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fortey · 2 years

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The Day I Met Ray Liotta

Once a long lost FunnyCrave or HolyTaco article, now returned! I emailed it to someone in 2011! RIP Mr. Liotta, you were awesome.

The life of an internet comedian is a whirlwind of excitement. If you’re not at a gala dinner to support the preservation of owls whose name may include the word “tit” but not in an obscene fashion, you’re spinning hilarious quips into 140 character gemstones on Twitter, then constantly refreshing to see who replied or retweeted you and helped validate your existence for a few moments. Oh, it’s quite the ride. Of course, along with this comes the magnificence of celebrity; brushing elbows with the world’s elite. Yes, celebrities are better than you and I because they have been on television. Have you been on television? Don’t answer, I won’t have time to read it.

Every so often, as writers, we get invited to cover luxurious events, movie premieres and golden jubilees. Recently, we were on our way to cover the opening of Moneyball when it became clear that getting to the theatre for the red carpet event would be a difficult task when it happened the day before and we had forgotten about it. Oops. Like any reasonable professional, the course of correction for this oversight was clear – cheap booze from Trader Joes.

The bus came quickly and the ride was as smooth as the finest Chinese silk, straight from the puckered anus of the most refined caterpillar. Upon reaching the stop conveniently located a mere block from Trader Joe’s, I departed from my public transit comrades’ company and sought out some discount bourbon that I felt would make my evening a little more festive as I planned another week of Holy Taco galleries and answered the site’s fan mail with veiled threats and outright threats.

Upon entering Trader Joe's I was met with the familiar smell of Joe himself – exotic spices from the Orient and a touch of sweat. Kind of what you’d expect a child in a shoe factory to smell like, if he’d managed to use that month’s salary to buy a ginger snap. Other customers milled about purchasing unsweetened green tea, trail mix and other preposterous products of that ilk. None of that for me, it was the single malt Imperial bourbon whiskey that was calling my name. To be fair, a Trader Joe’s employee was the one calling me after I accidentally knocked over a display of Toscano cheese, but he didn’t know my name so I refused to listen.

As I perused the store’s selection of liquors, emboldened by the knowledge an underpaid servant was now cleaning my artisanal cheese mess, I paused to ask a fellow alcohol enthusiast if the Aberlour would quench my thirst better than the Imperial, only I worded it thusly “How fast will this get me shitfaced?”

To my surprise, the gravelly voice that replied to me with a simple “it’ll get you where you need to be” belonged to none other than famed thespian Ray Liotta. Mr. Liotta, as you no doubt know, is the star of such films as No Escape and Operation: Dumbo Drop. I was taken aback.

“Are you Ray Liotta?” I asked. It was a stupid ass question at best, because he was clearly Ray Liotta. Also, no one likes being asked who they are. Generally the only people who ask you to confirm your identity are the police or idiots on the phone. I had made my first misstep in our new friendship.

Liotta may have smiled or sneered and said “yes,” making eye contact only briefly. Was he becoming testy? Did he realize he should not have initiated contact? I had to act quickly. How does one best know for writing internet articles about sex toys and the Black Eyed Peas (but not together. Not yet anyway) make a good impression on a man who has co-starred on film with Whoopi Goldberg?

“I wrote a pretty popular article about sex toys once,” I say, placing a hand in my pocket. Tactical error, that.

Mr. Liotta bade a hasty retreat, which makes sense even to me, and I was left holding my bourbon. The Aberlour sounded good so I took two and shortly followed after Mr. Liotta looking to not only explain myself but take some time to arrange a play date for us later in the week. Of course, being men, we wouldn’t call it a play date. That would be asinine. It would be Boy Time.

Having only watched Liotta on film, you may be surprised to learn he possesses some manner of Spiderman-like intuition or “Liotta Sense” if you will, which allowed him to stealthily avoid me with apparent ease thence forward. By the time I finaly caught sight of him he was leaving the store with several packages of breakfast burritos. Good choice, Ray. Good choice.

I was detained in line behind some filthy hippie who was trying to find out if there was gluten in his trail mix, as if anyone on earth would mourn his loss should he eat gluten (it’s poisonous, right? Why on Earth would they add that to trail mix? Add more raisins instead) and by the time I made my purchase, Ray had vanished forever. As I rode the bus home, I was wistful, and lifted my head with an impossible hope every time the bus stopped and the door opened to allow on a new passenger. “Ray?!” I’d say quietly, as other passengers moved away from me. But it never was. Ray Liotta probably has a car. No bus for him. No sir.

#comedy #shorts #rayliotta

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gaythingliker69 · 3 years

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PLEASE READ

TW: transphobia, mentions of hate crime

Hi, so since my post the other night I feel a sort of responsibility to tell people the situation of trans people in the UK. The short answer is it’s really bleak. The first thing I’ll mention is that in 2017 a trans woman was given residency in New Zealand from the UK as she faced “persecution” for her gender identity. The NZ authorities ruled that to send her back here would be “unduly harsh”. This must be at the forefront of everyone’s mind when trans rights come up in the UK, though it’s been forgotten over the last few years.

At that point the Labour Party was sort of ok for trans rights, with then leader Jeremy Corbyn calling for self ID. He certainly wasn’t perfect but he was better than his replacement. Corbyn was replaced by Sir Keir Starmer last year, and in his campaign for the leadership he refused to sign a pledge for trans rights, which was signed by his competitors Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy. The fourth contender, Emily Thornberry, refused to sign the pledge but spoke of her support for trans rights after the fact. Gemma Stone, a trans woman who said she was considering joining Labour but decided against it, described Starmer’s silence on the issue as “deafening”.

These days, Parliamentary support for trans rights comes from the backbenches - Members of Parliament who don’t hold a position as a government minister or shadow government minister. These include Zarah Sultana (the responses on that tweet are awful, but gives you an idea of what we’re up against) and Nadia Whittome of the Labour left, and Layla Moran of the Liberal Democrats, the first MP to identify as openly pansexual. Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party, has called transphobia “not acceptable” in her party. However, Moran lost the LD leadership contest to Sir Ed Davey in 2020, so no party in Parliament in England and Wales has a platform for trans rights. Starmer has appeared to embolden transphobia by not cracking down on MPs like Rosie Duffield. We are very much on our own. Even on the far left, often accused of supporting trans rights as a means to undermine Western civilisation or something (I joke but I think you get my point), has major issues with it. The Communist Party of Britain has rumours and allegations of transphobia in its ranks, and the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) infamously referred to LGBT+ politics as “anti-Marxist” and “anti working class”. Are there no working class LGBT+ people? Regardless, even the people who are labelled as liking us don’t appear to.

And Johnson’s Conservatives are a non starter. Just this year, they proposed making unenrolled deed polls (a method of quickly changing your name) invalid. This would mean there is a publicly available list of trans people and other vulnerable individuals, like those trying to escape or disassociate from abusive partners. The process would require consent from any spouse (the only other process of this nature that requires this is gender recognition for trans people) and the addresses of those who have changed their names would be public knowledge. I shouldn’t have to tell you how dangerous that is. It also appears there is little being done to stop the rise in hate crime, which were reported to have quadrupled last year. Politics is openly hostile from nearly every corner, it would seem.

In terms of healthcare there has been a similar decline. The BBC described waiting lists of over 3 years for gender clinics as “hell” (bear in mind this article was written before the pandemic hit the UK), though there were claims on Twitter that these times were up to 60 months in some places. These waiting times can lead to people taking the unfamiliar and often expensive private route. The High Court recently ruled that under 16s are unlikely to be able to give informed consent on puberty blockers, a troubling ruling that could have dangerous consequences depending on how the courts extend it in the future. The ruling that puberty blockers can only be used after you’ve gone through the bulk of puberty is a really curious one from a logical standpoint - they are not hormones, they are not irreversible. But I fear that’s what the courts or Parliament will come for next.

If you’re looking for an alternative source with different information from someone older, here’s a decent thread on how British transphobia partly emerged from the Skeptics in the Pub movement, making it unique to this hellish little rock.

This overview is really brief, and it would require me going a lot further in depth to go into how the media has fed into this, the controversies surrounding certain private doctors, or different groups and dog whistles they’ve adopted. But for now, I honestly feel quite helpless. There’s not much you can do to affect Parliament, especially not with the new laws coming in around protest in the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Bill. Petitions are useless unless they’re done through the Parliament website. If they gain 10,000 signatures they go to a petitions committee, then maybe the House of Commons itself. Only to be almost definitely voted down by Johnson’s Conservatives and their majority. Just please, spread this for all of us living here, and give any sort of suggestions for action. I fear this is going to get far worse before it gets better. We can but hope I’m wrong.

Update: 05/05/21

There have been some recent developments that I’m gonna note. I might use this as a sort of compilation document of documenting our position here.

Maya Forstater was a contracted consultant at the Centre for Global Development. Her contract wasn’t renewed in 2019 after a series of transphobic Twitter posts caused staff to complain about her. She received support from the Index for Censorship and was able to crowdfund her campaign. At the Central London Employment Tribunal, Judge James Tayler branded her views “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”. He said that her views weren’t protected under the Equality Act 2010 as they “violated the dignity” of trans people due to her insistence on misgendering. Judge Tayler did not say she couldn’t conduct so called ‘gender critical’ campaigns.

Part of Tayler’s judgement from the above linked article, the judgement itself can be read here. Various views on the case can be found in the ‘Reaction to the tribunal judgement’ of the Wikipedia article.

Forstater appealed, and there is yet to be a judgement. However, the Equality abs Human Rights Commission has intervened to say that Forstater’s beliefs are protected under the Equality Act as they are philosophical beliefs. The irony in this should be clear. The equality watchdog making an effort to protect bigotry over people’s right not to face abuse. I’ll update this when the decision is handed down, which will be later in the year.

