#national novel writing mont
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Good day ya'll!
Its 11:30 and I just completed a small research session on fillipino martial arts and taking extensive notes on how my characters might move in the upcoming combat scenes.
Funny enough, I always thought my larp experience would help in writing combat realistically… but oh boy… I WAS SO WRONG… its embarassing.
I am still no real expert, but maybe I can find someone to help with those scenes in particular down the line.
For now I did watch some videos and read some instructions online and feel confident to get into the fight scene, I've been hyped for yesterday… but first… warm up time!!
by Electrum Photography
Then and again, he would get a flicker of red eyes, burning brightly with flashes of inert blood magic, his friend no doubt struggling to hold it back, hating crowds as it was.
Dan… you are getting an ear full, for dragging her out here, he thought ruefully and picked up his pacing again.
A few moments later, she stumbled free from the bodies swaying and squirming with the thrumming beats. "going to try smth new, winky face", had been the last text he received from her before getting on the tube and hot damn… she had. Only her hair was reminiscent of the timid mage, kept straight and falling down onto her shoulders, bangs freshly trimmed to end in a straight line above her brows.
To cover her chest Lucille wore only a black pleather bra, the burning church tattooed across he abdomen, was on full display, showing its bell-tower ablaze, right between her breasts. She had paired it off with nothing more than a pair of latex gloves and a matching skirt, making Dan sweat just by looking at it. Clashing with the entire get up, the mad woman had forgone the use of shoes completely.
Not my best work… but after spending so much time on researching, I am a bit anxious to get writing. There is still some catching up with the long-term goal to do… soooo snaps fingers LET'S DO IT!
Okaaay… five hours later… didn't hit the word count… yet. But I am due for a food break, having ordered poké bowl from my fav restaurant.
I really underestimated how far fight scenes were out of my comfortzone… usually I am more for the whole emotional stuff… but as I am writing sci-fi about ppl doing sneaky shit and pissing off powerful other ppl, I don't think I will get away without it…
In the end… I went against the plan I had, and reshuffled my entire story a little bit.. soooo.. that just might turn into something interesting… who knows…
As of now I am at ~1400 words, so very close… aaaand the next scene coming up, will be snugly inside my comfort zone again, hence I am no tooo worried, I won't hit my mark for the day.This wraps up Chapter IV nice and neat~
I do a lot better at starting a chapter than ending it sooo...
But.. to learn from this, I will probably alter the daily warm up challenge a bit… by changing it to stuff I am not quite good at yet..
Maybe a paragraph of a battle scene or dialogue each day? Something like this.
As it stands now, I will wait for my food and write a bit more afterwards…
For now, lets continue with the Playlist, shall we?
Today's song:
Faunts - M4 Pt.2
youtube
Why is this on my playlist?
Those among you with an excellent taste in Video Games, might already know this one. If not by name, then from the Mass Effect I credits, as it is from the Game's OST.
To be honest, it doesn't align at all with what I usually listen to, but then that's mostly everything that leads to the release of dopamine in my brain… so I can't claim any consistency there.
Being a huuuuge fan of the Mass Effect Trilogy… and my alien waifu Garrus, connecting a very peaceful time in my life with these games… an age of innocence so to speak.. I have feelings about the song as well…
The lyrics just resonate with me… and I kinda always come back to it, when I have a hard time. Its not cheerful or anything.. but it holds this deepfelt wish for someone to heal… and struggling with mental illness, I just need it.
As my novel draws a lot from my personal experiences and how I see the world, this fits the story's playlist quite well… and its Mass Effect related… sooo doubly perfect~
Sooooo I will go wait for food now and play some Mahjong or whatever :D
Have a lovely day~
#writing#creative writing#on writing#national novel writing mont#nanowrimo 2023#nanowrimo#sci fi novel#science fiction#sci fi#writing challenge#writing journal#writing journey#faunts#mass effect#Youtube
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Oct. 5, 2022
Suzan-Lori Parks is drawn to archways. Early on in her New York life, long before she became one of the nation’s most acclaimed playwrights, she lived above a McDonald’s on Sixth Avenue — the Golden Arches. Then she moved out by Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, with its triumphal Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch. Now she lives in an apartment overlooking the marble monument honoring the nation’s first president at the entrance to Washington Square Park.
“It’s very symbolic,” Parks told me. “I’m always orienting myself to arches.”
Arches, of course, are gateways, portals between one world and another, and Parks is endlessly thinking about other worlds.
This season, audiences will have ample opportunity to join her.
A starry 20th-anniversary revival of “Topdog/Underdog,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning fable about two brothers, three-card monte and one troubling inheritance, is in previews on Broadway. “Sally & Tom,” a new play about Parks’s two favorite subjects, history and theater, but also about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, has just begun performances at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. “Plays for the Plague Year,” Parks’s diaristic musings on the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic and a coincident string of deaths, including those of Black Americans killed by police officers, is to be presented next month at Joe’s Pub, with Parks onstage singing and starring. And “The Harder They Come,” her musical adaptation of the 1972 outlaw film with a reggae score, will be staged at the Public Theater early next year.
“I’m like a bard,” she said. “I want to sing the songs for the people, and have them remember who they are.”
At this point in her career, Parks, who in 2002 became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama, is a revered figure, regularly described as one of the greatest contemporary playwrights.
“She occupies pretty hallowed air: She’s the one who walks among us,” said the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who teaches playwriting and performance studies at Yale.
“She’s the reigning empress of the Black and weird in theater,” he said. “And she really is the most successful dramatist of the avant-garde working today.”
PARKS HAS BEEN TELLING STORIES since she was a child. She wrote songs. She tried writing a novel. There was a period when she made her own newspaper, called The Daily Daily, reporting on what she saw through a Vermont attic window. (She was born in Kentucky, and moved frequently because her father was in the military.)
While an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke, she had the good fortune to take a creative-writing class at nearby Hampshire College with James Baldwin, who suggested she try playwriting, and, even though she feared he was just trying to politely steer her away from prose, she did. “That’s what I’m doing still,” she said. “Trying theater.”
Her apartment is filled with evidence of a furiously busy creative life: shelves heaving with plastic crates containing thoughts on pending and possible projects; elements of a second novel marinating on a wallboard cloaked by a blanket; index cards in Ziploc bags; a laptop perched on a crate atop the dining table; lyric revisions in notebooks on a music stand by an ever-at-the-ready guitar. (She is a songwriter who occasionally performs with a band; this season’s four productions all feature music she wrote.)
“Writing, I think, is related to being kind of like a witch,” she said as she showed me around. “Writing is magical. I loved mythology, and folk tales, and I could hear them — old stories — not in a recording of something that somebody living in my presence had told me, but if you listen, you can hear organizational principles of nature, which includes the history of people, which is narrative.”
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So writing is listening? “Not in a passive way,” she said. “I’m on the hunt.” By this point, she was on her feet, pantomiming the stalking stance of a wild cat, preparing to pounce. “You’re being drawn toward it, and you’re reeling it in at the same time, like a fisher.”
As she talked, she kept cutting herself off, reaching for ways to differentiate her craft. “There’s a lot of writers who have ideas, and they have an agenda, and that’s cool,” she said. “I think I’m something else.”
Digging in to the question of why she writes, she became more and more expansive, reflecting on the songlines of Indigenous Australians, which connect geography and mythology.
“We have our songlines too — we just forgot them a long time ago,” she said. “They’re encoded in all the religious texts. They’re in African folk tales. They’re in the stories that your mom or your grandmother taught you. They’re there, and I can’t get them out of my head.”
“If you can hear the world singing,” she added, “it’s your job to write it down, because that’s the calling.”
PARKS IS NOW 59, and her work has been in production for 35 years. In 1989, the first time The New York Times reviewed her work, the critic Mel Gussow declared her “the year’s most promising new playwright.” In 2018, my critic colleagues at The Times declared “Topdog/Underdog” the best American play of the previous quarter century; explaining the choice, Ben Brantley, who was then the paper’s co-chief theater critic, described Parks as “a specialist in the warping weight of American history,” and declared, “Suzan-Lori Parks has emerged as the most consistently inventive, and venturesome, American dramatist working today.”
“She is a genre in and of herself,” said the playwright James Ijames, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in drama for “Fat Ham.” And what is that genre? “It is formally really dazzling, in terms of how she structures the play; there is humor underpinned with horror and political satire; there’s this real thread of the blues and folkways and things that are just root Black American signifiers; it’s musical, it’s whimsical, it’s playful, and it’s dangerous — all of the stuff that’s so exciting to see onstage.”
Her early plays were experimental (“opaque,” Brantley once wrote). The recent plays have been more accessible, for which Parks makes no apologies.
“People — not you, but people — when they ask that question, they’re like, ‘Oh, so now you’re selling out! You’re getting more mainstream and you’re not being true to your roots!’” she said. “Oh, no. I’m becoming more and more and more true. Trust me on this one: I’m following the spirit, no doubt. So, yeah, ‘Plays for the Plague Year’ looks like real life, cause it is. So maybe we ought to think about what am I writing about, and if I’m true to what I’m writing about.”
Reflecting her singular stature, Parks has an unusual perch from which to work: She is a writer in residence at the Public Theater, where she receives a full-time salary and benefits. At the Public, she also conducts one of her great ongoing experiments, “Watch Me Work,” a series of events, in-person before the pandemic and online now, at which anyone can work on their own writing while she works on hers, and then they talk about creativity. Early in the pandemic, Parks held such sessions online every day.
“Her great subject,” said the Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, “is freedom. It’s both what she writes about, and how she writes.”
As part of her arrangement with the Public, Parks is also an arts professor at N.Y.U., which is how she wound up across from Washington Square Park, where she lives in faculty housing with her husband, Christian Konopka, and their 11-year-old son. For years, they shared one bedroom; this summer, they finally scored an upgrade, just 70 steps down the hall (their son counted), but now with a bit more space and that archward view.
She has surrounded herself with a striking number of good-luck charms: not only the pink unicorn balance board on which she stands while typing, but also a tray of unicorn plushies; James Baldwin and Frida Kahlo votive candles; a hamsa wall hanging she picked up at a flea market; milagro hearts from Mexico; Buddha, Ganesh, rabbit and turtle figurines; and a deck of tarot cards (yes, she did a basic reading for me; I drew the high priestess card). Also: she has tattooed into one arm, three times, a yoga sutra in Sanskrit that she translated as “submit your will to the will of God.” (She calls herself a “faith-based, spiritual-based person,” and is also a longtime practitioner of Ashtanga yoga, which she does every morning, after meditation and before writing.)
“All the help I can get, baby,” she said.
THE MANY ARTIFACTS on display in her apartment include a shelf set up as a shrine to Baldwin, a dollar bill Parks collected when, feeling the need to perform, she tried busking in a subway station, and a “Black Lives Matter” placard she held at protests during the summer of 2020, when she also signed the “We See You White American Theater” petition, written by an anonymous collective, calling for changes in the industry.
“Hey, I’m angry as the next Black woman,” she said. “And yet, to get through this, we need to also listen — listen to the voice of anger, listen to the voice of love, listen to the voice of wisdom, listen to the voice of history.”
She added, “Let’s not just stand around telling people that they suck. At least where I come from, that’s not a conversation, and, at least where I come from, that’s not good dialogue.”
The tone of some of the conversation around diversity in theater is clearly a concern of hers — that’s obvious in “Plays for the Plague Year,” which, in the most recent draft, contains a playlet called “The Black Police,” in which three “Black Cops” approach a “writer,” played by Parks, and say, “We’re here to talk with you about your blackness/Why you work with who you work with.”
In our interview, Parks said she was troubled by “the policing of Black people by Black people, and not just in the arts,” adding, “we have to wake up to the ways we are policing each other to our detriment.”
“No more trauma-based writing!” she said. “These are rules. And Suzan-Lori Parks does not like to be policed. Any policing cuts me off from hearing the spirit. Sometimes the spirit sings a song of trauma. I’m not supposed to extend my hand to that spirit that is hurting because it’s no longer marketable, or because I should be only extending my hand to the spirits who are singing a song of joy? That’s not how I want to conduct my artistic life.”
