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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 3 months

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By: Stephen Jay Gould

Published: May 1981

Kirtley Mather, who died last year at age ninety, was a pillar of both science and Christian religion in America and one of my dearest friends. The difference of a half-century in our ages evaporated before our common interests. The most curious thing we shared was a battle we each fought at the same age. For Kirtley had gone to Tennessee with Clarence Darrow to testify for evolution at the Scopes trial of 1925. When I think that we are enmeshed again in the same struggle for one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

According to idealized principles of scientific discourse, the arousal of dormant issues should reflect fresh data that give renewed life to abandoned notions. Those outside the current debate may therefore be excused for suspecting that creationists have come up with something new, or that evolutionists have generated some serious internal trouble. But nothing has changed; the creationists have presented not a single new fact or argument. Darrow and Bryan were at least more entertaining than we lesser antagonists today. The rise of creationism is politics, pure and simple; it represents one issue (and by no means the major concern) of the resurgent evangelical right. Arguments that seemed kooky just a decade ago have reentered the mainstream.

The basic attack of modern creationists falls apart on two general counts before we even reach the supposed factual details of their assault against evolution. First, they play upon a vernacular misunderstanding of the word "theory" to convey the false impression that we evolutionists are covering up the rotten core of our edifice. Second, they misuse a popular philosophy of science to argue that they are behaving scientifically in attacking evolution. Yet the same philosophy demonstrates that their own belief is not science, and that "scientific creationism" is a meaningless and self-contradictory phrase, an example of what Orwell called "newspeak."

In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"—part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus creationists can (and do) argue: evolution is "only" a theory, and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is less than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science—that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."

Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered.

Moreover, "fact" does not mean "absolute certainty." The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Evolutionists have been clear about this distinction between fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory—natural selection—to explain the mechanism of evolution. He wrote in The Descent of Man: "I had two distinct objects in view; firstly, to show that species had not been separately created, and secondly, that natural selection had been the chief agent of change. . . . Hence if I have erred in . . . having exaggerated its [natural selection's] power . . . I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations."

Thus Darwin acknowledged the provisional nature of natural selection while affirming the fact of evolution. The fruitful theoretical debate that Darwin initiated has never ceased. From the 1940s through the 1960s, Darwin's own theory of natural selection did achieve a temporary hegemony that it never enjoyed in his lifetime. But renewed debate characterizes our decade, and, while no biologists questions the importance of natural selection, many doubt its ubiquity. In particular, many evolutionists argue that substantial amounts of genetic change may not be subject to natural selection and may spread through the populations at random. Others are challenging Darwin's linking of natural selection with gradual, imperceptible change through all intermediary degrees; they are arguing that most evolutionary events may occur far more rapidly than Darwin envisioned.

Scientists regard debates on fundamental issues of theory as a sign of intellectual health and a source of excitement. Science is—and how else can I say it?—most fun when it plays with interesting ideas, examines their implications, and recognizes that old information might be explained in surprisingly new ways. Evolutionary theory is now enjoying this uncommon vigor. Yet amidst all this turmoil no biologist has been lead to doubt the fact that evolution occurred; we are debating how it happened. We are all trying to explain the same thing: the tree of evolutionary descent linking all organisms by ties of genealogy. Creationists pervert and caricature this debate by conveniently neglecting the common conviction that underlies it, and by falsely suggesting that evolutionists now doubt the very phenomenon we are struggling to understand.

Secondly, creationists claim that "the dogma of separate creations," as Darwin characterized it a century ago, is a scientific theory meriting equal time with evolution in high school biology curricula. But a popular viewpoint among philosophers of science belies this creationist argument. Philosopher Karl Popper has argued for decades that the primary criterion of science is the falsifiability of its theories. We can never prove absolutely, but we can falsify. A set of ideas that cannot, in principle, be falsified is not science.

The entire creationist program includes little more than a rhetorical attempt to falsify evolution by presenting supposed contradictions among its supporters. Their brand of creationism, they claim, is "scientific" because it follows the Popperian model in trying to demolish evolution. Yet Popper's argument must apply in both directions. One does not become a scientist by the simple act of trying to falsify a rival and truly scientific system; one has to present an alternative system that also meets Popper's criterion — it too must be falsifiable in principle.

"Scientific creationism" is a self-contradictory, nonsense phrase precisely because it cannot be falsified. I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know, but I cannot imagine what potential data could lead creationists to abandon their beliefs. Unbeatable systems are dogma, not science. Lest I seem harsh or rhetorical, I quote creationism's leading intellectual, Duane Gish, Ph.D. from his recent (1978) book, Evolution? The Fossils Say No! "By creation we mean the bringing into being by a supernatural Creator of the basic kinds of plants and animals by the process of sudden, or fiat, creation. We do not know how the Creator created, what process He used, for He used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe [Gish's italics]. This is why we refer to creation as special creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigations anything about the creative processes used by the Creator." Pray tell, Dr. Gish, in the light of your last sentence, what then is scientific creationism?

Our confidence that evolution occurred centers upon three general arguments. First, we have abundant, direct, observational evidence of evolution in action, from both the field and laboratory. This evidence ranges from countless experiments on change in nearly everything about fruit flies subjected to artificial selection in the laboratory to the famous populations of British moths that became black when industrial soot darkened the trees upon which the moths rest. (Moths gain protection from sharp-sighted bird predators by blending into the background.) Creationists do not deny these observations; how could they? Creationists have tightened their act. They now argue that God only created "basic kinds," and allowed for limited evolutionary meandering within them. Thus toy poodles and Great Danes come from the dog kind and moths can change color, but nature cannot convert a dog to a cat or a monkey to a man.

The second and third arguments for evolution—the case for major changes—do not involve direct observation of evolution in action. They rest upon inference, but are no less secure for that reason. Major evolutionary change requires too much time for direct observation on the scale of recorded human history. All historical sciences rest upon inference, and evolution is no different from geology, cosmology, or human history in this respect. In principle, we cannot observe processes that operated in the past. We must infer them from results that still surround us: living and fossil organisms for evolution, documents and artifacts for human history, strata and topography for geology.

The second argument—that the imperfection of nature reveals evolution—strikes many people as ironic, for they feel that evolution should be most elegantly displayed in the nearly perfect adaptation expressed by some organisms—the camber of a gull's wing, or butterflies that cannot be seen in ground litter because they mimic leaves so precisely. But perfection could be imposed by a wise creator or evolved by natural selection. Perfection covers the tracks of past history. And past history—the evidence of descent—is the mark of evolution.

Evolution lies exposed in the imperfections that record a history of descent. Why should a rat run, a bat fly, a porpoise swim, and I type this essay with structures built of the same bones unless we all inherited them from a common ancestor? An engineer, starting from scratch, could design better limbs in each case. Why should all the large native mammals of Australia be marsupials, unless they descended from a common ancestor isolated on this island continent? Marsupials are not "better," or ideally suited for Australia; many have been wiped out by placental mammals imported by man from other continents. This principle of imperfection extends to all historical sciences. When we recognize the etymology of September, October, November, and December (seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth), we know that the year once started in March, or that two additional months must have been added to an original calendar of ten months.

The third argument is more direct: transitions are often found in the fossil record. Preserved transitions are not common—and should not be, according to our understanding of evolution (see next section) but they are not entirely wanting, as creationists often claim. The lower jaw of reptiles contains several bones, that of mammals only one. The non-mammalian jawbones are reduced, step by step, in mammalian ancestors until they become tiny nubbins located at the back of the jaw. The "hammer" and "anvil" bones of the mammalian ear are descendants of these nubbins. How could such a transition be accomplished? the creationists ask. Surely a bone is either entirely in the jaw or in the ear. Yet paleontologists have discovered two transitional lineages of therapsids (the so-called mammal-like reptiles) with a double jaw joint—one composed of the old quadrate and articular bones (soon to become the hammer and anvil), the other of the squamosal and dentary bones (as in modern mammals). For that matter, what better transitional form could we expect to find than the oldest human, Australopithecus afarensis, with its apelike palate, its human upright stance, and a cranial capacity larger than any ape�s of the same body size but a full 1,000 cubic centimeters below ours? If God made each of the half-dozen human species discovered in ancient rocks, why did he create in an unbroken temporal sequence of progressively more modern features—increasing cranial capacity, reduced face and teeth, larder body size? Did he create to mimic evolution and test our faith thereby?

Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy of their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am—for I have become a major target of these practices.

I count myself among the evolutionists who argue for a jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change. In 1972 my colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record—geologically "sudden" origin of new species and failure to change thereafter (stasis)—reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory, not the imperfections of the fossil record. In most theories, small isolated populations are the source of new species, and the process of speciation takes thousands or tens of thousands of years. This amount of time, so long when measured against our lives, is a geological microsecond. It represents much less than 1 per cent of the average life-span for a fossil invertebrate species—more than ten million years. Large, widespread, and well established species, on the other hand, are not expected to change very much. We believe that the inertia of large populations explains the stasis of most fossil species over millions of years.

We proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium largely to provide a different explanation for pervasive trends in the fossil record. Trends, we argued, cannot be attributed to gradual transformation within lineages, but must arise from the different success of certain kinds of species. A trend, we argued, is more like climbing a flight of stairs (punctuated and stasis) than rolling up an inclined plane.

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. Yet a pamphlet entitled "Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution Is a Hoax" states: "The facts of punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge…are forcing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that Bryan insisted on, and which God has revealed to us in the Bible."

Continuing the distortion, several creationists have equated the theory of punctuated equilibrium with a caricature of the beliefs of Richard Goldschmidt, a great early geneticist. Goldschmidt argued, in a famous book published in 1940, that new groups can arise all at once through major mutations. He referred to these suddenly transformed creatures as "hopeful monsters." (I am attracted to some aspects of the non-caricatured version, but Goldschmidt's theory still has nothing to do with punctuated equilibrium—see essays in section 3 and my explicit essay on Goldschmidt in The Pandas Thumb.) Creationist Luther Sunderland talks of the "punctuated equilibrium hopeful monster theory" and tells his hopeful readers that "it amounts to tacit admission that anti-evolutionists are correct in asserting there is no fossil evidence supporting the theory that all life is connected to a common ancestor." Duane Gish writes, "According to Goldschmidt, and now apparently according to Gould, a reptile laid an egg from which the first bird, feathers and all, was produced." Any evolutionists who believed such nonsense would rightly be laughed off the intellectual stage; yet the only theory that could ever envision such a scenario for the origin of birds is creationism—with God acting in the egg.

I am both angry at and amused by the creationists; but mostly I am deeply sad. Sad for many reasons. Sad because so many people who respond to creationist appeals are troubled for the right reason, but venting their anger at the wrong target. It is true that scientists have often been dogmatic and elitist. It is true that we have often allowed the white-coated, advertising image to represent us—"Scientists say that Brand X cures bunions ten times faster than…" We have not fought it adequately because we derive benefits from appearing as a new priesthood. It is also true that faceless and bureaucratic state power intrudes more and more into our lives and removes choices that should belong to individuals and communities. I can understand that school curricula, imposed from above and without local input, might be seen as one more insult on all these grounds. But the culprit is not, and cannot be, evolution or any other fact of the natural world. Identify and fight our legitimate enemies by all means, but we are not among them.

I am sad because the practical result of this brouhaha will not be expanded coverage to include creationism (that would also make me sad), but the reduction or excision of evolution from high school curricula. Evolution is one of the half dozen "great ideas" developed by science. It speaks to the profound issues of genealogy that fascinate all of us—the "roots" phenomenon writ large. Where did we come from? Where did life arise? How did it develop? How are organisms related? It forces us to think, ponder, and wonder. Shall we deprive millions of this knowledge and once again teach biology as a set of dull and unconnected facts, without the thread that weaves diverse material into a supple unity?

But most of all I am saddened by a trend I am just beginning to discern among my colleagues. I sense that some now wish to mute the healthy debate about theory that has brought new life to evolutionary biology. It provides grist for creationist mills, they say, even if only by distortion. Perhaps we should lie low and rally around the flag of strict Darwinism, at least for the moment—a kind of old-time religion on our part.

But we should borrow another metaphor and recognize that we too have to tread a straight and narrow path, surrounded by roads to perdition. For if we ever begin to suppress our search to understand nature, to quench our own intellectual excitement in a misguided effort to present a united front where it does not and should not exist, then we are truly lost.

[ Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory," May 1981; from Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994, pp. 253-262. ]

Over forty years later and we're still dealing with this same nonsense. Now, not only from the religious right but the sex-denialism left.

#Stephen Jay Gould #Kirtley Mather #evolution #theory of evolution #creationism #creationists #evolution vs creation #science #scientific theory #what science is #religion is a mental illness

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gettothestabbing · 5 months

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Putting in another Christian Science ask: what kind of position does Mary Baker Eddy have? As in, are you required to accept all of her pronouncements, and if not, what's the criteria for what isn't and is accepted? Is she a prophet, or just the person who figured out Christian Science?

This is one of the things that people wonder most about Christian Science, and which also invites comparison to Scientology, which during its founder's lifetime was constructed around his personality. First off, no one ever prays to her. She is not an intercessory figure. We are not required to have all the opinions Mrs. Eddy had as a person, but we do follow all her writings. The only writings of hers we do not follow are her older drafts of Science and Health. While they are historically and theologically notable, Christian Scientists only follow the final, authorized 1910 edition of the book, in accordance with her wishes. She also wrote a lot of poems. 7 of them are the lyrics of some of our most beloved hymns. But we do not go to her poetry for theological instruction.

Mrs. Eddy held a few titles in her lifetime, notably Discoverer and Founder, but the ones that have officially endured past her death are Leader and Pastor Emeritus. I think the term prophet would be appropriate too; I certainly consider her such. But most CS people would stick only to the titles she allowed in her lifetime. They do this out of respect for her heightened spiritual understanding.

