of a longing to be somewhere else, with someone else.

He’s bought her things. Nice underwear and jewelry and that ridiculously expensive little vibrator he thought they could have fun with together. But she never takes it out around him.

She waits until she thinks he’s asleep – like now.

He cracks his eyes open in the gloom of the room. At first there’s only her silhouette on the bed, and the soft buzz of the device. But, as his eyes adjust, he can see hers are screwed shut, as if the tighter she closes them the closer she’ll get to whatever it is behind her lids that means so much to her.

Tim’s father drank after work then went out carousing with his friends and then came home and beat his wife and kids.  Tim was often beaten to a pulp and he thought that was normal.  His mother was a weak woman and usually ‘out of commission’.  Now Tim can see the dysfunction for what it was — he has since recovered from his own drinking problems.  He has risen the ranks of the West Hollywood AA, and now with 20 years sobriety, is the Secretary of the Old Timers’ meeting.  He quickly quieted the room which was filled with friends, who beamed with pride and affection for the tall, handsome man in his early 50’s, as he began his tale. 

He grew up in Virginia, son of an alcoholic but successful, driven man.  Tim was getting blackout drunk and crashing cars soon after getting his license.  Once he crashed headlong into another car and both cars were completely destroyed.  The other driver was his own brother, also driving drunk and in a blackout.  They were both driving their parents’ cars.  This accident was caused by the brothers’ early onset alcoholism and not shared hatred of their parents, if you can call them that.  The fact that they crashed into each other was pure coincidence.  His mother often showed him pictures of the totaled cars, thinking that this would dissuade our protagonist from drinking, and would not be considered a trophy of his contempt.

As a young adult, he nearly drank himself to death many times, separated by periods of sobriety in which he tried to fix other alcoholics and turn them into boyfriends.  However, this strategy never worked well.  For example, his sponsor checked out and then missed a couple dates.  He really thought the guy was the one, and kept trying to bring him back.  But looking back with his AA wisdom, he realizes that missing a few dates was probably a ‘red flag’.  This is the miracle of AA:  you learn to just ‘let go’, Regardless of how handsome the guy is.  Or the miracles he promises you.  Because he has a disease, and is not drinking ‘at’ you, even if that’s what he says (and is not drinking ‘away from’ you, even if it sure seems like it).

Now Tim has sponsees of his own and is amazed by how they seek him out, as he seems to have something they want.  He helps them to understand that alcoholism is a deadly and cunning disease that affects our thinking and can operate even in the absence of alcohol.  For example, after about 4 years of sobriety, he had started to make mistakes at work.  The mistakes started to pile up, and he was deep in debt, and soon enough he had intense cravings to drink, and he relapsed and became powerless to alcohol again, even though it felt like he was overwhelmed by financial problems.  The reason this happened was that he had stopped attending meetings, and stopped talking to his sponsor.  If he had, then he would have revealed the mistakes and wouldn’t have gotten overcome by them.  For this reason, you should seek a sponsor immediately.  And if people seem to be badgering you about getting a sponsor, it is only out of concern for your well-being.  And you must have a sponsor for the rest of your life because you can’t assume you are cured of alcoholism — complacency is actually a symptom of the disease.  Don’t make the same mistake as Tim.

An important realization is that you can’t change people and you can’t make them love you.  Another example: his brother was abusive when they were children, and at first while doing the steps he asked his brother to acknowledge that.  But that didn’t work.  Eventually he simply forgave his brother, and a week after sending a letter saying so, he received an invitation to his niece’s wedding – a miracle of AA.  When visiting the family, Tim’s father still offers him a glass of wine, thinking it’s not really alcohol, and asking again if he is still in AA.  The man has still never acknowledged the abuse.  But Tim has long since forgiven him and made amends.  The reason is that his father is still an alcoholic (although one of the rare ones who survive – most die without AA), and just being included in the family is what’s important.

Now Tim teaches these lessons to his young sponsees.  It’s worth attending AA for years, as he did, even if it takes until middle age before you discover that the solution to all your problems is to ‘let go’ and trust in your higher power, and that abusing others is ok as long as you have a drink first or can convince the victim that they too are alcoholic and must eventually forgive you.

Yesterday evening’s nationwide PBS broadcast of Kelly Rush’s new documentary short, Emery Blagdon & His Healing Machine, served as a reminder of just what it is that distinguishes the lives and careers of the most exemplary outsider artists. (The film can also be viewed on the website of Nebraska’s NET public-television network, which offers an informative Blagdon subsection.)

Until a decade ago, Blagdon’s sketchy biography and what he had accomplished had been known only through hearsay by some outsider art insiders, but in recent years, a fuller account of this remarkable self-taught artist, who died in 1986 at the age of 78, has come into sharper focus.

Rush’s film summarizes the discovery of this American autodidact’s work and brings the Blagdon story up to date with fresh research. It’s a tale that, for all the challenges and risks entailed in the conservation and preservation of fragile artworks, not to mention possible conflicts over ownership and inheritance issues or the potential for insensitive commercial exploitation of the work, actually turned out to have a happy ending.

Emery Blagdon was born in 1907 in central Nebraska, the oldest of his parents’ six children. In Rush’s film, the artist’s great-niece, Connie Paxton, who lives in Nebraska and was one of the extended family members who got to know Blagdon well, recalls that he had received an eighth-grade education but that he had realized early in life “that school would not hold his interest.” As a young man, Blagdon worked on a farm and also at a saw mill in the area of North Platte, the nearest large town. Later he traveled to the West Coast, where he worked as a gold prospector and as a saw mill hand. Years later, he returned to Nebraska when his mother fell ill. Like many of his family members, including his father and several siblings, Blagdon’s mother died of cancer.

In the film, Leslie Umberger, the curator of folk and self-taught art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., notes that witnessing human suffering up close had a profound effect on Blagdon. She says, “He began to devote his life” to finding a way by which “the power of the earth could be brought to bear in making a difference” in alleviating pain and suffering, and curing diseases. (Umberger, a former curatorial liaison to the Wisconsin-based Kohler Foundation on projects involving the preservation of works made by folk, self-taught and vernacular artists, has had considerable experience with such artists’ site-specific, whole-environment creations, a main concern of this cultural foundation. She was also formerly a senior curator of exhibitions and collections at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where she organized the 2012 exhibition Emery Blagdon: The Healing Machine.)

Blagdon, who was described by those who knew him as having been quite intelligent and not very talkative but not a total recluse, was in his late forties when he began producing his many hundreds of “pretties,” as he called them, including abstract paintings on board and sculptural objects made of wire, metallic foil, bottles, colored lights and assorted found materials. Blagdon believed that his creations, individually and together, possessed a healing power that could affect people in their presence. That is, just to be near them was to absorb a supposed electromagnetic energy their maker believed was soothing and curative. Blagdon created his “pretties” while living alone at his uncle’s farm, where, inside an 800-square-foot shed, he assembled those separate works into his multi-part “healing machine.”