#trans #lgbt #lgbtqiia+#lgbtq #lgbtqia #lgbtq rights #transgender #mtf #ftm #ftm transgender #mtf trans #mtf transgender #ftm trans #trans rights

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whatiwillsay · 3 years

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what really inspired the babe music video though...

So if you’ve read my babe mv analysis you know it’s one of the world’s loudest and best gaylor proofs in existence. What I want to explore here however is why 5-6 years after Swiftgron was over, is Taylor digging up the grave another time to drag her ex.

Seriously stop and think about it. Why on God’s gay earth did Taylor decide to Swiftgron her ass off in 2018. When she’s supposedly moved on to the London Lover and happy? The simplest explanation is that Babe is about Dianna so Taylor made sure people knew that. And hey that’s completely possible.

However it’s Christmas and I’m feeling generous so buckle up for some crack and reaching. (read: this is mostly a joke post so don’t come for my neck for playing around and making it. if you don’t like it don’t read✌️)

What if Taylor painting herself as the desperate other woman in this music video all about Dianna has a meaning further than it just worked out like that? What if Dianna was cheating on Winston with Taylor in a late stage illicit Swiftgron affair 👀👀👀???? (no I don’t think IA is about dianna, she doesn’t take runs)

Taylor said herself that “the narrative is never truly over” about her and Dianna so right after she and Karlie broke up why wouldn’t we expect a Swiftgron fling:

vimeo

Babe was released in late spring of 2018 so let’s try and pin down when this Swiftgron tomfoolery could have taken place...

We know Dianna was in London at the beginning of 2017 (with Carey Mulligan no less, a friend of Taylor’s!)

Thanks to @swiftiesleuth‘s (who is probably going to make fun of me for this theory but THAT’S FINE W ME) realistic Kaylor Timeline we know Taylor was hiding out in London at this point in time as well:

3 January 2017 - Taylor diaries that she’s “essentially based in London” and that “we have been together and no one has found out for three months.” (This could be three months with Joe from September 28 OR three months from Tily’s Halloween party. Either way, not Karlie).

8 January 2017 - Taylor and Zayn film the I Don’t Wanna Live Forever MV in London.

So the question is, can we build a theory about Swiftgron having a late stage affair simply because they were in the same city at the same time? Well if Kaylors can claim Kaylor got engaged solely because Taylor was not papped while Karlie went on vacation then I say YES! Tis the damn season!!!

Let’s look at social media clues. Dianna seemed to be in on Rep promo. You want proof? Well what else could she have meant when she posted a photo captioned “please don’t eat the daisies” a few months after the London affair. We know Karlie called Taylor daisy so perhaps social media criminal mastermind Dianna “queen of shade” Agron was trying to humiliate Karlie because Karlie smirked at her at that fashion show in 2015:

Emboldened by her own crimes she then flexed her insider knowledge of Rep promo by posting video of her singing on instagram with the caption “Zombie Love” a mere three days before Taylor appeared in the LWYMMD music video dressed as a zombie in the OOTW (a song about Dianna) dress. Why is Taylor a zombie in specific outfit? Because Swiftgron is back from the dead of course:

Not only that but in the music video she buries the Taylor in the met gala dress from 2014. She attended that met gala with Karlie. RIP KAYLOR LONG LIVE SWIFTGRON!??!?

Now positively DRUNK with power, Dianna seems to stalk Karlie to an event only to tauntingly call her goooeeoeoeooueuueugoussssssss to her face, the queen of manipulation and psychological warfare has struck again!!! This happens in Feb 2018 a mere matter of weeks before babe is dropped as a single.

We of course know Dianna admits to her own commitment issues on instagram two days before Babe drops but what if she is referencing her commitment issues not with Taylor but with her husband Winston because she is cheating on him with Taylor at this point in time or did some time in 2017???

Taylor releases babe and then later the music video seeming to be screaming to the whole world that yes she is cucking Winston Marshall and she wants you, your mom, and your cat to know about it!

Dianna voices her support of this by posting this to her IG stories at the end of May:

We know Taylor’s symbol was a snake during the rep era and she couldn’t trust just about anyone but, Dianna was letting her know to trust in her!!!

I’ve always suspected DBATC is a Swiftgron song due to the lyrics “i look through the windows of This Love, even though we boarded them up” -that references the flood that happened in Clean that taylor says she and the London Lover (or Karlie) boarded up the windows of after the storm in CIWYW.

I see you everywhere The only thing we share Is this small town

What if “i see you everywhere” is literal? because they’re sneaking around and actually seeing one another in a literal since?

My heart, my hips, my body, my love Trying to find a part of me that you didn't touch

Sounds like an affair to me!!!

When she says “the morning comes and you’re not my baby” she’s saying speaking present day because Dianna is still married to Winston.

and while Dianna seems to love rubbing Karlie’s face in it, like the evil villain we all know she is, Taylor likewise seems to like to rub Winston’s cuck status in his face in it since she adds a song he wrote about Dianna to her me! playlist in June of 2019:

look at the other songs she taunts him with “glad he’s gone”, “just friends”, “hey, ma”, “open my mouth”!! she’s sick!!!

Winston has had enough of this and he and Dianna split in July of 2019 though it doesn’t go public for a year.

To add insult to injury (and to personally attack tumblr kaylors all over the world) Taylor performs false god at SNL, a song she wrote about her and Dianna’s late stage affair with Dianna in attendance.

So in summation, perhaps Taylor is referencing Dianna so much recently because they hooked up more recently than 2013 and that’s why Taylor paints herself as the other woman in the Babe mv and has become obsessed with adultery lately. Because maybe Dianna was cheating on Winston with her 😌😌😌.

#merry christmas #this is mostly a joke #swiftgron #gaylor swift

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eddie-spaghettis-bifocals · 4 years

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Seed part 2

read part 1 here :)

For years now, Eddie has told Myra he wants a garden.

The first time he told her was a year into their marriage. She went along with it, probably assuming he had some semblance of botanical knowledge to suggest it at all, and then he killed everything he planted, and it had upset him in such a deeply personal way. She could never understand it. Not that he fucking understood it either, but rather than take the time to try and figure that out, he stubbornly tried it again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

Of course, at some point, Myra just begged him to stop. To stop doing this, to stop making himself so angry over something so trivial. “Why does it matter?” she’d ask. Ha! As if Eddie had any fucking clue, himself.

And he thought he never would. He thought it’d just be another one of those weird inexplicable things about him. He thought he’d spend the rest of his strange, spotty life miserably failing to garden every single summer and getting upset about it until he stumbled upon whatever the hell this midlife crisis symptom was trying to fucking tell him.

Ha.

You suppressed the weirdest childhood trauma known to man, it told him the second he came back to Derry. Then, when he saw all the losers: You used to have a real family that made you happy.

Your sickness isn’t real and you kind of always knew, he remembers shortly after Mr. Keene’s pharmacy basement nightmare. You’re gay actually, he accepts in the hours before going down into the sewers and very nearly dying.

You fell in love once a long time ago, he thought as he lie bleeding out in his best friend’s arms in the place he feared the most. He shut his eyes on accident and opened them back up in a hospital room, where he sees all the losers in various states of exhaustion. Richie is asleep, leaned halfway over onto his hospital bed, head on Eddie’s tubed up arm. And you never really fell out.

He was sure, at the time, that that was about the last of the suppressed Derry revelations about himself he could take, but that was then. This is now, at their final stop before meeting Mike at the airport and leaving Derry forever. Richie’s hand supports Eddie’s bandaged arm again as they stand in the Barrens, as if he thinks Eddie might lose his balance and topple right into the fucking creek—as if he doesn’t have a brand new cane to help prevent things of exactly that nature. He joins Eddie in staring up and up and endlessly up at what Eddie thinks may have been the lamest, most confusing grand gesture of his entire life:

A tree.

It definitely wasn’t here the last time he was, but he knows it innately, all the same. And judging by the look on Richie’s face, he knows it, too.

He wants to slap himself.

For years now, he’s told Myra he wants a fucking garden to his own bewilderment when all along, it’s been because of some stupid tree—and every embarrassingly intimate thing it accidentally represented—that he grew with comedian Richie fucking Tozier back when he was a nobody twenty-seven years ago. Back when they were both at their most honest and vulnerable. When Eddie was at his most unabashedly infatuated—uninhibited in a way he’s never been since, determined and emboldened, freshly thirteen and endlessly stupid—

“Well, whaddayaknow, huh?” Richie whistles. Eddie slides his nervous eyes over to see Richie still looking up like he’s afraid to stop. “Tall and shady. Just like you said. There’s some birds up top, I see. For Stan,” he says, and his lips tilt up at the sides.

There had been, it appears, some sort of magic involved in Eddie’s survival. Bill told him that by the time they got him to the hospital, the bleeding had stopped. Combine that with the fact that the scars on their palms are now completely gone, and the fact that Stan’s wife called Beverly back before Eddie woke up to tell her that Stan had pulled through somehow—it’s so strange we were sure he was gone—Eddie is inclined to think that, too.

And of course, they’re all overjoyed about it, but Eddie thinks Richie’s probably the happiest, since Stan was his best friend. Eddie likes to think that he was too, but there hasn’t been a good time over the last couple of days to ask. Or a good reason. Or a mature reason.

He knows that Richie, Bev, and Ben have made quiet plans to go to Georgia together after Richie finally leaves Derry to visit Stan in the hospital and stay for his recovery. Meet Patty. Obviously, they’re all invited, but they’re all acting like they don’t expect to see Eddie there for a while. At least not as immediately as Richie, Bev, and Ben will be there. He figures they all think he’s got his divorce to deal with and don’t realize that he’d rather do anything but.

