“I am strong. Could I really have any other name?”

That is what I should have told Judge Chu. But I was taken aback—in all my research, I hadn’t encountered any mention that she would ask why I wanted to change my name.

But really, what could I say? I was put on the spot, and torn between my obligation to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”, and the demand on the court’s schedule that I be brief. How could I sum up a life’s journey—a story of pushes and pulls, of deciding what to be and what not to be—in such a terse statement?

*

I embarked on my reinvention on the fourth Thursday of August 1988, my first day of high school. I didn’t have any new clothes, or the money to afford them, and my growth spurt hadn’t accorded me any sudden athletic prowess. By all counts, high school would continue the social disaster that was middle school, but there was one thing I could change.

Mrs. Horning, my English teacher, called the roll. I was second on the list. I was always first, second, or third. There was a comfortable predictability in always being at the beginning. It was time to make everything uncomfortable.

“Clint Baker?” Mrs. Horning read.

“Here. Call me C.J.”

I waited. Nary a snicker or snide remark—shocking, given that most of my closest friends were in this class. I could pull this off. I could do it. C.J. was going to have the best freshman year ever!

The best freshman year ever lasted until the beginning of second-period geometry. Mr. Holmes read off the names. I was third. Second was Marcus, a boy two years older from my church youth group. When I reiterated to Mr. Holmes my desire to go by my initials, Marcus glanced over at me and laughed. The next day, Mr. Holmes assigned our seats alphabetically by last name, which put Marcus directly in front of me.

When I passed forward my homework headed with “C.J. Baker”, Marcus thought I wrote my “C” like an “E” and my “J” like a “d”, and thus proceeded to call me Ed. Two days later, in Sunday school, the other students asked why he was calling me Ed, and he regaled them with the tale of my failed attempt to turn into a cool kid with a cool name. Marcus persisted with Ed for two more weeks, by which point his subversion of my plan was complete, and I had given up on my initials entirely.

“Clint Baker” is hard to pronounce—too many consonants crammed together—and thus hard to hear correctly. I have been called Cliff, Clark, Glen, Clem, Clement, Clarence, Terence, Trent, Brent, and Clinch. Seriously, “Clinch”?

Senior year, I once again had Mrs. Horning, this time for poetry, and once more, I asserted my right to a cool name. Now, though, I approached the matter more obliquely. I realized I didn’t need to make any grand proclamation to the world that I was changing my name. All I needed was a nom de plume.

Thus I began signing my poetry, “Clint Jackson Baker a.k.a. Sean Adrian Jaxon”. Sean was to honor my mother, who had considered naming me after Sean Connery, had my father’s brother John not named his daughter Sean a few months prior. Adrian demonstrated my PBS-induced Anglophilia, and Jaxon was both a respelling of my middle name and an obscure reference to Huckleberry Finn, making for an appealing literary allusion. Mrs. Horning and my classmates were amenable to my pen name, especially since I didn’t insist that they call me Sean.

 

The following August I began studies at St. Louis Christian College. When I first reached campus (two weeks early so I could begin my work-study job on the custodial crew), I asked the residents of my dorm to call me Sean.

Sean lasted until David arrived. He, a senior who had come from my church back in Indiana, would have nothing to do with my new name, and, through his considerable influence amongst the 150-member student body, Sean disappeared before the semester even began. Yet again I found myself stuck with my birth name, still chained to a history I so desperately wished to escape.

I made one final attempt the following year, after David had graduated. I had left my campus job to bus tables down the street at Mrs. O’s Café and Pie Pantry. For the first time in my life, I was in an environment where no one knew me. I chose to go by my middle name. Whenever a classmate dropped by the restaurant and asked if I was on shift, chaos ensued, as most of my coworkers assumed either that Jackson was my first name, or that I went by Jackson everywhere. And my manager confounded my tax records for years thereafter as he made out my checks sans first name—I was too timid to instruct him otherwise. When I left that busboy job after two years, I resigned myself to the fact that I would only ever be Clint Jackson Baker, Jr.

It takes three things to change your name:

1)   Resources. In most states, you are charged about $300 in court fees to change your name. In Minnesota, civil-court fees may be waived in cases of hardship. You must also have the time and stamina to track down documentation and to contact Social Security and the records office of the county in which you were born. Unemployed before the court proceedings, I had plenty of hardship and plenty of time.

2)   Chutzpah. Someone is bound to give you a hard time for changing your name, and you have to have reached a point in your life where you don’t give a damn about such opinions.

3)   A name. This is the most obvious, but also the most difficult to obtain.

*

Age: 33. Every night for two weeks solid, I came home from my customer service job at the children’s museum, went to my bedroom, switched on my computer, and researched names, playing with sound and meaning. That it meant avoiding my roommate was a bonus. He (a glum, smug man much too old for his age) was really the only dark spot in my life. I loved everything about my neighborhood—organic groceries and thrift store clothes, art house films and avant-garde plays, dive bars and hipster coffeehouses—all mere blocks away. Except for work and church, my entire world was within spitting distance of my front door.

And, for the first time since leaving evangelicalism, I had a posse of friends. We would go to each other’s houses to play obscure German board games until the beer kicked in (or soda in my case since I hate beer) and it was time to retire. Sometimes we went to the coffeehouses and discussed anything and everything. And unlike the evangelicals of my past, my new friends never once chastised me for failing to turn into a heterosexual.

In fact, I had experienced nary a trace of homophobia since my arrival in the Twin Cities just before my thirtieth birthday. I could not say the same of my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, where the mere act of walking down the sidewalk in t-shirt and jeans (a heterosexual uniform if ever there was one) elicited calls of “Faggot!” from passing cars an average of once a week.

For the first time in my life, I was home. In the Whittier neighborhood.

John Greenleaf Whittier lived from 1807 to 1892. He was as beloved for writing sappy Victorian poetry as he was reviled for advocating the abolition of slavery. He never once visited Minnesota, but the founders of Minneapolis, keen on giving their frontier city an air of sophistication, christened the streets and neighborhoods and schools with popular literary references: the Longfellow neighborhood, Emerson School, Hiawatha Avenue.

The man for whom the Whittier neighborhood was named: a pacifist who believed in the equality of all, simultaneously a florid, fluffy writer and an abolitionist badass, a man whose name I would gladly give to a son.

Yet as I lay awake upon my futon, I recognized that the chance to have a son was ebbing away. Ten whole years were lost forever, a decade spent toiling under the tutelage of underaccredited therapists to become “straight as an arrow” in the vain hope of finding a wife so that I might both prove my heterosexual credentials and become a father. I had been frozen, and thawed out only recently. In career, in relationships, in lifestyle, I was closer to twenty-three than thirty-three. I found myself unable to acclimate to the dating rituals my heterosexual peers had passed through during adolescence, and thus could not find a man who might join me in parenting. My earnings barely supported me, let alone a child. As I approached thirty-five, the watershed beyond which most agencies disallow one to adopt an infant, I saw the chance to name a child likewise slipping away. I had been planning my children’s names since I was seven, when I declared that I would have boy-and-girl twins named Alexander and Alexandria, after my mother’s fashion, who had named her twins Christopher and Christine. Even if down the road I were to adopt a teenager, the likelihood that I would name the child was virtually nil.

But Whittier was a good name, damn it, and I wasn’t about to let it go to waste.

I also wasn’t about to let an astounding coincidence go unacknowledged. When my father was born, his parents gave him the name John. His first brother came along when he was four, at which point my grandparents gave their new son the name John and changed my father’s name to Clint, which was also my great-grandfather’s name. Some believe this was a half-hearted attempt to cover up an affair, and that my grandfather and my great-uncle are actually reversed from what my family tree would indicate. This would certainly explain my father’s black-sheep status.

My mother’s name is Phyllis, which in Greek means “green leaf.”

John Greenleaf Whittier. How could I pass that up?

 

The surname was less forthcoming. All I knew was that, with a long, flowing first name, heavy on the first syllable, I needed a monosyllable to lend weight to the end of my full name. My first thoughts went to Shaw, but the name was problematic on two counts. My immediate association was with the playwright George Bernard Shaw, and I thought a doubly literary name too pretentious.

My second association was profoundly more embarrassing.

 

The depression and anxiety of living trapped in a closet had such an adverse effect on my academic performance in Bible college that I was no longer eligible for funding, so I dropped out of school and took an apartment a couple of blocks from campus—as far as I could move without a car. But a closet is a closet wherever you go. So, in short order:

I grew paranoid and agoraphobic;

I went days on end without changing my clothes or bathing, for fear of the sexual nature of my own body;

the idea that being both gay and a Christian was a contradiction unamenable to the universe looped endlessly thorough my brain;

I thought to put an end to the contradiction by leaping off the Washington/Elizabeth overpass and flattening my woes across I-270;

as every television public-service announcement I had ever seen replayed in my mind, I stopped at a payphone just before that irreversible move to call the suicide-prevention hotline, who recommended I call a friend to take me to the hospital;

and I did just that.

At the hospital, I was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder because I didn’t dare tell the medical professionals that the true source of my fear and anxiety was homophobia (both internal and external), for fear that these “secular” doctors would dissuade me from my attempts to turn into a heterosexual and thus put me on the path to hell.

My hospitalization led to my moving back to Indiana so that I might stabilize and have the support of family and friends. Shortly thereafter, I enrolled at Indiana. I fared somewhat better without the social pressure of living in a dorm, though I remained in the therapy that promised to change me into a heterosexual—or a giraffe, which I now realize was just as likely. I did well with my logic courses, in part because the assignments were shorter, but I struggled in any class for which I had to write an essay. To slog through the density of Sartre and Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, and then to churn out sparkling analyses of these paragons of intellect, was no simple task when I was grappling with biweekly visits to my therapist, in which I was told I had homosexual attractions because my father was distant and my mother was smothering—never mind that both my siblings’ heterosexuality and my mother’s generous leash refuted this claim. This antiquated, half-baked pop psychology was insufficient to dissuade me from enjoying the quick peek I got one evening when my friend Ryan lifted his arms, and the upraised hem of his t-shirt revealed his navel. However, the therapy did succeed in plunging me into a weeklong guilt-induced depression for having enjoyed that briefest titillation.

Rolling my stone up the Sisyphean slope of heterosexuality wasn’t the only distraction from my studies. Indiana’s philosophy department, like anywhere, is tiny, and undergrads regularly rub shoulders with graduate students. One grad student in particular, a dapper, perfectly coiffed, heterosexual New Englander… Well, in my blackest thoughts, I wanted to do more than rub shoulders. I wished he were in the habit of wearing t-shirts, rather than properly tucked Oxford shirts, that I might glimpse his navel. I actually wanted to see so very much more than his navel.

But my fantasies stopped there, for I couldn’t possibly imagine having sex with him, or any man. Such thoughts were verboten, a sure path to ensuring the damnation both of myself and of all around me. I was to be the quintessence of virtue, and any moral slip might cause a casual observer to stumble on his or her own path to salvation. It was not my potential for an eternity in hell that compelled me. I wanted no one to suffer that fate.