For those unaware, a brief explanation. [Well as brief as I, the perpetually long-winded person, can be.] Mary Baker Glover Eddy (1821-1910) was an American woman who had poor health and bad luck in marriage for the first half of her life. After a bad fall on ice in 1866, attending doctors told her that death was imminent and they could do no more for her. She asked to be given her Bible to read, and turned to the gospels. Reading a story of one of Christ Jesus' healings (which one has been long forgotten, even by Mary herself), she soon rose from the bed, and, after a short relapse later that day which she treated through the same method, she was fully healed of the injury. She spent the next three years completely focused on reading Scripture and praying to try and figure out how the healing had occurred.

The rest of her life was devoted to writing Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, a text Christian Scientists hold with the Bible as central to our faith and practice. Though first published in 1875, Mrs. Eddy continually revised and worked on this book for the rest of her life, with the final edition coming out the year she died. She always described this as being " a scribe under orders." She hoped that all Christian churches would read and accept the ideas in her book and that it would leaven the whole of Christianity and elevate worldwide Christian practice. This did not happen, and while some considered her ideas helpful to their understanding, many more clergy and Christians were openly hostile or declared it unchristian.

So eventually Mrs. Eddy founded her own church, now known as the Church of Christ, Scientist. In her lifetime, the Mother Church in Boston was built and then extended to fit the rapidly growing congregation. There was a room built in the original edifice called the Mother's Room, specifically for her to use and take rest in before or after giving a sermon. Many Christian Scientists called Mrs. Eddy "Mother" during her lifetime. She wrote against this several times, but among the people who worked in her household, she was less strict about this affectionate title. No one uses it today, and it would be weird and frowned upon if they did.

After her three years of study, Mrs. Eddy increasingly became famous as a healer. People would be healed passing her on the street, having only made eye contact with her, or while attending her lectures and sermons. But most healing accounts were the result of direct conversation with her or the patient requesting her to come. There are hundreds if not a thousand or more accounts of her healing works, and the Mother Church (the central governing body of CS) works hard to preserve, retrieve, and triple-check the authenticity of all such accounts.

Mrs. Eddy is deeply revered by Christian Scientists today as in her lifetime. I would never deny that there were personality-cult elements in the first generation of CS believers. It was easy, due to personal love for her and to her many healing works, for early students to make the mistake of focusing on her personality and imagine her as more than she said she was. Some students would lavish her with praise that made her uncomfortable and was theologically inappropriate, such as calling her Christ come again or claiming (as Bliss Knapp famously did in his 1946 book) that she was the woman crowned with stars from Revelation.

The Bliss Knapp book, The Destiny of the Mother Church, was controversially printed and briefly distributed by the Mother Church in 1990, which caused a minor schism within CS. The Church Manual has a section about Incorrect Literature, which this book clearly violated:

No Incorrect Literature. Sect. 11. A member of this Church shall neither buy, sell, nor circulate Christian Science literature which is not correct in its statement of the divine Principle and rules and the demonstration of Christian Science. Also the spirit in which the writer has written his literature shall be definitely considered. His writings must show strict adherence to the Golden Rule, or his literature shall not be adjudged Christian Science. A departure from the spirit or letter of this By-Law involves schisms in our Church and the possible loss, for a time, of Christian Science. (Manual of The Mother Church, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 43:21)

It was done for monetary reasons, which the Directors admitted, and has only recently been removed from publication. Bliss Knapp is one of the few students who both knew Mrs. Eddy personally and who proclaimed such heretical statements about her without being rebuked by her (as she was already dead) or being excommunicated. But this is purely due to how he set up his will and this book in trust, leading to the complicated monetary/theological situation in the 1990s. Had she read the book, Mrs. Eddy would have never allowed it to be published.

There are a lot of directions this could go, but I think the best way to explain Mrs. Eddy's ongoing role in the church is to tell you about Augusta Stetson. Augusta was an immensely popular preacher of Christian Science. Trained as a professional elocutionist, she converted to CS after hearing Mrs. Eddy speak in 1884. Although Mrs. Eddy disliked Stetson's style of preaching, she still sent her in 1886 to help found a church in New York City. Stetson's personal magnetism led her to develop her own cult of personality and enormous influence within this branch church. It became the largest and richest of all the branch churches.

Even when preaching was replaced with reading the weekly Bible Lesson [explained in a later paragraph], Stetson would not stop preaching until Mrs. Eddy personally told her to, and this change did not lessen her absolute control over that church congregation. Stetson held the First Reader position for so many years that as a direct result, the Church Manual specifically includes a term of three years for readership. Mrs. Eddy cared for Stetson personally, and for twenty years she tried to alternately praise and rebuke her into correct behavior, but she was not stern enough to cause Stetson to truly repent. Stetson saw herself, and soon styled herself to others, as Mrs. Eddy's successor. Mrs. Eddy and Stetson had their final conversation in 1908. Stetson appeared repentant, but the next year, she wrote a letter to Mrs. Eddy speaking of her in deifying, heretical terms, at which point Mrs. Eddy sharply rebuked her and asked for the Board of Directors of the Mother Church to investigate her. When Stetson heard of Mrs. Eddy's death, she declared that Mrs. Eddy would rise from the grave, appear to her personally first, and then appear to the rest of the world. She repeated this claim the rest of her own life, while running an offshoot of CS centered around her 'Church Triumphant,' noted as being anti-CS, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and promoting protofascist ideas and Nordic supremacy at various points in the 1920s. [None of these elements were ever present in CS theology or literature, naturally.]

I think that many people unfamiliar with Mrs. Eddy would assume that she was a person like Stetson. Mrs. Eddy never claimed to be a second Christ, the woman in Revelation prophecy, a reincarnation of any Biblical figure, or any part of the Godhead. Students who claimed this were rebuked universally. We refer to Mrs. Eddy as the Discoverer, Founder, and Leader of Christian Science. The discovery and founding are complete. They are not perpetual, as Christian Science recognizes no successor to Mrs. Eddy's work or position. She retains the titles of Leader and Pastor Emeritus.

Partly due to students like Stetson, who both wanted her position for themselves and attempted to flatter or deify her inappropriately, and partly because of the many offshoot spiritual movements that tried to appropriate her ideas without giving her credit for introducing them and tried to remove the Christian theology that gave those ideas backing, Mrs. Eddy was very firm on remaining Pastor Emeritus after her death. She often said that those who sought her [as a person] would find her in her writings. She also spoke out emphatically against Spiritualism in her writings and speeches. Our theology holds that there are no ghosts, nor can there be any communication between the dead and the living. Any Christian Scientist who claimed or claims to be in communication with Mrs. Eddy personally after her death is rebuked or excommunicated, depending on the extent of the claim made. Her leadership of the church is purely in her writings, in the ideas she gave us "as a scribe under orders."

But, to be fair, there is a lot of respect and interest in Mrs. Eddy's personality anyway. She was a warm, loving person. She was very strict about cleanliness. She loved ice cream. There are a multitude of church-sanctioned biographies about her, most of which I've read, some of which were even part of my homework for Christian Science Nursing training. Growing up, I had a children's book about her life.

Many CS churches also have one or more portraits of her, usually as an older woman with a serene expression. And because more CS churches have portraits of her than of Christ Jesus, I have been asked more than once if this means that we see her as a replacement for Jesus. To this I would say that Christ Jesus lived long enough ago that CS people are uncomfortable choosing a portrait of him, whereas Mrs. Eddy lived recently enough that we know for sure what she looked like. But I admit that it does invite suspicions of a cult of personality more than anything else.

In turning her church away from personal preaching by establishing the system of Bible Lessons and readership, Mrs. Eddy denied power to those who would seek, like Stetson, to take the theological rudder of the church away from her writings. Bible Lessons are compiled by a committee within the Mother Church three years in advance. There is one every week of the year, in a rotating system of subjects set out by Mrs. Eddy, so that we have each subject twice a year. The Sunday sermon is always a reading of this weekly Bible Lesson, with the First Reader reading the Bible citations and the Second Reader reading those from Science and Health. The books are meant to be read together, but the Bible always comes first. Wednesday sermons are compiled by the First Reader, but they must purely consist of quotations from these two books, which we collectively consider our Pastor.

Mrs. Eddy as Pastor Emeritus is similarly in a position in our church from which she cannot be removed. To pretend that CS owes her nothing would be wrong, and would inevitably lead us theologically astray. Every splinter group off of CS makes this mistake, and all of them lack the power to heal that CS demonstrates. Mrs. Eddy learned very early that the only way to heal was to understand that it was not a personal power. Only by knowing God as the only power and healer could she see others be healed while praying for them.

Sometime in the 1870s, she did take personal pride in having healed a little girl. When she reached home, a message had come saying the child had relapsed. In grief and repentance, she fell to her knees and spent the next several minutes repenting of this self-centered pride and giving the glory back to God. Soon, another message came from the family saying that the girl was perfectly well.

It was a lesson swiftly and absolutely learned, and it shows how Mrs. Eddy saw herself. She was the scribe under orders, no more and no less. To finish up, here's what she said in her Message to the Mother Church for 1901:

Finally, brethren, wait patiently on God; return blessing for cursing; be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good; be steadfast, abide and abound in faith, understanding, and good works; study the Bible and the textbook of our denomination; obey strictly the laws that be, and follow your Leader only so far as she follows Christ. Godliness or Christianity is a human necessity: man cannot live without it; he has no intelligence, health, hope, nor happiness without godliness. (Message to The Mother Church for 1901, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 34:20–28) (emphasis added)

#personal #asks #inbox #pers com #Christian Science #Mary Baker Eddy #I'm sorry to be so long-winded but I really want to be thorough especially when it comes to CS #cult of personality #Augusta Stetson #Bliss Knapp #long post

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dnaamericaapp · 2 months

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Rhiannon Giddens Defends The Black Roots Of Country Music: ‘We Keep Having To Tell The Story’

“You brought me here to build your house; to build your house, to build your house” is the phrase that opens Rhiannon Giddens’ first children’s book, “Build a House,” as well as the song that inspired it. Co-written by Giddens and famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the song also features Giddens on banjo, an instrument she has long sought to reclaim as an inherently African instrument foundational to American music. As she explained during an episode of theGrio’s “Writing Black” podcast, the banjo’s story parallels the creation of African-American identity and our continued experience in the United States.

“I was just really frustrated with the continuing ignorance about where American history comes from and just how we keep having to tell the story,” said Giddens, a Pulitzer Prize and Grammy award-winner, MacArthur Genius, singer, songwriter, instrumentalist, and author who has written in multiple genres. “So I wrote the song ‘Build a House’ because I was just sort of like “[white settlers] freakin’ brought us over here to build this whole freaking thing, and now you don’t want us to have a fair share of it. That doesn’t make any sense.”

In light of the recent controversy surrounding no less than Beyoncé now reclaiming a genre of music not only central to her native Houston but to her African-American heritage, the words of Giddens, a musical contributor on “Renaissance, Pt. 2,” hold new relevance.

“I mean, it’s kind of my life’s work; I can’t get away from it,” she explained. “And what I feel like I can’t leave is that idea of the cultural history of the United States. Just as so many buildings were built by enslaved people, not only the buildings but the bricks … people, when they see the edifice, they see the building, they don’t see that.” -(source: the grio)

DNA America

“It’s what we know, not what you want us to believe.”

#dna #dnaamerica #news #politics

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ausetkmt · 11 months

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It’s After the End of the World By Daphne A. Brooks

I remember how it ended. A bespectacled, lanky, light-skinned sister sporting two braided pigtails stepped up to the mic. She was rocking garden-green pants and a yellow spaghetti-strap tank top, and she came out late in the Black Rock Coalition Orchestra’s Nina Simone tribute set in New York on June 13, 2003. Armed with a startling mezzo-soprano that dipped into the outer limits of audible desire, she was covering “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl” like her life depended on it. Her crooning felt sexy and dangerous and inquisitive as she declared, “I want a little sweetness down in my soul...I want a little steam on my clothes.” The crowd swooned. We were suspended for a moment between the grief of having lost our Nina some three weeks before (April 21, the day that Prince would die 13 years later) and ecstatic remembrance as this then-unknown singer, Alice Smith, summoned the potency of our lost patron saint.

“Our Nina”—as she is sometimes called by black feminists who feel especially possessive and protective of her—was a musician whose body of work pushed us and challenged us to know more about ourselves, what we longed for, and who we were as women navigating intersectional injuries and negations of mattering in the American body politic. She was beloved as much for the emotional force of her showmanship as she was for the lyrical, instrumental, and political force of her virtuosity. That night (one I remember so vividly, perhaps, because it was the Friday before my father died), Smith was conjuring that revolutionary, climactic Nina feeling—the erotic kind, which women of color historically have rarely been able to claim for their own, and the socially transformative kind, that marginalized peoples have called upon to bring about radical change.

That revolutionary Nina feeling runs like a high-voltage current from her earliest American Songbook covers through her Frankfurt School battle cries, folk lullabies and eulogies, blues incantations, Black Power anthems, diasporic fever chants, Euro romantic laments, and experimental classical and freestyle jazz odysseys. It is the signal she sends out to tell us that something is turning, that we may be closing in on some new way of being in the world and being with each other, or we are at least reaching the point of breaking something open, tearing down Jim Crow institutions. Often enough, it indicated that we were joining her in tearing up those unspoken rules about how a Bach-loving, Lenin- and Marx-championing, “not-about-to-be-nonviolent-no-more” musician and black freedom struggle activist should sound.