“No squirrels though,” Richie hums. He looks at Eddie, eyes suddenly full of mischief as he pinches his lips to hide a smile. Just like he used to. “Just you, Rocky…”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Shut up, don’t fucking call me Rocky, that’s not even funny, are you kidding me?” He kind of hates the way he knows he’s doing exactly what Richie wants, just like back then. Richie watches him explode just like then, too, like there’s nothing else he’d rather be watching. Eddie’s heart thrums like a hummingbird’s. “Like, now I have to call you Bullwinkle, you fucking gargantuan moose-headed motherfucker and that’s not any more original than you still calling me Rocky twenty-seven years later.”

“What was it you said that day?” Richie grins. He’s not even hiding the way they both know he just likes to rile Eddie up. Eddie wishes he were really as annoyed with him as they both know he pretends to be. “Something about carving your name at the very top with my buckteeth?”

“Well what were you doing with them aside from taunting the bullies?” Eddie laughs out, surprised, but now he definitely remembers saying it. Worse, he remembers imagining later, after he and Richie had gone their separate ways, coming back here and carving Richie’s name instead. God.

“Ouch, and you called me a dickhead?”

Eddie snorts, can feel his smile matching Richie’s. “Yeah, you were being a dickhead.”

“You were being short.”

“Well—” Eddie stares and blinks and bolsters himself up for another round but finds himself laughing instead, isn’t all that surprised when he can’t make himself stop. He wants to say it’s a belated release of all the leftover adrenaline he’s probably still got pent up inside, but he’s getting tired of lying to himself. He can feel his smile stretching and stretching, and knows he hasn’t smiled like this in years, hasn’t laughed at something stupid like this in longer. The laughing kind of hurts, what with the violent ripping open, then rapid mending shut of his chest cavity, but he thinks for the first time in his life that this is a good pain.

Richie reaches to steady him, again as if he doesn’t have a cane for this very thing. Richie hasn’t even left yet, and Eddie misses him. Ridiculously, he thinks he’ll miss him for the rest of his whole life.

“You’re not funny,” Eddie deadpans once he stops laughing, once he's caught his breath, but he fails terribly, still grinning. He sees the way Richie is smiling back at him. He is just as afraid to look too much into it as he is to look away.

“You sound just like my critics,” Richie laughs. “You should come to my shows,” he offers like a second thought, but Eddie thinks his cheeks look a little pink, then that he’s losing his mind. “You could heckle me—that’s always good publicity. You’ve always been the best at roasting me. You know all the embarrassing stuff. You know exactly how much of a fucking joke my life is.”

Eddie scoffs. He would say he’s always been the worst at roasting Richie because he never means a word of it. “My life’s a joke,” he rolls his eyes. “On top of everything Derry did to us, I think this fucking tree kind of haunted me.” He says, as a joke, but he thinks there’s a part of himself that means it. Which is even more ridiculous. “I spent the better part of like fifteen years trying to garden for no apparent fucking reason because apparently this tree was that big a fucking deal to me. Do you remember wanting anything the way we wanted this tree to grow?”

Richie doesn’t answer right away. Instead, he sighs, meets Eddie’s gaze, then drops a bombshell. “Eds, dude, you gotta know I, like, barely cared about this thing.”

“What?” Eddie reacts with so much shock, it must show on his face because Richie winces. “You… what?” Eddie says slowly, waiting for Richie to crack but be doesn’t. Only shakes his head, sucks in air through his teeth and keeps wincing.

“Don’t look at me like that, I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m not mad, just—” He’s a little embarrassed. He could deal with this if they had both trauma bonded to this stupid fucking tree. He could chock that down to more Derry bullshit—he already had, but he couldn’t handle it if he were the crazy one and Richie had just been, what, humoring him? He shakes his head. “No, I am mad,” he decides, and Richie chortles and that only makes him madder. “What do you mean you didn’t care? That doesn’t make sense, you woke up at like five a.m. to come do this with me!”

“Yeah, ‘cause you cornered me in the clubhouse all alone and said you needed me.” Richie looks over at him, then seems to immediately regret it, drops his eyes onto the grass. “I mean, I barely even knew what you needed me for when you said it, but I thought if I didn’t do it, you might ask one of the others, so I woke up to come do this really fucking depressing thing with you—”

“Fuck you, man,” Eddie snaps, flustered. “It was supposed to be hopeful!”

“Well it was fucking depressing,” Richie tells him with an easy smile. He finally looks at Eddie as he does, but his expression is nervous. Pensive. “But that’s okay. Because it was you.” Again, Eddie’s heart thrums like a hummingbird. “And if you were gonna make anyone wake up at the ass crack of dawn to try your hand at desperately redefining the word ‘burial’ just to prove something to the universe, then I fucking wanted it to be with me.”

Eddie stares at him, speechless. Richie stares right back, shoulders kind of slumped, like he doesn’t know how to hold himself. There’s this feeling like a deep breath, a feeling of relief—finally it’s out there.

And Eddie supposes, now that he has to face it, that he knew. Maybe even back then he knew. Maybe he always knew, deep, deep down, that it wasn’t always just him. He was just afraid, and wasn’t that always the thing about him? He had been too afraid to hope then, and he almost wants to be now, but he looks at Richie and thinks they’ve wasted enough time.

“I always used to hope it was something like that,” Eddie admits. When Richie looks over at him, he stares back head-on, tells himself to be uninhibited, and determined, and emboldened, and endlessly stupid, just like he was all those years ago. Just like the last time they were here together. “That you did… stupid things just for me like I did stupid things just for you.”

Richie watches him like he’s afraid to hope, and frankly, Eddie kind of is, too. Irrationally, despite everything, he imagines Richie possibly having someone back in LA—possibly having a hundred someones on reserve, but something unhinged inside him thinks if even the jaws of fucking death couldn’t keep him from Richie, then good luck to Richie’s imaginary side piece in LA.

Richie laughs loosely, looking uncertain. “If you’re trying to tell me that this was one of those stupid things and not just some weirdly morose growth allegory, then—”

“Yeah, okay, growth allegory,” Eddie rolls his eyes, “whatever—whatever, but also you.” They’re close, Richie still hovering like something might happen, but Eddie doubts he planned for this. For Eddie to release his cane in favor of Richie’s hands. To tug him even closer like he knows what he’s doing. To reach up and pull his face toward him so he’ll stop looking wildly between Eddie’s hands and the cane on the ground he traded for them. “Like, mostly you.”

“Oh,” Richie blinks, eyes wide and owlish like they always looked when they were kids. He looks at Eddie, back and forth between his eyes like they’ll tell him the truth more than words could. He smiles and proceeds to nearly ruin it. “Cool, what the fuck am I supposed to do with this? I’m not good under pressure.”

Eddie scoffs, says, “Pressure,” and kisses him.

Richie kisses him back, startled and laughing a little, but he kisses back like it’s nature. Like it’s innate and organic and unchangeable. Something that Eddie’s certain has been trying to grow between them for decades.

They won’t forget it this time.

#reddie #seed #richie tozier #eddie kaspbrak #my writing #prompt fill #it's a metaphor hazel grace

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abeautifulblog · 4 years

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12 and 6 for the writing asks?

Yassssss~

12) My favorite place to write is our courtyard patio:

We live in the literal desert, so it gets too hot to be out there during the afternoon, but it’s lovely in the mornings and the evenings, and I’ve got my chair set up with a little rolling desk I built for my laptop. It’s also enclosed, so it’s safe for my blind & stupid cat to come enjoy the outdoors with me. (No really, I love her but she’s an idiot and also completely blind.)

(And yes, I gave Gene my own hobby when I wrote him as a gardener.)

6) Hardest story to write: haaah, I think you guys can probably guess the answer to this, based on which installments took the longest to get out – “Bodies in the Lake” and “Love Like Light.” And the common denominator there was making those nerds bone.

So yeah, now that I can finally talk about what was going on behind the scenes – why did those take so long?

Part of it was just that as the fic came to an end, there were fewer things left to write, so if I got stuck on one thing, there was really nothing else for me to work on in the mean time. “The Old College Try,” for instance, had been in the works since “This House,” but when I was blocked on it, I could put it on the backburner and write six billion remixes of the bake sale instead.

So after the Thanksgiving chapter, when they finally clear the air about Robert’s mental illness, the next item to check off the list was “nerds get sum fuk” – and I really thought they were ready to get down to it. I was planning a comedy romp at a bigfoot-themed ski lodge that would end with them hopping in the sack. I thought their issues were resolved already.

And then it just.

Wasn’t.

Happening.

Was the setting wrong? I’d chosen to put them on holiday as way to shake up the scenery, get them out of their usual (sexless) routine and perhaps embolden them to try something new. Should I have left them at Gene’s house, where Robert feels safe and comfortable? But then what’s the catalyst that makes them do it NOW, when they haven’t done it BEFORE? What makes Robert decide that now is the “right time”? How do I signal to the readers that it’s okay for them to have sex now, when earlier (like in “Ghosts in the Attic”) it would have been disastrous?

But yeah, I had been trying to make them fuck since chapter 18. It’s why that chapter is shot through with sex, why Robert has a boner for basically the entire first half – and not in the freaky-dissonant way that he did in “Ghosts in the Attic,” but as a natural, healthy reaction to his beloved boyfriend rubbing up on him in slinky yoga pants. It was to telegraph that sex is on the agenda, so that it wouldn’t be coming out of left field when they consummated at the end of the chapter.