The surname of that perfectly coiffed New Englander? Shaw.

To recall my closeted years every time I signed my name would have been the ultimate mortification.

When my parents were together, my father forbade us to attend church, although he went on occasion. He socially isolated us so as to hide the abuse. In January 1983, when I was eight, my mother escaped my father and filed for divorce. Nine months later, she won custody of us children and was awarded the house. However, my father, predicting this outcome, had ceased mortgage payments during the proceedings, thus ensuring she would not win the house regardless of the judge’s decision.

My mother (who at this point would have changed all our names to her maiden name of Cunningham had she the money) then rented a two-bedroom house for the five of us, which relocated us five miles south. Our new neighbors wheedled, begged, and cajoled us into attending their various churches, and more often than not ceased relations with us once my mother stated that we would no longer attend. She hated the pressure, believed the theology of these churches far off base, and found it hypocritical that they only cared about people who attended their congregations. Despite all this, the experience gave me my first taste of religion. There were promises of love from both God and others, promises that life would go well if you obeyed a strict moral code, promises of something good and beautiful after we die.

I say all this to explain that, on a certain level, I have to take responsibility for what came next. I was young, but I still chose my steps on my own.

 

Before it became an affluent megachurch, Sherwood Oaks Christian Church met in a considerably smaller building on the south side of Bloomington, Indiana, adjacent to the solidly middle-class subdivision from which it derived its name. Here I spent every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening of my adolescence learning how to live a life worthy of God.

In the parking lot, near the sidewalk, was a basketball hoop, because this was Indiana, where any flat exterior space requires a basketball hoop. Here the boys of my youth group played horse and two-on-two before our meetings. Every boy, that is, but me—I sat on the sidelines with the girls.

One Sunday evening, a boy named Brian Nash, who lived next to the church, ambled by. The basketball players invited him into the game, and he joined in. Thereafter he followed us into the building for Bible study, and from that night he became a regular member of our youth group.

His entry was much easier than mine had been. When I was in seventh grade, we had just moved (yet again) into a tiny house a mile or two from Sherwood Oaks, which stuck out to me because it was undergoing a construction project to add a larger sanctuary. Somehow, I was certain this was a good church, and so I started attending, even asking rides of the members on those days when my family didn’t attend. (They were less keen than I on accepting the social-outcast role the church assigned them).

When I joined the youth group, I was the only boy my age, but as years passed, a steady stream of boys filled the ranks. Our youth minister John had retained two key elements from his teenage identity—“hick” and “jock”—so he drew his clones into the group. I was the anomaly. Scrawny and precocious, I preferred drawing or writing poetry to shooting hoops.

I also didn’t help my cause in arguing constantly with both my peers and the adult sponsors of the group. Why, I asked, was a zygote’s life all-precious, but a criminal’s worth ending? Didn’t Jesus forgive a criminal whilst on the cross? Why were we beholden to the Republican Party when Jesus had called us not to an earthly kingdom, but a spiritual one? Why were they hell-bent on eliminating the very government programs they knew my disabled mother needed to care for my siblings and me?

I was not one of them, so they harassed me relentlessly, pulling pranks on me, calling me names. When we took a trip to the beach and they found out I was afraid of drowning, they saw fit to catch me wading knee-deep, push me from behind, and hold me under. John defended their actions. They loved me, he said, and this was how they showed their love. And I believed him.

Brian underwent no such initiation. He was baptized a few months after joining the youth group, but shortly thereafter, he disappeared from church. The doctrine in our denomination was that baptism, though necessary for salvation, was only the beginning of the Christian walk, and you could lose his salvation if you abandoned that walk. Yet no one followed up with Brian—not even I—despite most of us having gone to school with him.

This time I remained silent regarding the contradiction in doctrine. Perhaps I was wearying of the fight. Perhaps I had at last succumbed to their sadistic definition of love.

When I chose my name, I was 700 miles and 15 years from Brian Nash. Nonetheless, even though I liked his surname (it means “ash tree”, a botanical reference that speaks to my inner hippie), I could never have chosen it for myself—not as a slight to Brian, who was far gone from my life by that point anyway, but because I could never append those memories of false love to my name.

I come from hearty Appalachian stock. The Cunninghams of my mother’s side have lived in far-southern Indiana longer than there has been an Indiana, having relocated from Virginia just after the Revolutionary War as part of the fledgling American government’s push to root out the rightful inhabitants of what was then the Northwest Territory. (This fact is lost to my family’s history; I have only been able to piece it together through genealogical research and history class lessons.)

Now, if anyone wishes to argue that Indiana is not part of Appalachia, I will note that I am speaking of southern Indiana. Here, in the foothills leading to the Cumberland Plateau, both the geography and culture are closer to West Virginia than to Michigan. Bumpy, underfunded highways wind through these foothills, through tiny towns that persist solely because of the residents’ fierce ties to family. In these villages and in the hinterland beyond them, my mother’s forebears have spent the last two centuries farming the nothing dirt in this nothing backwater to raise nothing to feed their children.

The Bakers from which my father descended find their origins in the border country between Tennessee and Virginia, where they have been since before the Revolutionary War. Untying their roots required much effort on my part. I had to first weed out the persistent family myth that they—dark-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed—are not, in fact, part Cherokee. Then I had to stumble upon a word I had never heard uttered—“Melungeon”—and then toss out all the legends associated with that word. We Melungeons are not a lost tribe of Israel, nor are we the descendants of the mythical Phoenician sailors from whom the hereditary knot at the base of our skulls derives its name. Thanks to genetic testing, it has been determined that we are of mixed western European, southern European, and western African origin, which I at times ineptly label “Appalachian creole”.

My Melungeon ancestors ground out a mountain subsistence in much the same way as my mother’s forebears, raising hogs and tobacco out of the hardscrabble earth. When my father was ten, my grandparents determined they would leave the Cumberland Mountains for a new life. They set aside moving money, packed up the mule carts, traveled northwest, and settled wherever the moving money ran out. This tactic brought them to Paoli, Indiana, which was less rugged, allowing them to raise more hogs and tobacco than before.

I am the scion of two clans who have known little but to fight for survival. Is it any wonder I am a survivor as well? I was born, neither fair like my mother nor dark like my father, but blue and desiccated, thanks to the meager rations of coffee and grilled cheese sandwiches my father permitted my mother to eat. A week after my birth I nearly died again because a too-long frenulum kept me from suckling properly.

Right when I turned four, my family relocated north to Bloomington, Indiana, searching yet again for a better life. My father: foundering in the life of drugs and prostitutes his job as a long-haul truck driver afforded him, and, in his delusions, plotting his wife’s demise. My mother: barely escaping with her life and left permanently disabled from her husband’s abuse. My brothers and sister: young and confused and struggling to understand why the father they never actually knew was gone. I: the eldest, keeper of memories, hoping in vain that my siblings were too young to remember the darkness.

In school I sought escape from the nightmare of home, but found neither refuge nor solace, for I was Clint Baker, the boy who played with dolls. So I turned to the church for love, but its love was like chocolate to a dog, a delectable poison. Still, it so mimicked my father’s love, conditional yet capricious—can I be blamed for being so horribly mistaken? I dutifully enrolled in Bible College, where the staff discovered my misplaced diary, and therein the crush I had on a fellow student (years before the crush on the aforementioned Mr. Shaw). Thus I was given the ultimatum: if I was to remain in school, I had to enroll in therapy to convert to heterosexuality. Even after I transferred to Indiana University, I remained in the treatments so as to merit the love of God and man—when all I longed for was the love of a man. When I, wishing to no longer commit the sin of lying, dared to speak the truth that I was most definitely not turning into a heterosexual despite my best effort, I lost nearly everyone.

Then the state of Indiana slashed my funding for school and eliminated the insurance that I needed in part to treat the effects of having suffered a decade under the quacks who failed to transform me into a perfectly acceptable heterosexual. I packed my maximum four bags onto a Greyhound bound for Minneapolis, a place I knew only by reputation—the best decision, aside from abandoning the quackery, I have ever made. My worst day in Minnesota is better than my best day in Indiana because I can breathe free.

I come from strong people. I am Strong. Could I really have any other name?

By the time I chose my name, my days as a Christian were numbered. I was attending a small, struggling Lutheran church whose pastor happened to be my age and also happened to be gay. My work kept me away from morning services on alternate Sundays, and the tiny mainline congregation offered little else during the week—far removed from the thrice-weekly ritual I was accustomed to as an evangelical. I met with Pastor Jay in his office on occasion to discuss theology, philosophy, and life so as to fill in that gap. Our common ground helped me to open up, not only about my story, but also about the deep, nagging doubts I had concerning Christianity. After all, if the church—or, more accurately, some of the more conservative branches of Protestantism—had lied to me about homosexuality, how else had it deceived me? As a good Lutheran, Pastor Jay encouraged me to keep asking hard questions, a far cry from the evangelical world, where the greatest sin is to question.

Yet I could not fully escape the influence of evangelicalism. I still said “Amen” when I agreed with someone, and offered to pray when someone expressed a need. My name would bear the mark of my evangelical past, no matter how I might try to avoid it. I had always longed for a “Biblical” name, which in conservative Christendom is the mark of having been born into a good Christian family. (I knew so many Pauls in the church.) I also thought a Hebrew name would be a proper nod to my Judeophilia.

My first thought was Ezra, the prophet who oversaw the rebuilding of Jerusalem, but, whether the noble Ezra Jack Keats or the ignoble Ezra Pound, I again wanted to avoid a doubly literary name. (Consider it: I was almost Whittier Ezra Shaw, the most preposterous, pompous name imaginable.) I liked Nathaniel, but it was too long to go with Whittier.

Nathan. It means “gift” in Hebrew. All I have ever wanted to be.

But even as I was certain of my name—Whittier Nathan Strong, at last—I grew less certain of my spiritual identity. The questions Pastor Jay had encouraged me to ask led me not only out of Lutheranism, but out of Christianity altogether. I began attending a small Quaker meeting that rented space from the Lutheran congregation. Within Quakerism, where not all identify as Christian and some are even atheists, I was free to quit believing and start being.

At my first meeting, I introduced myself as Whittier Strong. They complimented me on the good Quaker name, and asked if I came from a Quaker family. I did not reveal the full story to them—yet.

*

My father’s siblings never told their spouses of the existence of their eldest brother, the possible bastard whom their parents didn’t even bother to send to college. And these aunts and uncles in name only had nothing to do with any of my immediate family once we moved out of Paoli. But when my father lay in the hospital comatose, they rallied round him. Suddenly I had a new family. I had not seen any of them since I was three.