Overall, few people ever saw it. However, based on her conversations with the few surviving sources who were close to Blagdon, Rush told me in a recent telephone interview, “He did invite some people over to see his work. Those who met him found him to be a gentleman, a generous person. He didn’t charge anything when he allowed someone to stand next to the ‘machine.’ He didn’t give away any of the components of the big work either, for he believed that all the pieces were integral parts of the big ‘machine.’”

As for its would-be healing effects, Rush added that, among the sources with whom she and her film-making team had spoken (her colleagues included cameraman/editor Charles P. Aylward and the late Nebraska public-radio veteran, Jerry Johnston), “many said they had not felt such energy when they visited Blagdon’s shed but they also did not consider him to have been mentally ill. Everyone realized Emery just marched to the beat of a different drummer.”

Absolutely central to the story of the rescue of Blagdon’s work are Dan Dryden, a New York-based sound engineer who has long worked with the Philip Glass Ensemble, and Dryden’s childhood friend, Don Christensen. The two men grew up in North Platte. In the mid-1970s, Dryden was operating a drugstore there when he first encountered Blagdon. In Rush’s film (and in a January 2004 New York Times article that I wrote about this subject, which effectively broke the Blagdon story), he recalls that an unusual-looking older man entered his store, approached him at the pharmacist’s counter and requested some “elements” for use in his “machines.” Dryden was intrigued. As it turned out, Blagdon wanted ordinary mineral salts like sodium bicarbonate. Later Dryden would visit Blagdon’s property and be invited to enter the shed.

Choked with emotion, Dryden tells Rush, “He opened the door, switched on some lights, and this rainbow of colored lights came on. I had never seen anything like it before and I’ve never seen anything like it since.”

Years passed, and, one after the other, Christensen and Dryden left Nebraska and headed to New York. In 1986, the two men returned to North Platte for a high school reunion and upon arriving found out that Blagdon had recently died. The artist had not left a will, so local officials were planning to unload his possessions in an open-to-the-public estate sale. A poster announcing that auction noted that items for sale would include tools, appliances, guns, furniture, a horse-drawn manure spreader and, in reference to the “healing machine” in the shed, “lots & lots of metal wire, fancy work.”

Dryden and Christensen trekked out to Blagdon’s property to check on the condition of that big work, concerned about what they might find there. In fact, they arrived to discover that the “healing machine” was safe and unharmed. In a 2004 interview, Christensen told me, “It was a wonderland, the product of an amazing intelligence.” The two friends decided to bid on the “fancy work” lot at the forthcoming auction, where, as Rush’s film points out, they found themselves bidding against Connie Paxton’s grandmother, a relative who had been close to Blagdon. She “did not want to see [Emery’s] work destroyed,” Paxton says in the film, but the older woman withdrew from bidding at a certain point, allowing Dryden and Christensen to win the contest.

Dryden tells Rush, “The only thing I can say about it is [that] the work found us. We didn’t know what we were going to find when we started really inspecting it. It was intimidating. There was a lot of material….” Or as Christensen told me ten years ago, “The gavel came down — and we became stewards of this man’s vision.”

Over the next eighteen years, at considerable expense to themselves, Dryden and Christensen stored the voluminous Blagdon oeuvre and began sorting out its parts. They created a classification system that included paintings; lamp-like hanging objects they dubbed “chandeliers”; wire-wrapped bundles; dangling, necklace-like strings of wire objects they called “cascades”; and other sculptural forms, which the artist had developed as integral parts of his larger work. They photographed their holdings, too.

By 2004, the job of caring for such a complex, fragile body of mixed-media artworks had become too costly and time-consuming, so Dryden and Christensen reached out to specialists with expertise in outsider art. Shari Cavin and Randall Morris of Manhattan’s Cavin-Morris Gallery, one of the most respected venues in the field, became their collaborators and guides to the art market. Dryden and Christensen’s goal: to find a reputable institution to acquire Blagdon’s body of work in its entirety, preferably one that was able to properly conserve it.

In Rush’s film, Cavin explains that she and Morris first mounted an exhibition of a selection of pieces from the larger Blagdon work at their gallery; they also brought some to the 2004 Outsider Art Fair in New York. Collectors reacted enthusiastically. “Shortly thereafter,” Cavin says in the film, “the Kohler Foundation stepped forward and purchased the entire remaining [Blagdon] environment and gifted it to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.” That museum’s 2012 exhibition displayed Blagdon’s cleaned-and-conserved masterpiece in a frame-like structure that nearly replicated his objects-filled barn. In that show, many parts of his “healing machine” were installed so that viewers could get a good sense of its original context and character. Other components of the big work — paintings and various sculptural objects — were also presented in a more conventional, museum-gallery setting to allow for closer inspection.

Rush’s short but informative documentary is especially valuable because it captures on film hitherto unheard-from sources, such as Paxton and the artist’s friend, Roger Neth. Their firsthand accounts offer rare glimpses of a man who appeared to be content, alone on his remote farm, engrossed in the making of his “healing machine.” In Rush’s film, Neth offers up such tidbits as the recollection that his pal Emery “never took a bath.” Neth says Blagdon told him, “I don’t believe in it. That’s where I get a lot of my power from.” Neth says, “He wore new overalls into town but took them off when he came home.”

In Emery Blagdon & His Healing Machine, Paxton notes that Blagdon lived with cancer himself for several years until he died. The advancing disease caused a crack to appear in his lip, and it became difficult for the old man to eat or talk. He refused to see doctors about his condition. Eventually his health deteriorated so much that he had to lock up his “shop,” as Paxton refers to Blagdon’s art-filled barn, and he never set foot in it again.

Dryden appears in Rush’s film as someone who was deeply moved by every aspect of his involvement with Blagdon’s “healing machine.” As he looks back on what he learned from its spirit, he says he admires the way in which Blagdon persevered, despite, Dryden surmises, having been gossiped about behind his back by rural and small-town people who would have dismissed him as “eccentric” — or worse.

However, Dryden suggests, Blagdon “appeared to care nothing about it and just carried on with his life, doing what he wanted to do.” Dryden adds, “That was the lesson.” It was one he personally absorbed, his remark suggests, not only about chasing a dream, but maybe also about the unsinkable healing power of art.

Emery Blagdon & His Healing Machine (2014) premiered on PBS.

From Andrew Sullivan:

...
Like [Tom] Ricks, I don’t believe my general inclinations politically have changed that much over the years. I prefer smaller government in general; I too believe in a robust defense; I have few issues with the free market; I think marriage and family are critical social institutions; I’m still a believing Christian; I have deep qualms about abortion and abhor affirmative action; I’m a fiscal conservative; want radical tax reform, cuts in unfunded entitlements, and culturally, I’m a libertarian, with a traditionalist streak alongside radical tendencies (so, for example, I both love the Latin Mass and intend to go to Burning Man next month). I haven’t renounced my precocious devotion to Thatcher and Reagan, even as I have out-grown them, as the world has as well.