She also said she is troubled by how much anger, at the Public Theater and elsewhere, has been directed at white women. “Not to say that Karen doesn’t exist. Yes, yes, yes. But it’s interesting that on our mission to dismantle the patriarchy, we sure did go after a lot of white women. If you talk about it, it’s ‘You’re supporting white supremacy.’ No, I’m not. I’m supporting nuanced conversation. And I think a lot of that got lost, and lot of times we just stayed silent when the loudest voice in the room was talking, and the loudest voice in the room is not always the voice of wisdom.”
THIS SEASON, SHE’S PIVOTING back toward the stage after a stretch of film work in which she wrote the screenplay for “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” and was a writer, showrunner and executive producer of “Genius: Aretha,” both of which were released last year.
At the start of the pandemic, she assigned herself the project that became “Plays for the Plague Year,” writing one short play each day for 13 months. The discipline was a familiar one: In 2002, after winning the Pulitzer, she began “365 Days/365 Plays,” then she did another daily playwriting exercise during the first 100 days of the Trump presidency. The pandemic play is part personal history — how the coronavirus affected Parks and her family — and part requiem for those who died during that period, from George Floyd to Parks’s first husband. The play, like much of Parks’s work, features songs she wrote. “I was moved into other states, where I wasn’t just documenting what happened that day, but I wanted to sing,” she said.
She’s got plenty still to come — she’s still polishing “The Harder They Come,” which will feature songs by Jimmy Cliff and others, including Parks, who said the story, set in Jamaica, “really captures a beautiful people in their struggle.” She’s then hoping to turn to that second novel (a first, “Getting Mother’s Body,” was published in 2003).
She is planning a screen adaptation of “Topdog,” as well as a new segment of her Civil War drama “Father Comes Home From the Wars” (so far, three parts have been staged; she said she expects to write nine or 12). Also: she’s writing the book, music and lyrics for an Afrofuturist musical, “Jubilee,” that she’s developing with Bard College; “Jubilee,” inspired by “Treemonisha,” a Scott Joplin opera that was staged on Broadway in 1975, is about a woman who establishes a new society on the site of a former plantation.
On a recent afternoon in Minneapolis, Parks settled in behind a folding table to watch a stumble-through of “Sally & Tom,” which is being developed in association with the Public, where it is expected to be staged next fall. The work, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, is structured as a play-within-a-play — it depicts a contemporary New York theater company in the final days of rehearsing a new play about Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, an enslaved woman. Parks has had a longtime interest in Jefferson and Hemings, and at one point had worked on a television project about the relationship that never got made; the play, she said, is not a straight historical drama, but “about how the world is made, and how we live in this country.”
The protagonist is a playwright who, like Parks, is warm but exacting, and is rewriting and restructuring the show as opening night nears. When I asked Joseph Haj, the Guthrie’s artistic director, how much he thought the play was about Parks, he at first shrugged it off, saying artists are always present in their work. After the run-through, he grabbed me to amend his remarks. “I take back everything I said,” he said. “I see her all over this.”
Kristen Ariza, who is playing the playwright as well as Hemings (the fictional playwright stars in her own play) said “the play is full of humor, until it’s not.”
“It feels so meta, because we’re doing the play, within the play, and we’re doing all these things like within the play,” she said. “She’s constantly questioning, ‘Does this fit? Is it working? Is it flowing correctly? She’s hearing our voices and adding things and making things work better as we go.”
A few days later, Parks was in Times Square, watching an invited dress rehearsal for “Topdog/Underdog.” The set is draped in a floor-to-ceiling gold-dipped American flag, meant, the director, Kenny Leon, told me, to reflect the way commerce infuses the culture.
Two actors who have enjoyed success onscreen, Corey Hawkins (“In the Heights”) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (“Watchmen,” “Aquaman”), play the story’s brothers, mischievously named Lincoln and Booth. They share a shabby apartment; Lincoln, fatefully, works as a Lincoln impersonator at an amusement park where patrons pretend to assassinate him, while Booth makes ends meet by shoplifting. Their relationship to each other, to truth-telling, and to their shared history is at the heart of the story.
Both actors encountered the play as undergraduates; Hawkins was a stagehand on a production at Juilliard, and Abdul-Mateen read a few scenes as Booth while at Berkeley. “It’s the first piece of material that I ever performed on a stage that I felt like was written for someone like me,” Abdul-Mateen said.
Like many people I spoke with, Abdul-Mateen was particularly struck by Parks’s ear for dialogue. “It’s as if she eavesdropped on these two characters,” he said, “and just wrote everything down as she heard it.”
Hawkins called the play “an ode to young Black men who don’t always get to live out loud.” And he is embracing that opportunity — one night, he called Parks at 2 a.m. to discuss a section of the play; she has also helped him learn the guitar, which he had not played before getting this role. “There’s something very grounding about that peace that she carries,” he said. “When she walks in the room, she carries the ancestors, the people we’re trying to honor, with her.”
Shortly after we hung up, my phone rang: Hawkins again, this time with a reverential plea. “Make us proud, man,” he said. “She’s a national treasure for us.”
#Suzan-Lori Parks Is on Broadway#Off Broadway and Everywhere Else#Suzan-Lori Parks#Broadway#Black Actors#African American Playwriters
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Holidays 12.6
Holidays
Abolición del Ejército (Costa Rica)
Adore You Day
Armed Forces Day (Ukraine)
Christkind (Central & Southern Europe)
Constitution Day (Spain)
Dia de la Constitucion (a.k.a. Constitution Day; Spain)
Dogecoin Day
Ed Tech Appreciation Day
Encyclopedia Britannica Day
Give a Secret Gift Day
Gorse Day (French Republic)
Gramophone Day
Halifax Explosion Anniversary Day (Canada)
Ice Cube Day (Astronomy Club)
International Bad Hair Day
International Desk Day
International Memecoin Day
Miner's Day (West Virginia)
Mitten Tree Day
Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies Day (Azerbaijan)
Musical Instrument Gift Day
National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women (Canada)
National Microwave Oven Day
National Miner's Day
National Pawnbrokers Day
National Sunnies Day (Australia)
National Travis Day
Put On Your Own Shoes Day
Quito Day (Ecuador)
Sindhi Topi and Ajrak Day (Pakistan)
Food & Drink Celebrations
Make & Bake Day
National ‘Cook For Christmas’ Day
National Gazpacho Day
Samichlaus Day
1st Wednesday in December
Special Kids Day [1st Wednesday]
Independence Days
Åland Islands (from Russia, 1917)
Bophuthatswana (from South Africa, 1977)
Finland (from Russia, 1917)
Ireland (from the UK, recognized in 1922)
Kingdom of Titan (Declared; 2020) [unrecognized]
Feast Days
Abraham of Kratia (Christian; Saint)
Aemilianus (Roman Catholic Church)
Akibasan Gongen Hibuse Matsuri (Fire & Water Festival; Japan)
Crossover Doozer (Muppetism)
Day of the North Wind (Pagan)
Denise and companions (Christian; Saints)
Dionysia, Dativa, Aemilianus, Boniface, Leontia, Tertius, and Majoricus (Christian; Martyrs)
Eliot Porter (Artology)
Frédéric Bazille (Artology)
Gamera Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)
Insult a Religious Fanatic Day (Pastafarian)
James Bernouilli (Positivist; Saint)
János Scheffler (Christian; Blessed)
María del Monte Carmelo Sallés y Barangueras (Christian; Saint)
Nicholas of Myra (Christian; Saint) [brewers]
Peter Paschal (Christian; Saint)
Pirate Appreciation Day (Pastafarian)
Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch (Christian; Saint)
Thor's Day (Norse)
Turnover (The Seasons of Earnings begins; Church of the SubGenius)
Lucky & Unlucky Days
Sakimake (先負 Japan) [Bad luck in the morning, good luck in the afternoon.]
Tycho Brahe Unlucky Day (Scandinavia) [35 of 37]
Unglückstage (Unlucky Day; Pennsylvania Dutch) [28 of 30]
Very Unlucky Day (Grafton’s Manual of 1565) [56 of 60]
Premieres
Adaptation (Film; 2002)
Aeronauts (Film; 2019)
As Good As It Gets (Film; 1997)
Beggar’s Banquet, by The Rolling Stones (Album; 1968)
Bullseye Bullwinkle, or Destination Moose (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 3; 1959)
Cinderella (Disney Cartoon; 1922)
Day Tripper, by The Beatles (Song; 1965)
DuBarry Was A Lady (Broadway Musical; 1939)
Dumb and Dumber (Film; 1994)
Ferry Cross the Mersey (Documentary Film; 1964)
Gimme Shelter (Concert Film; 1970)
Going To A Go-Go, by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (Song; 1965)
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, recorded by Bob Dylan (Song; 1962)
Hip Hip-Hurry! (WB MM Cartoon; 1958)
The Lake District Murder, by Ernest Elmore, writing as John Bude (Novel; 1935)
Live at the BBC, by The Beatles (Compilation Album; 1994)
Mary Had a Little Lamb, recorded by Thomas Edison (Song; 1877) [1st Recording of the Human Voice]
Mr. Willowby’s Christmas Tree (Muppet TV Special; 1995)
19th Nervous Breakdown, recorded by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1965)
Popeye (Film; 1980)
Red Bank Boogie, recorded by The Count Basie Orchestra (Song; 1944)
Rubber Soul, by The Beatles (Album; 1965)
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Animated TV Special; 1964)
Running on Empty, by Jackson Browne (Live Album; 1977)
Sixteen Stone, by Bush (Album; 1994)
Smoke on the Water, recorded by Deep Purple (Song; 1971)
Squeeze Play or Invitation to the Trance (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 4; 1959)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Film; 1991)
Still Crazy After All These Years, by Paul Simon (Album; 1975)
The Story of an Hour, by Kate Chopin (Short Story; 1894)
The Stroll, by The Diamonds (Song; 1957)
Sympathy for the Devil, by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1968)
Tommy Tucker’s Tooth (Disney Cartoon; 1922)
Turn! Turn! Turn!, by The Byrds (Album; 1965)
We Can Work It Out, by The Beatles (Song; 1965)
Whole Lotta Love, by Led Zeppelin (Song; 1969)
Today’s Name Days
Denise, Henrike, Nikolaus (Austria)
Nikola, Nikolai, Nina (Bulgaria)
Nikica, Niko, Nikola, Nikša, Vladimir (Croatia)
Mikuláš (Czech Republic)
Nikolaus (Denmark)
Klaus, Laas, Laus, Nigul, Nigulas, Niilas, Niilo, Nikolai, Nils (Estonia)
Niila, Niilo, Niki, Niklas, Niko, Nikolai, Nikolas (Finland)
Nicolas (France)
Denise, Henrike, Nikolaus (Germany)
Nikolaos, Nikoleta, Nikos (Greece)
Miklós (Hungary)
Nicola (Italy)
Klāvs, Niklāvs, Nikolajs (Latvia)
Bilmantas, Mikalojus, Norvydė (Lithuania)
Nikolai, Nils (Norway)
Dionizja, Emilian, Jarema, Jarogniew, Mikołaj (Poland)
Nicolae (România)
Mikuláš (Slovakia)
Nicolás (Spain)
Niklas, Nikolaus (Sweden)
Nicholas (Ukraine)
Claus, Ira, Nicholas, Nichole, Nicholet, Nick, Nicklaus, Nickolas, Nico, Nicolas, Nicole, Nicolette, Nikki, Niko, Nikolas (USA)
Today is Also…
Day of Year: Day 340 of 2024; 25 days remaining in the year
ISO: Day 3 of week 49 of 2023
Celtic Tree Calendar: Ruis (Elder) [Day 9 of 28]
Chinese: Month 10 (Gui-Hai), Day 24 (Wu-Xu)
Chinese Year of the: Rabbit 4721 (until February 10, 2024)
Hebrew: 23 Kislev 5784
Islamic: 23 Jumada I 1445
J Cal: 10 Zima; Threesday [10 of 30]
Julian: 23 November 2023
Moon: 36%: Waning Crescent
Positivist: 4 Bichat (13th Month) [James Bernouilli]
Runic Half Month: Is (Stasis) [Day 11 of 15]
Season: Autumn (Day 74 of 89)
Zodiac: Sagittarius (Day 15 of 30)
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Text
Holidays 12.6
Holidays
Abolición del Ejército (Costa Rica)
Adore You Day
Armed Forces Day (Ukraine)
Christkind (Central & Southern Europe)
Constitution Day (Spain)
Dia de la Constitucion (a.k.a. Constitution Day; Spain)
Dogecoin Day
Ed Tech Appreciation Day
Encyclopedia Britannica Day
Give a Secret Gift Day
Gorse Day (French Republic)
Gramophone Day
Halifax Explosion Anniversary Day (Canada)
Ice Cube Day (Astronomy Club)
International Bad Hair Day
International Desk Day
International Memecoin Day
Miner's Day (West Virginia)
Mitten Tree Day
Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies Day (Azerbaijan)
Musical Instrument Gift Day
National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women (Canada)
National Microwave Oven Day
National Miner's Day
National Pawnbrokers Day
National Sunnies Day (Australia)
National Travis Day
Put On Your Own Shoes Day
Quito Day (Ecuador)
Sindhi Topi and Ajrak Day (Pakistan)
Food & Drink Celebrations
Make & Bake Day
National ‘Cook For Christmas’ Day
National Gazpacho Day
Samichlaus Day
1st Wednesday in December
Special Kids Day [1st Wednesday]
Independence Days
Åland Islands (from Russia, 1917)
Bophuthatswana (from South Africa, 1977)
Finland (from Russia, 1917)
Ireland (from the UK, recognized in 1922)
Kingdom of Titan (Declared; 2020) [unrecognized]
Feast Days
Abraham of Kratia (Christian; Saint)
Aemilianus (Roman Catholic Church)
Akibasan Gongen Hibuse Matsuri (Fire & Water Festival; Japan)
Crossover Doozer (Muppetism)
Day of the North Wind (Pagan)
Denise and companions (Christian; Saints)
Dionysia, Dativa, Aemilianus, Boniface, Leontia, Tertius, and Majoricus (Christian; Martyrs)
Eliot Porter (Artology)
Frédéric Bazille (Artology)
Gamera Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)
Insult a Religious Fanatic Day (Pastafarian)
James Bernouilli (Positivist; Saint)
János Scheffler (Christian; Blessed)
María del Monte Carmelo Sallés y Barangueras (Christian; Saint)
Nicholas of Myra (Christian; Saint) [brewers]
Peter Paschal (Christian; Saint)
Pirate Appreciation Day (Pastafarian)
Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch (Christian; Saint)
Thor's Day (Norse)
Turnover (The Seasons of Earnings begins; Church of the SubGenius)
Lucky & Unlucky Days
Sakimake (先負 Japan) [Bad luck in the morning, good luck in the afternoon.]