It’s why the working title for “Bodies in the Lake” was sex_happens.doc – until it became clear that sex wasn’t going to happen. That the issues raised in “Ghosts in the Attic” were still completely unresolved. Indeed, Gene still didn’t even know those issues existed.

Gene is very good at handling Robert’s crises when it’s something he’s been through before with Alex – but when Robert steps off-script, Gene’s suddenly winging it, and it shows. Alex had a lot of sexual partners in the past too – as people who are outgoing and bisexual and dtf often do – but he never did Robert’s brand of self-destructive, self-loathing promiscuity, and so Gene has no understanding of the psychology behind that behavior, or why it’s different from Alex’s form of slutting around.

And then Mary was supposed to just smack some sense into him and shove him back into Gene’s loving arms, but holy shit, did that conversation get derailed. And as an author, when a character looks you in the eye and says, It’s time to talk about this, you let them talk.

That was when my housemate-beta, who’d been there for all my agonizing over how to make them fuck, said, “You have to break this up into two chapters. This conversation here, it’s the emotional climax.” And she was absolutely right, but that’s why the sex got delayed another year. 😫

(I had not, going into that chapter, intended for them to have that conversation. I thought I was showing their character growth in the gym scene at the beginning, which features a number of deliberate callbacks to the first chapter except for all the ways that they’re healthier now, drinking smoothies instead of mimosas and actually TALKING about feelings. I had not realized they were going to DOUBLE THE FUCK DOWN on character growth later.)

So that was “Bodies in the Lake” finally out, after only eleven months (and I do consider that chapter a conscious bookend to “Ghosts in the Attic”), but I still had yet to make them fuck.

(I feel like some exotic zookeeper – like, I have created the perfect conditions for you, have I not, so why won’t you two just fuck already??)

Because it’s not just about being horny and wanting to get their rocks off (anyone with a sex drive knows how to take care of that on their own), it’s about the profoundly intimate connection that sex can be for sexual people. (The misunderstanding around this is something I find distressing in asexual discourse, when it reduces sex to a one-dimensional, even selfish, urge. I understand that not everyone experiences sex the same way, but there’s nothing selfish about wanting to feel that kind of connection with your partner.)

Not to mention that the hard ban on sex would inhibit other forms of intimacy too – that Robert can’t do ANYTHING without part of his brain keeping track of whether it’s okay or not, worrying how far is too far, knowing that there’s a stopping point coming up. It feels analogous to how queer celebrities, before they come out, seem to have almost no public personality whatsoever – Anderson Cooper and Kristin Stewart are the ones who come to mind here – because they’re having to police themselves so stringently lest anything ‘kinda gay’ slip out, that they wind up clamping down on themselves far beyond that. (And then when they do come out and are free to be themselves, it turns out they’re smart and snarky and all-around cool people!) I feel like after the sex barrier’s been broken, Robert would become a lot more relaxed and uninhibited with non-sexual intimacy too.

I’d had the first half of that chapter written for ages – the conversation after Robert comes back to the house and he explains that period of his life to Gene – but I couldn’t seem to give them that final push. I made a lot of attempts, tweaking my approach in subtle ways, but nothing quite rang true.

It was my friend Sam (dude who wrote the Craig fic) who finally said, They need to fight.

(And also that Gene needed to get pushed off his pedestal – “Because I have BEEN that endlessly patient and supportive boyfriend, and it gets old.”)

And as soon as he said it, I realized he was right – I’d done the thing, the thing that every guide on writing sex tells you not to do, which is to neatly wrap up all the characters’ interpersonal issues and tie them off with a bow and then let them fall into bed. It’s what feels logical, but it is death to drama, because then there’s no tension, and no reason for the reader to pay attention during the sex scene that follows, because there’s nothing going to be accomplished in it.

…Buuuut, when I’d spent 100k words writing a love story about careful consent, and a protagonist who doesn’t have a good handle on his own desires, there was no way for me to let them barrel through sex on a full head of passion and talk about it afterwards. It’s why they had to stop halfway through and dial it back a bit, touch base and explicitly confirm that yes, I want to proceed, bring them back from the edge for a while so it clearly wasn’t just their downstairs brains doing the decision-making.

The result is that it’s not as sexy as I might have hoped for, and while I’m a little disappointed about that, it’s checked by the knowledge that – realistically – there’s no way it could have been. Scorching hot sex requires the participants to be uninhibited, and Robert and Gene can’t afford to throw caution to the wind when they’re venturing into a known minefield. They’ll be able to relax into it later, for sure, but for their first time, they had to be mindful and deliberate about it.

(And also hearkening back to a thought Robert had in “Ghosts in the Attic,” that he wanted to make Gene smile and laugh during sex. In essence, that his vision for them, what he wanted out of sex, was more for it to be intimate than for it to be hawt.

Ah well. Stay tuned for the hookup AU – basically, all the scorching-hot sex they weren’t having in Beautiful Day wound up in the hookup AU instead)

So yeah, getting them to bone was definitely the hardest part of this fic. There were so many factors involved thanks to Robert’s various issues, that required a lot of careful calibration – and in the end, he still had to take a leap of faith. And while it’s not my favorite part of the fic, now that it’s done I can get on with finishing the rest of it. The final chapter doesn’t have anything really fraught (that hasn’t already been written), so I’m optimistic that it’s not going to give me as much trouble as the previous two chapters.

#asks #sex happens

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sumukhcomedy · 5 years

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Should We Silence Bad Comedy?

I stopped writing in this at the end of last year mostly because I was sick about writing about comedy. This is time-consuming and I had other things to work on and the criticism and opinions of comedy have started to feel far more hack than comedy itself can be. But going on the road and doing comedy this past year, a number of different comedians and audience members brought up this blog and so I figured that, when I felt like it, I’d still post in this again. As you’ll see, given the numerous links to previous essays I’ve written, I’m writing yet again about topics I’ve already written about before but it’s only because comedy, comedians, and the mostly meaningless debate over it continues to get worse.

The most recent debates conjure up what continues to be the crux of comedy’s biggest current issue with simple terms like “free speech,” “PC,” “woke,” etc. just being thrown around with little care for an in-depth analysis of what these mean and how they mean different things to different people. This rears its head yet again with the recent Netflix specials of Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr and the firing of Shane Gillis by Saturday Night Live. It’s a strange moment in which those at the top of stand-up comedy and certain comedians on the rise are being lumped together over these issues and it’s created a muddied mess. The perspective I have and that I wish others had was that we should all think deeper on this and fall somewhere in the middle.

I’m not going to get much into the Shane Gillis situation mostly because I don’t care. I didn’t read much about it and I got the gist of what happened and that’s all that’s really needed at this point in a case of creating something likely very stupid that masks itself as comedy. If you’re in comedy long enough, you understand that it’s a business like everything else. For as “unique” or “alternative” or “fearless” as your comedy may be or you perceive it to be, it still will be scrutinized by corporate interests. SNL still has to abide by the cultural phenomenon it has become and that it is part of a corporate juggernaut. All Gillis had to do was play the usual card that comes with public relations and apologize in an appropriate manner. As most stories do, this would have all blown over and been forgotten about in a week or less. He chose not to apologize appropriately. He was fired as a result. That was his choice to double down on what seems to be both his past and his present and his support of what I can only perceive to be bad, unfunny, and uncreative comedy.

Chappelle and Burr are at a different level because they’ve earned it and, unfortunately, they get a huge brunt of it because they are famous and the expectations associated with them are so high. Why Chappelle doubled down on making jokes at the expense of the trans community or why he did a hack impression of a Chinese man in his most recent Netflix special is beyond me. Why Burr chooses to rail yet again at audiences being offended by what he says is beyond me as well especially when he’s mentioned this in a previous special in a much funnier manner. It seems only like they’ve lived at the top in comedy for so long and are now irritated by unnecessary criticism. In some sense, it’s understandable. But, for the most part, it seems just as unnecessary as the poor criticism. Why create uninventive comedy based out of anger towards audiences that, for whatever reason, don’t like you anyway rather than create comedy that’s observational and hilarious and was what made you considered the best in the business? I have no clue but this is at least where part of the material in Chappelle and Burr’s recent specials are at.

Sprinkle some crack on this impression.

But the types of individuals that seem to draw the ire of Chappelle and Burr and went after Gillis as well are equally bizarre to me. The fact that our culture has some sort of desire to tear down comedy or that it should fit some sort of “good” and “sensitive” mold for all is strange as well. It speaks to these individuals not actually having a knowledge of how comedy, business, and most of this country operates. Forcing someone into experiencing how comedy should be experienced and what kind of comedy they are allowed to like doesn’t change them. Making an effort to “cancel” a person simply because their comedy is in poor taste doesn’t particularly resolve anything other than to embolden those that support such bad comedy. This, to me, isn’t the way to change minds, implement diverse perspectives, or educate people in comedy. But, I’m not the loudest person in the room or a part of the masses of either side in this issue. Most sound and reasonable comedians and audience members aren’t a part of this conversation because we’re, shockingly, creating and enjoying good comedy.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Chappelle is one of the greats to me. Killin’ Them Softly was one of, if not the, most influential comedy specials on me. I still love him and thinks he’s hilarious. It doesn’t mean that I support his jokes about the trans community or find them funny. It doesn’t mean I understand why he did or talked about some of the things he talked about in his most recent special. As friend Curtis Cook put it best on Twitter, “Dave Chappelle is kinda my idol ‘cause it’s always been my goal to walk away from 50 million dollars after realizing audiences are laughing in a way that belittles the struggles of my people then return a decade later to make that money back by belittling the struggles of others.” I can’t explain why Chappelle said or does what he does on a stage now but it’s his right he’s earned and there’s certainly a lot of money involved in it.