But I am now regarded as a leftist by much of the right and to some extent, they’re right...

...even though Mr. Sullivan now, belatedly comes to believe much of what Liberals believe and finally deigns to notice a horde of grotesque truths about his Conservative Movement about which Liberals have been sounding the alarm for 30 years, Andrew Sullivan nonetheless looks us all straight in that eye and argues that he could not possibly be some mere Liberal.

Because in Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of "being right about everything" will permit you to achieve escape velocity. In Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee.

Mr. Sullivan regularly receives such largess, therefore he must not be a Liberal.

He instead must be the lone member be of some rare and singular new species; some miraculous form of haploid political minotaur.

Because if he is not something spontaneously-generated and utterly sui generis, then he is just another Lefty-Come-Very-Lately, showing up at our door at 3:00 A.M., 20 years late and trailing toxic baggage behind him like a Halley Comet.

And who in the world would pay him to do his little dance then?

Sex work is part of the human story.  Accepting and embracing sex work…should be our humane, as well as our pragmatic, approach to the reality of our human lives.  –  Richard Horton and Pamela Das

Rough Trade

Two [Frankfurt] men were sentenced…to long prison terms for raping and abusing two prostitutes…A 34-year-old has…ten years and three months…[while] his 33-year-old accomplice was sentenced to eight years and three months…

License to Rape

Two American paratroopers stationed at a US military base in Italy have been arrested for allegedly beating, raping and robbing a pregnant Romanian prostitute…The suspects…agreed to pay…But after the three reached a secluded area, they allegedly decided to get what they wanted for free.  The two…beat up and raped the prostitute…for…three hours…then…left [her]…in the…field…and made off with her purse…

Lying Down With Dogs

From Vietnam:

…the People’s Committee has asked the National Assembly to…[increase] the…penalties on sex buyers and publicly naming them in the local community and…[to replace] the words “sexual intercourse” with “sexual satisfaction” [in the law] in order to cover behavior causing sexual arousal and the sex trade of homosexuals…

Saving Them From Themselves

The UK continues its drive to become a colony of the US:

Police have warned teenagers of the risks that…”sexting”, can pose to their safety, with the possibility they could wind up on the sex offenders’ register.  Several teenagers have already been cautioned over the practice…and police have stressed the risk that sexting poses to teens’ future welfare, as well as their criminal record…

Schadenfreude 

I don’t think I’ll ever tire of seeing rescue industry figures exposed as frauds:

…Lady Katerine Nastopka…was surprised to see [reporters] at her fundraiser for the Rescue Children From Human Trafficking Foundation…In 2011, she made national headlines when she called herself a “Countess”…[and] claimed she had a connection to the famous Guggenheim family of New York.  Police arrested her and two others on charges of fraud for lying about the connection.  As part of a plea deal, she promised the court she would never use the Guggenheim name again…Nastopka…agreed to [speak to reporters but]…the interview never happened because [she] ran away…none of [the politicians she claimed as members of her board of directors]…know anything about [it]…

The Sky is Falling!

A reporter breathlessly asks if dating sites have a “prostitution problem“, in other words if sex workers use them to advertise.  You know, like sex workers have been using personal ads to advertise for as long as such things have existed.  But poor little Caitlin seems to imagine that the practice only started with “the advent of Craigslist”, and furthermore that large numbers of professional escorts will waste their time going on dates without first ascertaining whether money is forthcoming.  Her ignorance is so pronounced that it merely comes across as cute rather than deeply insulting when she suggests that it’s sex workers who need (presumably compulsory) “safe-sex education” rather than her fellow amateurs.

A Broker in Pillage

…the US Embassy in Pretoria…announced that the Department of Justice was conducting a workshop to teach South African law enforcement the practice of civil forfeiture…civil forfeiture is anti-democratic, and allows law enforcement agencies in the executive branch to attain some degree of independence from civilian or democratic oversight…foreign partnerships in law enforcement investigations allow the DOJ the ability to use worldwide NSA dragnet surveillance to find and acquire targets for asset forfeiture, particularly under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)…

An Example To the West

…retired sex workers in Zimbabwe have opened a prostitution consultancy…to help young women protect themselves from being taken advantage of.  Lima Mankarankara (65) said they teach the new sex workers about the industry and how it works.  They also teach them how to handle clients…

The Widening Gyre

I have a mental bet with myself about how silly these “slavery” claims will get before the end of the panic.  Bonus meme: pizza!

…Newspaper Expressen reported earlier this week that human traffickers had gone from “just” selling sex to selling women as lifelong slaves.  The newspaper’s sources said the cost for a slave…is €2,000 ($2680).  For 700 kronor ($100) one can rent a couple of girls for a day, for cooking, cleaning, or anything else…”It’s like ordering a pizza,” Per Hjort, a Stockholm detective, [said]…

King of the Hill

Most of this is the typical masturbatory filth (including the vile claim that most men who pay for sex are pedophiles), but it does include a link to the DoJ fantasy “report” which produced the infamous “top 13 child sex trafficking hubs” list: Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Dallas, Detroit, Tampa, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, Miami, New York, Washington, Las Vegas and St. Louis.  I do not believe these are intended to be in order of magnitude, so I’ll just count them as “top 13″ claims. 

Shift in the Wind (TW3 #44)

The biggest news story of the week was the release of a World Health Organization report calling for total decriminalization of both drugs and sex work; it was accompanied by this reiteration of The Lancet‘s support for our position:

Sex work must be decriminalised if the world is to stand a chance of controlling the AIDS pandemic, say scientists contributing to a series of research papers in the Lancet medical journal.  Sex workers…are subject to repression, violence and abuse…at the hands of those who are supposed to uphold the law, according to the series of seven research papers presented at the International AIDS Conference…decriminalisation of sex work…across all settings…would reduce HIV infections by 33% to 46% over the next decade…

Original Sin (TW3 #321)

Neofeminist rhetoric and pop “addiction” charlatanry has now been completely incorporated into evangelical Christian beliefs about sexual “sin” to form a fully-developed “sex trafficking” religion:

Opposition to sex trafficking is almost universal…But many also…believe pornography production and distribution is a “victimless crime.”  They don’t connect the dots that lead from pornography directly to sex trafficking.  Pornography is a powerful stimulant that can actually alter brain patterns, creating addiction…Our sexualized culture, with its constant sexual portrayal of women, affects not only boys and men but girls and women, too.  Mass-marketing advertising campaigns directed at young girls seem to dictate that they must dress and act like prostitutes to be valued…girls increasingly view themselves as objects in a process called “sexual self-objectification.”  One result is today’s epidemic of “sexting”…Catherine Mackinon says that consuming pornography is an “experience of bought sex and thus it creates a hunger to continue to purchase and objectify, and act out what is seen.”  Pornography, she says, is “advertising for trafficking”…

Pimping the Pimp

Nevada “authorities” continue to use ridiculous “pimp” myths to enrich themselves and increase their power:

…A bill which would provide more resources for victims of human trafficking passed in the House of Representatives…Metro Police’s Vice Section rescued 91 women from the slave trade last year and 148 the year before.  The legislation could have an impact on men who trap these women. The prosecution of pimps wouldn’t be possible without the rehabilitation of survivors…The bill accesses millions of dollars for non-profits, who apply for money to serve homeless, runaway victims of severe trafficking…

Presumably, “rescued from the slave trade” actually means “arrested and caged for consensual sex”, because all the police departments in the entire country don’t discover anything like 91 coerced prostitutes per year.  And “serving victims” seems to mean “locking up whores indefinitely until they agree to participate in kangaroo courts.”