I also had not seen my father in five years. When I began Bible college, he spirited out of nowhere with an offer of one hundred dollars every month until I graduated. I saw the money four times altogether. Now here he lay, bloated and intubated, with little chance of recovery. My newfound aunts and uncles offered their support to us as best they could. They have their own issues that keep them from getting close to anyone.

They certainly weren’t going to get close to me. My uncle John determined that my bleached-blond hair and pierced ear—benign indiscretions for a twentysomething in the late 1990s—were sufficient indicators that I was illegitimate. These were things that a real Baker simply did not do.

Three weeks after he entered the hospital, my father suffered a heart attack whilst rousing from his coma and died. His funeral, on Memorial Day weekend 1997, is the only time I have witnessed my adult brothers crying. I shed no tears. My tears would come years later in therapy—not the “ex-gay” nonsense, but real, legitimate therapy.

I have maintained no connection to my father’s relatives since the funeral sixteen years ago. I cannot abide by their insistence that all in their family obey the Baker Code. I will not attend church—certainly not as a means of accruing power and prestige in the community, and most certainly not now that I am an atheist. They require that my future spouse be younger than me, richer than me (to bring wealth into the family), and much more female than I desire. I will not attend Purdue University to study agriculture or business (or education were I a woman), and then return to the clan immediately thereafter. And, though I recognize that they crafted this code to raise themselves up from their humble Appalachian past, I cannot assent to it. I am beholden to no path but my own.

I am not a Baker.

My brothers Chris and Clinton keep in regular contact with our paternal relatives. (Yes, I was Clint and my brother Clinton—another story for another time.) In particular, they have developed an attachment to our uncle George, who at times has been the closest to a father figure they’ve ever known. They have even made a pilgrimage to our ancestral home of Kyles Ford, Tennessee. There, they met our great-uncle Paul, a man in his nineties who maintains that our ancestors were Italian and Portuguese, and who has faced derision in the community for maintaining this claim, regardless of the fact that he is correct.

I have made the pilgrimage virtually, via Google Maps. The town of Kyles Ford is little more than a crossroads squeezed between a river and a mountain. The Clinch River. Clinch Mountain.

Could my great-great-grandparents have made such a prosaic association and named their son after their home—a name that passed on to my father and to me? It’s possible; as I have dug further into the history of Kyles Ford, I have learnt that Clint was once a common name in the area. Could they have known that people would mistakenly call me “Clinch”? I wonder if they knew the name means “hill”—a little mountain.

*

“Why are you changing your name?” Judge Chu asked.

“Your Honor, I was named after my father, and I am not my father. I am my own man, and I should have my own name.” A beat, and then, “There are other reasons why I’m changing my name. I can tell you those if you need me to.”

Judge Chu chuckled and replied, “No, that will suffice.”

But no, it couldn’t possibly suffice. My explanation told nothing of my relationship with my father. It said nothing of why I ran into the church’s arms in search of the love he didn’t—couldn’t—give. It could not possibly tell of how I migrated from one faith tradition to the next until I reached the point that I lost faith in any god—but gained a deep, abiding faith in myself.

The explanation told nothing. No matter. The name bears everything.

Whittier Nathan Strong. Those three words are perhaps my greatest literary triumph, for never have I told such a complex story so succinctly.

***

Rumpus original art by Jim Gill.

Related Posts:

• On Homosexuality and Wrestling with a Faith that Doesn’t Want You
• A Zealot and a Poet
• The End of The World
• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Erika Rae
• Sympathy for the Devil

Archaeologists using Google Earth have stumbled on more than 50 geoglyphs (massive earth drawings) created by ancient peoples in Northern Kazakhstan in Central Asia, LiveScience reported. They’re difficult to see from the ground, but crisp satellite imagery shows massive squares, rings, crosses, and even one swastika formed from mounds of earth and timber. 

“You open Google Earth and spend hours looking through the territory, and if you’re lucky, you find something,” archaeologist Dr. Irina Shevnina said of the discovery in an email to Hyperallergic. “The geoglyphs were found quite by accident, though such monuments in Kazakhstan were not unknown.”

While it seems remarkable that such vestiges of ancient life were found through such a contemporary, openly accessible tool, Google Earth discoveries are quickly becoming commonplace. Using aerial imagery, satellite archaeologist David Thomas has identified over 670 archaeological sites in Afghanistan’s Registan Desert, including a Medieval Ghaznavid fortress. University of Western Australia professor David Kennedy has found thousands of ancient tombs in Saudi Arabia. Slovenian archaeologist Ivan Sprajc even located the lost city of Lagunita.

And those are just the professionals. As an Australian Geographic article noted last year, Google Earth is fueling a new kind of “armchair archaeology.” In 2005, Italian computer programmer Luca Mori noticed some unusual forms, which archaeologists later identified as a 2,000-year-old Roman villa. In 2008, the geologist Arthur Hickman stumbled on a massive meteorite crater in Washington. And last year, amateur satellite archaeologist Angela Micol found what look like eroded, triangular mounds in southern Egypt that could be its long-lost pyramids. You no longer have to be Indiana Jones to uncover lost civilizations, it seems (though don’t get your hopes up for Atlantis). 

Making such discoveries has become slightly easier; however, deciphering them remains just as difficult. Geoglyphs have been found around the world, from the Peruvian desert to the Ohio countryside, but archaeologists are still unsure of their meaning. Were they used in rituals? Could they have been a way of showing something to the gods, rather than to men?

Since the Kazakhstan ones were discovered last year (but only reported recently), Dr. Shevnina, her colleague Andrew Logvin, and a team of researchers from Kostanay University in Kazakhstan and Vilnius University in Lithuania have been conducting site excavations and radar surveys, and taking their own aerial photographs. After reporting their findings at the European Association of Archaeologists’ annual meeting in Istanbul, they told LiveScience, “As of today, we can say only one thing — the geoglyphs were built by ancient people. By whom and for what purpose, remains a mystery.”

“Unfortunately, no scientist will answer this question,” Dr. Shevnina elaborated in her email to Hyperallergic, “as it should be asked to the ancient people who built the geoglyphs.”

I’ve been very fortunate in my time at York to work with some amazing professors who have encouraged me to research areas that are not always accessible to undergraduates. This year is no exception, and I am currently undertaking a directed research project on Curses and Curse Stories with Professor Tony Burke. Obviously, this fits in well with my general research interests and gives me the opportunity to pursue these phenomena from a variety of angles. Part of my course mark involves a digital humanities component. So yes, this means that there is a companion website to by research project. Of course there is. So without further ado, I am happy to announce AncientCurses.com! This website will serve multiple purposes. On the one hand, it will act as a repository for the material I collect as I move through this project. As such, you will find handy resource guides to curses found in classical literature, Biblical stories, and other materials. It also provides research resources, such as bibliographies, online digital libraries, and other relevant websites. There is also a blog where I explore in more detail some of the more interesting curses I find and also sort through some of the issues which surround the study of curses. While some of the pages are admittedly sparse, the website is already up-and-running. Obviously, what’s there is a work-in-progress and I’ll be adding to it throughout the year (and maybe even thereafter). Here’s an excerpt form the first blog post:

This blog will mostly cover curses and curse stories as I encounter them in my research and attempt to understand the role of curses in ancient society. The study of cursing in antiquity is fraught with methodological issues. How do we define curses? Who practiced them? Why are similar phenomena labelled differently depending on the context? These are just some of the questions which confront those who study this area. The editorial colour which shades these practices must be noted, for what often lies underneath the rhetorical veneer are many shades of grey. My approach is a bit minimalistic: A curse, is a curse, is a curse. My view is that plenty can be said about curses and the societies that produced them without resorting to caricatures, hagiography, or convoluted taxonomy. Thus, this project will cover a large range of material in an attempt to comprehensively survey the subject matter and find points of convergence as well as roads of departure.  Among the sources are Near Eastern curses, literary curses (from classical and Biblical literature), and materials such as curse tablets and other forms of sympathetic malediction practices.

I hope you have the chance to stop by and let me know what you think of the site. In my opinion, the best part is the random curse generator on the sidebar—so you can get cursed anew with every visit.

Filed under: Academic, Ancient, Curses

China has blocked Instagram, various media outlets are reporting, after monitoring sites like Blocked in China and Great Fire were unable to access it. The photo-sharing app now joins the likes of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Soundcloud, WordPress, and Dropbox, among many others the government has blocked.

Citizens had been sharing images and videos of pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong over the weekend using hashtags #occupycentral and #umbrellarevolution, among others. The ban, which only affects mainland China, denotes Instagram’s ongoing transition to a more mainstream role in online discourse, where real political action can be expressed — and censored. According to a report in the Guardian, the Chinese government has also blocked mainland television broadcasts of the Hong Kong unrest; searches for protest hashtags on Sina Weibo, the country’s largest micro-blogging platform, allegedly turn up only irrelevant results, with some users claiming their accounts have been deleted over Hong Kong content.

The protests followed Beijing’s decision last month to limit proposed voting reforms that would allow Hong Kong citizens to freely elect their next leader. As many as 80,000 demonstrators thronged Hong Kong’s central business district, holding umbrellas and sporting goggles to protect against tear gas. The Chinese government responded with tear gas, pepper spray, and beatings. More than 40 people were injured.

Here’s a glimpse at the demonstrations from Instagram:

 

 

I live in the tavern district of the City of Y______. When I returned home a couple of nights ago, I had a sinking feeling that I had had too much booze... I was seeing double:




Technically, I suppose this is a double-double, although the folks at both Tim Horton's and In-N-Out Burgers would beg to differ. At any rate, I shouldn't have been drinking doubles... nor should the street-painting contractor.

We have to accept the truth…the oldest profession in the world [will only disappear] when humans no longer exist.  –  Khuat Thu Hong

Who Did Your Tits? 

A Tampa massage therapist, Jasmine Tridevil…contacted more than 50 doctors before finding one who would give her [a] third breast…The surgeon she found couldn’t create a silicone areola, though, so she had one tattooed onto the implant, which is made from silicone and skin tissue from her stomach.  While Tridevil’s dream is to star in an MTV reality show, she [said]…she had the surgery to become “unattractive to men” in addition to gaining fame.  “I don’t want to date anymore,” she said…

Alas, there is strong evidence that the story is a hoax.

Safe Targets

Here’s a good example of how criminalization makes sex workers vulnerable to extortion; Terra Jones not only shares the actual letters, but details the total uselessness of Alaska cops in responding to them and explains how “sex trafficking” laws have made conditions even worse.

Anatomy of a Boondoggle

Any amount of criminalization, no matter how slight, gives “authorities” an excuse to harass whores, even to the point of paying men to rape them:  “Fred Allen…is a gun for hire, having received tens of thousands of dollars from Sydney’s…councils in exchange for crucial evidence that is presented in court to help expose and close underground parlours.  In short, Mr Allen has paid sex with prostitutes and ratepayers foot the bill…”  Yes, I would class having sex with a woman for the express purpose of harming her – stealing her job or even getting her deported – as a form of rape.  No, I don’t want to debate it.