Photo by Gilles Petard/Getty Images

Soothsayer, chastiser, conjurer, philosopher, historian, actor, politician, archivist, ethnographer, black love proselytizer: She showed up on the frontlines of people-powered mass disturbances, delivering the good word (“It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day”) or shining discomforting light on the stubborn edifice of Southern white power (“Why don’t you see it?/Why don’t you feel it?”). And even when illness set in, and exile didn’t soften her grief for fallen friends and their unfinished revolution, she faltered for a time but ultimately stayed the course. She was fastidiously focused, insouciantly exploratory, and ferociously inventive at her many legendary, marathon concerts—Montreux, Fort Dix—the ones in which her mad skills, honed during her youthful years in late-night supper club jam sessions, returned in full. She was epic, our journey woman, the one who was capable of taking us to the ineffable, joyous elsewhere in that “Feeling Good” vocal improvisation that closes out that track.

Today, we return to her more passionately than ever before, looking to her for answers, parables, strategies—not only for how to survive, but how to end this thing called white supremacist patriarchy that some of us had naïvely believed was ever-so-excruciatingly self-destructing. Since her death, her iconicity has grown, spreading to the world of hip-hop (which, as the scholar Salamishah Tillet has shown, frequently samples her radicalism), to academia, where studies of Simone—articles and conference papers, seminars and book projects—pile high, making inroads in a segment of university culture previously cornered by Dylanologists. We take her with us to the weekend marches. Our students cue her up, summoning her wisdom and fortitude during the rallies.

This massive old-new love for our Nina is a way of being, and her sound encapsulates the pursuit of emotional knowledge and ethical bravery. She forges our awakening. I said as much a few weeks before Nina passed, when I offered a conference meditation on the late Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Lilac Wine,” a song I had kept on a loop during my grad years and one that had taught me a few things about heartbreak and heroism. Through the voice of that white, Gen X, alt-rock daring balladeer and ardent fan of Nina’s, I could hear Ms. Simone singing to me, “Leave everything on the floor, and face the end triumphantly.”

It was a message that she conveyed all on her own when I saw her in 2000 at the Hollywood Bowl—one of her rare, stateside shows in her waning years. That night, she kept a feather duster at the piano, and after each song, she raised it like a conductor’s baton, beckoning an ovation. I remember that it was a gesture that felt cold and distant at the time, a sign of her lasting, antagonistic relationship with her audience—all of which is no doubt true. But in hindsight, I think more about the lessons she was bestowing on us, yet again, that evening. At the close of every number, we were invited to recognize the wonder of her artistry and to listen with anticipation for whatever would come next, the next better world she would create for us and with us—a black space, a women’s space, a free space. All those endings which might lead to new beginnings.

Daphne A. Brooks is Professor of African American Studies, Theater Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Yale University.

Listen to Nina Simone: Her Art and Life in 33 Songs on Spotify and Apple Music.

Photo by David Redfern/Getty Images

“I Loves You Porgy”

Little Girl Blue

1958

Nina Simone’s first album, Little Girl Blue, was just a run-through of the material she’d been singing in clubs, in the arrangements she’d already made. They were ready to go. “I Loves You Porgy” became a Billboard Top 20 hit in 1959 and established her career in New York. To hear it is to understand how Simone’s critical consciousness began early and never turned off. She approached the ballad from George and Ira Gershwin’s “folk opera” Porgy and Bess not as a classical musician, as per her training, or as a jazz or cabaret musician, as she had been called—only as herself. Even on paper, the song is emotionally loaded: a plea for protection to a man the narrator has come to trust. In emotional terms, Billie Holiday’s 1948 version feels optimistic, guardedly bright; Simone’s feels concentrated and gravely serious, almost private, even as she adds trills and rhythmic details to every line. When she sings, “If you can keep me, I want to stay here/With you forever, and I’ll be glad,” there is no way to know what “glad” means to her. –Ben Ratliff

Listen: “I Loves You Porgy”

“My Baby Just Cares for Me”

Little Girl Blue

1958

When Nina Simone cut Little Girl Blue, she was still smarting from her rejection from a prestigious classical conservatory. Throughout the album, she proved her chops by dropping a reference to Bach in one swinging track and improvising with a fluidity that Mozart would have admired, and also by subtly changing a tune that American listeners thought they knew. The standard “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was first made popular by the 1930 musical Whoopee!, and through such lyrics as, “My baby don’t care for shows/My baby don’t care for clothes,” its singer takes pride in a romantic prowess that can cut across class divisions. The vaudeville star Eddie Cantor performed it onscreen in a brassy, obvious way that fit the era (up to and including his use of blackface makeup). Simone’s reading is more soulful and complex. The tempo has been slowed, but the feel for jazz swing has been powerfully increased. In the middle of the song, over a finger-popping groove, Simone delivers a solo of pellucid elegance. Her vocals draw their power both from blues grit and crisp articulations, and from the way Simone bridges those styles. The way she plays this song, those old “high-tone places” and social codes no longer seem so untouchable—in the presence of such artistry, they only seem embarrassing and ripe for redefinition. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: “My Baby Just Cares for Me”

“Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”

Nina Simone At Town Hall

1959

Recontextualizing an Appalachian folk song, Simone transposed a mournful lament with roots in the Scottish highlands to 1959 America, where “black” was imbued with far greater heft. Coming early in her career, “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” promised an increasing political consciousness in her music, the intent clear in the cascade of loving, mournful, minor-key piano in the intro and her ever-profound, trembling contralto. The line “I love the ground on where he goes” held particular meaning in 1959, as the Civil Rights Movement was hitting a fever pitch but the racist laws of the Jim Crow South still held strong. Town Hall, where the album was recorded, was in midtown New York. It was the first concert hall she ever played, a venue where she would be venerated for singing her mind. The song arrived at the beginning of her fame but, more importantly, it was an incubator of her mindset to come. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Listen:“Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”

Photo by Herb Snitzer/Getty Images

“Just in Time”

At the Village Gate

1962

Simone’s live albums, recorded in clubs or theaters, were fundamental to her work. All of them still feel charged. By 1957, when she was still playing in Atlantic City clubs, she had established a hard line: You paid attention or she stopped playing. By 1959, when she first played at New York’s Town Hall, she graduated in self-definition from club singer to concert-hall singer, which is to say she knew there was a sufficient amount of people who would come to hear her. And in April 1961, when she recorded At the Village Gate, she could bring back that imperial attitude to club dimensions, leading her quartet from the piano.

For about one full, intense minute at the start of “Just in Time,” she winds up her quartet with dissonant, percussive chord clusters. Then she settles into the first verse, sung at confidential level, drawing out her vowels into quavers. Her piano solo is as hypnotic and repetitive as what John Lewis made famous doing with the Modern Jazz Quartet, but smudgier and more emphatic. This is comprehensive skill—singing, playing, bandleading—and the song is all zone: nearing it, then staying in it. –Ben Ratliff

Listen:“Just in Time”

“The Other Woman/Cotton Eyed Joe”

At Carnegie Hall

1963

Nina Simone once dreamed of becoming the first black female classical pianist to play Carnegie Hall, but when she finally made it there on April 12, 1963, she was working in a different idiom. Her set was filled with traditional songs and standards she made her own, including this striking mashup that closes her At Carnegie Hall live album.

A staple in Simone’s sets, “The Other Woman” is a deceptively nuanced Jessie Mae Robinson tune with immense empathy for the mistress. It was first recorded by Sarah Vaughan, but Simone elevates the song further with her ability to conjure the loneliness of womanhood better than just about anyone, particularly when her accompaniments run slow and sparse. In performances over the years, the emotional burden of “The Other Woman” seemed to weigh heavier on Simone, as she experienced infidelity from both sides. At Carnegie Hall, though, she segues into the most elegant take on “Cotton Eyed Joe” imaginable, merging folk, jazz, and a touch of her beloved classical. –Jillian Mapes

Listen:“The Other Woman/Cotton Eyed Joe”

“Mississippi Goddam”

In Concert

1964

As the Civil Rights Movement gained traction, retaliation from racist whites became more intense, reaching a terrible apex in 1963, when the KKK murdered Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, and four children in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Nina Simone’s frustration and desperation is palpable in the biting, cynical way she performed “Mississippi Goddam” at Carnegie Hall—a room full of natty whites, but the rare New York concert hall that was never segregated. Within her voice, unloosed so explicitly for the first time, a sanguine irony formed the tension between its sentiment, the very real possibility of being murdered for her race (“I think every day’s gonna be my last”).

During her set at Carnegie, which was recorded for her album In Concert, Simone referred to this song as a show tune “but the show that hasn’t been written for it yet.” Its frantic tempo reflected the urgency of the moment, a template for protest songs to follow, and the piano chords propelled the song’s existentialism with the determination of a steam engine train. It was gonna make it on time, but its destination was still unknown. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Listen:“Mississippi Goddam”

“Pirate Jenny”

In Concert

1964

Nina Simone seethes the lyrics to “Pirate Jenny,” taking every ounce of delight in openly threatening her audience. The song, penned in the late 1920s by the German theatrical composer Kurt Weill, is a revenge tale in which a lowly maid fantasizes that she is the Queen of Pirates and that a black ship will soon emerge from the mist to destroy the town in which she has been treated so poorly. In Simone’s hands, it transforms from political metaphor into dark and unchained spiritual catharsis. Her performance devolves from singing to whispering, with raspy venomous verses such as, “They’re chaining up the people and bringing ‘em to me/Asking me kill them now or later.” Accompanied only by piano and timpani, she allows for long pauses, using silence as a psychological weapon. You can all but hear the audience clutching their pearls. –Carvell Wallace

Listen:“Pirate Jenny”

“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”

Broadway-Blues-Ballads

1964

Though the unremarkable Broadway-Blues-Ballads followed “Mississippi Goddam”’s overwhelming reception a few months earlier, its opening number, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” quickly emerged and remains a tentpole of Nina Simone’s identity. (Never mind that its lyrics were written by Bennie Benjamin, Horace Ott, and Sol Marcus.) After years of “inferior” show tunes and “musically ignorant” popular audiences, as she would later call them in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You, Simone was all too familiar with this song’s themes of lonely remorse, of seeming edgy and taking it out on the people she loved, of “[finding herself] alone regretting/Some little foolish thing...that [she’s] done.”

Though “Goddam” began a pivotal year in which Simone would refocus her life on civil rights and black revolution, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” would continue to reflect her personal struggles to come, including the bipolar disorder and manic depression that went undiagnosed and self-medicated until late in life. White audiences often saw her as the benign entertainer they wanted to; Simone long struggled to be seen as her whole, complex self. –Devon Maloney

Listen: “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”

Photo by Jack Robinson/Getty Images

“See-Line Woman”

Broadway-Blues-Ballads

1964

In the stretch between 1962 and 1967, Nina Simone was at her most prolific, releasing at least two albums per year—and three in 1964. Broadway-Blues-Ballads premiered several songs that became fixtures of Simone’s live repertoire, including the scintillating call-and-response number “See-Line Woman.” Built on the structure and rhythm of a traditional children’s song, it tells the tale of four escorts, dressed in different colors that signify what they’re willing to do. In Simone’s rendering, the “See-Line Woman” is something of a femme fatale, who will “empty [a man’s] pockets” and “wreck his days/And she make him love her, then she sure fly away.”

Simone’s performance showcases her voice as a powerful instrument, flirtatious and sly, backed by a stuttering hi-hat and flute arrangement that never outshines her vocals. The origins of the tune that inspired “See-Line Woman” remain uncertain, but Simone’s recording leaves little doubt that the song is hers. –Vanessa Okoth-Obbo

Listen:“See-Line Woman”

“Be My Husband”

Pastel Blues

1965

The lyrics of “Be My Husband” are attributed to Andrew Stroud, Nina Simone’s second husband and manager—a strong, guiding, sometimes violent hand in her career and her life. (Billie had one. Aretha, too.) The title seems mysterious at first: Is it a proposal, a bargain, or a command? Is she saying “marry me” or “act like a husband is supposed to act”? All of her musical and expressive genius is here. Her breath and guttural sighs seem to say, “This shit is work with an intermittent erotic respite.” Her voice dips, curves, bends, and flies, provides the melody and the rhythm. She demands, she pleads. She is all strength, then absolute vulnerability.

The year Simone recorded “Be My Husband,” death came for both her closest friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and Malcolm X. Spring brought Selma, and Nina serenaded the marchers. In this season of mourning and wakefulness, “Be My Husband” revealed itself to have been all these things: a proposition, a bargain, and a command. Do right by me, Simone sings, and I’ll do right by you. Love for a man, a people, a nation is struggle—it is work. –Farah Jasmine Griffin

Listen:“Be My Husband”

“I Put a Spell on You”

I Put a Spell on You

1965

History remembers Nina Simone as nothing if not resolute, thanks in significant part to “I Put a Spell on You.” Slinky and confident, with flashes of destructive insecurity, her now-iconic cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ blues lament begins matter-of-factly, informative even, then whips itself into the controlled fury of a woman who has made up her mind and is bracing for the inevitable fight. Simone refuses to be taken advantage of throughout, claiming what is rightfully hers: “I don’t care if you don’t want me/I’m yours right now.”