Regardless, I also laughed hard at certain parts in his special. The stuff about R. Kelly, gun control, and Jussie Smollett were vintage Chappelle to me. Is it his best special? No. Is he becoming old and detached? Likely. Does it mean I dislike him and kick his entire comedy to the curb? (No, or at least not yet unless some horrible, illegal stuff comes out about him). The same goes for Burr.

Gillis, on the other hand, was fired for statements he said that have been around for as long as comedy has existed. Bad comedy that punches down, is uninventive, and involves slurs will persist. I can say that because I have traveled the country for over a decade doing stand-up comedy and the audiences for that are there. They are there because people’s perspectives on comedy still are mostly in that realm either because they haven’t been exposed much to quality, creative comedy, they haven’t gone out of their comfort zone in life or comedy so bad comedy is all they know, or they are, frankly, just dumb people. But, as I mentioned, I don’t think you have the potential for changing people with comedy by forcing a certain type of experience on them. You change them by providing them with a different option and hope they enjoy it and learn from it. In many cases, they do not, but when they do, it’s far more rewarding as a performer to do that than to spend time making sure some guy you don’t know who probably sucks at comedy anyway gets fired from a job.

In my approach to comedy, I want to experience as many different types of audiences as possible. That’s just me. Comedy has always been segregated because our nation is still unraveling from a history of segregation. And I can at least say, having the opportunity to perform in a variety of different places, that there are equal amounts of bad comedy in all of them. There is bad comedy in comedy clubs (most of it). There is bad comedy in small towns (most of it). There is bad comedy in corporate events (most of it). There is bad comedy in alternative rooms (most of it). There is bad “ethnic” comedy (most of it). Maybe my comedy is bad to you, too! That’s just part of it all. And as we supposedly attempt progression in society, through the Internet and this discussion and debate on comedy, we are actually segregating ourselves even more than how segregated comedy rooms already are.

Look, I’ve been shit on for my race and who I am my entire life. I’ve been told by bookers that my material will “sail over their audience’s heads.” I’ve also been booked where I watched my comedy “sail over an audience’s head” and bomb horribly. I’ve also been booked and appreciated immensely by audiences. I’ve had the opportunity to headline really great rooms and open for really great comedians that I respect and that are now friends. All of that doesn’t happen without allowing myself to experience all aspects of comedy, take some shit and unnecessary criticism in life and comedy, and be better personally for it. Whether audiences will be better for it is up to them. Whether my fellow comedians choose to do this and try to be better is up to them as well. But, right now, we’re just in a vicious circle (thanks Dane Cook!) over this topic of bad comedy and the defense of bad comedy that makes all of comedy look dumber than its audiences. From my perspective, we shouldn’t silence bad comedy. It only energizes those that love and defend it. We should actually be continuing to create better comedy than it and hope it can change others. It probably won’t but whatever. It’s better than bitching constantly about the same topics over and over again but, then again, that appears to be what we’re fighting over in comedy: the ability to tell hacky stuff in our specific comedy room of choice and defend those we don’t even know to be able to do the same thing.

Laughter is a unique thing because it’s an emotion we can all have as humans. We all can experience it in whatever way we like and we’re bonded together by it. What prompts laughter for each person is different just as what leads to our other emotions are different as well among each of us. We shouldn’t condemn people for laughing just as we shouldn’t condemn them for crying or getting angry at a moment they likely shouldn’t have. We should try to educate them or make them laugh at something better just as we try to make our other emotions like sadness or anger better in other parts of our lives. If trying to make better comedy or these types of people laugh fails, then we move on. They’re left to live in whatever hole they would like with comedy. But there are plenty of people open to being better with comedy. Unfortunately, for now, comedians and their audiences are so caught up in a defense or condemnation of comedy in its most uncreative forms that they aren’t actually looking at why they appreciate comedy to begin with.

#dave chappelle #bill burr #shane gillis #snl #comedy #stand up comedy #pc #hack #woke #free speech #comedy special #netflix

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yasbxxgie · 6 years

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In the wake of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, the consequences of the 2016 election are settling in at a whole new level for white women. As a result, many are revisiting the post-election statistic that showed 53 percent of white women voted for the candidate who spewed racial vitriol and actively emboldened violence against people of color, tolerating his vile misogyny in the process.

We know Trump’s election only exposed more brazenly what’s always been true: White women have always sided with white supremacy.

Now we’re reckoning with another devastating truth, and this one pertains to all white women—including that other 47 percent of us. If we had ever collectively worked to create sustained solidarity with women of color, instead of consistently aligning with white men, we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with. Why? Deep, robust multiracial women coalitions would be an unstoppable force.

Another report knocked the wind out of some us. Though swarms of white women rose up publicly enraged, it was only among women of color that a clear and strong majority believed Christine Blasey Ford. A Quinnipiac poll showed that white women only broke 46 percent for Ford (and 43 percent in favor of Kavanaugh, a statistically insignificant difference). On the question of whether Kavanaugh should be confirmed anyway, 45 percent of white women said “yes.” Wow.

Here we sit, with ever more evidence that massive racial failure on the part of white women is at the center of this political crisis. At the root of it all is our collective choice to not learn, prioritize, or consistently live in public antiracist solidarity with communities of color, and especially with women of color.

In short, we’ve never bothered to learn calculus.

(For clarity’s sake, please know I’m purposely not talking about white men — yes, the ultimate perpetrators — here. I am not blaming white women for white male violence. I am also not disparaging the incredible courage of all survivors, including Blasey Ford. I am simply focusing on what white women collectively do and do not do, have and have not done, when it comes to race, racism, and antiracism.)

This is where (one) peril sets in. The longstanding failure to choose calculus that allowed this crisis leaves us wholly unprepared for a political moment where nothing less than brilliant mathematical abilities are required.

For women of color, that cuts deeply.

As we reel, more white women seem to say, “Oh shit! I really do need to learn calculus.” But women of color don’t have the time, energy, or patience to teach us. They certainly can’t trust us. And while women of color have distinctly individual perspectives on and responses to white women in this current moment, it’s safe to say that collectively they’re beyond outraged and all but done with us. Why? Because they’ve been demonstrating the life-or-death urgency of white women learning calculus for decades now.

And yet here we are.

Ongoing apathy toward making the work of antiracism a central priority of our lives as white women has allowed the school building to burn.

My fellow white women, there is nothing not bad about this moment.

Calculus is hard to learn in a regular and relatively calm school situation. Now we need to learn calculus in a school building that’s on fire.

Even for the most willing and earnest student, there’s no way around it: It takes a long time to learn calculus. And, yes, so many of us are deeply hurting, furious, raw, triggered, and afraid. But the building’s still on fire.

Students, sometimes have to actually screw up math problems to actually learn calculus. Screw ups are part of any learning process. But, again, the building’s on fire. And every white woman’s mistake pours more gasoline on a blaze that’s consuming us all very quickly.

The task here is as essential as it is herculean. We need to stop pouring more gasoline on this fire at the same time that we get belatedly serious about the long, slow, mistake-laden work of learning calculus—and we have to do it at lightning speed.

From one white woman to another, here are 10 concrete steps to take right now if we hope to ever do math with women of color—which is not optional if there is any hope of calling into existence the deep, robust, multiracial coalitions all our lives depend on.

No particular order here. Some of these steps fall in the category of “for the love of god, stop pouring gasoline!” Some fall in the category of our long, slow work. None are adequate. All are critical.

1. Stop saying ‘women’ anything.

When the phrase “women must…” or “women are…” is about to come out of your mouth: Stop. Commit to the discipline of being racially specific in your speech. “White women must…,” “white women are…,” or “women of color and white women seem to be…”—at which moment you may notice, “Oh, wait. I really can’t say anything about women of color because I don’t know.”

You may not understand why this discipline is important. Do it anyway. It’s important because there is no non-racialized woman. Committing to this practice will make you more likely to notice gaps in your awareness. You’ll be more likely to notice the racial assumptions embedded in your own claims. This will help you gain clarity about where you need to focus as you do your homework. It will also necessarily rein in your claims about “generic” women, which is one small but critical way to stop pouring gasoline on this fire.

2. Do not participate in any public action called by white women with a reflexive ’yes.’

Stop, seek out, and then listen seriously to what women of color say about it first.

That “women’s blackout” action? Serious douse of gasoline. Yes, a very small number of women of color in my life sent me the invitation, too. (Remember. People of color don’t speak in one voice on anything.) If more white women had slowed down and listened to what women of color had to say publicly about all the problems with that “black out,” well — I don’t need say more about its problems. Go read what feminists of color themselves said about it. They were clear.

3. If you didn’t take a knee during the anthem in support of Black lives for the last two years, don’t share the meme suggesting all women and girls should now take a knee (see item number 2).

Even better, invite other white women sharing this meme into public conversation about why this is a problem. Don’t yell at them. Ask them to talk it through.

But make sure some version of what’s wrong with this does get explained: If we haven’t been taking a knee for Black people already, then kneeling now exposes whose humanity we actually care about. Not to mention white people co-opting a Black people-led movement is a problem, along the lines of what happened to Tarana Burke. Gasoline.

4. Transfer the vast majority of the time you spend reading and engaging in media to reading and engaging with feminists of color.

Literally and almost exclusively read feminists of color (feminist men and other genders of color too) every single day as you try to figure out what the hell is going on in our country right now. Don’t worry, you’ll still get the news. But, you’ll get it through the analysis you’ll need if you want to move beyond basic addition. Do an audit of who is in your feed; choose to follow the many diverse and brilliant people of color who are public thinkers, writers, and activists. Engage their knowledge and wisdom (and their disagreements with each other). When you don’t understand what they’re saying or why they’re saying it—keep reading. Know that it’s going to take a while before the basic vocabulary of calculus makes sense to you. But it will come, if you stick with it.