Halfway Whores

Pearl-clutching sociologist agonizes over the “exploitation” involved in recruiting models for VIP parties; she says “This is a system of trafficking in women” and thinks it’s a problem that “the girls don’t seem to mind all that much”, indicating that she absolutely Does Not Get the halfway whore concept at all.

Welcome To Our World

…surrogacy opponents…include…social conservatives and Christians, especially Catholics, who either see surrogacy as unnatural and immoral or a gateway for gay parents, and some feminist groups, who see surrogacy as exploitative…Even the ostensibly pro-surrogacy crowd seems to favor making surrogacy more complicated and less accessible…[such] solutions [are billed] as “pro surrogacy” because they don’t outright forbid or criminalize the practice but…create more categories of people who can’t participate and raise financial costs and privacy invasion for those who do…

The Proper Study

A new Canadian study won’t surprise anyone who’s been listening to sex worker activists, but the backup comes at a crucial time:

Researchers have released…the first national report on the sex industry in Canada…based on five studies undertaken in St. John’s, Montréal, Kitchener, Fort McMurray, Calgary, and Victoria…“Many of the people linked to Canada’s sex industry—workers and their intimate partners, managers and clients—have much in common with other Canadians”…The average age of sex workers’ first sale was 26 years old…29 percent of sex workers first sold…sex…before …19…The average sex worker has 10 years of experience…67 percent of sex workers finished high school, and 15 percent have a bachelor’s degree or more…77 percent…identify as women, 17 percent as men, and 6 percent as other genders…Sex buyers purchase a sexual service a median of four times a year…only 17 percent bought sex on the street…

Surplus Women

“The bodies of two Tampa teenagers…Angelia Mangum, 19, and Tjhisha Ball, 18, were found…[on a Jacksonville roadside] bound with zip ties and lying on top of one another…both…had been…working there as exotic dancers…”  Naturally, the media cares more about recounting their record of a couple of petty offenses than about two young women whom society considered disposable.  A fundraiser has been started to assist their families with funeral costs.

Follow Your Bliss

No, he didn’t “turn pedophile”; he took this job on purpose to enable and cover up his crimes:

…Gregory Pyle…of…Illinois…was sentenced to 50 years in prison…after confessing to sexually abusing a child and distributing images…online.  Pyle was a 10-year veteran of his police department who…worked in a child predator task force…and…used his position…to obstruct the investigation into his actions…

I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now

88-year-old grandfather, Edwin Venn, was arrested…for prostitution, along with his john Amanda Pearson, 23.  Police had been watching Venn for several months and noticed a peculiar  pattern…Mr. Venn stood most weekend nights with cardboard sign on Hollywood Blvd that read:  “I’m for sale.”  Pearson admitted during her arraignment that when she found the 88-year-old Venn trying to turn tricks she and her friends decided it would be funny to sleep “with an old guy”.  Word spread and lots of girls paid Venn for sex.  Pearson said he only charged five dollars and gave them lollipops afterward.

The Public Eye

Here’s another sex worker on a reality TV show:

Kate McGrew [says sex work] is…”an aspect of my feminism…sex workers…have good strategy.  People say it cheapens the experience [of sex]…No, it doesn’t, it makes it more expensive”…

And one who was previously on a show runs for office:

One of the independent candidates for the Clacton by-election is Exeter sex worker Charlotte Rose…[who] previously appeared in a…TV series…called Love For Sale…[with] Rupert Everett and Russell Brand.  “My main policy is about sexual freedom…I also want there to be better sexual education in schools”…The former teacher and mother-of-two…was hounded out [of her neighborhood] by locals following media attention sparked by the TV show…

Smoke and Mirrors

Another case in which the truth is so obscured by exaggeration, dysphemisms, myths and lies that we’ll probably never know what really happened:

A…[Missouri] Judge sentenced 24-year-old Tiffany Piper to eight years in prison for selling two high school girls for sex…managed the [girls' work]…and placed ads online…[prosecutors claim that]  someone was [previously] trafficking Tiffany Piper for sex…[and] said…”At some point she was no longer a victim…because she perpetrated the same crimes that were perpetrated upon her”…[they] can`t say who first trafficked Piper, or who worked above her, because Piper never said…

The narrative simply doesn’t allow the prosecutor to admit that there is no shadowy “pimp” pulling the strings here, so Piper becomes the scapegoat.

Backwards into the Future (TW3 #42)

…in recent months a fierce debate over whether to legalise and regulate the sex industry [in Vietnam] has sprung up online and in the official press…even the National Assembly is due to address the issue at its next session in October…Researchers estimate there are around 200,000 sex workers in Vietnam…”We should legalise prostitution because it is part of human rights. Everybody has the right to enjoy sex,” said sociologist Le Quang Binh…

Comfort Zone (TW3 #311)

Given that the Immigrant Council is one of the groups trying to impose the Swedish model on Ireland, I trust you can see the endgame here:

A report…finds that victims of sex trafficking are left vulnerable to further abuse in…[Ireland's] direct provision centres because they can be easily contacted or intimidated by pimps and traffickers…the Immigrant Council of Ireland said…”traffickers have actually used the asylum system for residency and accommodation while simultaneously trafficking victims”…

Lack of Evidence (TW3 #316)

“…California Governor Jerry Brown [signed]…legislation which now requires district attorneys to get a court’s permission to use possession of more than one condom as potential evidence [of]…prostitution…”  How this will play out in real-world courtrooms:

DA: Your honor, I need permission to use these condoms as evidence, because “sex trafficking”.  It’s for the children!

Judge:  Granted.

Traffic Jam (TW3 #403)

…sex workers…and advocates submitted a report to the United Nations…on human rights violations committed in the U.S. against sex workers…and those profiled as such…Best Practices Policy Project (BPPP), Desiree Alliance and Sex Worker Outreach Project-NYC (SWOP-NYC) [documented] extensive violations of the right to equal protection before the law, the right to be free of cruel and inhuman punishment, and the right to health…Due process violations are also rampant…The report…[calls] on the U.S…to make good on a [2011] commitment…to address discrimination and violence against sex workers…

Imaginary Crises (TW3 #410)

Another good article attacking the “rape culture” myth:

…Both critics and supporters…note [that]…While the CDC estimates that nearly 2 million adult American women were raped in 2011 and nearly 6.7 million suffered some other form of sexual violence, the NCVS estimate for that year was 238,000 rapes and sexual assaults…[the high numbers result from a loose definition of rape, but by this standard]…the…CDC [found] that women rape men as often as men rape women.  The CDC also reports that men account for over a third of those experiencing…“sexual coercion”…defined as being pressured into sexual activity by psychological means:  lies or false promises, threats to end a relationship or spread negative gossip, or “making repeated requests” for sex and expressing unhappiness at being turned down…We must either start treating sexual assault as a gender-neutral issue or stop using the CDC’s inflated statistics…

The Scarlet Letter (TW# #413)

At least a few reporters are publishing critical views of currently-fashionable “john shaming” tyranny:

…“This violates the bedrock principle that punishment should not begin until you are convicted,” says Jonathan Simon…[of] Berkeley Law…“It’s the police saying, ‘We’re going to punish you upfront’…This isn’t just a few days in jail.  It’s distinctly degrading treatment, public exposure that puts people at risk of long-term internal trauma …it’s the kind of thing that the 8^th Amendment…was designed to prevent”…assistant professor Andrea Roth says…“Public humiliation affects a lot of people besides the johns…People say, ‘I saw your dad or husband on Facebook,’ and that can be devastating.  Your career can be affected—maybe permanently, given that once something goes up on the Internet, it’s there forever. It can disrupt entire families”…

Full of Themselves (TW3 #418)

Of all the semi-whores, none are as pompous as masseuses; they even infect those who write about them:

…Many [massage parlors] are locally owned small businesses staffed by well-trained professionals who provide high-priced services.  On the other hand, some are fronts for brothels…California Governor Jerry Brown signed a new bill that acknowledges that the state’s last attempt to regulate the massage industry struck the wrong balance…centralizing power moved massage parlors outside the authority of local governments, which are more likely to know when a business is illegitimate…

Given that most unlicensed massage parlors are Asian-owned, there is a strong whiff of racism in phrases like “locally owned” and “high-priced services”.

The Roof Caves In

…Somaly Mam has spoken out to defend herself for the first time…in the new issue of Marie Claire, Mam tells Abigail Pesta, “I didn’t lie”…she adds that she didn’t mount a legal fight against the claims because “I didn’t need a lawyer…I did nothing wrong.  My heart is my lawyer”…

Whither Canada? (TW3 #423) 

Alan Young…summed up…bill [C36] as “a very confused response to a very clear judgment”…when…asked if the bill could be amended, he was unequivocal:  “No.”  As a constitutional lawyer, he said, he’d “have a field day” with the bill, given…irreconcilable inconsistencies between the objectives, as laid out in the preamble, and the text of the proposed laws…Young also challenged the assertion that the government had struck the appropriate balance…”How can you even talk about ‘balance’ when you use the word ‘asymmetrical’…I’ve never seen anything in the history of [Canadian] criminal law that sets up asymmetrical prohibitions”…

A Whore in Church (TW3 #433) 

If George is smart, he’ll call off his protests first:

…A letter to Pastor Bill Dunfee of New Beginnings Ministries and Foxhole North strip club owner Thomas George was sent by city officials asking them to stop the weekly protests of each other’s establishment…the feud is straining local law enforcement and hurting the community…[but] they can’t legally be stopped from protesting…George explained to [reporters] that he…believes it is necessary to draw attention to…harassment by Dunfee and his congregation…

Above the Law (TW3 #434) 

Another one from Oklahoma:

A Tulsa County sheriff’s deputy…accused of sexual assault and indecent exposure resigned…as investigators search for more victims…Gerald Nuckolls…was arrested…[after using drugs as a pretext] to ask [a woman] inappropriate questions and…exposed himself to [her]…Nuckolls reportedly said he had a problem with pretty women…

Visit Every State

How fast could you visit all 50 states?

—as discussed by Stephen Von Worley on Data Pointed

This week's article is a little different. Instead of answering one of your questions, I'm going to look at someone else's answer to a question, and how thinking about that answer raised some new questions of my own. Eventually, the whole thing sucked me down a rabbit hole of calculations from which I barely escaped.

In the summer of 2012, the blog Twelve Mile Circle posted an article about the search for a 24-hour-long Google Maps route that visits as many US states as possible. They found that the maximum was about 19 or 20 states.

If you can visit 19 or 20 states in 24 hours, how long would it take to visit all 50? Stephen Von Worley read the article and did some calculating. He came up with a 6,813-mile route that visited the contiguous 48 states, then wrote an article on Data Pointed discussing how long the journey would take using different types of transportation.