Number Puzzle (TW3 #324)

Cathy Reisenwitz spoke to some German sex workers:

…Germany’s decision to legalize prostitution not only helped sex workers, but actually decreased the number of human trafficking victims…According to the data, violence against sex workers is down, while sex workers’ quality of life is up…From 2001…to 2011, cases of sex-based human trafficking shrank by 10 percent…The mean age of a sex worker in Germany is 31.  Besides not being supported by data, the claim that legalizing prostitution increased human trafficking also defies common-sense economics…

Nasty Words (Extra Edition) 

The guy who did the massive Timeglider charts of slang terms for genitalia has unveiled three new ones: slang for sexual intercourse, for oral and anal sex, and for orgasm, bodily fluids and contraception.  Because he could.

Whimsical Notions

A group of former prostitutes has filed a lawsuit against the South Korean government seeking more than $1.2 million in compensation, alleging that it exercised significant control over their activities…The women worked in special government-designated areas near U.S. military bases beginning in the late 1950s…[the regime included] mandatory testing for sexually transmitted diseases, and women who were infected were sent to government-run camps…[where] their human rights were violated…It is thought to be the first such legal action taken by women — now elderly, but known as “western princesses” during their youth — who once worked in brothels that catered primarily to U.S. troops…in the decades after the Korean War…

Catastrophic Consequences

SCOT-PEP…exposed proposals from Police Scotland to impose unannounced “welfare visits” on sex workers who work from home…”Operation Lingle”…includes a programme of increased online surveillance of suspected sex workers, a clear violation of the civil liberties both of sex workers and the general public.  Members of the public will also be asked to speculate about which of their neighbours might be a sex worker and report them to the police, despite the fact that selling sex remains legal in Scotland…

As you may recall, we’ve seen this tactic before in Canada.

King of the Hill (All Traffick, All the Time)

Having his ridiculous numerical claims debunked multiple times in the national media hasn’t stopped Texas politician John Cornyn from making more of them:

Child sex trafficking has historically had a huge effect on the current immigration crisis in the U.S., and according to two Texas congressmen…hundreds of thousands of victims [have been] identified…”At least 700,000 people were reported as victims of international trafficking each year, 14,500-17,500 of which are women and children who are trafficked specifically into the United States”…

To Protect and Serve (TW3 #413)

Since their local case was dismissed, they took it to the feds:

…30 strippers are suing the San Diego police department after cops…forced…[them] to pose “nearly nude” for photos taken by members of the police department’s vice squad…approximately 10 officers detained the women for nearly an hour without a warrant or probable cause, and…cops made “arrogant and demeaning comments” while “ordering the women to pose in various positions and expose body parts so that the police could ostensibly photograph their tattoos”…Police department spokesperson Lt. Kevin Mayer described the raids and photos as a “routine” part of the city’s permit to regulate establishments with nudity…and…is meant to deter the women from engaging in “illegal acts”…

The Public Eye (TW3 #423) 

This is a refreshing change:

The phrase “human trafficking” conjures thoughts of sex slaves.  Most people mentally picture oppressed and exploited women…chained to a life of prostitution from which they must be freed…Erin Kamler…[traveled] to Thailand…and…found that things are not that simple…she discovered a world where politics and morality trumped human rights…feeling the need to educate the masses, Kamler…wrote a musical about Thailand’s anti-trafficking movement.  The Los Angeles premiere of Land of Smiles will run Wednesday-Saturday, July 23-26, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, before heading to Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August…[in] the story…Emma…arrives in Thailand an abolitionist wanting to “rescue” all the sex workers.  After speaking with Lipoh, who is being held at a detention center following a raid of the brothel where she worked, Emma begins to question what “rescued” really means…

Nice While It Lasted

Like hell it doesn’t:

New Zealand’s second-largest political party wants to reverse the burden of proof in rape cases if it gets into power, making defendants prove their innocence…Andrew Little, the Labour Party’s justice spokesman, has outlined plans for a monumental shift in the justice system…he said…”This approach does not contradict the fundamental principle that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty”…

Before my November 2011 self-exile from the marital home due to the Minotaur’s PTSD crisis , he and I shared an office space I loved dearly. It was so restful and beautiful. Well, since then, I got him a very old and very large roll-top desk as a Fathers’ Day gift. So, when I repainted the space once the office to facilitate my move back into my own home? I had to transform that space, I now think of it as the “study” and it is a nice place to read, talk, pay bills or work on the computer.

That roll-top does take a big whack out of the room!  It is a very solid piece of furniture and makes the Minotaur aspire to film noir standards.  He has tucked a bottle of Scotch into the desk drawer in case I feel a case of vapors while bill paying!

And aside from the vintage leather chair in sage green and the modern folding leather chair in British tan for lazing in front of the window?  There is that crazy rotating PINK chair that lifted my spirits in the Haven for the past couple years!

We don’t’ have a big enough room to accommodate ALL the books AND the desks and such.  So we only put the one hand-built oak bookshelf into the study and some of our most favorite books.   We restored the old folding door instead of the cat-door equipped Dutch door that the Manchild had used to keep his dog out, but let the cats into what was his bedroom.  We have not decided if the animals will be allowed….possibly when we are in the room they can come in, too?

Tagged: householding, marriage, ptsd, renovation

I was very happy to read that a second Native American owned casino has cancelled a concert by Ted Nugent. Seeing that two venues have dropped the "Motor City Madman", I figure that the pressure is on. Accordingly, I decided to check out Ted's upcoming tour schedule and discovered that he'd be playing several dates at House of Blues locations. I figured it was time to send them an e-mail to express my displeasure:


To whom it may concern:

I am writing to express my consternation at the upcoming Ted Nugent concerts which are to take place on August 12th at your Orlando location and on August 14th at your Houston location. Given Mr Nugent's history of racially-charged, violent rhetoric, I feel that having him perform at your venues is contrary to your goal of celebrating an African-American musical tradition, and the performers who shaped and keep alive that tradition

Just over a year ago, Mr Nugent, in an interview with Alex Jones, had this to say about the African-American experience:

“I would like to reach out to black America and tell them to absolutely reject the lie of Al ‘Not So’ Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson, and the Black Panthers and Eric Holder and Barack Obama. They are enslaving you and the real shackles on black America, 100 percent of the time come from black America.