5. When women of color write about white women, do not privately message them with questions or rebuttal…

…Unless they explicitly tell you they are cool with that.

If they invite public response and you decide to say or ask something, cool. But be ready then to just sit and listen deeply to the response, whatever it is. If the response makes you uncomfortable or isn’t in the tone you were hoping for, don’t proceed to tell them how it made you feel (more gasoline). Sit with those feelings and then keep reading, thinking, and engaging. If you need to talk about those feelings, cool. Find another white person who’s also trying to learn calculus—maybe someone who’s been at it for longer than you have—and talk it through with them. Then keep reading and listening and sitting with your feelings some more.

6. Don’t just sit there with your feelings. Take your actual physical self to an organization led by people of color who are working for justice—and show up in person.

(Assuming that organization welcomes white participation, of course; most do.)

Don’t say you’re too busy. If you volunteer at your kids’ school, do stuff for your church, are part of a book club, spend time on Facebook, whatever else—this is the moment to transfer hours in your given week from white people (even time spent at your own kids’ school; your kids are going to be fine) to people of color.

The obvious reason for this is to put more labor toward the disproportionate heavy-lifting people of color are already doing for justice. The added benefit is that you’ll start to learn calculus in a way that reading alone doesn’t make possible. Show up. Do what is asked of you. Listen carefully. Don’t overspeak. If you’re uncomfortable being one of the few white people in that space, good. Do it anyway. Don’t flake out.

(Join the NAACP—they’re doing voter mobilization all over right now. Put in volunteer hours to people of color groups working to decrease the presence of police in schools. Get active in a sanctuary network for which Latinx activists are calling the shots; white people with citizenship are needed desperately for all kinds of work. Show up. Wherever people of color live, they are organized and acting. Figure out where and go.)

7. Read ‘So You Want to Talk About Race’ by Ijeoma Oluo.

Seriously, do this right now. If you have the means, buy a copy for another white woman in your life; for all the white women you know. Read it alone. Read it together. Talk about it. This book is a crash course in calculus. It’s brilliant, truthful, funny, loving, difficult, nuanced, and more. Read it with your teenager. Ask your teenager what they think about it (start inviting them to learn calculus, too). See if your co-workers will talk about it with you over lunch.

8. Make a concrete commitment to reallocate resources to women of color organizations. Donate to women of color running for elected office.

Now I am talking about money. This part isn’t so much about you and calculus. It’s just the right thing to do. It also may be the best hope we have to save this “democracy.” I don’t mean that in a “women of color are going to save us” kind of way. But, seriously, we don’t get to just run around giving Facebook shoutouts to Black women voters in Alabama for saving us from predators like Roy Moore, and then not go all in for them. We owe women of color something, and this includes being all-in in terms of having their backs as they step up and out into leadership (taking huge risks as they do so). We owe actual time, energy, and resources. Get your white women friends (and the men) to give money too. Do it.

9. Some white women, white queer folks, and a handful of white feminist men have been working for a long time to learn calculus. Find and follow them, too.

They are imperfect and make mistakes. But being white and trying to learn calculus is different from being a person of color and learning calculus. There are unique challenges. Your learning will speed up if you engage some of the white people who have been on this learning journey for a while.

Be careful who you listen to. Vet those white people to be sure their calculus-learning is legitimate and on the right track. See who they’re in dialogue with. Notice what feminists of color say to and about them. (Hint: If mostly only other white people like their work, don’t learn to do math the way they’re doing it.) Find the white folks who are obviously in relationships of accountability with people of color—these people do exist. Get with them.

10. Take an inventory: Where do you shop? Who cuts your hair? Where do you take your kids to the dentist? Where do you eat out?

Find ways to move your personal participation in the economy over to Black, Latinx, and other businesses owned and operated by people of color. This includes medical offices, stores—as many establishments as you can. Urge others in your life to do so, too. This not only actively reallocates resources you are already expending to communities of color and their economies, it also brings you into more frequent contact with people who our deep and wide white-segregated enclaves typically prevent us from being in contact with.

That’s no quick math formula. But it is critical pre-context for calculus-learning.

***

Here we are.

When you’re in a burning building, every step you take must be purposeful. We’re not going to be collectively calculus-fluent anytime soon. We’re also going to have to live with the consequences of our collective behavior. Namely, we’re going to be divided from women of color for a very, very, very long time. And there are no guarantees here. When I said there is nothing not bad about this moment, I meant it.

But I also know this. Standing still in a burning school building isn’t an option. And I know there are lots of white women and white queer folks (and a few white feminist men) right now who want to take purposeful steps. As much as we don’t quite know what to do, don’t totally get it, are ourselves hurting, fear making mistakes that pour gasoline—there are many of us ready to roll up our sleeves and learn the math. Let’s get purposeful. Together.

If this is you (and I commit to you, it is also me), know you are not alone. I offer this essay in a spirit of love, anger, urgency, and partnership. Let’s pull out our pencil and paper now—and a shitload of erasers. And let’s get to work. [x]

#jennifer harvey #ijeoma oluo #so you want to talk about race #white women #black women #race #racism #medium #white supremacy #white men

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multipleservicelisting · 3 years

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New Warnings of Violence as Security Tightens for Inauguration

WASHINGTON — Law enforcement officials are vetting hundreds of potential airplane passengers and beefing up airport security as officials amplify warnings of violence before the presidential inauguration from extremists emboldened by the Capitol attack last week.

The Transportation Security Administration is increasing the number of federal marshals on flights and explosive-detection dogs at airports. Screening officers will be deployed to assist a militarized “green zone” in downtown Washington.

Federal officials say the security perimeter, which includes an increasing number of armed members of the National Guard, is necessary to prevent an attack from domestic extremists. Such groups “pose the most likely threat” to the inauguration, according to a joint threat assessment from the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security Department, which warned that attackers could target federal buildings and public officials in the days leading to the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the 46th president.

The extremists “remain a concern due to their ability to act with little to no warning, willingness to attack civilians and soft targets, and ability to inflict significant casualties with weapons that do not require specialized knowledge,” federal officials wrote in the bulletin obtained by The New York Times.

David P. Pekoske, the T.S.A. administrator, said in a statement on Friday that the agency was vetting “hundreds of names” before the event on Jan. 20. Commercial airlines have tracked an increase in passengers checking in firearms on their way to airports in the Washington area, according to a separate bulletin from the Justice Department. Two of the prominent airports close to Washington are actually in Virginia, which has more relaxed firearms laws.

“Our intelligence and vetting professionals are working diligently around the clock to ensure those who may pose a threat to our aviation sector undergo enhanced screening or are prevented from boarding an aircraft,” Mr. Pekoske said, adding that several airlines had announced in recent days that they would not allow passengers to check in guns.

Federal agencies have also begun to identify those captured on video at the Capitol with weapons or engaging in violence and putting them on a “no-fly” list aimed at preventing suspected terrorists from boarding flights, according to an administration official. It was unclear how many suspects had been restricted from flying. Multiple Democrats in Congress demanded the move after the rampage at the Capitol.

Federal law enforcement officials have said they continue to be alarmed by an increase in chatter from groups like the boogaloo, a far-right group that aims to start a second civil war, and other racist extremists threatening to target the nation’s capital to protest Mr. Biden’s decisive victory in the popular vote and Electoral College.

Since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, intelligence officials have seen Chinese, Iranian and Russian efforts to fan the violent messaging, according to a joint threat assessment dated Thursday. The escalation is consistent with previous attempts to take advantage of divisive Republican talk, such as Russia’s drive to amplify disinformation spread by President Trump during the campaign about the security of mail-in voting.

Officials wrote in an intelligence bulletin obtained this week by The Times that extremists aiming to incite a race war “may exploit the aftermath of the Capitol breach by conducting attacks to destabilize and force a climactic conflict in the United States.”

Mr. Biden has resisted calls to move the celebration indoors for the sake of safety. His inauguration committee had already been planning a scaled-back celebration with virtual components because of the coronavirus.

But law enforcement remains concerned of potential threats throughout the country. There have been calls for armed protests in all 50 states, but it remains unclear how many will materialize and whether they pose any credible threats of violence.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has activated the Michigan National Guard to help with security in Lansing, where armed people flooded into the State Capitol last year to protest coronavirus restrictions and where 13 men were arrested in October on terrorism, conspiracy and weapons charges. At least six of them, officials said, had hatched a detailed plan to kidnap Ms. Whitmer, a Democrat who became a focal point of antigovernment views and anger over coronavirus control measures.

Updated

Jan. 15, 2021, 5:20 p.m. ET

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California authorized the deployment of 1,000 National Guard troops on Thursday and surrounded the State Capitol grounds in Sacramento with a six-foot covered chain-link fence to “prepare for and respond to credible threats.”

Defense Department and National Guard officials said on Friday that they were pressing governors of all 50 states for reservists to fill a growing demand for security.

National Guard officials said they would most likely need at least 25,000 troops in Washington, 5,000 more than they projected this week, for duties ranging from traffic control to security in and around the Capitol itself. That number, roughly more than three times the number of American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria, could still grow.

Among the most prized Guard units are military police. All Army National Guard troops are trained to deal with civil disturbances, but the military police Guard have additional training and expertise.

As Guard troops armed with M9 handguns and automatic rifles took up positions around the Capitol this week, lawmakers who had praised the decision by the Army secretary, Ryan McCarthy, to arm some troops expressed unease.