His conclusion:

• • 160 hours by car (plus airline flights to Alaska and Hawaii)
• • 39 hours by private jet (landing in each state)
• • 18 hours by F-22 fighter jet and helicopter (landing in each state)

And he stopped there.

Recently, someone sent me Stephen's article. I enjoyed it, but I got curious: Were there faster ways?

First of all, there are technically faster planes than the F-22. The SR-71 Blackbird is, by some measures,[1]Rocket planes are faster, but only over short distances, and usually don't take off on their own. Orbital rockets are much faster because getting to space is mainly a problem of going as fast as possible.​[2]The X-15 rocket plane, was about twice as fast as the SR-71, and is the only aircraft to fly up to space. the fastest plane. It holds the record for the fastest trip from New York to London. It's fast enough that if you fly it along the Equator going west, even with pauses to refuel, you'll see the Sun rise in the west and set in the east.[3]I just came across this positively stunning firsthand account by Bill Weaver, an SR-71 test pilot. In 1966, Weaver was flying an SR-71 at full speed, Mach 3.18, when it abruptly and catastrophically disintegrated. Somehow, he survived the breakup. He didn't eject; the plane just tore itself apart around him and scattered in all directions. In other words, he suddenly found himself flying along at Mach 3.18 ... without his plane. It's a mind-boggling story. If you relax the requirement to land—so you just need to pass over the borders into the state—an SR-71 using aerial refueling could fly Stephen's route—plus trips to Juneau and Honolulu—in about 7 hours.[4]Or possibly more. It couldn't fly his route exactly, since at full speed the plane's turning radius is something like 100 miles.

And if we're not bothering to land in each state—if we're just trying to through the state's airspace—some new possibilities open up. This is where I got thoroughly nerd-sniped.

Satellites in orbit are an order of magnitude faster than even the SR-71. An object in low Earth orbit can cross the entire US in minutes. Furthermore, a satellite in a polar orbit will eventually pass over every state, since the Earth turns slowly under its orbital path, but hitting all 50 states this way would take many days.

I started to wonder how many orbits were required, and whether a satellite doing carefully planned course corrections could pass over all 50 states faster than the 7+ hours needed by an aircraft.

If you allow the satellite to change course an unlimited number of times, it can just forget about orbits completely, following a twisty course that stays over the US. At that point, it simply becomes a question of how much fuel you're allowing it to have.

Instead, I started considering another version of the problem: What if your satellite that had to coast while near the US, but could fire thrusters on the far side of the Earth once per orbit, putting it on a new course for each pass? How many passes would be required to visit every state then?

I had previously written some code for analyzing airplane routes to help me answer the question in "Flyover States" chapter in the What If book. I repurposed this code to tackle my satellite question.

For a while, the best my math could come up with was a set of six orbits that crossed all 50 states:

I decided that 6 was probably the limit; I just couldn't figure out a way to do it with 5. But I left my computer churning on the problem for an evening, searching through combinations of orbits, and yesterday morning ...

... it came up with a solution that does it in 5.

Those 5 orbits cross over all 50 states ... and DC, for good measure. They're all slightly curved, since the Earth is turning under the satellites, but it turns out that this arrangement of lines also works for the much simpler version of the question that ignores orbital motion: "How many straight (great-circle) lines does it take to intersect every state?" For both versions of the question, my best answer is a version of the arrangement above.

I don't know for sure that 5 is the absolute minimum; it's possible there's a way to do it with four, but my guess is that there isn't. Perhaps there's a way to get just the 48 contiguous states with 4 lines, but I haven't found it yet.

If you want to play with arrangements of lines, you can use the Google Earth path-drawing tool. It's a little clumsy, but it works. If anyone finds a way (or proof that it's impossible) I'd love to see it!

Bringing things back to Stephen's original question, the 5 orbits (four, really, since you could start and end over on the US side) would take just over six hours to complete, including the three maneuvers over the Indian Ocean. In other words, in a spacecraft, you could beat even the fastest airplane.

Of course, those right-angle turns would take a lot of fuel—and, as mentioned before—if you were really trying to set this record, you would just need to get as much fuel as possible and fly a space figure-8 that stayed above the country.[5]Or in a hyperloop, I guess.

Either way, one thing's for sure: In the time I spent doing all that calculation, I probably could have just visited all those states by walking.

But the calculating was fun.

If that preacher man wants me to repent, he better pay me more money.  –  Minnie Rae Simpson

One of the recurring themes of these harlotographies is the difficulty of ascertaining the truth of almost any given detail about the life of any given whore who lived prior to the 20^th-century advent of obsessive recordkeeping.  The farther back in history one delves, the harder it is to be sure of dates and other details, and the more biography merges into fiction, legend or even myth.  By the late 19^th century we can be reasonably certain of things like birthdates and residences for whores of middle or upper-class birth, but solid facts about those of the working class – especially in the frontier regions of the young United States – can be just as obscure as those of a person born centuries earlier.  Add claims made by the lady herself to entice customers or inflate her reputation, and those made by reporters, biographers and other tall-tale-tellers during her life and after her death, and we have the recipe for a legend as misty as that of King Arthur even if its subject lived well into recent times.

One excellent example of this is the story of Minnie Rae (sometimes called Mary) Simpson, a young San Francisco streetwalker of the 1870s.  According to the popular narrative of her life, she was born in or near Philadelphia in 1860 to a woman known only as Lacey; her father is said to have been a shoe worker who participated in the Great New England Shoemakers’ Strike which began on February 22^nd, 1860.  He is supposed to have died en route to California in 1862, either just before or just after the birth of Minnie’s younger brother, Adam.  Lacey claimed a land grant near San Francisco under the Homestead Act and managed to build up a small farm, relying on young Minnie for assistance with her baby brother; however, she died of scarlet fever in 1869, leaving the girl an orphan (it is unknown whether Adam survived).  Without family or even friends in the area, Minnie was forced to provide for herself and did so, as so many others have throughout history, by prostitution; she lived for a time with a Mr. Simpson (from whom she took her surname) and is supposed to have travelled with him the following year to England and Scotland.  There she is said to have met the young J.M. Barrie, who in later years wrote Peter Pan and patterned the character of Wendy after her.

While on this tour she became pregnant, and the only known photograph of her was taken in 1871.  She gave birth to a son (whom she named Bartholomew) the following year; by this point she was no longer with Simpson and lived mostly on the street.  She was a close friend to the notable San Francisco eccentric Emperor Norton, who proclaimed her “The Little Countess”, and the association almost certainly contributed heavily to her fame; during the same time period she gave a series of interviews to a journalist, who turned them into a book entitled My Life as a Child Prostitute: The Autobiography of Minnie Rae.  Given the subject matter, it seems likely that the reason the journalist remained anonymous was to avoid controversy or even accusations of being one of Minnie’s clients.  It was a wise precaution; though the Cult of the Child was not yet in full swing in the US, Minnie’s pragmatic view of prostitution (“I get paid to be a whore.  If I married some farmer, I’d have to do it for free”) and her statements that prostitutes do the work because it’s lucrative and gives them a high degree of freedom, were almost as incendiary then as they would be now.  Only a few copies were ever printed, and these were gathered together by a preacher and burned in 1880, soon after the Emperor Norton’s death.  One copy survived, and was passed down to her descendants by Bartholomew until it, too was lost sometime in the late 20^th century; only a few photocopied pages remain.  Minnie herself left San Francisco in 1873 and vanished from history; how Bartholomew knew anything about his mother or gained his copy of her book is entirely unclear, considering he was an infant at the time.  The only other concrete evidence of her existence is Minna Street in San Francisco, named for her by a politician who was one of her clients.

Now, the skeptical reader will no doubt already see a few problems with this narrative; though there are exceptions to every rule, in the late 19^th century the average age of menarche in the US was about 14, and conditions such as Minnie lived in would tend to raise the age due to poor nutrition; in other words, getting pregnant at the age of 11 was even less likely in 1871 than it is now, and delivering a healthy baby from such a pregnancy would be unlikelier still.  Furthermore, though she was undoubtedly precocious, her making the kind of splash that she did in the short time she managed it seems to me less like something a 10 or 11-year-old could accomplish, and more like the actions of a bright 14 or 15-year-old with a baby face who realized that lurid narratives sell.  The intelligent, outgoing Minnie was well-known among clients and acquaintances as a tale-teller, and she even boasted that Mark Twain had been inspired by some of her yarns; it seems very likely that she ratcheted her age down a few years for the sake of marketing, but whether she told her clients that age or whether it was something she came up with for a credulous journalist is unknown.  Given that her business is known to have gone up after she got pregnant (an obvious sign of more advanced physical maturity), and that underage whores still to this day exaggerate their back-stories for gullible members of the press, the latter seems far more likely.  One thing I find fascinating is that those who retell her story never find it odd that her birth year is known with such certainty despite the fact that her birthplace, her original surname and any event of her life after 1873 are not; I reckon the wanking fantasy of the pregnant 10-year-old streetwalker is just too juicy to pass up.

Larger-than-life characters tend to live on in the imaginations of others long after their deaths, and Minnie Rae is no exception.  Beside Peter Pan’s Wendy, she was also named a Discordian saint in 2006 (unsurprising, given that the Emperor Norton was a major influence on the philosophy); the Discordians seem to have started a rumor that the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train system was named after her son Bartholomew.  Minnie believed in reincarnation, and claimed to have been a Babylonian harlot who was mentioned in the Bible; whether she meant Revelation’s “Whore of Babylon” is unknown.  But it seems likely that her belief inspired two modern-day strippers to claim to be Minnie reincarnated; one of them, who went by Fannie Mae, worked in Los Angeles during the ‘90’s. The other, Kitty, worked on Bourbon Street in New Orleans during the ‘50s and ‘60s, knew Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (one of the founders of Discordianism), and because of that connection (and a tentative one to Jack Ruby) was suspected by Jim Garrison as being connected to the Kennedy assassination conspiracy.  Confused yet?  Read some of the links, and it’ll probably get worse.  But it all goes to show that when dealing with the demimonde, appearances are often more important than reality, and adhering to conventional beliefs about women and girls is foolish at best.

[jimbenton]

POW!

magnus-thegreat-redundancy:

I believe that every american should at least watch this monologue from The Newsroom

Go home, back to my parents’ house; open the closet door; find the three boxes buried in the corner; dig them out; drag them out; peal off the duct tape and take out their contents: notebooks, photo albums, mix tapes, zines—what’s left of my youth. Spread it out in front of me and search for evidence, artifacts. Find: two show flyers, a sheet of stickers, a demo cassette, a few crumbled photographs.

One CD. Rock Immortal.

That’s it.

*

Rock Immortal was the only full-length album produced by the end-of-the-millennium East Bay band Dory Tourette and the Skirtheads. Part of the lesser-known Geekfest scene, the band derived its name from the local slang for meth, “skirt,” and the punk name of its frontman, who did in fact have Tourette’s Syndrome.