Tycho Brahe Unlucky Day (Scandinavia) [35 of 37]
Unglückstage (Unlucky Day; Pennsylvania Dutch) [28 of 30]
Very Unlucky Day (Grafton’s Manual of 1565) [56 of 60]
Premieres
Adaptation (Film; 2002)
Aeronauts (Film; 2019)
As Good As It Gets (Film; 1997)
Beggar’s Banquet, by The Rolling Stones (Album; 1968)
Bullseye Bullwinkle, or Destination Moose (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 3; 1959)
Cinderella (Disney Cartoon; 1922)
Day Tripper, by The Beatles (Song; 1965)
DuBarry Was A Lady (Broadway Musical; 1939)
Dumb and Dumber (Film; 1994)
Ferry Cross the Mersey (Documentary Film; 1964)
Gimme Shelter (Concert Film; 1970)
Going To A Go-Go, by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (Song; 1965)
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, recorded by Bob Dylan (Song; 1962)
Hip Hip-Hurry! (WB MM Cartoon; 1958)
The Lake District Murder, by Ernest Elmore, writing as John Bude (Novel; 1935)
Live at the BBC, by The Beatles (Compilation Album; 1994)
Mary Had a Little Lamb, recorded by Thomas Edison (Song; 1877) [1st Recording of the Human Voice]
Mr. Willowby’s Christmas Tree (Muppet TV Special; 1995)
19th Nervous Breakdown, recorded by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1965)
Popeye (Film; 1980)
Red Bank Boogie, recorded by The Count Basie Orchestra (Song; 1944)
Rubber Soul, by The Beatles (Album; 1965)
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Animated TV Special; 1964)
Running on Empty, by Jackson Browne (Live Album; 1977)
Sixteen Stone, by Bush (Album; 1994)
Smoke on the Water, recorded by Deep Purple (Song; 1971)
Squeeze Play or Invitation to the Trance (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 4; 1959)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Film; 1991)
Still Crazy After All These Years, by Paul Simon (Album; 1975)
The Story of an Hour, by Kate Chopin (Short Story; 1894)
The Stroll, by The Diamonds (Song; 1957)
Sympathy for the Devil, by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1968)
Tommy Tucker’s Tooth (Disney Cartoon; 1922)
Turn! Turn! Turn!, by The Byrds (Album; 1965)
We Can Work It Out, by The Beatles (Song; 1965)
Whole Lotta Love, by Led Zeppelin (Song; 1969)
Today’s Name Days
Denise, Henrike, Nikolaus (Austria)
Nikola, Nikolai, Nina (Bulgaria)
Nikica, Niko, Nikola, Nikša, Vladimir (Croatia)
Mikuláš (Czech Republic)
Nikolaus (Denmark)
Klaus, Laas, Laus, Nigul, Nigulas, Niilas, Niilo, Nikolai, Nils (Estonia)
Niila, Niilo, Niki, Niklas, Niko, Nikolai, Nikolas (Finland)
Nicolas (France)
Denise, Henrike, Nikolaus (Germany)
Nikolaos, Nikoleta, Nikos (Greece)
Miklós (Hungary)
Nicola (Italy)
Klāvs, Niklāvs, Nikolajs (Latvia)
Bilmantas, Mikalojus, Norvydė (Lithuania)
Nikolai, Nils (Norway)
Dionizja, Emilian, Jarema, Jarogniew, Mikołaj (Poland)
Nicolae (România)
Mikuláš (Slovakia)
Nicolás (Spain)
Niklas, Nikolaus (Sweden)
Nicholas (Ukraine)
Claus, Ira, Nicholas, Nichole, Nicholet, Nick, Nicklaus, Nickolas, Nico, Nicolas, Nicole, Nicolette, Nikki, Niko, Nikolas (USA)
Today is Also…
Day of Year: Day 340 of 2024; 25 days remaining in the year
ISO: Day 3 of week 49 of 2023
Celtic Tree Calendar: Ruis (Elder) [Day 9 of 28]
Chinese: Month 10 (Gui-Hai), Day 24 (Wu-Xu)
Chinese Year of the: Rabbit 4721 (until February 10, 2024)
Hebrew: 23 Kislev 5784
Islamic: 23 Jumada I 1445
J Cal: 10 Zima; Threesday [10 of 30]
Julian: 23 November 2023
Moon: 36%: Waning Crescent
Positivist: 4 Bichat (13th Month) [James Bernouilli]
Runic Half Month: Is (Stasis) [Day 11 of 15]
Season: Autumn (Day 74 of 89)
Zodiac: Sagittarius (Day 15 of 30)
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Review Of My 2022 New Year’s Resolutions/2023 Resolutions
Time for my yearly breakdown. This was, honestly and truly, one of if not the roughest year of my entire life so far. Sure, 2020 sucked for everyone and I remember my 2015 (I think) starting off really bad but ending okay, but this one takes the cake unquestionably. I am still in the grieving and recovery process. That being said, whatever progress I made on my resolutions pales in comparison to the fact that I am still here.
*Reduce “Want To Read” list down to 60. Reread a book.
Mild Fail. My read list is currently sitting at 77, which is one more book than it was a year ago. That being said, I reread a few short books this year, read everything on my secondary list that I got from the NTCE conference, and finally read The Count of Monte Cristo, the last book from my 50 Books To Read Before You Die bookmark and the longest book on my list. I can only consider this a fail to an extent.
*Watch all the important movies of 2021 and keep that movie list under control.
Pass. This one endures as necessary and achievable.
*Listen to 20 albums I already own.
Pass. I did one better on this: I listened to every single album I had that I had never listened to. My music listening list is empty. I last made a real dent in it in 2020 but this year I was determined to just destroy it.
*Play 10 new games.
Pass. Speaking of destroying lists, I also completed my entire game list this year after having it become a monster from bundle buying in 2020. I spent basically all of August plowing through itchio games that I got until there was nothing left. It’s an incredibly freeing position to be in.
*Run at least three times a week. Preferably four.
Fail. I did some walking and actually lost a ton of weight over the summer but it’s slowly creeping back as it does every year and my strength is still nonexistent.
*Go to at least two new places within pandemic restrictions.
Pass. I went on a road trip around the Midwest and down to see my brother which included five new national parks and a bunch of major cities, my favorites being Charleston and Louisville. Then I took a spontaneous trip to Iceland that was amazing.
*Make a new flower crown.
Pass. It’s more of a laurel, which I ended up having the kids wear during Julius Caesar, but it’s something. I should have made something more daily usable but eh.
*Finish writing something you’re proud of.
Pass. I finished a play I had started winter break of 2021 and then also wrote a rather sad short story. Both were essentially therapy but I do think they turned out well.
*Be better than last year.
Fail. I was objectively worse than last year. I hit rock bottom. And yet, I managed to do a lot.
2023 RESOLUTIONS
*Reduce “Want To Read” list down to 60.
*Watch all the movies of 2022 that I care about. Watch/Rewatch all the movies on that list I made with Adam.
*Get good at bass guitar.
*Try game mastering a campaign.
*Exercise at least three times a week. (Once the weather gets better. I live in an apartment now, and I can’t really run inside)
*Go to at least two new places (This one is very likely already happening as I already have a trip planned for Spring Break to hit up four new and two old national parks and I’m writing a grant to go to Morocco but still)
*Go back to doing something with your novel.
*Be better than last year.
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#NaNoWriMo2019 at 15K Cheers and Happy & Reading & Writing! Flossie Benton Rogers, Conjuring the Magic in Romance!
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Books Books Books
100 Years of Solitude
11.22.63
120 Days of Sodom
1491
1984
A Brief History of Time
A Canticle for Leibowitz
A Child Called It
A Clockwork Orange
A Confederacy of Dunces
A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters
A Land Fit for Heroes Trilogy
A Little Life
A Naked Singularity
A People's History of the United States
A Scanner Darkly
A Series of Unfortunate Events
A Short History of Nearly Everything
A Song of Ice and Fire
A Storm of Swords
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
A Thousand Splendid Suns
A Walk in the Woods
A World Lit Only by Fire
Accursed Kings
Alice in Wonderland
All Quiet on the Western Front
All the Light We Cannot See
All the Pretty Horses
America, the Book
American Gods
American Psycho
And then There Were None
Angela’s Ashes
Animal Farm
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Anna Karenina
Anything Terry Pratchett, But, Mort is My Favorite
Anything Written by Robin Hobb
Apt Pupil
Artemis Fowl
Asimov's Guide to the Bible
Asoiaf
Atlas Shrugged
Bartimeaus
Batman: the Long Halloween
Battle Royale
Beat the Turtle Drum
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Belgariad Series
Beloved
Berserk
Bestiario
Black Company
Blankets/habibi
Blind Faith
Blindness
Blood Meridian
Blood and Guts: a History of Surgery
Bluest Eye
Brandon Sanderson
Brave New World
Breakfast of Champions
Bridge to Terabithia
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: an Indian History of the American West
Calvin and Hobbs
Candide
Carrie
Cat's Cradle
Catch 22
Cats Cradle
Chaos
Child of God
Choke
Chuck Palahniuk
City of Ember
City of Thieves
Cloud
Collapse
Come Closer
Complaint
Confessions of a Mask
Contact
Conversation in the Cathedral
Cosmos
Crime and Punishment
Dan Brown
David
Dead Birds Singing
Dead Mountain: the Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident
Delta Venus
Die Räuber (the Robbers)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Don Quixote
Dragonlance
Dune
Dying of the Light
East of Eden
Educated
Empire of Sin: a Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans
Enders Game
Enders Shadow
Escape from Camp 14
Ever Since Darwin
Every Man Dies Alone
Everybody Poops
Everything is Illuminated
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Fahrenheit 451
Far from the Madding Crowd
Faust
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
Feet of Clay
Fight Club
First Law
Flowers for Algernon
Flowers in the Attic
Foundation
Foundation Series
Foundation Trilogy
Frankenstein
Freakonomics
Fun Home
Galapagos
Geek Love
Gerald’s Game
Ghost Story
Go Ask Alice
Go Dog Go
Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
Goldfinch
Gone Girl
Gone with the Wind
Good Omens
Grapes of Wrath
Great Expectations
Greg Egan
Guards! Guards!