“I would always rather see the Guard in a supporting role for domestic missions,” said Representative Michael Waltz, a Florida Republican and former Army Green Beret who is now a member of the Maryland National Guard. Having soldiers in law enforcement, he said, “makes me nervous.”

The authorities are hoping to keep the public away from downtown Washington during the inauguration. The Office of Personnel Management advised federal agencies to find ways to allow employees to stay home next week. Mayor Muriel Bowser recommended the public tune into the event online.

The National Mall — an iconic arena of American celebration, protest and unity — will be closed until at least Thursday, the day after Mr. Biden’s inauguration, the National Park Service announced on Friday.

Two small areas adjacent to the two-mile park, which extends from the foot of the Capitol to the Tidal Basin behind the Lincoln Memorial, will remain open for inauguration events, and areas will be set aside for peaceful protest, the service said in a statement.

“Based on the current assessment, no more than 100 individuals at each location can be safely accommodated,” the statement said. Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia issued a joint statement with other public officials in the state saying multiple bridges connecting Washington to Virginia, including Theodore Roosevelt and Arlington Memorial, would be closed through the inauguration.

The Memorial Bridge, which connects the mall to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, will also be shut, along with long stretches of the grand thoroughfares that crisscross the capital’s downtown, including Constitution, Pennsylvania and Independence Avenues.

Thirteen subway stations and several bus routes near the White House will also be closed, and ambulances will be stationed downtown. Military vehicles and troops in the streets evoked images of Civil War-era Washington.

“We saw white extremists storm the Capitol building who were trained and organized,” Ms. Bowser said, adding, “We all have to think about a new posture.”

Reporting was contributed by Glenn Thrush, Hailey Fuchs, Eric Schmitt and Zach Montague from Washington, and Kathleen Gray from West Bloomfield, Mich.

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shockfemme · 5 years

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to kill the future in the present: Sade LaNay Interviews Jennif(f)er Tamayo

Content warning: This interview contains sensitive topics regarding racial violence

Sade LaNay: First I want to say thank you. I have been obsessed with your voice since 2015 when I read your lyric manifestos at Weird Sister. I remember those essays and Wet Land by Lucas de Lima breaking and opening in me, the process of crediting my work as an artist to myself and validating my self in the world.

It’s a gift to be able to talk to you about your chapbook, to kill the future in the present, a work that I find incredibly tender and generative. This is a text I can think and feel with. I’m inspired by the foundation you establish for a distinct poesy. This chapbook is mood, a heated conversation, the epitome of free writing, the kind of writing that bothers insecure people. Aesthetically, it’s like staring into the sun. It pulses with repressed feeling, the need to be held and the knowledge that our precarity is not rare.

Do you want to speak to the path you’ve been on creatively from that point in time to now?

Jennif(f)er Tamayo: thank you, Sade luv, for sharing that process of breaking/opening. it’s an honor to hear you say that. Lucas’s work also does that for me too -- his new book Tropical Sacrifice claims the lowly, (in)toxicated chicken as a kind of hero and I’m in love with its intensity, its “lyric power bottom” thrusting.

Something has been happening to me since that period of time you indexed, gracias a lxs diosxs!! From the outside in, it has appeared like less public writing, less public production, less ambient generosity with how I move through writing communities. From the inside, it has also meant more unlearning and untying toxic bonds to anti-Blackness that permeate through art/poetry spaces. Much of the change is indebted to the excessive and antagonistic performances of the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo, who inspired me to remain repulsed by and repulsive to whitened poetries. They spoiled so many of us <3 <3 <3

SL: Goddess, I miss MCAG. I miss the abundance of hope and creative energy I had then. I miss needing to write to survive, that is, to continue spiritually instead of needing to write to piece together a precarious material existence. I also think this is a time to sharpen every tool we can get our hands on.

JT: YeSSSS! I miss the way I would write poems that felt like fire in my mouth. But now, I want to sharpen that fire, to direct it more carefully. Specifically, what I want -- and this relates to your questions about creative paths -- is to write sentences with a clear enemy in mind. Or, better, to reorganize structures of sentencing for traveling in time. These are the same things to me.

SL: Will you explain what you mean by sentencing because I don’t want to assume? I think of my own anxiety regarding the sentence--how to move from the poetry I write which formally avoids the sentence and feeling inadequate about the act of placing sentences on a page one after another, having confidence that my ideas are successfully expressed.

JT: In to kill Ii had a story I wanted to tell, but first (and forevermore) I needed to address the formal and violent challenges that the sentence, as a structure, has reproduced at the level of being and knowing ourselves. The sentence-- as a familiarly enforced unit of expression and a unit to challenge/break/resist -- has so much to do with ideas of subjectivity, temporality and geography; the arrangement and duration of ?. Sentences are enf0rced and lived encl0sure committed to progress, straightness, capitalist accumulation...enforced enclosure... So I am seduced by the conditions of the sentence & the structures it reproduces & I have asthma & it has been getting worse & worse every year & with every new(ly) (in)toxicated place I move to & So, what about a ___________________ struggle for ___ body, in a more _______ way.

& the sentence is also a kind of sentencing. The carceral sentence that (en)traps and subjugates: the sentence was handed down today... and so on. These are related formations. I see my favoring of the sentence in this particular part of my creative life as a way of attending to the various mechanism that determines anti-Blackness as a way of living/writing. So I am carefully studying the sentencing of those poet-scholars I admire, like Sylvia Wynter and Frank Wilderson, III, who have diagramed the (im)possibilities of this foreclosure.

For all these reasons, the sentence and its ruptures are about precision. This is sentencing. I want no nervousness about what I am trying to articulate. This is hard work, and particularly with poetry; readers are so prepared to freely and wildly interpret you. But we know what this feeling of freedom portends...

SL: The connection between identity and theory is something that excites me about your writing in to kill the future in the present. Experiencing this style of writing from you emboldens me to confront my own fears of illegibility, unintelligibility. Due to that fear, I often restrict my writing to my experiences, my identity, things I can articulate confidently. The harder thing is to excavate from that writing a new way forward.

I think of Octavia Butler’s fiction. In Kindred, on her trips to the past, Dana is considered aberrant by whites and blacks because of her tone; her lack of accent and lack of affective deference to white supremacy. It’s a familiar struggle. As well as the labor of confronting experiences of being “too little to be little” with intimates, with therapy, with writing (other people’s and my own). Our bodies carry so much of what makes us tender and tinder, how are you staying soft, how are you keeping from combusting?

JT: I suppose to travel in time is to subject the self to a kind of disfigurement of consciousness. Butler literalizes this in Kindred. What does it look like to combust under the weight of too much body knowledge? Dana’s story always struck me as some kind of invitation and warning: tendered tinder.

Sade, I have wanted to combust. I have sensed that many of us need to burn for what we have inherited and continue to reproduce. I am speaking directly to non-Black non-Indigenous latinxs here. How have we constructed “brownness” to enable proximity and intimacy with whiteness? To enact anti-Blackness? For example, RAICES, the non-profit that is supporting families fight incarceration at the U.S./Mexico border raised close to 20 million dollars-- where was this material support for the “refugee ban”? Where is this material support for Black Lives Matter?

I think I save my tenderness and softness for my most beloveds, my best friends -- and I keep it private. It’s hard for me to talk about it in a place that will become public (like this one), because I want to safeguard it from those who will turn it into something it is not <3 But I do remember my therapist teaching me about the word “empathy” and it being like a fucking surprise to me. I mean, I have been grateful that my resentment and bitterness has sharpened me against this world’s bullshit, but I also want to be able to hold someone I love without a slight edge running through me. I know this because I have been held this way and it feels beautiful. I want to hold you that way, Sade.

For now, I guess, my tenderness has meant to continue. As in, continuing to live and to remain on earth despite the hopelessness and dejection I feel.

SL: I’ve been struggling with hopelessness this summer (and forever). Feeling so sick with it that it was hard to get out of bed for weeks at a time. My belief in my ability to escape institutional and intimate spaces and relationships rooted in and perpetuating white supremacy wavers drastically. After Dana is whipped for running away, she thinks of how “[n]othing in my education... had helped me escape” yet still teaches children on the plantation to read. In to kill, Moten reminds us “Escape is an activity, it is not an achievement.” I worry that fugitivity might last forever if I don’t know where I can escape to.

I’m getting ready to begin my first adjunct position, teaching at a state prison. Should we expect not to encounter freedom in our relationships and environments? Is resistance an everlasting condition of fugitivity?

JT: Moten seems to note this very thing: “you don't get escap ed ” -- the verb gestures toward forever. I am sorry for this. I am sorry. I am in a space of considering how my migration from South America fits into the pattern of predation -- how I am might be both the fugitive and/but the captor. The narrative of displaced non-black Latin American migrants leans very heavily toward salvation and redemption-- but what habits of anti-Blackness have me and my family brought with us in this “Latinx” Diaspora. We brought this shit with us too. And, more importantly, how were we, in some ways, escaping our own whiteness in coming to the States.

SL: What do you hear and/or imagine when I say “trauma informed care”? Currently, trauma informed care is geared toward getting a trauma’d body to function successfully within a body negating white supremacist jingocapitalist cisheteropatriarchy.

I want to say trauma informed care without intersectionality ain’t shit. Trauma informed care that doesn’t track racism’s permutations geographically and temporally is trash. Trauma informed care without abolishing “the various material and abstract enclosures that organize life within violence” is triage. For me to kill the future in the present is doing the labor of trauma informed care.