“Racism against blacks was gone by the time I started touring the nation in the late 60s. Nothing of consequence existed to deter or compromise a black American’s dream if they got an alarm clock, if they set it, if they took good care of themselves, they remained clean and sober, if they spoke clearly, and they demanded excellence of themselves and provided excellence to their employers.”

I enjoy listening to Elwood's "Blues Hour" on my local radio station,WXPK, on Sunday nights, and the nightly "blues breaker", which airs while I drive to work, has expanded my knowledge of American roots music. When it came time to buy a new pair of workboots this past winter, I chose to purchase from your sponsor Red Wing boots. I find it hard to reconcile the reverent, informative content of your musical and cultural offerings with your decision to book a performer who has such a profound contempt of African-Americans and such an ignorance of the very experiences that shaped the blues.

Sincerely yours,

BBBB


Time to nuke the Nuge, to drop a hundred megaton outrage-bomb right on his wallet.

“To date, little is known about what makes people cross over from viewing images to committing child abuse…”

Link to article

“In a special report, FOX55 News@9 investigates how much the state is paying for sex offenders. Some sex offenders are housed long after they’re free from prison. That costs [Wisconsin] state almost half a million dollars every year. You’re footing that bill.”

Link to article

This essay first appeared in Cliterati on June 15^th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.

During the reign of the Emperor Julian a man named Numerius, who was governor of Narbonensis (what is today southern France), was accused of embezzlement by one Delphidius; because Numerius was a high official his trial was presided over by the Emperor himself.  Numerius’ defense consisted entirely of denying his guilt, but since Delphidius had no actual evidence this was enough.  When it became clear that his attempts to trick Numerius into self-incrimination had failed, and that the charge would fail with them, Delphidius cried out, “Oh, illustrious Caesar!  If it is sufficient to deny, what hereafter will become of the guilty?”  Julian’s famous (and quotable) reply was, “If it suffices to accuse, what will become of the innocent?”

The principle was not new in 4^th century Rome; it is clearly stated many times in Roman law, appeared in both Athenian and Spartan legal codes, and traces of it appear in Deuteronomy.  From Rome it passed into the Western legal tradition, and it is one of the pillars of English common law.  Indeed, every schoolchild knows that a person on trial is presumed innocent until proven guilty.  However, this is no longer true in many cases; all over the West, but especially in the United States, this powerful defense against tyranny once enjoyed by everyone from beggar to prince has been slowly eroded away in the name of expediency.  Prosecutors eager to “score” convictions take advantage of the vast arsenal of overlapping laws to charge people with so many different crimes for one supposed act that conviction on even a small fraction of them would result in decades of imprisonment; the frightened (and often completely innocent) victim nearly always agrees to some lesser charge rather than face the prospect of spending most of his life in a cage where he may be repeatedly raped, tortured  and denied even the respite of death.  Intimidating a victim into confession circumvents the need to have any evidence at all, much less enough to secure conviction in court.

In some kinds of cases, however, prosecutors don’t even need this kind of barbaric threat to induce a confession, because the presumption of innocence is either directly weakened or effectively nullified by other prosecutorial weapons; or, the accusations are handled in special kangaroo courts where the presumption does not exist; or, the accused is simply punished directly by the police without the need for a trial, evidence or anything else.  And what kind of crime, you may ask, is so heinous that it justifies undermining a venerable principle and virtually ensuring that huge numbers of people will be punished for things they did not do, or else receive punishments that are wildly disproportionate to something they did do?  Mass murder, perhaps?  High treason?  Burning down orphanages?  Stealing war widows’ pensions?  Plunging whole countries into economic depression?  No, something that in the minds of American is far worse than any of those:  pleasure-seeking, especially sexual pleasure.

In many American states, if a neighbor calls the cops because the couple next door is fighting, “the husband is arrested…no matter what the wife says…and prosecuted.  Because many wives rightly refuse to cooperate with such proceedings, the Office on Violence Against Women…authorized so-called “evidence-based” prosecutions, kangaroo courts in which…hearsay…is allowed and the accused man is denied the constitutional rights of confrontation and cross-examination.”  On university campus, a similar third-party accusation can subject a young man to a “campus tribunal” such as the one described here:

…the tribunal does pretty much whatever it wants, showing scant regard for fundamental fairness, due process of law, and the well-established rules and procedures that have evolved…for citizens’ protection…the…allegations were a barrage of vague statements, rendering any defense virtually impossible…Nor were [they] supported by any evidence other than the word of the ex-girlfriend.  The [accused]…was expressly denied his request to be represented by counsel…The many pages of written documentation…were dismissed as somehow not relevant…witnesses against him were not identified…nor was he allowed to confront or question either them or his accuser… 

The war against people who enjoy ingesting substances spawned an even viler abrogation of the presumption of innocence:  civil asset forfeiture, by which the police or a court can steal a victim’s property under the ludicrous pretense that it (the property) has committed a crime; since inanimate objects have no rights, the state can take it unless its owner can prove its innocence (a reversal of  the normal burden of proof).  From the drug war the practice expanded to the War on Whores, and in the US and UK the police now routinely rob sex workers and clients of money, vehicles and other property.  And when there’s nothing else for greedy cops to steal, there’s always a victim’s reputation:

[St. Louis, Missouri] police are reviving a push to…humiliate…those prowling the streets for prostitutes.  “Johns”…will receive postcards…admonishing them for their crime, giving reminders about…sexually transmitted diseases and listing their court dates…In addition, police say they plan to routinely provide local news media with mug shots of those charged with prostitution crimes…

These so-called “Dear John” letters are not unique to St. Louis, nor even to the United States; the practice of publicizing “mug shots” on television, the internet  or even billboards is also widely used.  The pretense used to justify this is that these shaming tactics are not punishments but merely “public records”; I’m sure people who lose their jobs or families due to these actions are comforted by the distinction.  The truth is obvious to anyone whose mind is not warped by the “law and order” sickness:  all of these practices – the extrajudicial punishments, the legally-sanctioned robbery, the kangaroo courts, the plea bargains – are just ways to get around the inconvenient necessity of actually having to prove a person has done something wrong before subjecting him to violence.  Oh, well, presumption of innocence had a good run, almost 3000 years; I suppose we should be grateful for that much.  But it sure was nice while it lasted.

Basically dinosaur days were just filled with feathers everywhere you looked.

Who wants to visit an abandoned cowboy-themed Japanese theme park with me?