Personal meaning aside—in 1965, she was halfway through a marriage—“I Put a Spell on You” also evokes Simone’s relationship with her audiences over the years. Its release, after all, came just as she was finding her own magic: As she wrote in her autobiography, “It’s like I was hypnotizing an entire audience to feel a certain way….This was how I got my reputation as a live performer, because I went out from the mid-Sixties onward determined to get every audience to enjoy my concerts the way I wanted them to, and if they resisted at first, I had all the tricks to bewitch them with.” –Devon Maloney

Listen:“I Put a Spell on You”

“Feeling Good”

I Put a Spell on You

1965

Throughout her life, Nina Simone rebelled against the tendency for her music to be categorized as jazz or blues, as it gave little acknowledgement to her classical training and her fluidity in other genres. I Put a Spell on You cemented her status as a singer at ease with popular music, who could command attention even when her exceptional piano skills played a secondary role. Simone’s version of “Feeling Good” is one of the album’s masterworks, and it became a standard in its own right. From the opening notes of the strictly vocal intro, she looks to nature to describe contentment: birds flying high, the sun in the sky, a breeze drifting on by. When the big band orchestration comes in, the horns and strings transform the song into a sermon of unbridled joy, peaking with a rousing scat solo that can only emerge from the depths of a free soul. –Vanessa Okoth-Obbo

Listen:“Feeling Good”

“Ne Me Quitte Pas”

I Put a Spell on You

1965

This song finds Nina Simone’s emotions at their most indulgent, her shivering voice at its most precise. Penned by the Belgian crooner Jacques Brel and originally recorded in 1959, its cloying lyrics “Do not leave me” were meant to poke fun at men who could not keep their hearts in their shirts. On Simone’s recording, however, the work becomes something else entirely: It is an agonizing mediation on the kind of existential desolation that only a broken love can bring. Andrew Stroud, a retired NYPD lieutenant, once held her at gunpoint and raped her; she remained in this relationship for nearly 15 years, during which she recorded most of her defining albums. Here, she expands and contracts, pianissimo to fortissimo, as though the entire song were a series of sighs; when she sings, “Let me be the shadow of your shadow,” in its original French, a cosmic rumble emits from the depths of her heart. The chorus is simply the song’s title repeated, and the fourth one sounds precisely like the last flicker of a candle’s flame. –Carvell Wallace

Listen:“Ne Me Quitte Pas”

Photo by Frans Schellekens/Getty Images

“Strange Fruit”

Pastel Blues

1965

In 1965, three very important marches took place between Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, in protest of laws that prevented black citizens from exercising their right to vote. The third and most successful of these culminated in a concert organized by Harry Belafonte, at which Nina Simone performed. There, Simone—who once declared that she was “not non-violent”—used music as her weapon in the fight for liberty.

Pastel Blues was not an overt protest record, but “Strange Fruit” was an unequivocal rebuke of the lynchings that claimed so many black lives. The song was originally popularized by Billie Holliday, who often performed it under strict conditions to avoid backlash over its severe message, but Simone was no longer held back by fear, having already put her career on the line with the similarly frank “Mississippi Goddam.” Over somber piano keys, she recounts the horror of seeing black bodies hanging from the trees like fruit, in one of the most startling metaphors ever set to wax. At the song’s apex, when describing how the bodies would be left “for the leaves to drop,” Simone wails the third word with an anguish that’s as unforgettable as the painful history that the song decries. —Vanessa Okoth-Obbo

Listen:“Strange Fruit”

“Sinnerman”

Pastel Blues

1965

One of Nina Simone’s most recognizable recordings, “Sinnerman” has been repurposed by everyone from David Lynch to Kanye West. What remains in its original form, however, is the pure punk of it. This live recording rides hard on a driving 2/4 backbeat, one that accelerates a full 10 bpm over its 10-minute run. Simone’s backing band is sharp, the rimshots and high hats insistent, the piano work both velvety and forceful. It is a song of apocalypse, of bleeding seas and boiling rivers and the inability to escape God’s wrath no matter where you turn.

As a child, Simone learned “Sinnerman” from her mother, who sang it in revival meetings to help sinners become so overwhelmed as to confess their transgressions. Hellfire, brimstone, and damnation were the lullabies on which she was nursed, and it explains her disdain for the fearful. “Sinnerman” is an attack; its hypnotic repetition is designed to induce you to God or madness, whichever comes first. She unleashes her voice, sharp and wide, like sunlight glinting off the blade of a knife. Here, Simone—whose life was as violent and lawless as her music was transcendent—channels heaven and hell equal measure. –Carvell Wallace

Listen:“Sinnerman”

“Lilac Wine”

Wild Is the Wind

1966

“Lilac Wine,” a woozy torch song, originally appeared in James Shelton’s if-you-blinked-you-missed-it 1950 Broadway musical revue “Dance Me a Song.” In 1953, Eartha Kitt dropped a cover and the song became a standard. Nina Simone’s arch-dramatic reimagining is as exotic and dizzying as the titular intoxicant, veering drunkenly between minor and major keys. Simone slows down the tempo to a dirge-like crawl; her classically inflected piano accompaniment is spare and insistent like a metronome. But it’s her trembling singing that really delivers the devastation: The way she captures crestfallen confusion and inebriated fogginess in her vocal performance is astonishing, and no easy feat. Even more astonishing: The way she balances the song’s damaged gloom with a heaving romantic tenderness. –Jason King

Listen:“Lilac Wine”

“Wild Is the Wind”

Wild Is the Wind

1966

Nina Simone debuted her elegant take on “Wild Is the Wind” on 1959’s At Town Hall—a year after Johnny Mathis scored an Oscar nod for the standard—though it would be another seven years before Simone introduced her ominous studio version. Wild Is the Wind, one of three albums Simone released in 1966, is filled with songs that yearn for understanding and romantic resolution, but few capture the feeling with as much uneasiness as the title track. One minute she’s completely swept away by love’s rapture with classical-piano opulence; the next her vibrato purrs on its lowest setting. The music cuts out. Nina smirks sharply. “Don’t you know, you’re life itself,” she coos. Some annotations of this line end it with an exclamation point, but Simone sings it more like a question. She knows how she feels, but there’s still something uncertain about it, perhaps a reflection of her own turbulent private life at this moment. –Jillian Mapes

Listen:“Wild Is the Wind”

“Four Women”

Wild Is the Wind

1966

While most of her records featured interpretations of songs written by others, Wild Is the Wind is special for a composition penned by Simone herself. On “Four Women,” she deconstructs the shameful dual legacies of slavery and racism in America, narrating from the perspective of four black female characters. Aunt Sarah is forced to work hard and be strong, lest a whip be cracked on her back; the biracial Saffronia exists between black and white worlds, shouldering the knowledge that her father “forced [her] mother late one night”; Sweet Thing is the little girl forced to grow up too fast, who has come to understand her body as something that has a cost. The song is set to a simple melody of bass and percussion, with Simone on the piano, but the tension builds with each vignette. By the time she gets to Peaches, the most vengeful character, Simone is yelling with the fury of many generations, and the instruments crescendo. With “Four Women,” Simone took a stand for black women, whose suffering at the nexus of race and gender discrimination is often rendered invisible. Shortly after its release, it was banned by several radio stations for supposedly incendiary content—a possibility that Simone must have anticipated. But she was a fearless fighter, and the song was her affirmation that black womanhood would remain at the heart of her activism. –Vanessa Okoth-Obbo

Listen: “Four Women”

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Stringer

“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”

Silk & Soul

1967

Though urban America was unraveling in 1967, with riots exploding in Detroit and Newark, Simone was being encouraged by RCA Records to go easy on the activism and focus on her career. She released three studio albums that year, the final being Silk & Soul, which was mostly filled with love songs and strings. However, right at the top of Side B was a track that would become an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement: “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” written by the jazz pianist and educator Dr. Billy Taylor.

The song’s swinging melody and finger-popping performance belies its message, summarized in the yearning ambiguity of its title. The contrast between the emotion of the lyrics (“I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart/Remove all the bars that keep us apart”) and the upbeat, gospel-based arrangement added depth and power. Out of this tension, the song rang out as a hopeful but realistic vision of emancipation. –Alan Light

Listen:“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”

“Come Ye”

High Priestess of Soul

1967

“Come Ye” is the sparest track on High Priestess of Soul, an album produced with a fairly heavy hand by Hal Mooney. By then, Simone was seen widely as not just a musician but as a kind of power station of black consciousness, with the ability to politicize audiences—even white and American ones. In vocals and percussion alone, this is an original African-American folk song: polyrhythmic, in a single tonal center, played with hand drums. In four verses, Simone gradually raises its stakes until it all ends direly: “Ye who would have love,” she sings. “It’s time to take a stand/Don’t mind the dues that must be paid/For the love of your fellow man.” This is the intersection of cultural memory, passion, and action—medicine, warning, and alarm. –Ben Ratliff

Listen:“Come Ye”

“Backlash Blues”

Nina Simone Sings the Blues

1967

Simone’s friend Langston Hughes mailed her the lyrics to this song in poem form, and she took immediately to his indictment of “Mr. Backlash,” a personification of white oppression of black America’s small gains (and the “black, yellow, beige and brown” among them, equally oppressed). Simone delivered these promises and threats with a slinky blues rasp, forecasting that the person to receive the backlash would be the oppressor himself. Its lyrics also dovetailed with the rise of the Black Panther Party, which had begun exercising their right to open-carry in their efforts to protect the black people of Oakland from police brutality. Simone sang easily, measuredly, with the confidence that one day a score would be settled: “Do you think that all colored folks are just second class fools?” –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Listen:“Backlash Blues”

“I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl”

Nina Simone Sings the Blues

1967

In the 1960s, Simone left her first label, Colpix, ended up at Phillips, and then hopped over to RCA Victor. In 1967, she recorded her debut album for RCA: Nina Simone Sings the Blues, a hard-driving, tough-talking collection of originals and covers. On “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” she borrows the basic blues progressions from “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” a 1920s cautionary standard originally popularized by Bessie Smith. But Simone comes up with an original lyric that bypasses social commentary and conjures up bawdy flirtatiousness and lust instead: “I want a little sugar in my bowl/I want a little sweetness down in my soul/I could stand some lovin’, oh so bad/I feel so funny, I feel so sad.” Impressive in her thematic range, Simone had no problem mixing double entendre lyrics about ribald sex and in-your-face politics on her albums: “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl” appears alongside her classic civil rights protest song “Backlash Blues.” Songs like this serve as a reminder that the revolutionary activist who can’t occasionally admit to being horny isn’t really the revolutionary activist we need. –Jason King

Listen:“I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl”

“Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)”

’Nuff Said

1968

What and whom are we mourning? How will we mourn, and can we transform the depths of our despair into living in a way that honors what we’ve lost? Nina Simone turns each of these questions over and over from multiple vantage points in this nearly 13-minute performance, recorded on April 7, 1968, at Long Island’s Westbury Music Fair, three days after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. She and her band learned the song, written by bassist Gene Taylor, earlier in the day.

Shaped by the improvisational urgency and rawness of the moment, the live rendition of “Why?” captures many Ninas: the sermonizer accompanying herself on piano and leading her congregation through the wilderness; the Civil Rights dreamer delivering a delicate jazz tale of a nonviolent folk hero; the anguished pallbearer voicing a funeral hymn; and the master of the black freedom struggle jeremiad who laments, “Will the murders never cease?” before slipping fully into her militant “Mississippi” self. She mourns not just for King but for the numerous slain leaders, martyrs, fellow freedom-fighting artists, and “many thousands gone,” as her friend James Baldwin put it—the black subjugated masses who shape the epic sorrow and weariness of her subdued vocals. This dirge-turned-protest-song absorbs the weight of all these bodies but also defiantly affirms the presence of she who remains on the battlefield. “We’ve lost a lot of them in the last two years, but we have remaining Monk, Miles,” Simone reflects slowly, speaking to the audience. From the rafters, a stentorian voice finishes the list: “Nina.” –Daphne A. Brooks

Listen: “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)”

“The Desperate Ones”

Nina Simone and Piano!

1969

Nina Simone never had the widest vocal range or the purest pitch, but she had a once-in-a-generation talent for conveying the meaning of a song through tone and phrasing. With few exceptions, once she sang a song, it was hers, and she was never afraid to make bold choices that could seem downright strange at first listen. Throughout the 1960s, that incomparable voice appeared in many settings, from huge orchestral arrangements to minimal ballads, as she moved confidently from one musical genre to the next. And at the tail end of the decade, she made an album that returned her to the milieu of her first days as a performer.

Nina Simone and Piano! closes with “The Desperate Ones,” an oblique song by Jacques Brel that depicts, with heavy romantic imagery, the weariness of the ‘60s youth trying to remake the world. It was always a quiet song, both when Brel sang it in 1965 and after it was translated into English for the 1968 off-Broadway show Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. But Simone’s performance takes the hushed intensity to an almost frightening level, showcasing her staggering ability to convey feeling with simple elements. She just barely hints at a melody as she reframes the song’s story as something passed between strangers in a darkened alley. Singing in a raspy whisper, her voice is filled with yearning and empathy and wonder, and the starkness of the arrangement highlights its eerie magic. –Mark Richardson

Listen: “The Desperate Ones”

“To Be Young, Gifted and Black”

Black Gold

1970

Lorraine Hansberry, the first black woman to have her work produced on Broadway (A Raisin in the Sun), was a friend and mentor to Simone, and a key figure in her political awakening. When Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer in 1965, at age 34, the singer was devastated—and when Malcolm X was killed the next month, her radicalization was complete.

In 1969, Hansberry’s ex-husband adapted some of her writing into an off-Broadway play called “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” One Sunday, Simone opened the newspaper and saw a story about the production. She called her musical director, Weldon Irvine, to help with the lyrics, and the song—which would be her final contribution to the protest canon—was finished 48 hours later. With its simple, direct message of racial and personal pride and forceful melody, the single was a Top 10 R&B hit and Simone’s biggest crossover success since “I Loves You, Porgy.” It would be covered by Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, and Solange, and CORE named it the “Black National Anthem.” Simone even performed the song on “Sesame Street.” –Alan Light

Listen: “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”

“Just Like a Woman”

Here Comes the Sun

1971

In the early 1960s, as Simone’s star was rising at New York’s Village Gate club, a young Bob Dylan was scratching at the door of the folk scene brewing across the street, doing parody songs between sets by bigger names. Less than a decade later, Simone had five Dylan covers in her discography, none more necessary than “Just Like a Woman.”