The 1999 album was recorded in a reported drug-fueled two-day frenzy, when all three of the band’s members were under age 21. Produced by late Hickey frontman and San Francisco Mission legend Matty Luv, Rock Immortal was released on the now-defunct DIY co-op label Smarmy Post-Angst Musicians (SPAM) Records.

Mission artist Chubby did the cover art, an apocalyptic cartoon scene of burning buildings; a sun with a line-snorting straw in its nose; a spread-eagle pigtailed girl licking a lollipop and pinching the thigh of a character twice her size; and a tattooed tranny eating a bowl of cereal, with a quote bubble that reads, “Told you dat shit will kill you.”

At the center of the scene, a hairy man with a horse cock and penis arms is a nailed to a crucifix.

He is looking straight at me.

*

When I first met Dory Tourette at the Berkeley BART station, he was hunched over an acoustic guitar that looked twice his size, his head jerking and his fingers running up the frets. A black guitar case lay open in front of him and every few minutes, a commuter would deposit some coins. I was 15, he 19.

That summer, ostensibly selling zines out of my backpack, I began to sit with him. Really I just wanted to be near him, to soak in every burst of electric energy that shot off him and through the station.

I thought I was in love, but really it was just a typical teenage obsession exacerbated by depression, speed psychosis, and confessional poetry. I started following him around the East Bay, waiting around the corner while he bought 40s with his brother’s ID; crouching between the cars in a parking lot, chopping lines on the mirror of a Revlon compact; smoking weed in public parks, our hoodies pulled over our heads to block the wind; crashing college parties and drinking all their beer.

When I picture him now, I see him moving, always in the progressive tense. He is leaning against a brick wall, strumming; crouching down on one knee, fingerpicking; standing between the planks of a half-built patio, howling. Masturbating in the middle of the street outside Gilman. Jumping out of a car window. Falling to his knees on the stage at Burnt Ramen. Playing a guerilla show at Ocean Beach, taking a swig of whiskey, the burn of it rippling across his face as it hit his ulcered insides. Collapsing on Leile’s living room floor, piss spreading out in the carpet beneath him. Curling up on the porch, burying his head in his hands and sobbing, “My mom kicked me out,” over and over, and not moving away when I put my arm around his back. Leaning towards me the morning after I’d tried to hook with him, the morning after he’d refused to take advantage of me—touching my shoulder and asking me if I was cool, dude, you cool?

Reaching in his backpack and pulling out a CD, saying, “So like, some guy at a label could see this and be like, ‘Yeah, those dudes party and get fucked-up at their shows but they could still make this, they could still do this.’ Like, this is what we’re capable of, dude, what we could do: we could make this album.”

The florescent BART station lights glinting off the case.

*

Rock Immortal opens with “Sex With Junkies,” a thrashy-punk-meets-bubble-gum-pop song composed of two verses, one chorus, a catchy melody and just-seedy-enough lyrics. If they’d left it at that, if they’d made that into a formula and followed it, the album might have been a hit.

By the second track, Rock Immortal drives deep into The Skirtheads’ genre-busting subversion: dirty Mission punk mixing with country twang, Buddy Holly hiccups and a Johnny Cash story-telling sensibility. Frenetic sounds are anchored in basic chords and a simple song structure, then topped off with lyrics about snorting meth, killing white people, getting raped by cops, dating nine-year-olds, and crying, always crying: “Make me cry tonight,” “I’m gonna cry,” “If you fuck with my head and make me cry”—a vulnerability that complicates any shock-value appeal.

The driving force of the album is the character Dory Tourette, part invented alter ego, part self-mythologized caricature of frontman Dory Ben-Shalom—a tragi-comedy anti-hero who acts out our darkest and most taboo impulses in an ill-fated search for love. The album sends listeners careening into the world of that character, though in its vulnerable moments, you can’t help but get whiffs of the other, the person inside. You get closer and closer to that center, until at last the album ends with two solo tracks.

*

With its vulgar lyrics and genre bending, Rock Immortal was one of the best manifestations of the Geekfest sensibility, a fringe subsect more concerned with challenging paradigms and championing outsiders than donning bullet belts and pounding out power chords. The Geekfest scene grew in response to what many regarded as an increasing commodification and reductive aestheticizing of punk. Underage bands were told they didn’t sound “punk enough” to play Gilman or receive Maximum Rock N Roll coverage—a case of weirdos rejecting the weirder-os. There was nothing left to do except go weirder, grosser, more offensive and unmarketable. Bands formed their own free all-ages shows and in turn, their own label: SPAM Records, reachable at (510) BAD-SMUT.

While releasing Rock Immortal, SPAM Records co-founder John Mink “got a lot of flack” from people who “didn’t get it.” “I’m not even sure I got it,” Mink later wrote on a now-deleted Myspace blog post. He just knew there’d be lasting power in releasing a truly idiosyncratic piece of art. But the broader punk scene didn’t agree. They largely rejected the album, and the most enraged denizens demanded Dory Ben-Shalom be jailed for the supposed sex crimes of Dory Tourette. It goes without saying that there wasn’t a place for the album in the mainstream. Too strange, too grotesque, too unclassifiable and perverse, Rock Immortal slowly sank into the static of the thousand DIY albums of the thousand indie bands of that era.

And though Rock Immortal immediately became one of my all-time favorite and most-listened-to albums, I was 16, so that isn’t saying a whole lot. It probably had more to do with the scene and the era; with being young and fucked-up and killing myself; with my unrequited crush on Dory and the way I turned the album into an emblem for all those things.

At least that’s what I told myself. The album followed me as I drifted away from the punk scene: got clean, went to college, worked two jobs, muddled through a life that felt like a bombed-out battlefield. I wrote off that person I’d been and all the things she’d felt as teenage drama, theatrics. None of it was real. I threw my old zines and mix tapes and my copy of Rock Immortal into a box that I taped shut and stored at my parents’ house.

But I couldn’t quite get away from it. Before I locked it away, I imported Rock Immortal into my iTunes. It’d come on shuffle every now and then, and a few times a year I’d listen to the album all the way through. I’d hear those old songs and a wave of nostalgia would slam into me: cigarettes on foggy nights, distortion through toilet-paper earplugs, smeared ink stamps on my wrists, the taste of cheap speed dripping down my throat.

Images would rise from that buried place in me: Dory on the pavement outside Gilman, Dory on the corner in front of the liquor store, Dory on the floor between the ticket machines.

Dory in the parking lot between the cars, telling me which nostril to use when I snorted, telling me to use a hollowed-out Bic pen instead of a rolled-up dollar because it was cleaner, it was safer, I had to think about my health.

Dory crouched on one knee, strumming his guitar while I made us a straw.

Eventually SPAM Records went under and Rock Immortal became even harder to find. Everyone got older. The Geekfest scene disintegrated. Dory cleaned up a bit, got a regular job, got a girlfriend, put a damper on the self-destruction he’d performed all over the East Bay in the previous millennium.

Then sometime in the mid-2000s Rock Immortal reemerged. A wave of Geekfest nostalgia swept through the Bay, and the album gained a modest cult following among a younger generation of punks who weren’t so disturbed by its vile lyrics and genre twisting.

The Skirtheads played a few shows during those years, the last of which was in June 2007 at Gilman Street. The show was recorded and clips were later uploaded to YouTube. In the footage Dory has put on weight. His hair is shaggy and his signature pervert moustache is buried beneath a stubbly beard. The crowd is bigger than it ever was at any of their earlier shows, filled with kids locking arms and swaying and singing along, “The Saint, The Saint, The Saint St. Ides.”

I am in that crowd. I am one of those kids.

That was the last time I saw Dory. On October 22, 2007, Dory Tourette Ben-Shalom died in his sleep. He was 28.

*

You can still find Rock Immortal, which is somewhat impressive given the album’s release occurred before the advent of social media, before the end of the last millennium, before the curtain dropped on an era when things could still get lost, buried, distorted, and forgotten.

You can Google Rock Immortal and get led to a couple of sites that offer free downloads. Someone uploaded the whole album to YouTube. You can even still get the physical thing: Thrillhouse Records offers an LP version for $9, with the description “The best album you’ve never heard! Seriously!”

You can find blogs and Tumblrs that describe the album as “disgustingly overlooked,” and “criminally underrated.” You can find tributes written by old friends, usually stark and restrained, some of which note the scarcity of what has survived: “Rock Immortal remains Dory’s sole statement to those of us who weren’t there for the whole Geekfest scene.”

But you can also find write-ups by people who only knew Dory tangentially—from shows or parties, people he met on MUNI buses—who haven’t been able to shake the album either. They find themselves still humming the songs, they say. You can even find comments from people who never met Dory and never saw The Skirtheads play. You can read how the album found its way to the Tulsa suburbs “via a crusty with a home-made Crass tattoo on his neck,” and developed fans there. You can read about how Dory became “kind of a legend” in upstate New York.

You can see the rings of reverberation the album has made, the way in which I am not alone—how there’s a little group of us who’ve been followed by this bizarre, obscure album by one of the most bizarre, obscure bands of a scene and an era that are gone.

*

Near the center of Rock Immortal, buried between “The Lord Said Ejaculate” and “I’m Too Young To Be a Pedophile,” sits the oddball track “Build Me a Straw.” Stylistically, its execution is heavier, grinding-er, closer to the Hickey style of punk that so influenced the band. Gone are the country or rockabilly twists; gone also is the stripped-down despair present the first time I heard the song, acoustic and solo on the BART station floor.

Here the drums are relentless and the vocals come in one headphone like a far-away thing. There’s no chorus, just one verse that repeats itself before the song splits apart and a scrambling guitar solo takes over, driving you deeper towards something, though all it ends up being is a fade-out.

The lyrics are a diversion, a shift away from the over-the-top absurdity that characterizes the album. In this song, the character of Dory Tourette is not pseudo-celebrating drugs or inappropriately pining for the affections of an underage girl. Both of those elements are present but what occurs instead is a break in the character. Something else is glimpsed: the loneliness that underpins those longings, the desperation and futility that perhaps underpin the whole album and give it its gravity, its center, its thing that lingers.

When I hear it now I always see the same thing: this one moment in the parking lot when we’re crouched down between the cars. I am chopping lines and cutting a Bic pen, and Dory is sitting next to me, and I’m filled with so much longing—for him, for the high, for anything to make it all stop hurting—that it feels like my chest might explode. I want to give it all to him then, every ugly painful thing, all the shame I carry, and I want him to take me away, I want to run away, I want to go anywhere and be anything, as long as it’s with him.

And then it all sinks back. The static melts and the chasing fades, and there comes this funny little moment where it’s just us, sitting between the cars—two adjacent islands with his song reverberating between us.

“Little girl build me a straw / Stupid burning to my tongue / I can’t make her understand / I’m not violent enough / I’m not violent enough”

*

You could probably still do it: find someone with an original copy of Rock Immortal. If you asked around enough, I’m sure someone could dig one up.