Let’s all watch the queen age on bank notes.

Paleofuture takes you inside the Soviet American Exposition of 1959.

Le Bestiaire Fabuleux.

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Jimmy Savile was an unusual choice of icon for the revivalist ‘fear the Satan in our midst’ movement. That is possibly the reason why he is consistently described as a ‘fixer’, or the ‘go-between’, arranging young flesh for the more usual Satanic demon of debauched product of public schools or the clergy. There has long been a class divide element in the construction of the archetypical Satanist; young and vulnerable working class children from council estates drawn into a web of evil by the rich and powerful ‘upper class’.

The origins of the current obsession with the ‘evil in our midst’ can be traced to the activities of the emerging charismatic and fundamentalist Christian religious movements in the late 70s, where flamboyant ‘exorcisms’ encouraged acceptance of the reality of Satanic presence.  At a time of declining regular worship, and the emergence on the ‘left’ of progressive views on sexual practices such as homosexuality, leaders of those religious movements were natural bed fellows for extreme right wing politicians of the ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ persuasion such as Geoffrey Dickens.

That Dickens, an arch supporter of capital punishment, and an outspoken opponent of homosexuality, is currently the darling of the left is purely because they have overlooked his ‘other’ views and honed in on the element of those beliefs which support their view that the ‘working class’ are perverted and abused by the ‘upper class’.

Dickens was an early supporter of an organisation called ‘Reachout Trust’ - an Evangelical Christian charity. Their ‘Occult expert’ was a woman called Audrey Harper. Audrey’s tale follows a familiar pattern of degradation (as sold to Bella magazine. Bella? Really?) and final redemption by Evangelical Christians – after which she established a living as talking head commentator and ‘proof’ of the existence of Satanic Abuse Rings, and babies created for sacrifice. 

Dickens wrote the foreword to Audrey Harper’s flight of recovered memory, called Dance with the Devil. Harper claimed to have been inducted into a Satanic coven in Virginia Water, in a ceremony which involved being smeared with blood; in her original version of the story the blood had come from a sacrificed cockerel, although she later substituted the dead bird in the story with a murdered baby.

Dickens, like Simon Danczuk, managed to be the representative of the good people of Rochdale, privy to all manner of inside information, without ever stumbling over the scandal of the very real child abuse occurring in Rochdale – but an absolute whizz at publicising unproven historic abuse by dead ‘Toffs’. Dickens is even managing it after his own death.

It is one of the wonders of the current furore over the missing ‘Dickens Dossier’ that few are asking ‘which dossier’? – for there were several. Several as in several different subjects, not several different copies.

If we take first, the dossier that everyone hopes the NSPCC investigation will find; the one which proves that Tories are intrinsically evil, that paedophilia as a practice is indelibly stamped on one’s DNA along with instructions on which political party to vote for, and thus those who vote Labour will never be infected by this evil – then there were several copies in existence.

Geoffrey’s wife had one copy. She burnt it; possibly because she had more reason than most to distrust anything Geoffrey had to say. He had not one, but two, mistresses that he flitted between – once famously announcing to a press conference that he had ‘left his wife’ but asking them to keep quiet, since he hadn’t actually told her yet…..

Just in the last few days it has come to light that allegedly Andrea Davidson had a copy.  Yes, that Andrea Davidson, the professional forger who has shown up in every conspiracy theory worthy of note. The Andrea Davidson that allegedly had a close relationship with Tony Blair – but never thought to send him a copy for safekeeping. The Andrea Davidson that was parachuted into Iraq by the SAS – but never trusted those fine fellows sufficiently to entrust one of them with a copy. The Andrea Davidson that took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy – but never gave Julian Assange the information that now the NSPCC seeks so urgently. Rats! Wouldn’t you just know it!

Leaving that aside – the first point to note is that Dickens claimed he sent the ‘dossier’ which Leon Brittan is accused of ‘losing’ describing the ‘cover-up’ to the ‘Lord Chancellor’ on the 24th March 1981. The Lord Chancellor at that time was Lord Hailsham, not Leon Brittan!

Dickens’ informant was a policeman who had worked on the original Paedophile Information Exchange inquiry – the leak itself something that was subject to a later inquiry. He was complaining that Peter Hayman was not prosecuted for his membership of PIE. Dickens associated homosexuality with paedophilia; so membership of an organisation which was campaigning to lower the age of consent for homosexual activity from (then) 21 became a ‘child abuser’ in his eyes.

Leon Brittan has recently said that he had correspondence with Dickens in 1984. Newspaper reports of 1983 (Daily Express August 25th) say that Dickens has ‘eight names, big people, really important names, public figures and I am going to expose them in Parliament’. Coincidentally, the same day, Scotland Yard handed the Director of Public Prosecutions the result of their two year trawl of names appearing in publications by PIE. Was the same policeman responsible for the original leak still talking to Dickens? Did Dickens really offer to courageously name names that would otherwise have remained unknown – or was he opportunistically jumping on the result of a painstaking and through investigation by the Police into PIE? 

Just to muddy the waters further – in November 1983, the Daily Mail published a story from Dickens saying that he HAD handed a dossier to Leon Brittan – but not one naming 8 big names involved in PIE – but a dossier of alleged perverted homosexual activity in Buckingham Palace! Innocent young footmen and stable lads were being drawn into a ‘web of vice’ by wealthy patrons. Actually they were indulging in perfectly legal sexual practices – the law had changed by that time – but the age of consent was still 21 – homophobes could still equate paedophilia with homosexuality. Today those young stable lads and innocent footmen would be free to marry each other if they wished – Dickens would self-combust were he still alive.

Should the missing ‘Brittan’ dossier turn out to be the ‘Buckingham Palace’ dossier, as I suspect, then we shall be watching the pleasant spectacle of the left wing having hailed as a hero, the saviour of child abuse everywhere, a man who turns out to be a homophobic religious fanatic who wanted to deny homosexuals the right to express themselves and their sexuality freely.

A photograph of a nude male in a downtown Manhattan gallery’s front window has drawn protests from neighborhood parents and schoolteachers requesting its removal. Fully frontal, the young man stares out to the busy street with his genitalia in plain sight, in a large image that is part of Rivington Design Houses’ current exhibition. CFNM (clothed female, naked male) is portrait photographer Bek Andersen’s first solo show in New York and features nude portraits of men in the intimate settings of their homes. Inside the gallery, eight additional photographs hang on the walls, each as unflinchingly revealing as the print hanging up front.

The show opened only a week ago, but the photograph quickly bred controversy within the surrounding blocks, home to two preschools, a public school, and a daycare center. Two days after the opening reception, police arrived at the gallery to inform owner Brion Isaacs of complaints that a nude man was walking on the street, but they left upon realizing the man was merely a work of art. Isaacs, however, found himself facing “a mob of teachers and parents” at the start of this week who insisted he take down the photograph, claiming it was inappropriate for children. Isaacs refused and plans to keep the image up through the duration of the show, which ends on August 15.