In Simone’s hands, Dylan’s half-improvised song about watching an ex-girlfriend walk away became a heartfelt paean to all women. Each once-bitter read from Dylan—“she takes just like a woman,” “she breaks just like a little girl”—was now delivered as an affirmation of female resilience and vulnerability, a human frailty that invited empathy rather than contempt.

Voiced by a woman—especially a famously forthright, tenacious one like Simone—the song got a first-person adaptation; rather than infantilizing the “woman” in question and separating her from the world, Simone’s interpretation closed the gap. Released near the height of her influence as a political artist, it’s a feminist treatment with an inversion that feels contemporary, even half a century later. –Devon Maloney

Listen: “Just Like a Woman”

“22nd Century”

Here Comes the Sun

1971

As Nina Simone tells it in her memoir, by the early 1970s, everything was coming undone for her; she had “fled to Barbados pursued by ghosts: Daddy, [sister] Lucille, the movement, Martin, Malcolm, [her] marriage, [her] hopes…” On its surface, “22nd Century” translates this personal moment of peril into big, broad, metaphorical strokes that wed the apocalyptic with cathartic possibility and radical euphoria. “There is no oxygen in the air/Men and women have lost their hair,” she prophesizes, holding steady at the center of an intoxicating swirl of flamenco guitar and calypso steel drums. “When life is taken and there are no more babies born....Tomorrow will be the 22nd century.”

In the future that is Nina’s, things fall apart so that notions of time, space, and the human can be razed and take on new shape. But in this era in which she sought out Caribbean maroonage, there is perhaps an even deeper connection forged by way of this hypnotic, nearly nine-minute odyssey. Covering Bahamian “Obeah Man” Exuma’s stirring, hybrid mix of junkanoo, carnival, and folk, she sticks close to his original recording from that same year and merges her Afrodiasporic revolutionary vision with his: “Don’t try to sway me over to your day/On your day,” her reaching vocals insist. “Your day will go away.” –Daphne A. Brooks

Listen: “22nd Century”

Photo by David Redfern/Getty Images

Medley: “My Sweet Lord/Today Is a Killer”

“Emergency Ward!”

1972

No artist ever wielded power over an audience as deftly as Nina Simone, but the same can be said of her talent for turning covers into transcendent events. By 1972, she’d perfected—several times over—both delicate alchemies. She used her crowds’ expectations to lure them in before delivering uncomfortable yet necessary truths, all while constructing what one academic, quoting theorist William Parker, called “inside songs”—covers that dig up the song lying “in the shadows, in-between the sounds and silences and behind the words” of the original.

That creative electricity is palpable on this gargantuan, 18-minute live jam that takes up an entire side of Emergency Ward!, the record now considered Simone’s major anti-Vietnam War statement. Backed by a gospel choir, she invites the audience in with George Harrison’s then-two-year-old mega-hit, locking into a mesmerizing church sing-along before revealing the Trojans within: David Nelson’s brutal poem about the desperate, decaying hope of the Civil Rights era. Lines like "Today/Pressing his ugly face against mine/Staring at me with lifeless eyes/Crumbling away all memories of yesterday’s dreams,” dropped into the rhythm of Harrison’s exaltations, inflate the performance like a hot air balloon, making it the ultimate testament to Simone’s ability to turn even a simple interpretation into a political masterpiece. –Devon Maloney

Listen: Medley: “My Sweet Lord/Today Is a Killer,”

“Funkier Than a Mosquito’s Tweeter”

Is It Finished

1974

Nina Simone’s palate was always broad, but with this reimagining of a Tina Turner barnburner, she used minimalist funk arrangements as a platform for her unleashed vocals—mewling and crawling at alternate intervals, the disgusted cursing of a woman highly over a dusty dude. The openness of the 1970s served her more adventurous impulses well, though by the time she cut “Funkier,” she was fully spiraling into depression and alcoholism. (Who could blame her, with the serrated knife that had been the late 1960s, from Civil Rights to Vietnam?) Her edge showed in this song: Her voice cracks with exasperation, alluding that the predator she sings about might well be the good ol’ US of A. Spent, she wouldn’t record another album for four years. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Listen: “Funkier Than a Mosquito’s Tweeter”

Photo by Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images

“Baltimore”

Baltimore

1978

Following the death of Freddie Gray in April 2015, Simone’s 1978 recording of Randy Newman’s “Baltimore”—“Oh, Baltimore/Ain’t it hard just to live”—was widely circulated on social media, illustrating the continuing endurance and power of her work. The song was the title track from a particularly fraught album that appeared as Simone was living in poverty in Paris and her recordings were getting increasingly rare. She fought so much with Creed Taylor, who had signed her to CTI Records, that she insisted he not only leave the studio, but the country. She finally cut all of her vocals in a single, hourlong session.

She did acknowledge, however, that she liked this song, which Newman had recorded the year before. The narrator of “Baltimore” is worn down by the American economy and malaise—“hard times in the city, in a hard town by the sea”—and finally decides to pack his family in a “big old wagon” and send them out of town. Having fled the U.S. years earlier, Simone’s reaction to the lyrics was personal. “And it refers to, I’m going to buy a fleet of Cadillacs,” she said, “and take my little sister, Frances, and my brother, and take them to the mountain and never come back here, until the day I die.” –Alan Light

Listen: “Baltimore”

“Fodder on Her Wings”

Fodder on My Wings

1982

In the early ’80s, Nina Simone was living in France and she was deeply lonely; her family life was strained, and she was suffering from encroaching mental illness. A new song on her 1982 album, Fodder on My Wings, captured with startling intimacy the pain of this period, and she returned to it frequently through the next decade, cutting another studio version three years later (the synth-heavy take on Nina’s Back!) and including it on several live albums, including an awe-inspiring performance on 1987’s Let It Be Me. The title of the song itself is titled “her” wings while the album it appears on uses “my”; the slippery point of view underscores its heavily personal nature, as Simone sings of a bird that traveled the world, from Switzerland to France and England—all places she herself had spent time—and then crashed to earth. “She had dust inside her brain” is the harrowing image the sticks with you, but Simone’s vocal makes a song of weariness and defeat carry an air of defiance, a wise word from someone who survived to tell the tale. –Mark Richardson

Listen: “Fodder on Her Wings”

“Stars”

Let It Be Me

1987

Simone first covered Janis Ian’s searing, mordant meditation on fame during her infamous set at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival; suffering from bipolar disorder, she goes through something like a mental breakdown during the performance. (The scene is a highlight of Liz Garbus’ Oscar-nominated documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?) This spine-tingling 1987 version—Simone’s best, most coherent rendition—was recorded live at Hollywood’s intimate Vine Street Bar & Grill for Let It Be Me.

Written by Ian when she was just 20, “Stars” is a potent critique of star-making machinery: The narrator is both a weary observer of fame, watching faded stars who live their lives in “sad cafés and music halls,” and a tragic figure undone by fame herself. Simone’s embittered, conversational phrasing transforms the song into a cosmically exhausted, stream-of-consciousness rant. She sounds so nakedly weary and afflicted with pathos, you worry she might not even make it to the last verse. But ultimately, Simone’s piano accompaniment builds to a rousing, show-must-go-on climax: “I’ll come up singing for you even though I’m down.” Break out the Kleenex: Few other songs in Simone’s arsenal can make you truly grasp the toll she paid for being alive and giving us her music. –Jason King

Listen: “Stars”

“Papa, Can You Hear Me?”

A Single Woman

1993

In 1993, Nina Simone recorded and released her last studio album, A Single Woman. Living in Southern France, she was lured back into the booth by Elektra A&R executive Michael Alago, who brought major label marketing dollars and seasoned producers and orchestrators. Taken from the 1983 Barbra Streisand film Yentl and penned by Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman, and Michel Legrand, “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” is a powerhouse musical theater showstopper that no one would mistake for a conventional jazz standard. But Simone—who starts the song with an allusion to the Negro spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—slyly reconstructs it as an interior, howling lament for her father, who passed away in the early 1970s while they were estranged.

Backed by swelling strings, Simone pulls every ounce of melancholic emotion out of the heart-wrenching lyrics. As the chords ramp up, so does her quivering voice; every time she tackles the song’s falling Middle Eastern vocals runs, it sounds like tears streaming down her face. One of her most dramatic performances captured on record, “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” finds Nina Simone working through the despair of her own orphanhood, exorcising her troubled relationship with the men who defined aspects of her complicated life. How fitting that her final album—a musical commentary on what it means to be a mature, single woman living in exile—captures such pure, unadulterated human feeling. –Jason King

Listen: “Papa, Can You Hear Me?”

#Nina Simone #Black Music #Goddess #Black Voices #Black Music Month #2023

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arcticlutra · 7 months

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So I'm currently awaiting for my computer to reboot with the new SSD I just installed. In the interim please enjoy the WIP snippet:

Marble.

His mother's complexion had always reminded him of marble, like the statues she'd shown him in the museums, and the smaller busts of alabaster she'd had commissioned for their home.

His mother's complexion had always reminded Tim of marble. And she, like those statues had all ar once seemed both distant, removed, and yet so brimming with life and movement. Even now he can still picture her smile and hear her laugh.

Her marble complexion had looked so cold against the crimson pool of blood he saw her die in, after the vampire had ripped her throat out, and had impaled his father on iron railing.

And that one instant, Timothy Drake vowed that he would avenge her and hunt down the vampire who did this.

It would be many years later when he had the chance, when an erstwhile and unseemingly innocent letter took him across the Atlantic and into the grimey and soot laden streets of London on the search of his mother's killer. As he breathed in the heavy air he looked up at the greying edifice of his maternal inheritance: a townhouse in Belgravia emblazoned with his maternal family crest, that his American father had scoffed at.

Belmont Place had been bereft of a Belmont for too long.

#tim drake #dc fanfic #castlevania au #vampire hunter Timmy #he goes pew pew pew with the stakes #victoriana

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katekelton · 1 year

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https://gallery30south.com/kelton-phoenix/

Kate Kelton: PHOENIX

JANUARY 2023

Seeking to elevate brave Silence Breakers who’ve come forward during the #MeToo movement, Kate Kelton’s portraiture combines their oft familiar faces with elements of her family’s Czech architecture. Her portraits are cloaked in the garb of statues that Ladislav Šaloun sculpted onto the central train station that her great- grandfather, Josef Fanta, designed for Prague between 1901 – 1909. Sampling and mixing her own lineage, Kate has transformed a historical body of work, itself a thing of lasting beauty, exchanging granite for graphite; plaster for paint.

Headdresses and crowns deify Kate Kelton’s subjects. She uplifts the Unsung Sheroes & Heroes, Patriarchy Smashers, Warrior Survivors, Silence Breakers, Philosophers, Truth-Tellers, Whistle Blowers and Thought Giants. She paints portraits cloaked in the garb of statues Ladislav Šaloun sculpted onto the train station that her great-grandfather, Josef Fanta, designed for Prague in 1901 – 1909.

Apotheosis through a reclaimed, reapplied Art Nouveau.

Kate’s recent work is a matter of expansion through contrast – she is as ephemeral as her subjects are concrete architecture; she is structural when her subjects should slip through your fingers like too-fine sand. Taken as a whole, the works in her magnificent series Phoenix are incredibly intelligent, but when looked at individually, you come to understand that these are statements of life beyond themselves. The series take embellishments of a Prague train station designed by her great-grandfather, Josef Fanta, and combines these with portraits of men and women who have stood against the sexual harassment and assault rampant in Hollywood –particularly those who have testified against Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, and Bill Cosby, and made allegations against Franco Zeffirelli, Donald Trump, Russell Simmons, Max Landis, Michael Jackson, Nick Carter, Luc Besson, and others. These women, like Kate herself, have suffered in the era where powerful men, every bit as immovable as the train station, wielded their power without check. The portraits emblazoned on architectural elements, they are marked against the edifice, every bit as permanent, and perhaps even more defining. If you approach those as portraits, you’re taking the moment but missing the permanence. If you take them as statuary, you’re missing the fact that they are, in fact, alive within those gazes. It’s really incredible how much a shift of the light, a dart of the eye, can turn each of them from a memorial into a promise. This is not an exhibition about tragedy. This is a monument to courage, survival and empowerment.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kate Kelton was born in the south of Germany, after her parents escaped Czechoslovakia. Her early years were spent in a VW bus traveling Europe with her mother, an abstract painter. Settling in Toronto, Canada at age seven, Kelton attended the Etobicoke School of the Arts as a Visual Arts Major, and received a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Film, from Ryerson University. Her father was an architect. His grandfather, and namesake, was Josef Fanta: renowned Art Nouveau architect, engineer and sculptor, who worked closely with Alphonse Mucha. Photographer Dagmar Hochová is Kelton’s great aunt, on her mother’s side. Kelton also had a recurring role on Stephen King’s Haven on the Syfy Channel. When the illustrated re- edition of the book it’s based on, The Colorado Kid, was published, she illustrated the front and back inside covers. Her first lead role on tv was opposite Eric Roberts and Eddie Izzard, in the Independent Film Channel’s Bullet In The Face. Alex Maleev illustrated her for the poster. Her first feature film, Deepa Mehta’s The Republic of Love, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. Her film credits include cult classics, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and American Psycho II. Did you also spot her in music videos, like Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me?” Almost as good as googling her as “the Tic Tac girl.” ;} Kate has exhibited her artwork internationally for decades, at, among others: the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, the New Walk Museum & Art Gallery in the UK; Gallery 1988 in New York, Venice, and West Hollywood; Gabba Gallery, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, and Durden & Ray in Los Angeles; Art On Scene in Beverly Hills; Galerie F in Chicago; Lawless Concept in Montreal; and The Sony Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto. Her work has toured with Yoko Ono’s Group Show Arising from Zurich, to Portugal, to the UK and Germany.