You could follow them to their parents’ house, open the closet door, pull out the boxes, and sift through the refuse. You could find the CD. You could crack open the case, see the track list and the credits, and the sketch of another crying man with penis arms. You could see the montage of the promo stickers, snippets of lyrics written in cursive alongside simple hand-drawn images. You could see the CD itself, pressed with the image of a nose clutching a straw and chasing a bag of powder across a cityscape.

You could see that I’m not making this up, that it’s not all static and myth—that there was something tangible at the center, and that it survived.

Related Posts:

• The Other Bay Area
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: HICKEY’S VARIOUS STATES OF DISREPAIR
• Michael Chabon’s Punk Rock Days
• Albums of Our Lives: Death Cab For Cutie’s Transatlanticism
• Songs of Our Lives: Dead Kennedys’ “Chemical Warfare”

No real blogging today … unexpected life bits occupying me.  The blessed rain finally came! But the sunshade we just put on the front of the small “Haven” household (now inhabited by eldest son Manchild and his Beloved) inadvertently created an emergency.  Water ran off it to the end, where it pooled and ran back towards the slightly lower house!  It was almost over the metal door threshold when the Manchild noticed it.  So we old farts fell out along with him to do a fast repair job.

A ditch was dug, just as we used to do ’round our Army tents.  The runoff fell into this and was ditch-guided towards the lower back yard and Labyrinth. We filled the ditch with some of the plentiful fist-and-above sized rocks.  Then the inside out rubber tire planters were stationed around the edges of the rest of the sunshade area to catch and block water from the rest of the driveway….a dike of planters.

The little building was built, not by us, but by the original house owner and built at a grade where all the water of the yard drains towards it!  We had somewhat corrected this upon our remodel in 2006 that made it a habitation, by putting in a holed pipe in front of the doors.  Our mistake this week was not realizing runoff from the sunshade would overwhelm that drainage capacity.  But the problem is solved with only some muddied muscle power, no money spent.

And now, I am off for errands….fuming and powered past my physical weariness to realize that yes, yet again, we like war better than we like feeding hungry people.

Filed under: Life

So I was asked a few days ago to speak on Full Disclosure Podcast about the #MyNameIs controversy that’s got everyone moving to Ello/GooglePlus/whatever. A really good writeup by Dottie Lux is here- my profile has been reinstated, at least for now, while my girlfriend is still banned. She’s lost not only a social network, but close to 7 years of photos documenting her transition. It’s fucking horrible.

Anyway. Here’s the podcast interview, I hope you enjoy it. Note that there is also discussion of child pornography in the first half, relating to photographer Wyatt Neumann who had his social media accounts shut down when nude photos of his 2 year old daughter were deemed child pornography. As this may be triggering to some folks, I wanted to give you a head’s up.

I can’t get it to embed, so here you go!

In a dispatch this weekend appearing in Artforum’s usually stultifying Scene & Herd blog, it was reported that artist Oscar Murillo had carried out an intriguing intervention at a party hosted by the Brazilian collector Frances Reynolds. Coinciding with the ArtRio fair, the celebration was meant to commemorate the conclusion of Murillo’s residency at Reynolds’s Rio de Janeiro mansion. And although a residency might connote a withdrawal from the world as usual, even a sense of artistic monasticism, Murillo turned the monk in the abbey into the skunk at the garden party, delivering a fiery speech that expounded upon Brazil’s “colonization”; in doing so he brought his host to tears and caused Tunga, a Brazilian artist represented by Luhring Augustine, to leave.

The speech’s turn came from the content of the residency itself, as Artforum correspondent Frank Expósito writes:

Upon arriving for the stay, Murillo had been struck by the fact that the house staff was predominantly black. He said he couldn’t ignore it. So the artist, dressed in a white jumpsuit, worked as a member of the house staff for the entirety of the residency.

If what preceded the speech is compelling (perhaps the most interesting work the artist has undertaken in his short yet meteoric career), the hectoring that followed his address at the Reynolds party beggars belief:

Guests tried to enjoy the outdoor party after the polemical address, but it wouldn’t be so easy. The once pristine jumpsuit, now dirty by the knees, swayed overhead as a reminder. Murillo stood firm amid a fray of questioning. “Do you even know who Paula Cooper is? Do you?” badgered collector Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas, referring to successful social activists in the art world. “Do you know who Karl Marx is? Read it again,” pursued another. Murillo shook his head and responded to the questions about his integrity with more questions. “Do you know of any other artist coming from the working class in Latin America? Do you know how much Gabriel Orozco sells now?” The crowd could not be satiated. On my way out, David Zwirner’s Greg Lulay gave the artist a congratulatory hug.

I think it’s fair to say that Murillo’s labor-attuned gesture, though certainly not unprecedented in recent art history — Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s longtime Department of Sanitation residency and Fred Wilson’s “Guarded View” (1991) come to mind — represents a welcome transition away from the large and largely derivative canvases for which he has thus far been best known, and delivers more bite than the Chelsea chocolate factory that may have presaged this line of thinking.

And the community that so quickly lionized Murillo has more than earned his withering scrutiny, with Donald and Mera Rubell’s condescending remarks about the young artist in a New York magazine article this summer offering the most appalling example of the genre. (Sample quote from Mera Rubell: “People are always trying to figure out the power of the immigrant…The power of the immigrant is that they always show up. You don’t always know if you can deliver but you always show up. Oscar always shows up.”)

Unfortunately, his New York gallery, David Zwirner, did not have any more information about the Reynolds project when we reached out to them earlier today.

A 101-year-old film discovered by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is the oldest known feature film starring a cast of black actors. The footage, discovered among 900 negatives acquired from Bronx-based Biograph Studio in 1939 by the museum’s first curator of film, is set to be screened next month. The pioneering film will be presented alongside archival documents and other findings as part of MoMA’s 100 Years in Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History. According to the Guardian, black actors appeared in film as early as 1909, but such footage is believed lost.

The untitled 1913 film, provisionally named Bert Williams Lime Kiln Field Day Project, features the Caribbean-American vaudevillian Bert Williams. In a news release, MoMA notes that the seven reels of “rushes” — unedited daily takes — were filmed at “virtually the same time” as the Ku Klux Klan–promoting film The Birth of a Nation, which ignited controversy and spurred the hate group’s recruiting efforts.

But in the Biograph Studio reels, ancillary documentary material depicting the movie’s filming presents “candid footage of the black cast and white crew interacting on set, and several frames of Williams mingling with white extras on a suburban street location during a break in filming,” per MoMA. Along with offering footage of sets in New York and New Jersey, the reels represent a substantive contribution to the video documentation of this period in American history and show business.

I have written before of how this case has affected Mrs Griffin – DLTs wife.

I have yet to see an ounce of concern or sympathy for the other victims of Operation Yewteree. The children and partners of those prosecuted. They are genuinely innocent.

Stuart Hall’s elderly wife has seen her life torn apart; Max Clifford’s wife has suffered; Freddie Starr’s wife has seen her husband reduced to a shadow of his former self. Whatever you feel about the guilt or innocence of these men – their families have done nothing to deserve the life they must now live.

Whilst that equally applies to the families of all those convicted of crimes – few have to suffer the gloating, gleeful, media coverage that blights the life of these women.

Financially ruined, fighting a personal battle against cancer – spare more than a thought for Mrs Griffin tonight.

If you have any spare coppers – tip them into the donate button, and I will ensure that they are turned into as large a bunch of flowers for Mrs Griffin as they will permit – from all of us who remember that ‘victims’ come in all shapes and forms and some of them bear a greater burden than others.

It will be a pathetically small gesture dropped into her ocean of misery – but hopefully it will let her know that not all of the social media landscape is dancing a jig of victory tonight.

* Edited to add: I have removed the donate button from this post to stop you generous souls from sending any more money! 

I have just sent a cheque for £283 to Dave Lee Travis’ solicitor who will ensure that Marianne Griffin gets her flowers from you all. 

If I hadn’t taken the button down – she was in danger of ending up with hay fever!!! Thank you all of you. 

Sapphophobia describes the intersection of biphobia and misogyny. It is named after the poet Sappho, who, despite what you might have heard, was actually bisexual.

Sapphophobia is when bi women are seen as indecisive, because all women are seen to lack a strong mind. Sapphophobia is when bi women are seen as deceptive, because all women are seen as liars. Sapphophobia is when bi women are seen as making it up for attention, because all women are seen as attention-seeking minxes. Sapphophobia is where bi women are seen as greedy, because all women are seen to be out for all they can get. Sapphophobia is when bi women are seen as sluts, because all women in control of their sexuality are seen as pathological.

It’s impossible to separate sapphophobia from misogyny, just as it is impossible to separate it from broader biphobia. It’s telling that it’s usually men who repeat this trope, although as I painfully learned last year, women can do it too and that’s rooted in internalised misogyny as well as a heterosexual hatred of queer women.

So today, I send love to my bi sisters, my pansexual sisters, my queer sisters. You are beautiful, and fuck the world. Literally, if that’s what you want.

I did not wake up to smell the coffee this morning.  I slept an exhausted sleep with dreams so rich that morning felt like a foreign country.  My alarm had been practicing futility for 20 minutes.

My dreamscape was not totally unlike our waking world.  I was living in a rather grubby industrial town.  Somewhat oddly, a blocky dirty factory crowned the hill in town — an industrial “castle” full of exhausted workers instead of knights.
But my concern was of an archaeological dig on the edge of town.  It was the talk of the town.  A skeleton of an apparently important woman had been found.  One of the findings related to this was sending me scurrying up the hill to the town-crowning factory, because it had a large locking room used as a sort of commercial safe.  Anyone in town could store their valuables there and I stored my jewelry box there!

I was going to my jewelry box because on the ring finger of the found skeleton there was an imprint of a ring, as if it had been burned through her flesh and onto the bone itself.  The ring was the perfect image of one I owned.(And oddly, the image of a ring I DID actually own once, before I gave it away when I mostly stopped wearing rings.) I got to my jewelry box and took out a ring, putting it on my finger, eager to be out of the depressing environs of the factory and walked out to the parking lot. Peculiarly, the ring on my finger was NOT the one I meant to get…but a silver band with a garish heavy silver skull!

There I met a woman I knew; I treated her like family, but she certainly was not my mother. She was distressed and when I asked why she told me her daughter had gotten a job at the factory — but nobody had seen the young woman since. The factory blew off her phone calls and she was going to get an answer in person, put they had not let her inside. I led her toward the cars, greatly concerned and told her I’d heard some foul stories about women employees vanishing. I embraced her as I confided that there were rumors of possible human traffic, and we discussed how to get this addressed in a “factory town.”