“I told them they have the full right to avoid our space, or tell [their] kids not to look or walk in the next street or around the block,” Isaacs told Hyperallergic. “Or tell them what’s really happening. Because you’re in New York. You’re going to see a lot worse than a bunch of penises.”

He also offered to bring Andersen into the gallery and host an open discussion with children about the show and listen to everyone’s opinions, but the teachers and parents laughed at the suggestion, saying there was no way they were going to allow that to happen. When he asked if they would allow their children to see Michelangelo’s David, they said yes, with one parent arguing that the sculpture is “different because his penis is smaller.” Isaacs also recalls a teacher saying that “freedom of expression needs to have its limits,” a remark he found odd coming from someone in that profession.

“I also asked them how many of them bring their kids to museums and galleries, and two people raised their hands out of 20,” Isaacs said. “So I could understand why this may be surprising to them.”

The image, which Isaacs chose because its square format fits the window well, has drawn mixed reactions from passersby: nearly everyone pauses by the gallery or, at the very least, turns his or her head to stare. Drivers and passengers in vehicles stopped in traffic elbow one another, pointing out the marked member. Most people, according to Isaacs, just giggle or snap a photo with the full-frontal male — which he had expected; some of the offended do walk inside the gallery, and like the parents and schoolteachers, demand the photograph’s removal.

“I’d say we hear both sides everyday,” Isaacs said. “Everyone thinks we should put a camera up and video people’s reactions. It would be funny.”

Harlem resident Scott Laubner, 44, who learned about the show only through the publicized controversy, finds no issue with the image. “I think it’s fine, really,” he told Hyperallergic. “There’s nothing sexual going on. It’s just a naked person … there’s nothing wrong with that. This is what we all look like underneath our clothes.”

21-year-old kimono designer Sasa Li agreed. “I can see why some people would be offended by it, but quite frankly, it doesn’t bother me,” she said. “I feel like there’s a lot of sensitivity towards male nudity, and then when it comes to female nudity, it’s like, whatever, it’s the norm. I have no qualms with this.”

Isaacs also thinks that different reactions would emerge if the image was of a woman, adding that it may also depend on whether or not she shaved her pubic hair.

Edward Arakelian, 22, visiting from Sydney, Australia, thinks that the manner of display may also play a role in the photograph’s reception.

“I think it’s a bit full-on, to be hanging on a window on a main street, but that’s just my personal opinion,” Arakelian said. “The height of the painting as well … it’s easy for kids who pass to see especially the genitalia — it’s sort of right at their height. Maybe if it was a little higher, or if it wasn’t as obvious it would be alright, but especially with kids, it’s a bit out there.”

This is far from the first time the male nude has tested the limits of public taste and art. In 2004, Czech sculptor David Černý installed a fountain in Prague of two men gripping their penises, while water streaming from the tips wrote out quotes by the city’s most famous residents. And in 2012, Vienna’s Leopold Museum devoted an entire exhibition to art revolving around the male nude, featuring larger-than-life pictures of naked men by its facade. More recently, who can forget the barrage of complaints Tony Matelli’s “Sleepwalker” (2014) received on the campus of Wellesley College, regardless of its subject wearing underwear? In a curious incident in 2011, which bucks the trend, sculptor Laura Facey received backlash for her “Redemption Song” (2003), which is a symbolic representation of the spiritual emancipation from slavery, because of complaints that the male figure must ‘gay’ since he did not respond sexually to the presence of the naked female figure in the sculpture.

“You’re like a widow.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

“I’m not. That’s exactly what you’re like. Not a Catholic one, though – the Catholic ones are insatiable.”

“Why do I think you’re speaking from great experience?” I joked. “Look, I’ve never given you a reason to believe I’d succumb to your charms.”

“No, true enough.  I keep hoping you’ll change your mind, or snap out of it. You live in a fantasy. You’re a middle-aged woman waiting for your knight in shining armour to come home from the wars.” He leaned his elbows on the table and his chin on his fisted hands. “Stop waiting. He’s not going to come. And I’m here.”

“I’m not waiting.”

“You can work out all that distraught grief on me.”

“I’m not distraught.”

“Whatever it is you’re feeling, then. I think you should repurpose it.” The sun left spider-legged shadows under his eyelashes.  He gave me his best boyish smile. “I really do. You’re not getting any younger. You’re going to end up alone and bitter.”

There it was – just the thinnest edge of cruelty – the sharp-finned worm that turns in men who get rebuffed.  I shook my head and smiled back at him. “Why would you even want that? To be someone’s second choice?”

“Second, ay? Second’s not bad. I thought I’d be your fourth or fifth, at least.”

“Don’t you get enough pussy in Dublin?” But I already knew the answer. He was too charming, too good with words. Beautiful in that wrecked, weathered way that draws women. Not too handsome – that put a lot of women past their twenties off – but exactly the sort of forty-something women fell for. Fit and a little worn, sexy but comfortable. I knew he got as much pussy as he wanted.

“A man needs a challenge.”

“So it’s a conquest you’re after? You’ve set your sights on storming my bastion?”

“It’s not a bad bastion. Plus, I’ve a little time on my hands.”

“I’m a project?”

He shrugged. “Everyone needs one.”

I laughed.  “It occurs to me that if I’d jumped into bed with you the first time we met, you’d have lost interest years ago.”

“But you didn’t, and I haven’t.”

“I’m not going to fuck you. I’m never going to fuck you. You get that, right?”

He shrugged again. “Well, we could get creative. Why don’t we just pretend we’ve done all that already and now we’re an old married couple who’re bored to death with each other and have had to resort to unspeakable perversions to keep the flame alive?”

“Oh, you’re good. You’re really good.”

He beamed. “I’ve got a very plush hotel room. Want to see it?”

“You don’t really think I’d give it up for a swish hotel room, do you?”

“Well, I knew a box full of diamonds and pearls wouldn’t do the trick, but I did think I might tempt you with good architecture and impressive interior design.”

“Clever. Cunning, even.”

“That’s me.”

I leveled my eyes at him. “Listen. Don’t come back. You’re a nice man. I’m not sure what you want,  but I’m sure I can’t give it to you.”

He let the impatience show in his eyes. “It’s what you want that I can’t fathom. You’re like some pitiful virgin saving herself for an imaginary lover who doesn’t exist.” There was anger there, building up steam. “Whoever he is, he’s not worth it, darlin’. He’s not real. You’ve built him out of projected desires. It’s an awful trap you’ve constructed for yourself. But I’m real and here. In the flesh.”

“Has it occurred to you that that’s exactly what I don’t want?”

He exhaled and sat back, his eyes drifted towards the stream of pedestrians on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. “You, woman, need a psychiatrist.”