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nefretemerson · 9 months

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full article under the cut :)

When I was growing up in a conservative evangelical community, one of the top priorities was to manage children’s consumption of art. The effort was based on a fairly straightforward aesthetic theory: Every artwork has a clear message, and consuming messages that conflict with Christianity will harm one’s faith. Helpfully, there was a song whose lyrics consisted precisely of this aesthetic theory: “Input Output.”

Input, output, What goes in is what comes out. Input, output, That is what it’s all about. Input, output, Your mind is a computer whose Input, output daily you must choose.

The search for the “inputs” of secular artwork sometimes took a paranoid form—such as the belief in subliminal messages recorded in reverse, or in isolated frames from Lion King where smoke allegedly forms the word sex. Most often, however, the analysis was more direct. Portraying a behavior or describing a belief, unless accompanied immediately by a clear negative judgment, is an endorsement and a recommendation, and people who consume such messages will become more likely to behave and believe in that way.

This theory underwrote the whole edifice of Christian contemporary music, which aimed to replace a particularly powerful avenue for negative messages. One of my running jokes for many years has been that all Top 40 music is effectively Christian contemporary music now; American Idol confirmed the hegemony of the “praise band” vocal style. More clear is the fact that all mainstream criticism—especially of film and television—is evangelical in form, if not in content. Every artwork is imagined to have a clear message; the portrayal of a given behavior or belief is an endorsement and a recommendation; consumption of artwork with a given message will directly result in the behaviors or beliefs portrayed. This is one of the few phenomena where the “both sides” cliché is true: Left-wing critics are just as likely to do this as their right-wing opponents. For every video of a right-wing provocateur like Ben Shapiro decrying the woke excesses of Barbie, there is a review praising the Mattel product tie-in as a feminist fable.

Here, however, I am more concerned with the critical practices of my comrades on the left. Among leftist publications, Jacobin stands out for its reductive and moralizing cultural coverage. Addressing the other major movie of this past weekend, for instance, the critic Eileen Jones worried in a recent column, “If you’re already convinced of the dangers of nuclear war, superseded only by the ongoing end-times series of rolling climate catastrophes that now seem more likely to kill us all, this film is going to lack a certain urgency.” Sadly, instead of an educational presentation on nuclear war, film audiences will instead find a biopic that takes some liberties with its subject’s life and character for the sake of creating a Hollywood blockbuster. Jones finds more to like in Barbie, despite “the familiar, toothless, you-go-girl pseudo-feminist pieties that Mattel has been monetizing for decades, alongside the nostalgic how-can-our-consumer-products-be-bad affirmations of Barbie as some sort of magic, wholesomely progressive uniter of generations of mothers and daughters.”

This trend is not limited to one publication. It is pervasive in online culture, above all on social media. For instance, over coffee on the morning after the epic Barbenheimer Friday, I learned some disturbing facts about Oppenheimer on Twitter. At least one viewer was worried that the film about the man who created the nuclear bomb did not include any Japanese characters. Indeed, it did not even directly portray his invention’s horrific consequences. Surely this aesthetic choice was meant to minimize his actions by rendering his victims invisible. (An article in New York magazine drew attention to the same absence.) I also learned that the area surrounding Los Alamos was actually cleared of Indigenous and Hispanic residents, another bit of history that is effectively erased by the film.

Let’s imagine, though, that those complaints had been anticipated and addressed. Let’s imagine an entire subplot of a family going about their business in Hiroshima. We get to know and like them, to relate to them as our fellow human beings. Then, shockingly, they are incinerated by a nuclear blast. One can already hear the complaints. If the family were portrayed as too morally upstanding, it would be a dehumanizing portrayal that idealizes them as perfect victims. If they had moral flaws, the film would be subtly suggesting that they deserved their fate. And either way, the film would be attacked for offering up their suffering as a spectacle for our enjoyment. The same would go for the displaced population of Los Alamos—by portraying them as passive victims with no agency, critics would surely complain, the film would be reinscribing white authority.

Obviously leftists do not have to be as paranoid in their quest for messages supportive of the status quo as Christians playing their records backwards in the hopes of finding satanic content. And of course we are a long way from having anything like the real-world thought police of Stalinism. During that dark era of Soviet history, writers and artists were expected to subscribe to the standards of socialist realism—which, instead of portraying the sordid and brutal reality of the present, anticipated the future reality of socialism by showing heroic workers building a utopian society. Those who fell short of those ideological expectations could expect a personal phone call from Comrade Stalin, if not worse. By contrast, it seems relatively harmless to hope that films and TV shows might reflect one’s own politics and to lament when they fail to do so. Yet the very fact that the demand is so open-ended that it is impossible to imagine an artwork meeting its largely unstated and unarticulated standards shows that something has gone wrong here.

To be clear, I don’t want to defend Oppenheimer in any way. I have not actually seen the film. Nothing anyone is saying is necessarily wrong; it’s just not interesting. Like most film and TV viewers, I read reviews because I want to decide whether or not to see a given movie or show, or else to think it through from a fresh perspective. For example, I note that Oppenheimer is very long—how is the pacing? Does it maintain a clear focus throughout, or does it indulge the common vice of biopics by trying to cram too much in? The type of critical literature that concerns me does not address such basic aesthetic questions, or does so only incidentally.

Even more insidiously, though, the logical goal of such very narrow standards could be to create artwork that is straightforward political propaganda. We’ve seen how badly that turned out for the evangelicals (and, indeed, for the Stalinists). Even if we are unlikely to face the scourge of a Leninist equivalent to VeggieTales, however, this style of criticism infantilizes its audience members by assuming they are essentially ideology-processing machines—unlike the wise commentator who somehow manages to see through the deception.

Political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level. And it’s much more likely that people are consuming politics as a kind of aesthetic performance or as a way of expressing aesthetic preferences than that they are somehow reading their politics off Succession, for example (“Welp, I guess rich people are good now. Better vote Republican!”). Just as the reduction of art to political propaganda leads to bad art, the aestheticization of politics leads to bad, irresponsible politics. That’s because aesthetics and politics are not the same thing. They are not totally unrelated, obviously, but they are also and even primarily different. A political message can be part of an aesthetic effect, just as a political movement can benefit from an aesthetic appeal. But we get nowhere if we confuse or collapse these categories.

This story was adapted from a post on Adam Kotsko's blog, An Und Für Sich.

#oppenheimer #barbie #the appreciation of art done merely thru the lens of virtue is so Boring #and so deeply familiar #the evangelical/fundamentalist christians did it first and they're still doing it better lmaooo #the milquetoast christian 'art' scene is so wonderfully expansive and so unbelievably dull

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drosera-nepenthes · 2 years

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A Big To-Do For A Shah's Bride-to-Be.

For weeks the world has been talking about the slender dark-haired girl and her royal wooer. Rumors told of their romantic meeting last spring in Paris. Happy speculation insisted that on a recent whirlwind tour of Parisian couturiers the clothes she was so lavishly buying were to be her trousseau. Now, at last, it was official. In the royal palace in Tehran, Farah Diba was sitting for an engagement portrait with her future husband, the 40-year-old ruler of Iran, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlevi. He had just made known that he will make her his queen on Dec. 21. Like any bride-to-be the 21-year-old Farah Diba was being formally presented to her fiance's family and friends.

The girl they met is tall (5'9”) poised and pretty. Her hair has been styled by the best hairdresser in Paris and much of her wardrobe has been exquisitely fashioned by the House of Dior. The future queen of Iran comes from more humble surroundings than her two predecessors. The shah's first wife, Queen Fawzia, was of royal blood, sister of Egypt's deposed King Farouk. His second, handsome Queen Soraya, was partician, the European-bred daughter of one of Iran's oldest and most powerful families. Farah Diba, whose father was a career army officer and bank official, belongs unquestionably to “the thousand families” – Iran's equivalent of “the 400.” But she is nevertheless a commoner who grew up in something very like an American middle-class life before going off at 19 to a tough school of architecture in Paris. There she had to watch her pennies like any other Left Bank student.

Besides the problem of getting used to the regal ways of the Iranian court protocol and to the responsibility of being mistress to the shah's eight palaces, the most crucial obligation of Farah as queen will be tho provide the shah and Iran with a male heir. Failure of his two former wives to do so created constitutional questions over dynastic succession to the throne, the most recent resulting in the Shah's divorce of Queen Soraya. Said the future queen, Farah Diba, “I earnestly hope that I will be of service to my country and my fellow countrymen.”

The sudden favor she had found with the shah thrust Farah Diba, with scant warning, into a new glittery whirl of rich clothes, fancy parties, and courtly protocol. A lighthearted girl, as well as an intelligent one, she took it all gaily and graciously in stride.

In Paris on her recent clothes-buying trip she put in a dazzling appearance at the opera modishly swathed in white mink and regally ensconed in the box of the Iranian Embassy. Back home in Tehran there were parties including an elegant affair in the palace of the queen mother where 800 guests came to meet Farah and celebrate the recent marriage of the shah's sister to the commander of the Iranian air force. This edifice, with its Venetian crystal candelabra and 18th century furnishings, was to be her new home ground. The shah, in addition to giving her a 55-carat, half-inch-square diamond engagement ring, had arranged for her to take up residence in the queen mother's palace until the wedding day.

Life, Dec 7, 1959

#Farah Diba #Iranian royal family #1950s #magazine article

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dustedmagazine · 1 year

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“Everybody Hollerin’ GOAT” — Derek Taylor’s 2022

I’ve been reverentially pilfering Bill Steber’s photos as visual ledes for as long as I’ve been writing these Year End paeans (the first was in 2003, making this one the nineteenth). There’s something about Steber’s keen eye for negative space, composition and context that makes me think of Blue Note’s Francis Wolff, if transplanted to the Mississippi hill country. No blues to speak of in the stack of recordings this time around, at least as sourced from that legendary, loamy region, but still lots that’s helped keep my head screwed on and faculties relatively fog-free over the past twelve-months.

Wadada Leo Smith

Smith’s ascendance to octogenarian eminence was simply too merry and momentous an occasion to be contained to a single year. As the concluding two entries in a hexalogy of releases on the Finnish TUM label highlighting facets of his multifarious output, Emerald Duets and String Quartets, Nos. 1-12 dropped in May and were also arguably the most ambitious. The Dusted bullpen collectively dug in on both sets in a rousing Listening Post roundtable that forgivably favored the more accessible exploratory encounters with drummers Jack DeJohnette, Andrew Cyrille, Han Bennink and Pheeroan AkLaff.

Joe McPhee

The Powerhouse from Poughkeepsie turned 83 years young in November and as with past years his productive spirit appears immune to enervation or ennui. Ensemble efforts like Survival Unit III’s The Art of Flight (Astral Spirits/Instigation) and Pride of Lion’s No Question No Answers (RogueArt) continue to be the common currency of his artistic realm, but McPhee also found aegis for the release of exhilarating duets with cellist (and freshly-minted MacArthur “genius”) Tomeka Reid (Let Our Rejoicing Rise) and British sax eidolon Evan Parker (Sweet Nothings (For Milford Graves), both pressed on the prolific Corbett vs. Dempsey imprint (see below).

Peter Brötzmann

Speaking again of unstoppable octogenarians, Herr Brötzmann came out of COVID isolation with renewed vigor and a concert calendar still compellingly competitive with musicians a fraction his age. New entries in his edifice-sized discography weren’t nearly as plentiful, but a pair of archival releases still packed a gobsmacking punch. Historic Music Past Tense Future (Black Editions Archive) drops the German reedist and bassist William Parker into the precision polyrhythmic maelstrom of Milford Graves circa spring 2002 across a double slab of vinyl. In a State of Undress (FMP/Be!) is free jazz of a more formal sort with the one-off aggregate of trumpeter Manfred Schoof, bassist Jay Oliver and drummer Willi Kellers tempering the leader’s orotund edges.

Tyshawn Sorey + Greg Osby — The Off-Off Broadway Guide to Synergism (Pi)

Keeping up with Tyshawn Sorey’s indefatigable activities is a lot like keeping pace with Joe McPhee, a full-time pursuit worth every penny and effort. This three-disc set has the instant enticement of capturing his working trio in the hothouse context of an extended gig at the Jazz Gallery in NYC. Add to that a program of alchemized standards sourced from the Great American Songbook and jazz brethren along with altoist Greg Osby in a rare sideman station and the results become an irresistible trigger pull. In a word: epic.

Cecil Taylor

Taylor’s been gone four-plus-years, but his in-life prolificacy continues to bestow posthumous gifts. Revelatory and digital-only, The Complete, Legendary, Live Return Concert at the Town Hall, NYC, November 4, 1973 (Oblivion) expands greatly on its previously truncated incarnation, Spring of Two Blue-J’s originally on Taylor’s own Unit Core imprint back in 1974. Respiration (Fundacja Słuchaj!) and Live in Ruvo Di Puglia 2000 (Enja) reveal previously unreleased prototypes of his solo repertoire separated by the span of thirty-two years. Sharing a surname with the pianist probably suggests the presence of bias, but I will still ardently go on record in stating that all three are essential.

Albert Ayler — Revelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondation Maeght Recordings (Elemental)

Previous editions of this material are now obsolete thanks to this magnificent, meticulously assembled set. So invasive were earlier edits and excisions, particularly as concerns the catalytic contributions of Ayler’s life and musical partner Mary Parks (aka Mary Maria), that it’s like hearing the concerts anew. Parks’ memory and jazz history are restored by producer Zev Feldman and his retinue of collaborators. The results are glorious, both in terms of restored fidelity and the extended majesty of Ayler’s last band firing on collective, conflagratory cylinders.