We walked back towards our cars, and she suddenly said. “I need to cut string over a blade!” As the oddity of dreams often is, I knew what this meant IN the dream — it was some magical/superstitious thing like “knocking wood” apparently. She found a piece of dental floss, I pulled my key chain and held steady the little curving blade of an old P-38 can opener! (Yes, I have one of those on my actual keychain.) She couldn’t cut the floss, her husband joined us, suggesting a different piece of string and began searching the grubby parking lot of something of that sort. I told her I had a knife and opened my purse to find it. And searching my purse for my actual antler handled folding knife is where I awakened.

I had the sort of weekend that I would expect to induce stress-fed dreams. But that dream is pretty enigmatic with relation to real life issues that hit air distribution devices this weekend. My youngest son, my PTSD “Runaway” out of the Army since July out in the wilds of Texas, is coming home. THIS WEEK. He is coming to STAY and bringing his two dogs, to whom my allergy-pain-in-ass body will mount a ferocious reaction. His dogs will bring the combined household total of pets needing care and costly vet services to TEN. This freaked me out so badly I considered taking our two rescued dogs BACK to their rescue sites.

Of course, the pet stress was merely a surface distraction from the real issue. Knowing my much worried about younger son is returning, I was instantly in terror of feeling the sense of failure and helplessness that stalked me in the years following his precipitate flight from home in his teens. Knowing that to even COME home means he has hit the end of a rope with his medically disabled issues and PTSD makes me feel inadequate and frightened for him.

But thankfully, my friends and family rallied. Two young visitors offered me surcease and escape at need to their apartment. My husband and son promised I would not be “doing it alone” as it always was in the past. My son told me he would take Fen, the little beguiling terrier mix we’ve had only a week, to his house. Samoyed Jack doesn’t really increase my allergy load, so the two new dogs will hopefully not overwhelm me into the ER by themselves. We resolve to find a way to pay the vet bills for two ancient ferrets – Helen and Farley, ancient Jack, middle aged Fenster, Uncas, and Beatrice, young Gracie and incoming Ladybug and Marley.

I fell into bed and died to consciousness and my mind spun me a tale. I don’t know its meaning, but waking with Fen the scruffy terrier on my husband’s pillow under his covers? Well, start the week on a rueful laugh, right?

Tagged: dreams, family, parenthod, ptsd

…for the season?

Well, there sure is a reason I never liked playing dominos.  Any why I am sick of histrionics.

And that Starbucks doesn’t get any of MY bucks…cause one more “I love coffee AND guns” bumper sticker is going to make me puke.

And why guns are not the answer.

And here?  Well, it is the autumnal equinox.  Today I clean and take inside the beads counting the dead — to protect some of the more delicate ceramic bits from the frosts of winter to come.  And I will sit in meditation outside in the occasional misting rain, contemplating the change of world amidst the change of seasons.

I will wonder how the winter ahead will go.  My husband will retire, we will have less income. We still support my eldest son, medically disabled veteran and college graduate, who cannot find more than a minimum wage job that barely pays his child support and gas for the car.  We will soon be supporting our youngest medically disabled veteran son and his pets, too.  The house is filling up as I put up fall garlands and beg the skies for rain.

I will wonder why the national news is filled with a search for a nutcase who shot two cops; but has scarce a word about a nutcase felon who shot his daughter and six little grandchildren with a gun he shouldn’t have been allowed to have.  I will wonder why the White House is more worried about a man with an itsy bitsy pocket knife running through the front doors instead of why the man was PTSD crazed enough to do so. (And no, thank you, I don’t give a rat’s ass what was IN his car — he did not take anything really dangerous with him to the White House.)  I will wonder why my country is gearing up for war against the bunch of murderous religious asshats of ISIL, while not addressing the murderous minded (to women) religious asshats of THIS country. And I’ll wonder why we can’t quit religious justifying the beating of women and children in this country.(Maybe because we dont’ read the correct bedtime stories to our children?)

 

Filed under: Politics, PTSD Journals, Religious Nuts & Bolts, War & No Peace, War on Women Tagged: child abuse, ecology, environment, ISIL, moron media, propaganda, ptsd, religious folly, spousal abuse, war

Few did obsessive nature handicrafts like the Victorians, whether it was seaweed scrapbooking or shell arranging, something of the salon repression boiling over into insanely labored DIY arts. One of the fascinations was with the newly accessible microscopes, which showed previously invisible specimens such as the single cell algae diatoms, of which there are hundreds of different types in the world. With a single hair, practitioners would scoot the diatoms, encircled by iridescent glass-like silica cell walls, into kaleidoscope patterns only viewable beneath a lens.

Due to this being incredibly tedious, the art of diatom designs didn’t really make it into the 21st century. However, filmmaker Matthew Killip found one Englishman named Klaus Kemp who is carrying on the craft. In the short documentary The Diatomist, shared earlier this year on Vimeo, Killip visits Kemp at the work he’s perfected over years of research, showing some of the gorgeous miniature art, as well as expeditions to the water the diatoms call home. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a horse trough, or a ditch, gutters, you name it, where there is water it’s worth having a look,” Kemp says in the film.

“Klaus Kemp has devoted his entire life to understanding and perfecting diatom arrangement and he is now acknowledged as the last great practitioner of this beautiful combination of art and science,” Killip writes alongside the film. Kemp uses a needle instead of the Victorian hair to move the diatoms around, but the results are just as labored and lovely as the antique examples. You can see more of them at Kemp’s Microlife Services site.

h/t Boing Boing

There’s never been much of a unified scene when it comes to capturing landscapes in art, but maybe more even than before artists are very experimental with how to show a stretch of space. The environment is only being culled back further by development, and human eyes are more frequently fixed on the universe beyond our Earth. In Landmark: The Fields of Landscape Photography by William A. Ewing, released this month from Thames & Hudson, over 100 photographers are compiled to explore the contemporary landscape.

Ewing writes in his introduction to the book:

Environmental dangers notwithstanding, there are still pleasures to be gained from landscape photographs that remind us of what we have lost, or grasp for alternative routes to the future … Each generation of photographers has a new world to contend with, full of Chekhov’s good and evil, but also full of unique pictorial possibilities.

Some of the photographs were exhibited last year at Somerset House in London, but even if you’re familiar with the more prominent names like Hiroshi Sugimoto and his grey, liminal water views, or Edward Burtynsky’s shocking industrial captures, it’s really Ewing’s curation that is most on view. Usually massive group books divide up their pages by artist; here the over 230 photographs are arranged on generously-sized pages by subjective themes. Ewing acknowledges that landscape photography is “as varied a terrain as the landscape itself,” and seems as much interested in contrasting ways of looking as creating a cohesive argument for the genre.

For example, the “Sublime” chapter has a 1998 Sally Mann photograph of an ethereal forest right by a high-definition 1984 shot of the Witch Head Nebula by David Malin, and a tree void of leaves shrouded with snow in Japan photographed by Michael Kenna in 2005, alongside a NASA Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera image of the Moon’s frigid north pole. It’s like that throughout the section, stars, and small terrestrial views hauntingly joined. Later in the apocalyptic “Rupture,” the “battered world,” as Ewing describes our planet, reveals its growing wounds, like in Pablo López Luz’s aerial of the seemingly endless sprawl of Mexico City, and in “Scar,” its mutilations, such as Daniel Beltra’s eerily beautiful overhead of a 2010 ocean oil spill. Landmark has quite a scope of work, and is limited by its nature, yet Ewing’s careful eye and passionate voice in his writing are compelling in uniting these disparate photographs in a continuation of the landscape genre.

Landmark: The Fields of Landscape Photography by William A. Ewing is available from Thames & Hudson.

EDIT: v0.21 adds .OBJ export from the webplayer; you can now actually use this to make models and import it into whatever you want. (If you want to use this in Unity, you will need to apply a material / shader that uses vertex colors and doesn't cull backfaces, so pretty much any of the "Particle" shaders)

There are 2 common modes in 3D polygonal modeling: vertex manipulation and sculpting. But for many of these workflows, a 3D mass exists mostly as a surface to be unwrapped and painted. If all we need is a 3D canvas to paint upon, why can't we just go straight to the painting part?

"Mural" is an experimental freehand 3D modeling tool similar to SketchUp's "Freehand" tool or the impressive Tilt Brush, except SketchUp imagines it more as a tracing aid and Tilt Brush relies on VR hardware and doesn't readily export geometry.

I want to make Mural as an accessible 3D tool that borrows game UI metaphors (specifically, first person mouselook) and directly exports the resulting 3D models for use in games, or anything, really. Many of the models made in Mural will not look like "traditionally" modelled 3D objects, and intentionally embrace glitchy non-representational aesthetics, twisted normals, vertex colors, and z-sorting artifacts. If it hasn't already occurred, I imagine the "politics of 3D" will shift to embrace these phenomena as artistic features rather than aesthetic flaws.

(I am also indebted to Rich Edwards' early research with "3d concepts" using semi-transparent planes.)

CHANGELOG
v0.22

• decoupled canvas movement from painting (thanks for suggestion @Dewb) so you can now move the painting surface WHILE painting

v0.21

• added simple .OBJ export for webplayer; press F12 to save a .OBJ to your computer

v0.20

• fixed stroke shader, colors now render properly
• added a color picker hue / saturation circle, adapted from code in UnityPaint
• replaced line renderers with generated meshes from Vectorosity
• added .OBJ export
• added very basic undo support (press [Z] to delete most recent stroke(s) )

If you regularly follow geek culture, you've probably seen early versions of Dirk Loechel's spaceship comparison chart, which shows the relative sizes of vehicles from science fiction games, movies and TV shows. Well, it's finished -- and it's even...

I missed out on the big climate change awareness march in Manhattan today. I work weekends, and heading down to Manhattan for a spell before rushing back to Westchester in time for work was just not an option. I don't think that this was a cop-out on my part. I cover "green" issues fairly regularly, and the presence of one more person at the rally isn't as important as the presence of a voice consistently harping on green issues.

To me, the biggest problem facing our society is our utter failure to look beyond the immediate future: the next quarter, the next election cycle, the next ratings period... these occupy the thoughts of our policy makers to a far greater extent than a long-term, sustainable future. The symptoms of this underlying failure to develop a long-range plan, better yet, a multi-generational blueprint for the future, can be see in all walks of life- bubble economies, boom-and-bust cycles, environmental degradation, and infrastructure delapidation. Tragically, I don't see any changes being implemented until it's too late. Hell, at this point, I'm convinced that the best we can do is to lessen the impact of the coming crash, but big business and bad government actors are doing their damnedest to put the pedal to the metal.

I've long maintained that fossil fuels should be considered "startup capital" to be used to usher in a sustainable energy economy. The problem is that Homo sapiens has been burning (quite literally) the "seed money" with little effort to develop the next generation of energy sources. My personal feeling is that biofuels developed from algae or small, quick growing plants suck as duckweed. Carbon capture would best be achieved through reforestation efforts.

At any rate, the most important change that has to occur is that we, as a species, have to think of a future beyond the next quarter.