Guns Germs and Steel
Guts (short Story)
Half a World
Ham on Rye
Hannibal Rising
Hard Boiled Wonderland
Hatchet
Haunted
Hawaii
Heart Shaped Box
Heart of Darkness
Hellbound Heart
Hellraiser
Hell’s Angels
Helter Skelter
His Dark Materials
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Hogg
Holocaust by Bullets
House of Leaves
How to Cook for Fourty Humans
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Huckleberry Finn
Hyperion
I Am America, and So Can You
I Am the Messenger
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
I Was Dr. Mengele’s Assistant
In Cold Blood
In Search of Our Mother's Gardens
Independent People
Infinite Jest
Into Thin Air
Into the Wild
Introduction to Linear Algebra
Invisible Monsters
Ishmael
It
Jacques Le Fataliste
Jane Eyre
Jaunt
Job: a Comedy of Justice
John Dies at the End
John Grisham
Johnathan Livingston Seagull
Johnny Got His Gun
Jon Ronson
Journal of a Novel
Jurassic Park
Justine
L'histoire D'o
Lamb
Last Exit to Brooklyn
Les Miserables
Lies My Teacher Told Me
Life of Pi
Limits and Renewals
Little House in the Big Woods
Lockwood & Co.
Lolita
Looking for Trouble
Lord Foul’s Bane
Lord of the Flies
Lyddie
Malazan Book of the Fallen
Maldoror
Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media
Man’s Search for Meaning
Mark Twain’s Autobiography
Maus
Meditations
Megamorphs (series)
Mein Kampf
Memnooch the Devil
Metro 2033
Michael Crichton
Middlesex
Mindhunter
Misery
Mistborn
Moby Dick
Mrs. Dalloway
My Side of the Mountain
My Sweet Audrina
Nacht über Der Prärie (night over the Prairie)
Naked Lunch
Name of the Wind
Neuromancer
Never Let Me Go
Neverwhere
New York
Next
Night
Night Shift
Norwegian Wood
Notes from Underground
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea
Of Mice and Men
Of Nightingales That Weep
Ohio
Old Mans War
Old Mother West Wind
On Heroes and Tombs
On Laughter and Forgetting
On the Road
One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
One of Us
Painted Bird
Patrick Rothfuss
Perfume: the Story of a Murderer
Persepolis
Pet Sematary
Peter Pan
Pillars of the Earth
Poisonwood Bible
Pride and Predjudice
Ready Player One
Rebecca
Red Mars
Red Night (series)
Red Shirts
Red Storm Rising
Redwall
Replay
Requiem for a Dream
Revenge
Riftwar Saga
Ringworld
Roald Dahl
Rolls of Thunder, Hear My Cry
Round Ireland with a Fridge
Running with Scissors
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind
Scary Stories to Read in the Dark
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Schindler’s List
Sein Und Zeit
Shades of Grey
Sharp Objects
Shattered Dreams
Sherlock Holmes
Sho-gun
Siddhartha
Sisypho
Skin and Other Stories
Slaughterhouse Five
Smoke & Mirrors
Snow Crash
Soldier Son
Sometimes a Great Notion
Sphere
Starship Troopers
Stiff, the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Storied Life of A.j. Fikry
Stormlight Archives
Story of the Eye
Stranger in a Strange Land
Surely, You're Joking
Survivor Type (short Story)
Suttree
Swan Song
Tale of Two Cities
Tales of the South Pacific
The Alchemist
The Altered Carbon Trilogy
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
The Art of Deception
The Art of Fielding
The Art of War
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation
The Autobiography of Henry Viii
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Beach
The Bell Jar
The Bible
The Bloody Chamber
The Book Thief
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Brothers Karamazov
The Call of Cthulu and Other Weird Stories
The Cask of Amontillado (short Story)
The Catcher in the Rye
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Clown
The Color out of Space
The Communist Manifesto
The Complete Fiction of H.p. Lovecraft
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
The Dagger and the Coin
The Damage Done
The Dark Tower
The Declaration of Independence, the Us Constitution, and the Bill of Rights
The Devil in the White City
The Dharma Bums
The Diamond Age
The Dice Man
The Discworld Series
The Dresden Files
The Elegant Universe
The First Law Trilogy
The Forever War
The Foundation Trilogy
The Gentleman Bastard Sequence
The Geography of Nowhere
The Girl Next Door
The Girl on the Milk Carton
The Giver
The Giving Tree
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gilly Hopkins
The Hagakure
The Half a World Trilogy
The Handmaid’s Tale
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The Hiding Place
The History of Love
The Hobbit
The Hot Zone
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Hyperion Cantos
The Jaunt
The Jungle
The Key to Midnight
The Killing Star
The Kingkiller Chronicles
The Kite Runner
The Last Question (short Story)
The Lies of Lock Lamora
The Little Prince
The Long Walk
The Lord of the Rings
The Lottery (short Story)
The Lovely Bones
The Magicians
The Magus
The Martian
The Master and Margarita
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
The Monster at the End of This Book
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
The Music of Eric Zahn (short Story)
The Name of the Wind & the Wise Man's Fear
The Necronomicon
The New Age of Adventure: Ten Years of Great Writing
The Night Circus
The Nightmare Box
The Odyssey
The Omnivore's Dilemma
The Orphan Master’s Son
The Outsiders
The Painted Bird
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Phantom Tollbooth
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Plague
The Prince
The Prince of Tides
The Princess Bride
The Prophet
The Queen’s Gambit
The Rape of Nanking
The Red Dwarf
The Republic
The Rifter Saga
The Road
The Satanic Verses
The Screwtape Letters
The Secret History
The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
The Selfish Gene
The Shining
The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer
The Silmarillion
The Sirens of Titan
The Six Wives of Henry the 8th
The Solitude of Prime Numbers
The Speaker of the Dead
The Stars My Destination
The Stormlight Archive
The Story of My Tits
The Stranger
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck
The Suspicions of Mr. Witcher
The Tao of Pooh
The Things They Carried
The Time Machine
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Tin Drum
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green
The Wasp Factory
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
The World According to Garp
The Yellow Wallpaper
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Things Fall Apart
Thirsty
This Blinding Absence of Light
Tiger!
Time Enough for Love
To Kill a Mockingbird
To Say Nothing of the Dog
Toni Morrison
Too Many Magicians
Traumnovelle
Tuesdays with Morrie
Tuf Voyaging
Undeniable
Under Plum Lake
Universe in a Nutshell
Unwind
Uzumaki
Various
Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia
Walden
War & Peace
War and Peace
Warriors: Bluestar’s Prophecy
Watchers
Water for Elephants
Watership Down
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Wheel of Time
When Rabbit Howls
Where the Red Fern Grows
Where the Sidewalk Ends
Why I Am Not a Christian
Why People Believe Weird Things
Wizards First Rule
Wool
World War Z
Worm
Wuthering Heights
You Can Choose to Be Happy
Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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TIME: A CLOWN WITH GLAMOUR
May 26, 1952
TIME: The Weekly News Magazine ~ Lucille Ball: Prescription for TV; a clown with glamour. May 26, 1952.
On Monday evenings, more than 30 million Americans do the same thing at the same time: they tune in ‘I Love Lucy’ (9 p.m. E.D.T., CBS-TV), to get a look at a round-eyed, pink-haired comedienne named Lucille Ball.
An ex-model and longtime movie star (54 films in the past 20 years), Lucille Ball is currently the biggest success in television. In six months her low-comedy antics, ranging from mild mugging to baggy-pants clowning, have dethroned such veteran TV headliners as Milton Berle and Arthur Godfrey. One of the first to see the handwriting on the TV screen was funnyman Red Skelton, himself risen to TV's top ten. Last February, when he got the award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences as the top comic of the year, Skelton walked to the microphone and said flatly: "I don't deserve this. It should go to Lucille Ball."
By this week, the four national TV rating services (Nielsen, Trendex, American Research Bureau and Videodex) were in unaccustomed agreement: each of them rated ‘I Love Lucy’ as the nation's No. 1 TV show.
Lumps & Pratfalls. The television industry is not quite sure how it happened. When Lucy went on the air last October, it seemed to be just another series devoted to family comedy, not much better or much worse than ‘Burns and Allen’, ‘The Goldbergs’, ‘The Aldrich Family’ or ‘Mama’. Like its competitors, Lucy holds a somewhat grotesque mirror up to middle-class life, and finds its humor in exaggerating the commonplace incidents of marriage, business and the home. Lucille's Cuba-born husband, Desi Arnaz, is cast as the vain, easily flattered leader of an obscure rumba band. Lucille plays his ambitious wife, bubbling with elaborate and mostly ineffectual schemes to advance his career.
But what televiewers see on their screens is the sort of cheerful rowdiness that has been rare in the U.S. since the days of the silent movies' Keystone Comedies. Lucille submits enthusiastically to being hit with pies; she falls over furniture, gets locked in home freezers, is chased by knife-wielding fanatics. Tricked out as a ballerina or a Hindu maharanee or a toothless hillbilly, she takes her assorted lumps and pratfalls with unflagging zest and good humor. Her mobile, rubbery face reflects a limitless variety of emotions, from maniacal pleasure to sepulchral gloom. Even on a flickering, pallid TV screen, her wide-set saucer eyes beam with the massed candlepower of a lighthouse on a dark night.
What is her special talent? TV men credit Lucille with an unfailing instinct for timing. Producer-Writer Jess Oppenheimer says: "For every word you write in this business, you figure you're lucky to get back 70-80% from a performer. With Lucille, you get back 140%." Broadway's Oscar (’South Pacific’) Hammerstein II, hailing Lucille's control, calls her a "broad comedienne, but one who never goes over the line." To her manager, Don Sharpe, Lucille is "close to the Chaplin school of comedy—she's got warmth and sympathy, and people believe in her, even while they're laughing at her."
Western Mirage. Lucille explains that the TV show is important because "I'm a real ham and so is Desi. We like to have an audience. We like being up on our toes." But the show also allows her some time with her ten-month-old daughter, Lucie Desirée, and for the first time in eleven years of trouping, gives her a home life with husband Desi. Says she: "I look like everybody's idea of an actress, but I feel like a housewife. I think that's what my trouble was in movies."
Actress Ball was a long time arriving at the calm waters of motherhood and housewifery. The daughter of Henry and Desirée Hunt Ball, she was born in Jamestown, N.Y. (near Buffalo) at what she calls "an early age." Pressed, she will concede that it was quite a while ago: she admits to being 40. Her father was an electrician whose job of stringing telephone wires carried him around the country. When Lucille was four, he died of typhoid in Wyandotte, Mich.
Lucille spent her childhood in Jamestown (1920 pop. 38,917), but managed to see very little of it. Mostly, she inhabited a dream world peopled by glamorous alter egos. Sometimes she imagined herself to be a young lady of great poise named Sassafrassa, who combined the best features of Pearl White, Mabel Normand and Pola Negri. Another make-believe identity was Madeline, a beauteous cowgirl who emerged from the pages of Zane Grey's melodramatic novel, ‘The Light of Western Stars’. To get authentic background for Madeline, young Lucille corresponded with the chambers of commerce of Butte and Anaconda, Mont. She read and reread their publicity handouts until she felt she knew more about Montana than the people who lived there. It was the powerful spirit of Madeline that caused her for many years to claim Butte, Mont., as her birthplace. Only in the most recent edition of Who's Who did she finally, grudgingly admit to being born in Jamestown, N.Y.