Chris Dingman — Journeys Vols. 1 & 2 (Inner Arts)

Chris Dingman nearly topped my Year End list two-years ago with an ambitious five-disc opus Peace, a dedicatory body of work for solo vibraphone initially conceived as an aural paregoric for his ailing father. The elder Dingman passed away prior to its release and in navigating the grief in the years since, the son’s doubled down on the unaccompanied format as means of realizing Albert Ayler proffered adage that “music is the healing force of the universe.” Journey’s 1 & 2 reflect their predecessor, but also refract it through a sequence of malleted excursions emphasizing melody and repetition in rippling, elliptical patterns that soothe and enthrall.

Corbett vs Dempsey

John Corbett is indicative of my favorite species of record collector: an altruist whose obsessiveness in the endeavor is exceeded by his ardor for sharing the spoils of this searches through reissues that completely do the artifacts justice. Chief among the offerings this year, German free jazz pianist Georg Gräwe’s first two forays as a leader, New Movements (1976) and Pink Pong (1978), and the pivotal Globe Unity (1967), which restores Alexander von Schlippenbach’s first multinational large ensemble enterprise to circulation. Also of note, another stack of entries inspired by the Sequesterfest series of concerts initiated during the pandemic. Drummer Hamid Drake’s Dedications features solo percussion-planted encomia to his influences and is probably my pick of the eight titles released so far.

The Pyramids — Aomawa: The 1970s Recordings (Strut)

A box set that brings a personal blind spot into bracing focus and rectifies it. The Pyramids initial three albums plus a concert air shot given the deluxe treatment by the Strut label. Ancient to the Future with audible Sun Ra Arkestra and Art Ensemble influences, reedist Idris Ackamoor’s ensemble is never slavish or supine in its interpretations of precedence. Percussion jams are plentiful, as are spiritual jazz overtones, and it all combines in an earthy gestalt that also has a healthy respect and acumen for groove. I’m of an age where regrets feel increasingly impractical, but it’s still good to catch up.

Grounation — The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari (Soul Jazz)

An arguable Jamaican analog to Aomawa in its assemblage of certain analogous ingredients, Groundnation was also something else entirely. Sprawling across three LPs (a milestone in the country’s recording industry), The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari resonates as history lesson, call to arms, sacred text, and adulatory celebration among other appellations. Count Ossie, Cedric IM Brooks and their confreres mined both zeitgeist and musical alloy that had lasting effects not just on reggae, but self-determinate roots-oriented music of all sorts. Soul Jazz’s painstaking attention to accurate reproduction and contextualization is admirable and immersive.

Robbie Basho — Bouquet (Lost Lagoon)

Self-produced, released and circulated in 1984, Basho’s penultimate album tests and perhaps proves the prevailing theory that detractors of his singing far outnumber those of guitar playing. Still, he succeeds where other great polarizers of the pipes like Irene Aebi, Yoko Ono and Ethel Merman fail in his unflappable earnestness and credulity. The self-doubt and cumulative frustrations that haunted Basho in life subsume in the sincerity of his music, strangely sui generis in its intensely personalized strains of borrowed religion, spirituality and mysticism. Mileage varies, but there’s no denying Basho’s commitment to his muses.

Sun Ra

Labels like Modern Harmonic and Cosmic Myth Ra continue to keep Ra relevant even though the Saturnian left the planet decades ago. This year’s passel of reissues includes timely returns of Ra to the Rescue and Universe in Blue, each augmented with extra and/or extended tracks. The latter album includes several showstopping John Gilmore spotlights and ample Ra organ-omics while the former gets its most complete edition yet with a survey of snapshots across 1970s sessions. A genuinely new release, Prophet zeroes in on Ra’s 1986 in-studio experiments with the then-newfangled eponymous console and he responds like a kid in a keyboard candy store with select Arkestral band members, including an ailing June Tyson, in exuberant, if fleeting, support.

Steeplechase

The Danish label is an old reliable in these pages, plugging along with current releases from its international stable of artists alongside occasional, but always welcome, reissues. Stephen Riley’s My Romance isn’t the tenorist’s first recording with B-3 organ, but it does mark his first as a leader. Electing Brian Charette to cover the keys with just Billy Drummond on cans in support is a stripped-down stroke of genius. Vintage concert performances with bop pianist Duke Jordan in the company of Danish tenorist Bent Jaedig (Montmartre ’73) and archival recordings by tenorist Brew Moore (Special Brew) and dearly departed Philly guitarist Monette Sudler (In My Own Way) stand out, too.

Bear Family

Bear Family basically has access to a bank vault-sized archive when it comes to vintage country fare. It’s a mighty good thing because Bill Carter holds at best token traction with the 21st century arbiters of the genre. Sixty-seven tracks across two discs chart the ups, downs, and all arounds of Carter’s career (The Complete Recordings from 1953 to 1961) jumping from Western Swing to hillbilly to honkytonk to rockabilly. Perhaps best of all, Carter was 92, lucid, and around to see the release back in March. Western Swing legend Bob Wills’ younger brother Billy Jack was the recipient of similar treatment with Cadillac In Model ‘A’, a comparatively stingy 31-track survey and latest in the label’s long running Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight series.

Ezz-thetics

Born out of both providence and necessity, the Ezz-thetics label exists in the continued absence of the venerated Hat Hut lineage of imprints. The earlier catalogs are tied up in legal proprietary knots, leaving owner Werner X. Uehlinger to throw caution to the curb and pursue a longstanding dream of applying his decades-honed judgment as a producer to free/jazz classics. The venture immediately ran afoul of critics who took umbrage with his audacity in side-stepping stateside copyright considerations and reimagining sacred texts. Wherever one opines on those controversies, there’s no denying the new lease audio engineer Michael Brandli has accorded the source materials. Cecil Taylor’s (With) Exit to Student Studies Revisited, Paul Bley’s Play Annette Peacock Revisited, and Sun Ra’s Nothing Is… Completed & Revisited are exemplary stand outs.

Fresh Sound

Lisbon-based Fresh Sound is another reissue label that continuously courts its share of contention. The logical, if admittedly self-serving counter is that American rights holders to nearly all of the music that they traffic in couldn’t be bothered to apply even a fraction of the care or quality they bring to bear. Exacting attention to the most esoteric and obscure jazz artists has long been the archetype. This year’s batch includes definitive collections of trumpeter Dave Burns (1962 Sessions), baritone saxophonist Virgil Gonsalves (Jazz in the Bay Area 1954-1959), altoist Joe “Mouse” Bonati (Portrait of a Jazz Hero) and Belgian vibraphonist Fats Sadi (Sadi’s Vibes: A Retrospective 1953-61).

Morteza Mahjubi — Selected Improvisations from Golha, Parts 1 & 2 (Death is Not the End)

Tempered instruments aren’t an intuitive match for micro-tonal composition, but that hasn’t hindered musicians of manifold ethnicities from adapting them to the intricacies of indigenous music. Iranian pianist Morteza Mahjubi did so prolifically during his lifetime, recording his innovations for Golha (Flowers of Persian Song and Poetry) radio programs between 1956 and his passing in 1965. Spread over two album-length discs (with hopefully future volumes to follow), Mahjubi applies his custom tuning system to the ivories and approximates the sonorities of endemic instruments like the tar (lute) and santur (hammered dulcimer).

Branko Mataja — Over Fields and Mountains (Numero)

Mataja’s biography reads like a Spielbergian screenplay. Abducted from his native Belgrade and conscripted to a German work camp during WWII, the lifelong guitar enthusiast worked a variety of trades after being liberated, before emigrating to England, then Canada, and finally a string of stateside cities. Mataja eventually settled in Los Angeles where he worked as a barber and started a side business a freelance guitar technician. Memories of his home country haunted him, and he recorded a pair of albums in his garage studio/workshop from which this LP is sourced. Milky, murky reverb and sustain are calling cards, alongside an improvisatory approach to traditional Croatian melodies that’s equal parts melancholic and mysterious.

V/A — Padang Moonrise: The Birth of the Modern Indonesian Recording Industry 1955-1969 (Soundway)

A double-LP + 7” survey stacked with sublime discoveries from coordinates geographic and temporal that beg for an even deeper dive. Reverb-dipped guitars and swirling, droning organs are persistent common denominators alongside varied hand percussion and a revolving cast of melancholic crooners across genders and dialects. It’s cross-cultural music that’s exotica-adjacent and still ripely redolent of American soul. Ghost World’s Enid would’ve had a field day immersing herself in this stuff. I know I have.

Jalaleddin

Old, but still new to me, and perhaps my most listened to platters among the many vinyl discoveries procured on record shop safaris this year. Discogs lists seven albums to Jalaleddin’s name, and I feel fortunate to have found six on the cheap in a single shop. Based in San Francisco in the 1970s and a master of the kanun (Turkish trapezoidal zither,) Jalal Takesh started his musical career cutting belly dance records. Benefiting from a Santana-like broadmindedness, his bandleading would soon conscript musicians of other traditions including Indian ragas, Greek rebetika, and Spanish flamenco. Hand-sketched and colored by an academic friend of Takesh’s, the album cover illustrations are aces, as well.

25 More in No Fixed Order…

Andrew Cyrille/William Parker/Enrico Rava — 2 Blues for Cecil (TUM)

Michael Bisio Quartet — MBefore (Tao Forms)

Ingrid Laubrock/Brandon Lopez/Tom Rainey — No Es La Playa (Intakt)

Patricia Brennan — More Touch (Pyroclastic)

Mark Turner — Return from the Stars (ECM)

Jeb Bishop/Pandelis Karayorgis/Damon Smith — Duals (Driff/Balance Point Acoustics)

Ches Smith — Interpret it Well (Pyroclastic)

Sam Rivers — Caldera (NoBusiness)

Toots Thielemans & Rob Franken — The Studio Sessions 1973-1983 (Dutch Jazz Archive)

The Pyramids — Penetration! (Sundazed)

Horace Tapscott Quintet — S/T (Mr. Bongo)

V/A — Girls with Guitars Gonna Shake (Ace)

John Ondolo — The Hypnotic Guitar of John Ondolo (Mississippi)

Biluka y Los Canibales — Leaf-Playing in Quito 1960 to 1965 (Honest Jon’s)

Myra Melford’s Fire & Water Quintet — For the Love of Fire & Water (RogueArt)

Ndikho Xaba & The Natives — S/T (Trilyte/Mississippi)

Brandon Seabrook — In the Swarm (Astral Spirits)

Sirone — Artistry (Moved by Sound)

William Parker — Universal Tonality (Centering)

Charles Mingus — The Lost Album from Ronnie Scott’s (Resonance)

Markos Vamvakaris — Death is Bitter (Mississippi)

Jeff Parker — Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy (Eremite/Aguirre)

Mal Waldron — Searching in Grenoble: The 1978 Solo Piano Concert (Tompkins Square)

Allan Botschinsky Quintet — Live at The Tivoli Gardens 1996 (Stunt)

Jimmy Castor Bunch — The Definitive Collection (Robinsongs)

Derek Taylor

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music-despite-everything · 1 month

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That Day by Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die.

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This is the desk I sit at and this is the desk where I love you too much and this is the typewriter that sits before me where yesterday only your body sat before me with its shoulders gathered in like a Greek chorus, with its tongue like a king making up rules as he goes, with its tongue quite openly like a cat lapping milk, with its tongue - both of us coiled in its slippery life. That was yesterday, that day. That was the day of your tongue, your tongue that came from your lips, two openers, half animals, half birds caught in the doorway of your heart. That was the day I followed the king's rules, passing by your red veins and your blue veins, my hands down the backbone, down quick like a firepole, hands between legs where you display your inner knowledge, where diamond mines are buried and come forth to bury, come forth more sudden than some reconstructed city. It is complete within seconds, that monument. The blood runs underground yet brings forth a tower. A multitude should gather for such an edifice. For a miracle one stands in line and throws confetti. Surely The Press is here looking for headlines. Surely someone should carry a banner on the sidewalk. If a bridge is constructed doesn't the mayor cut a ribbon? If a phenomenon arrives shouldn't the Magi come bearing gifts? Yesterday was the day I bore gifts for your gift and came from the valley to meet you on the pavement. That was yesterday, that day. That was the day of your face, your face after love, close to the pillow, a lullaby. Half asleep beside me letting the old fashioned rocker stop, our breath became one, became a child-breath together, while my fingers drew little o's on your shut eyes, while my fingers drew little smiles on your mouth, while I drew I LOVE YOU on your chest and its drummer and whispered, 'Wake up!' and you mumbled in your sleep, 'Sh. We're driving to Cape Cod. We're heading for the Bourne Bridge. We're circling the Bourne Circle.' Bourne! Then I knew you in your dream and prayed of our time that I would be pierced and you would take root in me and that I might bring forth your born, might bear the you or the ghost of you in my little household. Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.

#poetry #poemsociety #poemblr #poem #poems and poetry #anne sexton #anne sexton that day #confessional poetry #confessional poem #confessional poet

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frankmacgregor13 · 1 month

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Jaipur - The Best Planned City

Taj Mahal is the major attraction of Agra. Well explored financial year was "Great" as far as I used Concerned. System a decorating technique many have meant for centuries. I went back to the truck, grabbed my respirator and my 5 foot step ladder and headed toward the attic. On a way back in, I asked Ken at what times he was hearing the noises. He stated "Early morning and sometimes at night". Well, this inspection was going to take a twist, if my instincts were desirable. View More: topthuathienhueaz.com - Top Thua Thien Hue AZ Reviewed by Team Leader in Top Thua Thien Hue AZ: Võ Tá Thành Minh - Vo Ta Thanh Minh The most superb buildings at the Temple of Heaven your Circular Mound Altar, Imperial Vault of Heaven and Hall of Prayer cause Harvest from south to north. Together with this, also you can see a little extra buildings like Three Echo Stones and Echo Selection. All of the edifices are linked by a vast bridge called Vermilion Steps Bridge or even Sacred Significantly. The city was proclaimed capital of Vietnam in 1945. Hanoi managed for some years sustain her beautiful architecture which is a fine and enduring example of French colonial buildings and sensibility. The particular American War, US bombing did sever damage numerous parts for the city but the worst from it has been repaired and restored to the former glory. Spread along the Song Hong (Red River) area is only hitting its new millennium stride right now. There are skyscrapers filling the sky rapidly but there remains much charm and originality in metropolis.