“And how convenient that you happen to be one.”

“I’d never treat someone I was involved with. I’m just saying – I can see what’s going on with you. It’s not healthy.”

And corruption, right there. Ironically, it was the only thing that gave me a flutter of desire. I smiled blandly. “Thank you for your diagnosis.  Good to know that your idea of healthy entails me sleeping with you.”

For just a moment, he looked stricken, but he covered it over fast. “That’s not what I meant.”

But now he was wounded meat, and I couldn’t help myself. I leaned in, smelling his unease. “Now that you’ve dissected my psyche, it’s my turn. Ever since we met at that conference, you’ve been coming to see me, knowing I’d turn you down.  Once I’d get. Twice, even, is understandable, but four times, five times? Heal thyself, physician. You’ve constructed just as many fantasies – of you rescuing some Rapunzel from her tower of dreams. Of bringing her down to earth and leading her into the real world of the flesh. And once you’d done that, it would be over for you. The object of desire achieved, you’d dust off your palms and move on to the next one.”

He didn’t shift in his seat, but I could see from his muscles that he desperately wanted to. He had control in spades.  “Maybe. Maybe. You’re smart for a lunatic.”

I settled back in my chair. “So, let us agree that we’re each suffering from different but complementary delusions and be polite about it. You come here to drink at the well of the impossible and so do I. Okay?”

The muscles by his jawline twitched. He was chewing at the inside of his cheek. “Okay,” he said, thoughtfully. “Okay. But I’d like to know one thing.”

“Shoot.”

“If I come here with fantasies of rescuing Rapunzel, why do you come? Why do you keep agreeing to meet me?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said, catching the waitresses eye and motioning for the bill. “I come to find out if I can resist you. I come to see if I can still be faithful or if I’m simply lacking the opportunity to betray him.”

The bill arrived. I slid a twenty onto the saucer, then shouldered my purse.

“Just… wait. What is it that you think you’re being faithful to?”

I stood up, looking down at him with as much warmth as I could muster. “You disappoint me. ‘What’ is the wrong question.”

New York City may lean on its cultural institutions to encourage adoption of a planned municipal identity card for undocumented New Yorkers, the New York Times reported. A proposal made last week to leaders of city-owned arts organizations, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Museum and Lincoln Center, would see those institutions offer free admission or other perks to cardholders.

Tom Finkelpearl, the recently appointed cultural affairs commissioner (and former director of the Queens Museum), suggested the practice in a meeting at the Met last week. “My sense is that the reaction from cultural institutions is very positive and enthusiastic … We just have to work out the details,” Finkelpearl told the Times.

Though the paper writes that the initiative aims to make sure that “a card intended to help undocumented New Yorkers does not simply become an easy way to identify them,” it’s unclear how membership to a museum or discounts on concert tickets would change anything about the essential nature of such a database of legally precarious New Yorkers, or attenuate fears of its abuse.

The report also notes that New Haven, Connecticut, adopted a similar ID card in 2007; the program offers benefits like “downtown parking and shopping.”

I’m not the most femme of the femmes. I’m new to skin care. I never used moisturizers, and even struggle to remember sunblock on a regular basis (I remember when it means I’m getting it rubbed into my skin by a babe, but otherwise, eh). Still, I’ve started to use lotions and such on my skin instead of ignoring it, and, fancy that, my skin is loving the TLC!

I am in love with my Seagrape Soap products, particularly the rose serum. And it’s a requited love, judging by my skin’s reaction to being massaged with rose serum on a daily basis for the past month. I don’t have particularly oily or dry skin, just the occasional breakout- and the rose serum has made me skin feel glorious and soft without drying me out or making me feel greasy. Also it smells lovely! I’ve been using it when I wake up, especially as my makeup glides over it easily. It takes very little to get full coverage and feels pampering while also not taking a lot of time.

While the rose serum was my runaway favourite of the products I received from Seagrape Soap for review, I also got some massage candles (Dark & Sexy and Exotic Fields), a lip tint in Bad Girl, a solid shampoo bar in Tea Tree Lavender, and their Sexy Travel kit, which includes a massage candle (Deep Light), a cocoa honey dust, a bath soak (Aches & Pains), and a massage oil (also Deep Light). The only thing I haven’t gotten to try yet is the bath soak, but it smells herbally and divine. I love earthy, green smells and this totally hits the mark.

The massage candles come in such incredible scents. As someone who can find vanilla cloying and lavender sleepy, I found the scents Seagrape Soap has created to be refreshing- the spiciness of Dark & Sexy, the freshness of Exotic Fields, and the tanginess of Deep Light are all pleasant, gender neutral, and harmonious. I also liked the way they melted into some really nice massage oil. And the travel sizes helps make these the kind of thing you can have in your purse “just in case”, taking up the same space as a potted lip balm. Similarly the massage oil has a lovely scent and soaks into the skin beautifully, leaving you not feeling overly greasy or needing to reach for the bottle over and over again.

The cocoa honey dust falls into that realm of products that I often giggle at. I remember being a teenager and seeing the Kama Sutra branded edible dusts, which always tasted very much like flavoured dust. Why would one need a persuasion to lick their lover? But I know that I’m pretty adventurous and really into sweat, so I can see that for other people this would be a nice alternative. This one has a dryness to it, but it’s not overly sweet, which I appreciated. If I want a sugar rush midsex I’d likely just use pixy stix, you know? Instead this is fun to sprinkle a bit on, lick it off, and, well, keep licking, which is the point of such things. As a foreplay item, it’s pretty good. Keep in mind though that this tastes like cocoa, and not chocolate, or you’ll be surprised!

I hadn’t tried solid shampoo before and was curious. I didn’t find that it lathered as much as I’m used to, but it didn’t matter- this shampoo bar definitely did what it says on the tin. My hair felt healthy and light after use, really silky and nice to touch. You can also use it to shave and as a face soap, which I found I also liked it a lot for. If you want a solid option instead of Dr. Bronners, this may well hit all your marks. I don’t have a dry scalp so I can’t speak to how well it manages that, but it certainly made my hair feel luxurious.

Finally, there was the lip tint, a bright pink colour they called “Bad Girl”. It’s cute, and provides a very light colour, but as I tend to go for bolder looks I suspect this one will sit in my purse for when I want a more natural look. It glides on really nicely, and has a light amount of glossy finish- I just personally am more of a lurid colours kind of girl (as anyone on my Instagram may suspect)! If you like Burt’s Bees, you’ll love this.

All in all I would definitely use more of Seagrape’s products. I’m curious to have Phil try out the shaving set, actually! The scents really did it for me, and I think a couple of them would make incredible scented moustache wax. Hey Seagrape Soap! Make moustache wax!

Thank you Seagrape Soap for providing me with these products in exchange for an honest and fair review (as well as giving me a chance to pamper myself!)