Horrses to Warter. While she lived there, Lucille did her best to rid Jamestown of dullness. Sometimes she gilded reality by imagining that the family chicken coop was her palace ("The chickens would become my armies"). She remembers that she was always unmanageable in the spring. "I'd leave the classroom for a drink of water and never come back. I'd start walking toward what I thought was New York City and keep going until someone brought me home."
By the time she left high school at 14, she had staged virtually a one-man performance of ‘Charley's Aunt’ ("I played the lead, directed it, cast it, sold the tickets, printed the posters, and hauled furniture to the school for scenery and props"). In a Masonic musical revue, she put so much passion into an Apache dance that she threw one arm out of its socket. Jamestown citizens still remember her explosive personality with wonder: it took quite a while for the dust to settle in Jamestown when Lucille finally left for Manhattan at the age of 15.
Probably because of the dreamy mental state induced by Sassafrassa and Madeline, Lucille is not too clear about dates, events and people. In New York,
she headed straight for John Murray Anderson's dramatic school. At the sound of her voice ("I used to say 'horrses' and 'warter' "), her teacher clapped hands to his forehead. Anderson tactfully told Lucille's mother that her daughter should try another line of work. Lucille made a stab at being a secretary and a drugstore soda jerk, but found both occupations dull. She answered chorus calls for Broadway musicals with a marked lack of success. When she even lost a job in the chorus of the third road company of ‘Rio Rita’, a Ziegfeld aide told her: "It's no use, Montana. You're not meant for show business. Go home."
Periodically, Lucille did go home to Jamestown. But she returned again and again to the assault on New York. She managed to get into the chorus of ‘Stepping Stones’, and held on until the choreographer announced that she wanted only girls who could do toe work ("I couldn't even do heel work"). Lucille turned to modeling, progressed from the wholesale garment houses through department stores to the comparative eminence of Hattie Carnegie. She still has a warm feeling for people in the garment trade, because "they're the nearest thing to show business in the outside world. They're temperamental and jealous. I like them." She had a great many admirers. One of them, Britain's actor Hugh Sinclair, says: "She disarmed you. You saw this wonderful, glamorous creature, and in five minutes she had you roaring with laughter. She was gay, warmhearted and absolutely genuine."
As a model, Lucille called herself Diane Belmont, choosing her name in honor of Belmont Park Race Track, where fashion shows are sometimes staged. But it was another few years before Lucille finally got her break. She was walking up Broadway past the Palace Theater when she met agent Sylvia Hahlo coming down from the Goldwyn office. Sylvia grabbed her and cried breathlessly: "How would you like to go to California? They're sending a bunch of poster girls there for six weeks for a picture. One of the girls' mothers has refused to let her go."
$50 to $ 1,500. The movie was ‘Roman Scandals’, starring Eddie Cantor, and it was six months instead of six weeks in the making. Lucille was grimly determined to keep her foot in the Hollywood door. She got a succession of bit parts in such movies as ‘Moulin Rouge’ and ‘The Affairs of Cellini’, worked for three months with the roughhouse comics known as The Three Stooges ("It was one continuous bath of Vichy water and lemon meringue pie").
When RKO picked up her contract, she gradually emerged as a queen of B pictures, then began making program movies with comics Jack Oakie, Joe Penner and the Marx Brothers (’Room Service’). Her salary rose from $50 a week to $1,500 and her hair, already turned blonde from its original brown, now became a brilliant but indescribable shade that has been variously called ‘shocking pink' and 'strawberry orange.' While she was in ‘Dance, Girl, Dance’, and being hailed by Director Erich Pommer as a new 'find' (by then,
she had been playing in movies for six years), she met a brash, boyish young Cuban named Desi Arnaz.
Gold Initials. Desi had come to Hollywood to make the movie version of the Broadway hit, Too Many Girls. Taking one look at luscious (5 ft. 7 in., 130 Ibs.) Lucille, who was wearing a sweater and skirt, he cried: "Thass a honk o' woman!" and asked: "How would you like to learn the rumba, baby?" He took her for a ride in his blue convertible, with the gold initials on the door, and she shudderingly recalls that the only time the speedometer dipped below 100 m.p.h. was when he rounded a curve. On the way home, Desi hit a bump and, as Lucille tells it, a fender flew off. He simply flicked the ash from his Cuban cigarillo and sped on.
Lucille was as dazzled by his full name (Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y De Acha III) as by his history. The only child of a prosperous Cuban politician who had been mayor of Santiago and a member of the Cuban Senate, Desi had fled to Miami with his mother during the revolution of 1933. His father, a supporter of President Machado, was put in jail, and the Arnaz possessions disappeared in the revolution.
After six months, Desi's father was released from jail and rejoined his family in Miami, where he went into the export-import business. Desi, who was 16, enrolled in St. Patrick's High School (his closest friend was Al Capone's son Albert), and got a part-time job cleaning canary cages for a firm which sold birds to local drugstores. He soon found steadier work as a guitarist in a four-piece band incongruously called the Siboney Sextette. The critics agreed on Desi's meager musical gifts. "He was always off-beat," says theater owner Carlos Montalban. "But he's an awfully nice guy—a clean-cut Latin."
Conga Line. Whatever Desi had, it was something the public liked. He began beating a conga drum in Miami and soon nightclub audiences, from Florida to New York, were forming conga lines behind him. His good looks and unquenchable good humor interested producer George Abbott, who was searching for a Latin type to play a leading role in ‘Too Many Girls’. "Can you act?" asked Abbott. "Act?" answered Desi, expansively. "All my life, I act."
The courtship of Desi and Lucille was predictably stormy. Says a friend: "He's very jealous. She's very jealous—they're both very jealous." They were married in 1940, while Desi was leading his orchestra at the Roxy in New York and Lucille was between pictures in Hollywood. She flew in from the coast; they got up at 5 a.m. and drove to Connecticut, where they were married by a justice of the peace. Since they had no apartment, Desi compromised by carrying his bride across the threshold of his dressing room at the Roxy. Hollywood offered odds that the marriage would not last six weeks.
The marriage lasted better than six weeks, but after four years trouble blew. Desi kept moving about the country with his band, and Lucille, when not making pictures, mostly sat home alone. Their marriage was drifting on the rocks, and only World War II averted immediate shipwreck. Desi refused a commission in the Cuban army and was drafted into the U.S. infantry. He was moved on to Special Services, and spent much of the war shepherding USO troupes from one base to another.
In 1944, Lucille filed suit for divorce. She won an interlocutory decree but never got around to filing for her final papers. The reason: she and Desi were in the midst of a new reconciliation. But all the old difficulties remained. Lucille would sit night after night at the clubs where Desi's band was playing, but that resulted in rings under her eyes rather than a new intimacy. She tried cutting down on her movie work by starring in a CBS radio show called ‘My Favorite Husband’, and Desi also took a flyer at radio. They worked out a vaudeville act and toured U.S. theaters with their new routines.
Lucille credits Desi with being the one who was willing to take a chance on TV. "He's a Cuban," she says, "and all Cubans gamble. They'll bet you which way the tide is going and give you first pick." But it was a real gamble. Movie exhibitors do not look kindly upon movie stars who desert to the enemy. If the show flopped, Lucille would have no place to crawl back to. They told CBS that they would give television a try only if both of them could be on the same show. At first, they wanted to play themselves. They compromised by turning Desi into Ricky Ricardo, a struggling young bandleader, and letting Lucille fulfill her lifelong ambition of playing a housewife.
The decision to film the show also made CBS bigwigs uneasy. It would cost four times as much as a live show, and the only interested sponsor, Philip Morris, wasn't prepared to go that high. Again there was a compromise. Desi and Lucille agreed to take a smaller salary in return for producing the show and keeping title to the films.
Real Plumbing. Long years in the practical business of orchestra leading had given Desi considerable organizing ability and business sense. He set up Desilu Productions (Desi president, Lucille vice president), and leased a sound stage from an independent Los Angeles studio. Because Lucille was ‘dead' without an audience, a side wall of the studio was knocked out to make a street entrance, and seats installed for an audience of 300. When a show is ready for the cameras, the audience laughter is picked up on overhead microphones and used in the final print.
Though ‘I Love Lucy’ is filmed, it is more like a play than a movie. All of the lines and action are memorized and, whenever possible, the show is played straight through from beginning to end, and not shot in a number of unrelated scenes. The action takes place on four sets; two of them represent the Ricardos' Manhattan apartment, a third shows the nightclub where Ricky's band plays and the fourth is used for any other scenes called for by the script. Says Desi proudly: "We have real furniture, real plumbing, and a real kitchen where we serve real food. Even the plants are really growing; they're not phony."
Desilu Productions hired a pair of veteran troupers, William Frawley and Vivian Vance, to play the family next door and serve as foils and friends for Desi and Lucille. Academy Award-winning Karl (’The Good Earth’) Freund supervises the three cameras, and Director Marc Daniels (soon to be replaced by Bill Asher) gives Lucy its rattling pace. The writers—Jess Oppenheimer, Bill Carroll and Madalyn Pugh—turn out scripts that do not impose too much on the audience's credulity and are reasonably free of clichés. The writers are held in an esteem not common in TV. Lucille bombards Jess Oppenheimer with photographs flatteringly inscribed to "the Boss Man," and Desi has presented him with a statuette of a baseball player and a punning tribute, "To the man behind the ball."
"Wanta Play Cards?" Desi and Lucille live an unpretentious life on a five-acre ranch in the San Fernando Valley. The only Hollywood note is a kidney-shaped swimming pool, and the most recent addition to the house (a wing devoted to daughter Lucie and her nurse) cost $22,000—more than the house and land cost originally. Neither Desi nor Lucille has ever been socially ambitious, and their friends are the same ones they have known for years. Both Desi's mother (now divorced from Arnaz Sr., who still lives in Miami) and Lucille's Mom live nearby.
At home, Lucille, who collects stray cats and dogs, is an amateur painter ("I use oils because it's easier to correct mistakes than with water colors"), and generally considers herself a lazy, lounging homebody. She is fascinated by Desi's boundless energy.' He spends weekends fishing on his 34-foot cabin cruiser, Desilu; plays violent tennis; likes to cook elaborate dishes. Says Lucille: "Everything is fine with him all the time. Wanta play cards? Fine. Play games? Fine. go for a swim? Great." There's only one problem: "Desi is a great thermostat sneaker-upper and I'm a thermostat sneaker-downer. Cold is the one thing that isn't great with him."
Sex & Chic. Though life has grown noticeably more placid for Desi and Lucille, it promises more money than they ever made before. Desilu Productions has already branched out beyond ‘I Love Lucy’. It is filming TV commercials for Red Skelton, and is at work on a new TV series, ‘Our Miss Brooks’, starring Eve Arden. Three of the best 30-minute Lucy shows are being put together in a package and will be experimentally released to movie theaters in the U.S. and Latin America. This year, ‘I Love Lucy’ has grossed about $1,000,000, and sponsor Philip Morris has signed a contract for 39 more shows beginning this fall. All of the old Lucy films can be sold again as new TV stations go on the air (eventually there will be 2,053 TV transmitters in the U.S., compared to today's 108).
In reaching the TV top, Lucille's telegenic good looks may be almost as important as her talent for comedy. She is sultry-voiced, sexy, and wears chic clothes with all the aplomb of a trained model and showgirl. Letters from her feminine fans show as much interest in Lucille's fashions as in her slapstick. Most successful comediennes (e.g., Imogene Coca, Fanny Brice, Beatrice Lillie) have made comic capital out of their physical appearance. Lucille belongs to a rare comic aristocracy: the clown with glamour.