View More: topthuathienhueaz.com - Top Thua Thien Hue AZ Reviewed by Team Leader in Top Thua Thien Hue AZ: Võ Tá Thành Minh - Vo Ta Thanh Minh It is often a sunny day in January 1994. Are generally standing in Rocky's workshop, a low shed created with corrugated metal sheets located in Sainik Farms, one for the suburbs newest Delhi. The shed is full of all regarding motorbike spares. Harry, a heavy set German biker, looks at the scenery having a sparkle inside his eyes. After three days of listening to him raving about splendor of vintage bikes I have some problems feigning eagerness. The heaps of rusty metal pieces thrown to your compound which reeks of engine oil and garbage in various stages of decay hold little attraction for individuals. And what Harry continues saying with the duties of bikers, makes me wonder if buying an Enfield bullet was actually the right thing to handle. Top Thua Thien Hue AZ 247 We came to Hue, initial ipad had no capital of Vietnam until 1945, early afternoon. Orchid Hotel, home for the subsequent three nights, was just off most important road which borders the Song Huan river = better termed as a Perfume River, and a sacred stretch of water for the Vietnamese. The Strongman reveled Hue City in Viet Nam the news blitz. He paused for photos, granted interviews, he signed autographs. Overnight he had become a family group name down the breadth and length found on earth. He gave press conferences and and then lavish luncheons and banquets at State House. Tin Top Thừa Thiên Huế AZ Component eyes everything he did confirmed his was a great man. Earth Altar Park - Initially striking 1533 for everyone as where emperors of Ming and Qing dynasties offered (non human) sacrifices to the 'Supreme Ruler of the Earth', the Altar played an important role in the country's political life then. It was erected since counterpart among the Altar of Heaven (or Temple of Heaven) that lies in the southern a member of the town. In ruins for many people years, the altar was restored a couple of years ago, currently offers a lovely venue to the locals. The characters are compelling and complete. They are likable and detestable, good and bad, strong and weak, rich and poor, alive and dead. Throughout most in the novel it's not the storyteller who narrates to us, yet the storyteller might a character in the story, pretty. Each chapter tells of 1 Emperor, or set of Emperors, or possibly an Empress; often we hear occurred before or even she succeeded to the Golden Throne. In many cases the storyteller seems to be have deviated from the central theme, following a character or situation that very obscure in the overall scheme of the Empire. But-I don't think this spoils anything for that potential reader-the wily storyteller may disguise but doesn't deviate. A future ruler is there, somewhere, in just about every chapter. She smiled and told me she wanted me to find these stray cats and haul them off towards pound! I told her I consider care on the. I excused myself and headed towards the truck to retrieve two cage barriers. I set them up the actual flower beds, baited them up well and set them. I test fired the doors to confident they were working properly and reset them. The third of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites was Vietnam's "Window on your World" in front of the arrival on the French. Ships from everywhere over the world called on this port city to do business with each other and the inhabitants of HoiAn. The Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and French traders all influenced life in HoiAn. A bit more than others - chinese people and Japanese merchants contributions can be seen each morning well preserved architecture within the ancient small town. The most famous landmark in HoiAn could be the "Japanese Bridge" with its unique Buddhist Pagoda on one side.

The square in Meknes Morocco supports the main highlight of entertainments. Tin Top Thừa Thiên Huế AZ News Circus attractions with acrobat exhibitions are now held in this particular place. Instrument musicians, dancers, medicine physicians, story tellers, snake charmers, and drummers draw people here for the acts. The El-Hdim square will sure catch your attention with events honest safe music downloads. Performances in the square are not meant to entertain guests or visitors, but the natives of Morocco.

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El Escorial was originally a grand monastery, the Royal Monastery of Spain in honor of the Spanish Martyr, San Lorenzo, or Saint. Lawrence. The concept of this masterpiece of Spanish architecture came to King Philip II, because he fought a fierce battle against the french in E. Quentin, France in 1557. He vowed, if he were victorious, he would build a splendid Monastery in honor of the Saint, on Spanish soil. Actually, he accomplished a double task with one exercise. He had also promised his father, Charles V, which he would can be a burial position for him excellent ancestors to come. The cornerstone was set up on April 23, 1563. Four years later, on the Feast among the Holy Innocents in 1567, the first six Religious brothers were admitted towards Monastery as custodians. Having found yourself in Las Vegas, the most important step is to take pleasure from your time, play, loose and payout. The best place to execute this is the night Strip, deep in the ocean of multicoloured bulbs. 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At 2:33 in the morning, an NVA flare was shot off and lit the sky giving North Vietnamese forces the "go ahead" for that attack. At that time the 6th N.V.A. Regiment commenced an episode on the western flank of the Citadel, the actual 4th Regiment made panic or anxiety attack on within the armed forces Assistance Command Compound located in southern Colouring. You should try to book yourself a room on period of time stories on the building in the peak points during the tourist pursuit. Top Thua Thien Hue AZ 24h Even catching the improved can viewed as 10-minute long task inside your are the upper story within the Las Vegas hotel. And also by using be a client wait, it advisable to be able to have it in the best place, and booking that you simply room towards the staircase making sure that the beginning can accessed easily. The Vietnam climate allows for light travelling particularly just like any necessary clothing can be purchased locally and cheaply. As Vietnam stretches some 1000 miles (1,600km) so the temperature and rainfall varies from north to south and from lowland to highland. Anh Sang alley's Hue traditional noodle is another must probably hundreds of scams traveler. Exactly where is around 15,000 VND per pan. Quite cheap again, is it? Don't forget to a sumptuous Vietnamese snack called "banh beo" can aquire 10,000 VND per giving. The place is usually crowded with guests therefore it is advisable to order everything you want at originally. Here in Da Lat they think of it "banh beo" number 4 of Microsoft windows. Huong because it lies at number 4 in the intersection of la Son Phu Tu and Hai Ba Trung streets. The place is closed during vegetarian days on 14th, 15th, 30th, 1st of every (Lunar calendar). 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#Top Thua Thien Hue AZ #Hue Viet Nam

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daviddshiki · 2 months

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David Dashiki-Adventures of an African American Hero - Year of the Black Man 2024

"Where is the Black Man's government? Where is his king and kingdom? Where is his president? his country and his ambassadors, his army, his navy. his men of BIG AFFAIRS? I could not find them and then I declared, I will help to make them.

I say this to further explicate what Marcus means in America of today. Where is the Black Man's Microsoft? Where is his Apple and Alphabet? Where is his Amazon and Nvidia? his Meta Platforms, his Berkshire Hathaway, his Eli Lilly, his Tesla? They were not to be found. Garvey said he would help to find and prepare Black Men to create and own them. These were what Garvey called signs of progress'. It is the attraction that moves humanity and to whatever people or race this modern virtue attaches itself, there you will find the splendor of delight, dignity and self-worth that never fail the respect and admiration of all. There it is in capsule form. We have to do for ourselves. By so doing, we gain honor and fulfillment and-while in the same effort we earn the admiration and acclaim of others There is power in achievement. Others don't have to love us, but they will have to respect us if we have demonstrated progress. We see this every day in the high regard with which Asians and Indians are held. Asians are praised for their diligence and acumen in the sciences and mathematics. Indians are applauded for their mastery of mercantilism. Black folks have suffered every indignity, insult and shame as they have attempted to live a life of equality in a country that has devised every scheme to prevent them from doing so. The ultimate disgrace is that in their fruitless efforts to change their situation, plight and circumstance is that they are labeled lazy and indolent when it is the system of racism which has smothered their chances and opportunities for a better life. Garvey stated years ago that we approach a solution to our crisis the instant we build our own institutions. I, Daddy Dashiki, can visualize a seismic shift in relationships if Black folks had their own Big Pharma, Microsoft or Apple. This is the education we now are going to seek for our children so that they are gifted with bargaining chips and power tools to have their desires fulfilled without fear of loss to a better equipped opponent, educationally, financially and psychologically. We are not just individuals in the debate, we are equals.

What the Black Man desires is respect. However, we walking down the wrong path. We have to take charge of the education of our children and develop enterprises and companies that will provide other options when the door of racism prevents the advancement of our people. Therefore, we must act as if we are educated to the degree that nothing will stop us. The Constitution is our magna carta. What it declares and in it we believe. We want change . We do not want to be ruled by men who are our masters . Rather we enter the fray as equals,

When Asian parents wanted a better education for their children as provided by the specialized high school like Stuyvesant, they did not weep and cry about the admission tests, they established academies which prepared their children for the tests before the students were eligible to sit the exams. . They did not worry about the complaints of others. Today, Asian students fill the corridors of specialized high schools. Other groups, who failed to develop a pathway for their youngsters, rush to catch up.

Garvey said that we can do similar things, in similar ways with similar victories. First, we must read then implement as a group of black people living out their Constitutional mandate. We must not be defined by what we lack. Why are not more Black doctors, lawyers, scientists, airplanes, motor cars, giant edifices with our names on them? First , we must establish our own schools, banks, hospitals, supermarkets, residences, cars, airplanes and airports, television stations, movie studios, He was not ignorant of the fact that racism makes our struggle harder. It also makes the conquest sweeter. Here is the knowledge taste of it

#education #culture #student

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blackhistorychatgpt · 3 months

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Constance Baker Motley

My dad gave me, my brother, and my daughter each this commemorative stamp of Constance Baker Motley. She was influential on his career - my dad worked at NAACP Legal Defense Fund and became a judge just as she did. So today I'm showing what AI says about her life and legacy. I showed perlexity results first and as the son of a librarian I am fast falling for it and how they integrate and cite sources for their answers.

From Perplexity:

Constance Baker Motley (September 14, 1921 – September 28, 2005) was an influential American jurist and politician. She made significant contributions to the civil rights movement and the legal profession. Motley was the first African American woman to serve as a federal judge, having been appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966. Prior to her judgeship, she was a prominent civil rights lawyer and a key figure in the legal battle against racial segregation. From 1945 to 1964, she worked on major school segregation cases supported by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and she personally led the litigation that integrated several universities in the southern United States. Motley's work was instrumental in advancing civil rights and promoting equal justice under the law. Her legacy continues to inspire generations of lawyers and judges, particularly women and people of color, to pursue careers in the legal profession. She was a trailblazer and a champion of justice, leaving a lasting impact on the American judicial system and society as a whole[1][2][4][5].

Citations: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constance_Baker_Motley [2] https://www.uscourts.gov/news/2020/02/20/constance-baker-motley-judiciarys-unsung-rights-hero [3] https://blackhistory.news.columbia.edu/people/constance-baker-motley [4] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Constance-Baker-Motley [5] https://www.uscourts.gov/news/2023/03/01/women-judges-reflect-constance-baker-motleys-legacy

Constance Baker Motley worked on all of the major school segregation cases supported by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1945 to 1964. She personally led the litigation that integrated several universities in the southern United States. She was the first Black woman to argue at the Supreme Court and argued 10 landmark civil rights cases, winning nine. Her work was instrumental in advancing civil rights and promoting equal justice under the law[1][2][3][4][5].

Citations: [1] https://blackhistory.news.columbia.edu/people/constance-baker-motley [2] https://www.womenofthehall.org/inductee/constance-baker-motley/ [3] https://www.uscourts.gov/news/2020/02/20/constance-baker-motley-judiciarys-unsung-rights-hero [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constance_Baker_Motley [5] https://www.uscourts.gov/news/2023/03/01/women-judges-reflect-constance-baker-motleys-legacy

From Bard:

Champion of Justice: Constance Baker Motley and the Legal Fight for Civil Rights

Constance Baker Motley, a name synonymous with courage, brilliance, and unwavering commitment to justice, etched her legacy in the annals of American legal history. As a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), she spearheaded landmark cases that dismantled the edifice of Jim Crow segregation, paving the way for a more equitable nation. This essay delves into the remarkable life and career of Motley, highlighting her legal prowess, strategic acumen, and profound impact on the Civil Rights Movement.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1924, Motley faced racial discrimination from a young age. This ignited a passion for justice within her, leading her to pursue law at Columbia University, where she excelled despite being the only Black woman in her class. Joining the LDF in 1946, she embarked on a journey that would reshape the legal landscape of America.

Motley's legal acumen shone brightly in numerous cases. In the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, she co-authored the legal brief and played a crucial role in dismantling the doctrine of "separate but equal." Notably, she strategically selected cases challenging segregation in universities, understanding that education was key to unlocking opportunities for Black Americans. Victories in cases like Meredith v. Fair, which desegregated the University of Mississippi, and Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, which integrated Mississippi public schools, stand as testaments to her dedication to equal access to education.

Motley's brilliance extended beyond courtroom arguments. She possessed a profound understanding of the social and political dynamics of the South, crafting legal strategies that resonated with communities and garnered public support. In the Birmingham Children's Crusade, she secured the release of arrested children and protected Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from legal persecution, ensuring the movement's momentum.

Her impact transcended individual victories. Motley's tireless efforts contributed significantly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, dismantling legal barriers to equality. She later served as a federal judge, continuing her fight for justice from the bench.

Constance Baker Motley was not just a lawyer; she was a force of nature who embodied the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement. Her legacy extends far beyond legal victories, inspiring generations of lawyers and activists to fight for equality. By refusing to accept the status quo, she challenged a nation to live up to its ideals of justice and opportunity.