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Decolonizing Indigenous Cultural Protection
In 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux and legions of their allies protested the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would carry Bakken crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois, crossing underneath Lake Oahe, the reservation's water source. Tribal members opposed the pipeline over fears of water pollution and climate impacts; it also crossed their ancestral lands, and they argued that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had not adequately surveyed the burial grounds in its path. But because the pipeline wasn't on tribal lands or under tribal jurisdiction, there were few legal options. As Indian law attorneys Hillary Hoffmann and Monte Mills write in their new book, A Third Way: Decolonizing the Laws of Indigenous Cultural Protection, after almost 200 years of treaties, court cases and federal infringement, "The tribe had lost almost every source of legal authority to regulate or stop it." The pipeline was ultimately constructed, though its legality is still in court over potential environmental violations.
The battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline exemplifies how difficult it can be for tribal nations to assert their sovereignty within the existing legal structure to protect culturally important land, water, wildlife and ancestral objects. Over the last decade, however, Hoffmann and Mills argue that a new era of Indian law has emerged that protects Indigenous cultures based on Indigenous value systems. This "third way" -- neither solely Indigenous nor European, but rather both -- shows tribal nations working within those legal constraints in novel ways, or changing them altogether, to better reflect their values. This could mean different outcomes in future cultural protection conflicts.
In A Third Way, Hillary Hoffmann and Monte Mills share what they've learned over their combined 31 years of teaching Indian law and working with tribal nations. They explore the myriad ways Indigenous people are decolonizing laws around cultural protection. The book details the history, context, and future of the ongoing legal fight to protect indigenous cultures. At the federal level, this fight is shaped by the assumptions that led to current federal cultural protection laws, which many tribes and their allies are now reframing to better meet their cultural and sovereign priorities. At the state level, centuries of antipathy toward tribes are beginning to give way to collaborative and cooperative efforts that better reflect indigenous interests. Most critically, tribes themselves are building laws and legal structures that reflect and invigorate their own cultural values. Taken together, and evidenced by the recent worldwide support for indigenous cultural movements, events of the last decade signal a new era for indigenous cultural protection. I highly recommend this important book to anyone interested in the legal reforms that will guide progress toward protecting indigenous cultures.
#indigenous rights#indigenous cultures#standing rock#nodapl#sovereignty#cultural protection#environmental ethics#decolonialization
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Holidays 8.18
Holidays
Armed Forces Day (Macedonia)
Arbor Day (Pakistan)
Bad Poetry Day
Birth Control Pills Day
Butch Appreciation Day
Constitution Day (Indonesia)
818 Day
Gambrinus Night (Ireland)
Helium Discovery Day
Janmashtami (a,k.a. Sri Krishna Jayanti or Sri Krishna Astami; Parts of India)
Long Tan Day (Australia)
Mail Order Catalog Day
National Angela Day
National Aspin Day (Philippines)
National Badge Ribbon Day
National Couples Day
National Day of Action Against Bullying and Violence (Australia)
National Jaden Day
National Science Day (Thailand)
National Tree Plantation Day (Pakistan)
National Volunteer Firefighters Recognition Day
Never Give Up Day
19th Amendment Day
Plum Day (French Republic)
Scott Pilgrim Day
Serendipity Day
Stevens Johnson Syndrome Awareness Day
Texas Chainsaw Massacre Day
Vietnam Veterans Day (Australia)
Virginia Dare Day (Roanoke Island)
World Breast Cancer Research Day
World Day of Forest Fire Prevention
World Pleasure Day
Write a Bad Poem Day
Food & Drink Celebrations
National Fajita Day
National Ice Cream Pie Day
National Soft Serve Day
Pinot Noir Day
3rd Friday in August
Brother’s Day [1st Friday after Full Moon]
Carrot Fest begins (a.k.a. The World’s Greatest Carrot Fest; Canada) [3rd Friday & Saturday]
GME Professionals Day [3rd Friday]
Hawaii Statehood Day (observed) [3rd Friday]
Hug Your Boss Day [3rd Friday]
Kool-Aid Day [3rd Friday] (also 2nd Friday)
Men’s Grooming Day [3rd Friday]
National Hawaiian Shirt Day [3rd Friday]
National Men's Grooming Day [3rd Friday]
Independence Days
West Bengal (India; from UK, 1947)
Feast Days
Agapitus of Palestrina (Christian; Saint)
Alberto Hurtado (Christian; Saint)
Alfred Wallis (Artology)
Clare of Monte Falco (Christian; Saint)
Cook (Positivist; Saint)
Cousin Monster (Muppetism)
Daig of Inniskeen (Christian; Saint)
Evan (a.k.a. Inan; Christian; Saint)
Fiacre (Christian; Saint)
Florus and Laurus (Christian; Saint)
Helena of Constantinople (Roman Catholic Church)
Poetry Day (Pastafarian)
Richard Wagner Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)
Shango’s Day (Pagan)
William Porcher DuBose (Episcopal Church)
Lucky & Unlucky Days
Sakimake (先負 Japan) [Bad luck in the morning, good luck in the afternoon.]
Unlucky 18th (Philippines) [2 of 3]
Premieres
Accepted (Film; 2006)
Blue Beetle (Film; 2023)
Deliverance (Film; 1972)
Devil Without a Cause, by Kid Rock (Album; 1998)
Everlong, by the Foo Fighters (Song; 1997)
Half-Fare Hare (WB MM Cartoon; 1956)
The Hitman’s Bodyguard (Film; 2017)
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov (U.S. Novel; 1958)
Louvre Come Back to Me! (WB LT Cartoon; 1962)
Morning Glory (Film; 1933)
Nine Perfect Strangers (TV Series; 2021)
ParaNorman (Animated Film; 2012)
Red Hot Chili Peppers, by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (Album; 1984)
Shake It Off, by Taylor Swift (Song; 2014)
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (TV Series; 2022)
Snakes on a Plane (Film; 2006)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Film; 1952)
Take the Money and Run (Film; 1969)
The Tick (TV Series; 2016)
Uncle Buck (Film; 1989)
The Usual Suspects (Film; 1995)
Today’s Name Days
Claudia, Helena, Helene, Rainaki (Austria)
Florije, Jela, Jelena, Jelka (Croatia)
Helena (Czech Republic)
Agapetus (Denmark)
Elina, Heleene, Helen, Helena, Helene, Hell, Hella, Helle, Hellen, Helli, Ilona (Estonia)
Leevi (Finland)
Hélène, Laétitia, Laëtitia (France)
Helene (Germany)
Flora, Floros (Greece)
Ilona (Hungary)
Elena (Italy)
Helēna, Liene (Latvia)
Gendvilė, Ilona, Mantautas, Saulenė, Saulenis (Lithuania)
Tormod, Torodd (Norway)
Agapit, Bogusława, Bronisław, Bronisz, Helena, Ilona, Klara, Tworzysława (Poland)
Elena, Helena (Slovakia)
Agapito, Alberto, Elena (Spain)
Ellen, Lena (Sweden)
Flora, Laura, Myron (Ukraine)
Aileen, Eileen, Elaina, Elaine, Eleanor, Elena, Eliana, Ella, Ellen, Ellie, Helen, Helena, Iliana, Lena, Leonora, Nell, Nellie, Nelly (USA)
Today is Also…
Day of Year: Day 230 of 2024; 135 days remaining in the year
ISO: Day 5 of week 33 of 2023
Celtic Tree Calendar: Coll (Hazel) [Day 11 of 28]
Chinese: Month 7 (Geng-Shen), Day 3 (Wu-Shen)
Chinese Year of the: Rabbit 4721 (until February 10, 2024)
Hebrew: 1 Elul 5783
Islamic: 1 Safar 1445
J Cal: 20 Hasa; Sixday [20 of 30]
Julian: 4 August 2023
Moon: 5%: Waxing Crescent
Positivist: 6 Gutenberg (9th Month) [Cook]
Runic Half Month: As (Gods) [Day 6 of 15]
Season: Summer (Day 58 of 94)
Zodiac: Leo (Day 27 of 31)
Calendar Changes
Ṣafar [صَفَر] (Islamic Calendar) [Month 2 of 12] (Void)
ʼĔlūl (a.k.a. Elul) [אֱלוּל] (Hebrew Calendar) [Month 6 of 12]
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Holidays 8.18
Holidays
Armed Forces Day (Macedonia)
Arbor Day (Pakistan)
Bad Poetry Day
Birth Control Pills Day
Butch Appreciation Day
Constitution Day (Indonesia)
818 Day
Gambrinus Night (Ireland)
Helium Discovery Day
Janmashtami (a,k.a. Sri Krishna Jayanti or Sri Krishna Astami; Parts of India)
Long Tan Day (Australia)
Mail Order Catalog Day
National Angela Day
National Aspin Day (Philippines)
National Badge Ribbon Day
National Couples Day
National Day of Action Against Bullying and Violence (Australia)
National Jaden Day
National Science Day (Thailand)
National Tree Plantation Day (Pakistan)
National Volunteer Firefighters Recognition Day
Never Give Up Day
19th Amendment Day
Plum Day (French Republic)
Scott Pilgrim Day
Serendipity Day
Stevens Johnson Syndrome Awareness Day
Texas Chainsaw Massacre Day
Vietnam Veterans Day (Australia)
Virginia Dare Day (Roanoke Island)
World Breast Cancer Research Day
World Day of Forest Fire Prevention
World Pleasure Day
Write a Bad Poem Day
Food & Drink Celebrations
National Fajita Day
National Ice Cream Pie Day
National Soft Serve Day
Pinot Noir Day
3rd Friday in August
Brother’s Day [1st Friday after Full Moon]
Carrot Fest begins (a.k.a. The World’s Greatest Carrot Fest; Canada) [3rd Friday & Saturday]
GME Professionals Day [3rd Friday]
Hawaii Statehood Day (observed) [3rd Friday]
Hug Your Boss Day [3rd Friday]
Kool-Aid Day [3rd Friday] (also 2nd Friday)
Men’s Grooming Day [3rd Friday]
National Hawaiian Shirt Day [3rd Friday]
National Men's Grooming Day [3rd Friday]
Independence Days
West Bengal (India; from UK, 1947)
Feast Days
Agapitus of Palestrina (Christian; Saint)
Alberto Hurtado (Christian; Saint)
Alfred Wallis (Artology)
Clare of Monte Falco (Christian; Saint)
Cook (Positivist; Saint)
Cousin Monster (Muppetism)
Daig of Inniskeen (Christian; Saint)
Evan (a.k.a. Inan; Christian; Saint)
Fiacre (Christian; Saint)
Florus and Laurus (Christian; Saint)
Helena of Constantinople (Roman Catholic Church)
Poetry Day (Pastafarian)
Richard Wagner Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)
Shango’s Day (Pagan)
William Porcher DuBose (Episcopal Church)
Lucky & Unlucky Days
Sakimake (先負 Japan) [Bad luck in the morning, good luck in the afternoon.]
Unlucky 18th (Philippines) [2 of 3]
Premieres
Accepted (Film; 2006)
Blue Beetle (Film; 2023)
Deliverance (Film; 1972)
Devil Without a Cause, by Kid Rock (Album; 1998)
Everlong, by the Foo Fighters (Song; 1997)
Half-Fare Hare (WB MM Cartoon; 1956)
The Hitman’s Bodyguard (Film; 2017)
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov (U.S. Novel; 1958)
Louvre Come Back to Me! (WB LT Cartoon; 1962)
Morning Glory (Film; 1933)
Nine Perfect Strangers (TV Series; 2021)
ParaNorman (Animated Film; 2012)
Red Hot Chili Peppers, by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (Album; 1984)
Shake It Off, by Taylor Swift (Song; 2014)
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (TV Series; 2022)
Snakes on a Plane (Film; 2006)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Film; 1952)
Take the Money and Run (Film; 1969)
The Tick (TV Series; 2016)
Uncle Buck (Film; 1989)
The Usual Suspects (Film; 1995)
Today’s Name Days
Claudia, Helena, Helene, Rainaki (Austria)
Florije, Jela, Jelena, Jelka (Croatia)
Helena (Czech Republic)
Agapetus (Denmark)
Elina, Heleene, Helen, Helena, Helene, Hell, Hella, Helle, Hellen, Helli, Ilona (Estonia)
Leevi (Finland)
Hélène, Laétitia, Laëtitia (France)
Helene (Germany)
Flora, Floros (Greece)
Ilona (Hungary)
Elena (Italy)
Helēna, Liene (Latvia)
Gendvilė, Ilona, Mantautas, Saulenė, Saulenis (Lithuania)
Tormod, Torodd (Norway)
Agapit, Bogusława, Bronisław, Bronisz, Helena, Ilona, Klara, Tworzysława (Poland)
Elena, Helena (Slovakia)
Agapito, Alberto, Elena (Spain)
Ellen, Lena (Sweden)
Flora, Laura, Myron (Ukraine)
Aileen, Eileen, Elaina, Elaine, Eleanor, Elena, Eliana, Ella, Ellen, Ellie, Helen, Helena, Iliana, Lena, Leonora, Nell, Nellie, Nelly (USA)
Today is Also…
Day of Year: Day 230 of 2024; 135 days remaining in the year
ISO: Day 5 of week 33 of 2023
Celtic Tree Calendar: Coll (Hazel) [Day 11 of 28]
Chinese: Month 7 (Geng-Shen), Day 3 (Wu-Shen)
Chinese Year of the: Rabbit 4721 (until February 10, 2024)
Hebrew: 1 Elul 5783
Islamic: 1 Safar 1445
J Cal: 20 Hasa; Sixday [20 of 30]
Julian: 4 August 2023
Moon: 5%: Waxing Crescent
Positivist: 6 Gutenberg (9th Month) [Cook]
Runic Half Month: As (Gods) [Day 6 of 15]
Season: Summer (Day 58 of 94)
Zodiac: Leo (Day 27 of 31)
Calendar Changes
Ṣafar [صَفَر] (Islamic Calendar) [Month 2 of 12] (Void)
ʼĔlūl (a.k.a. Elul) [אֱלוּל] (Hebrew Calendar) [Month 6 of 12]
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i got tagged omg!! (i forgot this was a thing)
Tagged by: @levi-robbed-my-tea-cupboard I’m not even sure we interacted before? anyway tysm I feel very flattered, it’s been so long since I’ve done one of these haha
RULES: answer 20 questions, and then tag some more people (arg who will I tag??)
1. NAME: Lucie (nice to meet you uwu)
2. NICKNAMES: I love nicknames but don’t really have any, feel free to interact with me, message me and give me literally any name you want. I’m Lu for my family and a very long time ago I kind of went by Hanji
3. ZODIAC SIGN: Leo but why would you care
4. HEIGHT: 1m68, I’m not far away from Hanji’s height
5. LANGUAGES: French is my mother tongue, but I’m also pretty fluent in English, it’s the language of my studies. I’ve been studying Japanese in school for four years so I’m also quite good at it. I have primitive notions of Korean and German.
6. NATIONALITY: Belgian
7. FAVOURITE SEASON: Summer, I like long vacations, sun and drinking Japanese ice tea (but I love the wind and rain of the shit-weather city I live in rn)
8. FAVOURITE FLOWER: idk sunflower?
9. FAVOURITE SCENT: opening a bottle of Oi Ocha. Bread baking. Vanilla. The smell of the stuffed toys I sleep with.
10. FAVOURITE COLOR: Purple & pink.
11. FAVOURITE ANIMAL: Pigs & elephants (I love these with all my heart aaah... idk if you guys know this pain of absolutely loving animals you basically never see. I somehow manage to come across pigs maybe once or twice a year and I haven’t seen an elephant in like four years)
12. FAVOURITE FICTIONAL CHARACTERS: yasss fiction is my passion~ Mari Ohara from Love Live Sunshine is my ult alongside Hanji Zoe. Then I love all Love Live girls (particularly Ayumu, Rin, Umi, Shizuku and Chika), Salia from Cross Ange, Yuki from Haruhi Suzumiya, and basically everyone from Psycho Pass (Gino, Akane, Shion, Mika, Kei) and Tokyo Ghoul (Tooru, Kaneki, Akira, Hairu). In terms of novels I love everyone from the Count of Monte-Cristo and from Q (by Joumana Haddad). Also Ubu. And Constance from Ocean’s 8. And I’m forgetting so many but anyhow fiction = life
13. COFFEE, TEA, OR HOT CHOCOLATE: Black coffee no sugar, but I also enjoy tea quite a lot and I’m a total sucker for japanese green tea, hot or cold, and traditional macha
14. AVERAGE SLEEP HOURS: 7+
15. DOG OR CAT PERSON: ewww
16. NUMBER OF BLANKETS YOU SLEEP WITH: I have my duvet and then a Mulan plaid on top of that
17. DREAM TRIP: visiting Uchiura & Numazu in Japan (if everything goes fine I’m going this summer aaah), and then I want to go back to the US with my two high school friends and also I wish to return to an amazing monastery in North Macedonia that’s called St Joakim Osogovski, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world and I really want to stay there a write a book in this amazing setting
18. BLOG ESTABLISHED: I think around september 2016?
19. FOLLOWERS: 540 (and I’m very proud ok, thank you to everyone from the bottom of my heart)
20. RANDOM FACT: I really like the trolls from David the Gnome for no particular reason
Tagged people: @hanji-the-shitty-glasses @myoceanlivesinyoureyes @chaiiro-me @hanjithenewcommander @meijidamia @shushu3991 I just like your blogs but yeah I don’t really have tumblr friends anymore
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ALTERNATIVE STYLE ICON: RICHARD CHAMBERLAIN IN WALLENBERG: A HERO’S STORY
by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans
The writer George Santayana famously wrote that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Ironically many who repeat his quote forget who first uttered it.
I had long meant to write about Richard Chamberlain in this role. I once referred to him as “the fey king of the miniseries” and I don’t regret it: foppish, almost milquetoast in fare as varied as a two-part TV version of The Bourne Identity (with Jaclyn Smith, natch), Shogun, and as a leading candidate for an honorary Seinfeld puffy shirt: Not only did he play the Count of Monte Cristo in a 1975 TV movie, but a bunch of what Elaine Benes would have called chandelier-swinging characters in other Dumas adaptations, including Aramis in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers and Louis XIV and his twin in The Man in the Iron Mask. Postmodern swashbuckler author Arturo Perez-Reverte even described a character in one of his own novels as looking “like Richard Chamberlain in The Thorn Birds, only more manly.” That same Thorn Birds role, Father Ralph de Bricassart, also inspired a certain Rhunette Ferguson to give her son, a future New York Jets player, perhaps my favorite name ever: D’Brickashaw.
Dubbing Chamberlain an Alternative Style Icon for his role as Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg is low-hanging fruit. For years this TV special dwelt at the bottom of my Netflix queue for that express purpose. Former Savile Row tailors Manning & Manning won an Emmy award for the outfits they made for him; decades later Bryan Manning had some very interesting things to say to the inimitable Simon Crompton of Permanent Style about the 1930s and 1940s cutting styles he had to adopt for Chamberlain’s outfits for the movie. Chamberlain’s costumes are appropriately dashing, from the full diplomatic gala white tie ensemble worn while conspiring with the Papal Nuncio of Budapest to a tan double-breasted suit with horizontal peaked lapels that is, quite simply, magnificent.
Zagreb, one of the most beautiful cities in eastern Europe, admirably filled in for 1940s Budapest and Stockholm in the making of this production. I’m fairly certain that I’ve stayed at the Zagreb hotel on whose esplanade Chamberlain wore that suit, in an early expository scene where the American and Swedish governments encourage Wallenberg to take a position with the Swedish legation in Budapest. I’ve been told Zagreb’s one of two cities in Europe where the street lamps in certain neighborhoods are still gaslit. Gaslighting happens to have been one of the reasons that I finally wrote about this icon.
Of course there’s plenty to mock in the conventions of this telefilm, even beyond Chamberlain’s indisputable 1970s and 1980s stock hero status: its heavy-handed setup and plotting, making Wallenberg out to be a one-man anti-Nazi force from his time at home in Sweden (wearing a U. Michigan sweatshirt to indicate that he had studied in the US - did college sweatshirts even exist back then?). Miniseries meant melodrama and its archetypal characters: an adorable child whom Wallenberg saves from the death camps only to die of illness; a shoehorned-in love interest in the form of a kindhearted baroness who lobbies her suspicious husband to relax the Hungarian government's strictures on Jews; a fiery Hungarian resistance fighter who provides the unofficial, combative counterpoint to Wallenberg’s diplomatic, humanitarian efforts through official channels. And, of course, Wallenberg’s kidnapping by the Soviets at the fall of Budapest meant his story was perfectly framed for 1985, when we still couldn’t trust those Russians. (In fact, to this day no one knows what they did with him.)
A few appropriately haunting and powerful moments do ring true, including Wallenberg’s cordial verbal fencing matches over contraband Scotch and cigarettes with Adolf Eichmann. Whether those meetings really took place in that form or not, their film versions appropriately capture the realities of how we are forced to engage with evil. Rarely are we simply battling an easily identifiable other, weapon to weapon. Instead, we encounter evil in the everyday – in fact, it seeks us out, finds shared ground, converses with us over pleasantries and hospitality even as we recognize its intentions. It identifies with us, we identify with it. Even as you know it is evil.
Eichmann had made it his avowed duty to kill the Jews of Europe. Wallenberg’s mission, as an emissary of an officially neutral power, was to help save as many as he could. And he did, through famously fearless, reckless endeavors including the distribution of thousands of official-looking Swedish passes to the Jews of Budapest, the creation of vast cultural centers and warehouses in the Swedish mission buildings in which these new countrymen could work under the aegis of their adoptive country, and savvy diplomatic maneuvering with the Hungarian and German authorities and military. He went as far as to climb on top of a train bound for Auschwitz and distribute passes to as many deportees as he could while soldiers fired shots at him. Looking back, historians suggest they were firing over his head to warn him as they could easily have dropped him at that range, but it’s not likely Wallenberg knew that at the time.
At that time diplomats of neutral powers could make fortunes more safely as armchair heroes: playboy Porfirio Rubirosa reportedly did so in Paris selling visas to the Dominican Republic to French Jews during World War II. In that respect, perhaps, both he and Wallenberg were heroes… of different sorts.
Wallenberg did not do it for money. The Wallenbergs were Swedish aristocracy (with, the film takes pains to remind us, an ounce of Jewish blood) with considerable means – hence the finely tailored wardrobe for Chamberlain. Thus, an easy cynical response to this essay could be that a rich aristocrat with diplomatic immunity risked nothing swanning around the salons of Budapest, just like the fictional gentleman spies we read about and watch on screen.
That response is wrong. Heroism is not just born of opportunity. It is recognizing when a choice confronts you and taking the difficult, unpopular and dangerous one in order to do what is right. Fictional heroes like Bond or Steed rarely suffer meaningful personal loss and rarely confront the reality of evil. Evil is your friend with many positive qualities, maybe more intelligent or cultured or better dressed than you, the one you looked up to, who gradually reveals the awful things he or she believes and has done. Evil is those complicit in carrying out those things by their inaction, their credulity, or their cooperation, not at the point of a gun but of a paycheck. Evil is legal, logically explained, repeated and reported until its baseless reasoning becomes fact and the foundation for more lies, more evil. Evil can so easily become the system.
Hindsight is a handicap, for it doesn’t usually permit us to see that there were no times without ambiguity in battles between good and evil and no certainty that good triumphs. We have the privilege of retrospect to acknowledge the dashing diplomat in Savile Row suits was a hero for saving innocents from deportation and death as part of the most ghastly genocide in history. We learned what genocide is, and had to invent the word to describe it. Because at that time the people singled out for persecution and death were unpopular, historically, socially and legally marginalized, supposedly easily identifiable and classifiable. A group that societies had made it easy - through regulation, ghettoization, oppression and antagonism – to hate, and whole false narratives drawn up to explain why that group hated and wanted to destroy us even more than we them.
One of A Hero’s Story’s most timely and inspiring lines is Wallenberg’s reply to the Hungarian ruler’s query why the King of Sweden cared so much about the Jews of another country, when he was a Christian. Wallenberg reminded the prime minister that the King’s “concerns transcend religion or national borders.” That concern is humanity, our lowest common denominator, our shared recognition of our capacity for suffering. That concern drove a man to acts of incredible selflessness, a generous mercy that seems to have cost him his liberty and his life. There is no romance to Raoul Wallenberg’s fate. It is worth remembering that he probably saw little romance in the actions he took in Budapest.
Now is no less an unromantic time, no less a time when others – so many different others –are easily denigrated, feared, distrusted, brutalized. Otherization, both of many within our borders and pressing against them, has returned, as has fascism, with apologists blandly elegant or brutally populist, like some inauspicious comet in our skies. Now, again, is a time for heroes – men and women who recognize how difficult and dangerous it is to do what is right. That struggle is far from those of Chamberlain’s habitual roles swashbuckling against a monolithic, universally despicable, evil. Evil is among us, habituating us, desensitizing us, gaslighting us. Far from frills and fanfare, celebration, or certainty of triumph, can we place ourselves in Wallenberg’s Budapester shoes and do what is right?
Quality content, like quality clothing, ages well. This post first appeared on the No Man blog in February 2017.
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What Is Burning the Amazon? A Plea from Brazilian Anarchists
As the fires in the Amazon rainforest continue to burn, our comrades in Brazil have sent us this analysis of the causes of the catastrophe and how it should inform our vision of the future.
“I worry about whether the whites will resist. We have been resisting for 500 years.”
—Ailton Krenak
Living Dystopia
The scene is gloomy. On August 19, 2019, smoke covers cities across the state of São Paulo, turning day into night at 3 pm. The previous day, in Iceland, people organized the first funeral, complete with a gravestone and a minute of silence, for a glacier declared dead. The smoke that engulfed São Paulo is caused by forest fires in the Amazon Forest far away in the North of Brazil; the glacier has disappeared due to rising temperatures related to the carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere.
Chief of the Tenharim people of southern Amazonas fighting wildfire.
These tragic scenes—almost picturesque, almost absurd—could sound comical if they weren’t real. They are so extreme that they remind us of fictional scenarios such as those described in the novel And Still the Earth, a Brazilian environmental dystopia by Ignácio de Loyloa Brandão. Written in the 1970s during the military dictatorship in Brazil, the book describes a fictitious dictatorial regime known as “Civiltar,” which celebrates cutting down the last tree in the Amazon with a jingoistic declaration that it has created “a desert greater than that of the Sahara.” In this story, all the Brazilian rivers are dead; jugs of water from each of the extinct rivers are displayed in a hydrographic museum. Aluminum can dunes and highways permanently blocked by the shells of abandoned cars are the backdrop of São Paulo. The city itself suffers from sudden heat pockets capable of killing any unsuspecting person; mysterious diseases consume the citizens, especially the homeless.
The author claims that he was inspired by real events that seemed absurd and unusual at the time. Today, these are becoming ever more ordinary.
News of the increased burning of the Amazon has sent shockwaves around the world. Burns rose 82% in 2019 over the same period last year in Brazil, according to the National Institute for Space Research, and new outbreaks of fire are still being reported as we write. The catastrophic images of destruction have fueled the indignation of people around the world who are concerned about the future of life on earth, seeing how important the Amazon rainforest is for climate regulation and global biodiversity. Images of the fires compelled French President Emmanuel Macron to bring the subject to the G7 summit and to exchange barbs with President Jair Bolsonaro in the media after France offered millions of dollars in funds to fight forest fires.
Protest against deforestation in the Amazon, in São Paulo, August 23, 2019.
Since the end of 2018, half a billion bees have been found dead in four Brazilian states. The death of these insects that are essential to fertilizing 75% of the vegetables we eat is linked to the use of pesticides banned in Europe but permitted in Brazil. In August 2019, the court dismissed the charges against a farmer who used pesticides thrown from a plane as a chemical weapon against Guyra Kambi’y indigenous community in Mato Grosso do Sul in 2015. The same month, groups of farmers, “land grabbers” [people who falsify documents in order to obtain ownership of land], union members, and traders used a Whatsapp group to coordinate setting fires in the municipality of Altamira, Pará, the epicenter of fires consuming the Amazon rainforest. As reported in Folha do Progresso, the “day of the fire” was organized by people encouraged by the words of Jair Bolsonaro: “The goal, according to one of the leaders speaking anonymously, is to show the president that they want to work.”
The recent wave of fires linking President Jair Bolsonaro’s policies to attacks against forests, peasant farmers, and indigenous peoples is an intensification of a process as old as the colonization of the Americas. While the Workers’ Party (PT) was still in power, many projects were introduced to expand and accelerate growth, including the construction of the Belo Monte plant, which displaced and impacted indigenous communities and thousands of other people living in the countryside. The approval of the Forest Code in 2012 enabled farmers to advance over indigenous territories and nature reserves with impunity, while suspending the demarcation of new protected lands.
Both left and right governments see nature and human life chiefly as resources with which to produce commodities and profit. The government of Bolsonaro, a declared enemy of the common people, women, and indigenous groups, doesn’t just threaten us with the physical violence of police repression. In declaring that he will no longer recognize any indigenous land, Bolsonaro is intensifying a war on the ecosystems that make human life possible—a war that long precedes him.
A 500-Year-Running Disaster
For centuries, we have struggled to survive the greatest disaster of our time, a disaster that threatens the sustainability of all the biomes and communities on this planet. Its name is capitalism—the cruelest, most inequitable, and destructive economic system in history. This threat is not the result of the inevitable forces of nature. Humans created it and humans can eliminate it.
Anarchists in Sao Paulo on August 23, 2019 protesting against the government and against the deforestation of the Amazon: “Burn fascists, not forests!”
In Brazil, we have witnessed firsthand how this system exploits people, promotes genocide, and degrades and pollutes the earth, water, and air. Even if we ultimately manage to abolish it, we will still have to survive the consequences of letting it go on for so long. The destruction of entire ecosystems, the poisons in rivers and in our own bodies, the species that have gone extinct, the glaciers that have disappeared, the forests that have been cut down and paved over—these consequences will remain for many years to come. In the future, we will have to survive by gathering what we need from the ruins and waste that this system has left in its wake. All the material that has been torn from the ground to be strewn across the earth’s surface and dumped into the seas will not return overnight to the depths it came from.
Recognizing this should inform how we envision our revolutionary prospects. It is foolish to imagine that the abolition of capitalism will expand that the consumer activities that are currently available to the global bourgeoisie to the entire human population; we must stop fantasizing about a regulated post-capitalist world with infinite resources to generate the sort of commodities that capitalist propaganda has led us to desire. Rather, we will have to experiment in ways to share the self-management of our lives amid the recovery of our biomes, our relationships, and our bodies after centuries of aggression and exploitation—organizing life in regions that have become hostile to it.
The ways we organize our resistance today should be informed by the fact that our revolutionary experiments will not be taking place in a world of peace, stability, and balance. We will be struggling to survive in the midst of the consequences of centuries of pollution and environmental degradation. The best-case scenario for the future will look like the situation in Kobanê in 2015: a victorious revolution in a bombed-out city full of mines.
Last stand: neither utopias nor dystopias—revolution!
So What Is Burning the Amazon?
There is a consensus among scientific researchers, government institutions, social movements, and rural and urban peoples regarding the impacts and risks of global warming and increasing industrialization and urbanization. Some of these consequences are about to become irreversible. The deforestation of the Amazon itself may become irreparable if it reaches 40% of its total area.
It has never worked to demand that governments solve these problems for us—and it never will. This is especially foolish when we are talking about the environmental disasters caused by their own policies. Land seizures and the deforestation of the Amazon are inextricably interlinked with the organized criminal enterprises that smuggle and kill in the countryside. Fully 90% of the timber harvested is contraband supported by a vast apparatus of illegal capitalism involving armed militias and the state itself.
Populist leaders like Bolsonaro aim to benefit from the unfolding ecological catastrophe at the same time that they deny it is occurring. On the one hand, they claim that there is no need for action to curb global warming—alongside Trump, Bosonaro was the only other leader who threatened to abandon the Paris Agreement, claiming that global warming is a “fable for environmentalists.” This helps to mobilize the far-right base, which admires and celebrates outright dishonesty as a demonstration of political power. On the other hand, as the consequences of climate chaos and environmental imbalances become obvious undeniable facts, these leaders will opportunistically take advantage of environmental crises, product shortages, refugee migrations, and climate disasters such as hurricanes as pretexts to accelerate the implementation of ever more authoritarian measures in the fields of health, transportation and security. Using authoritarian and militarized means to determine who can have access to the resources they need to survive in a context of widespread scarcity is what many theorists have called ecofascism.
The intervention of foreign states in the Amazon forests according to their own economic interests is simply the continuation of the colonialism that began in 1492. No government will solve the problem of fires and deforestation. At best, they might slow the impact of the exploitation they have always engaged in. Neoliberal capitalism demands endless growth, mandating the transformation of forests and soil into competitive consumer goods on the global market.
So what is burning the Amazon—and the entire planet? The answer is clear: the pursuit of land, profit (legal or not), and private property. None of this will be changed by any elected or imposed government. The only truly environmental perspective is a revolutionary perspective seeking the end of capitalism and the state itself.
Mundurukus warriors without state support set out for direct action to expel loggers from the Sawré Mybu Indigenous Land in Pará.
Exercising Our Ability to Imagine
The dystopian images of And Still the Earth and George Orwell’s novel 1984 were intended as warnings: exaggerated projections of the worst that can happen if we fail to change the course of history. Today, with cameras around every corner and our own TVs and cell phones carrying out surveillance on us, it is as if these dystopian novels are being used as a handbook for governments and corporations to bring our worst nightmares into reality.
Dystopias are warnings; but utopias, by definition, represent places that do not exist. We need other places, places that are possible. We need to be able to imagine a different world—and to imagine ourselves, our desires, and our relationships being different as well.
We should use the creativity that enables us to picture zombie apocalypses and other literary or cinematic calamities to imagine a reality beyond capitalism right now and begin building it. Today, as reality surpasses fiction, our activities are largely characterized by disbelief and passivity. But you cannot be neutral on a moving train—especially not one that is accelerating on a track into the abyss. Crossing your arms is complicity. Likewise, acting individually is insufficient because it maintains the logic that has brought us here.
We have to rediscover revolutionary reference points for self-organized and egalitarian collective life. We need to share examples of real societies that have resisted the state and capitalism, such as the anarchist experiments during the Russian and Ukrainian Revolutions of 1917 and the Spanish Revolution of 1936. We should remember, also, that all of these were ultimately betrayed and crushed by, or with the connivance of, the Bolshevik Party and the Stalinist dictatorship that followed it, which carried out unprecedented industrialization and the mass displacement of agrarian peoples. This illustrates why it is so important to develop a way of imagining that does not simply replicate the visions of capitalist industrialism.
We can also look to contemporary examples like the Zapatista Uprising in Mexico since 1994 and the ongoing revolution in Rojava in northern Syria. But in addition to the examples offered by anarchists or influenced by anarchist principles, we should learn from the many the indigenous nations around us: Guaranis, Mundurukus, Tapajós, Krenaks, and many others who have ceaselessly resisted European and capitalist colonial expansion for five centuries. They are all living examples from whom anarchists can learn about life, organization, and resistance without and against the state.
If there is any fundamental basis for solidarity in response to the attack on the foundation of all life in the Amazon, it is the potential that we can build connections between the social movements, the poor, and excluded of the world and the indigenous and peasant peoples of all Latin America. To put a halt to the deforestation underway in the Amazon and countless similar forms of destruction that are taking place across the planet, we must nourish grassroots movements that reject the neoliberal resource management of soil, forests, waters, and people.
For a solidarity between all peoples and exploited classes, not between paternalism and the colonialism of governments! The only way to address the environmental crisis and global climate change is to abolish capitalism!
Another end of the world is possible!
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