JT: Thank you for sharing this take on “trauma informed care” with me -- I was not familiar with it. But thinking with the caveats of your question, I am reminded of the critiques that have swirled around what has emerged around a “self-care industrial complex” As in, how might self-care alternate from community-care? And, how might self-care be complicated by different notions of the self personhood that require a broader set of parameters? As you say, “trauma informed care without intersectionality ain’t shit.”

I am also trying to sit with the feeling that maybe I don’t want to or I am afraid to “function successfully” in my body. In different words, I am curious about what opportunities for seeking justice are foreclosed to the healing body, particularly my non-Black, non-Indigenous healing body. I acknowledge the privilege that comes with saying this. And also acknowledge the discourse on “failure” that usually ensues from this line of thought (particularly in the academy). This is not what I am talking about.

So much of the therapeutic care I’ve experienced is about trying to work through my trauma and I am wondering about what it feels like to work with trauma. Because, to closely consider and study history is to attend to trauma on a massive, unfathomable scale. There is no working through but perhaps there is a working with. I am still trying to make myself tender to this particular historical, cosmic trauma, to let it prism through me, particularly in writing and performance.

SL: Yes yes yes. Time and trauma are unavoidable nonlinear energies that many of us are trying to navigate with a finite, needful body. Deciding to work with instead of through or even against those energies; my body precludes my participation in and cooperation with the myriad manifestations of white supremacist violence.

The voice of Nina Simone does the labor of trauma informed care for me, sonically manipulates time. Her performance at the Westbury Music Fair, fifty years ago, the day after Dr. King was gunned down, comprises the album ‘Nuff Said in which Nina alchemizes the poisonous present into a timeless and time-filled gift.

JT: “Timeless and time-filled gift” is such a precise way of describing Nina Simone’s performances and the way her voice refracts various temporalities. When she says, “Are you ready to smash white things,” at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, reading from the poem “Are You Ready” by The Last Poets, I sense this timelessness. She is trying to tangle time so that her audience feels its pressures. The refrain “are you ready” scoots, ever-forward, the present experience of pain in-the-now. I am not this performance’s intended or primary audience but I have been beckoned by its registers and directions.

SL: I think of how resistance affected the arc of Nina’s life. The vibrancy of her performance of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” at Morehouse in 1969 is subdued by 1988 in Hamburg. It doesn’t sit well to feel like the artists who live at the densest intersections; are most ardent in their resistance to white supremacy, will garner the least recognition and support while they are living. I don’t want more than I need. I don’t want the choices I make, in my art and life, to resist oppression to alienate me from relationships and resources. I don’t want death to seem more inviting than the present moment I’m surviving. I want 400 years of BLACK FEMME JUBILEE. The end of punitive debt and the distribution of wealth. What kind of reparative scaffolding do you want to see erected, in addition to “400 YEARS OF WHITE SILENCE”?

JT: Sade, this is a tough question and I don’t know if I am the one to attempt an answer. I am not sure my answers on reparations and scaffolding can be trusted. In “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind me that as an accomplice in a fight for Black and Indigenous justice, my “moves toward innocence” will be to try to reconcile and to rescue myself. (Am I doing it now?) The (first) item on the agenda: return Indigenous lands. The (first) item on the agenda: “end the war on black people.” This is not a sufficient answer to your question, but as I think and study, I have found that I need to keep these agendas stitched to my mind.

When I say, “400 YEARS OF WHITE SILENCE,” I am wondering if the fight begins with a move toward silence or, better, a certain kind of silencing-labor by those of us who have spoken for too long and who may not have a fucking clue what we are talking about. What does this silence or effort toward silence, as it relates to poetry and writing, feel like: less books by white(ned) people, less books by cis people, less books by non-Black latinxs, more writing that is not writing, more writing that is a kind research, writing that is caretaking, writing that is editing, writing that is being with ( as Alexis Pauline Gumbs has considered), writing that unequivocally centers the two primary demands on the table, writing that takes down/ breaks/up.

SL: In to kill the future in the present you redact the notes you take regarding the details about your crossing. Is this a self-preservative, protective measure? It feels like both a deliberate and reflexive gesture under eyes that “wouldn’t think we were so sane” when we tell our stories. Another way to manipulate time and sound through absence, the vacuum of inarticulation that trauma creates.

JT: In the past, I haven’t been careful enough to protect my family’s stories -- I haven’t always treated them with the honor they deserve. Through newer writing, I am trying to be more intentional with and protective of my storying. These stories may be “mine”-- as the saying goes in certain writerly traditions -- but they may not be mine to share in the way I do. I want to protect the power and magic they contain; they have been secretive for a reason. I’m learning that the hard way...

In another sense, the redaction was also a gesture of refusal. I refuse you the titillating story of our capture. Our detention. I refuse you the perverse pleasure you get from the details of our suffering. I refuse you the language, the articulation, the narrative, the coherence. You see lines of various length but the oral/aurality of it is withheld. It is trapped in my body, my mother’s body, through the telling. There was no way to tell this-- and I didn’t want to tell it, even if I could.

In the past few months, I was upset and disappointed to see the image of a crying child at the U.S./Mexico border traveling the internet (via a fundraiser) and then landing on the cover of Time magazine. What kind of work is this image doing for us? What habit of spectacle does it satisfy? I wondered whether the child could have given consent to be captured like this and how this image would impact her later...

Our appetite for images and narratives of suffering cannot continue to be the catalyst for our move toward action. Imagine if this was your child... NO. Narrative refusal, a kin to what Audra Simpson calls ethnographic refusal, attempts to retrain the kind of expectations for consuming and reproducing suffering.

SL: Final question, what are your pronouns? Mine are they/them/hers.

JT: My pronouns, currently, are she/her/hers. Also, I luv you.

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beautytipsfor · 4 years

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Aide Says Trump Asked About ‘Investigation’: Impeachment Update

(Bloomberg) -- The House Intelligence Committee held its second public hearing on Friday to hear testimony by former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was removed from that post in May by President Donald Trump.The impeachment committees separately met in a closed session with David Holmes, a staff member at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, about this week’s revelation that Trump on July 26 asked Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union, about the status of “investigations” he sought from Ukraine.Here are the latest developments:Aide Says Trump Asked About ‘Investigations’ (7:20 p.m.)Holmes testified that Sondland told him in July that Trump “did not give a s--- about Ukraine” and that the president only cares about the “big stuff” that benefits Trump “like the Biden investigation that Giuliani was pushing,” according to a copy of his opening statement posted online by CNN.Holmes told the impeachment inquiry behind closed doors that Sondland called Trump on July 26 on his cell phone, which Holmes could overhear because Sondland held the phone away from his head apparently because Trump’s voice was so loud, according to the statement.Sondland told Trump that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy “loves your ass.”“I then heard President Trump ask, ‘so he’s gonna do the investigation’?” Holmes testified, according to CNN. Sondland said “he’s gonna do it,” adding that Zelenskiy will do “anything you ask him to.”The call occurred one day after Trump spoke with Zelenskiy and asked for investigations, including into Joe Biden.Holmes said he came forward after reading news reports that senior diplomats may have been acting on Ukraine without Trump’s knowledge.“I came to realize I had firsthand knowledge” about “the question of whether the president did, in fact, have knowledge that those officials were using the levers of our diplomatic power to induce the new Ukrainian president to announce the opening of a particular criminal investigation,” Holmes’ opening statement said. Aide Testimony Said to Confirm Envoy Account (5:54 p.m.)While Holmes testified behind closed doors, Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters outside that “everything he says will confirm that what ambassador Taylor said was true.”Earlier this week, top U.S. envoy to Ukraine William Taylor testified in public that his aide -- later identified by an official as Holmes -- overheard Trump asking U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland about “the investigations” when the ambassador used his cell phone to call the president.Lieu said Holmes “has some specific quotes that leave no doubt of what the president of the United States was thinking” when he said “investigations.” He meant investigations of Joe Biden and the 2016 election, Lieu said.Lieu also criticized the State Department should release notes taken by embassy officials. “If any of those notes exonerated the president, we would have them right now,” he said.Republican Mark Meadows questioned whether someone overhearing a phone call can really have firsthand knowledge.“We know it’s not a firsthand account because this witness, to my knowledge, has never talked to the president. That would be firsthand,” Meadows said. ”Overhearing a phone call of someone else can be very dangerous if you try to draw too many conclusions from it.”Embassy Aide Questioned About Trump Call (4:54 p.m.)Democrats on the three committees leading the inquiry are questioning Holmes about the phone call he overheard between Trump and Sondland that took place in a restaurant “on what looks like a totally unsecured cell phone,” said Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee.“Cell phones can be hacked by any foreign government,” Lieu said. “It’s very disturbing that maybe it wasn’t just Holmes that heard this but the Russians and other foreign governments as well.”North Carolina Representative Mark Meadows, a Republican on the Oversight Committee, said he didn’t expect to learn much from Holmes’s testimony “other than a phone call was overheard.” He said Democrats still must address what he described as a “fundamental question: why was the aid withheld?”Envoy Was An ‘Obstacle’ to Trump (3:50 p.m.)In closing the hearing after about six hours of testimony, Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said the entire episode began with an effort to get Yovanovitch out of the way because she was an impediment to the investigation of Joe Biden that Trump and Rudy Giuliani wanted.“The fact that they failed in this solicitation of bribery doesn’t make it any less bribery,” Schiff said. “It doesn’t make it any less immoral and corrupt. It just means that it was unsuccessful.”“You were viewed as an obstacle that had to go,” Schiff said. If people read the transcript of testimony, they’ll see “that the president praises the corrupt, Lutsenko,” referring to former prosecutor general of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko, who resigned under pressure in August.“He condemns the just, you,” Schiff said to Yovanovitch. “And then he asks for an investigation of the Bidens. There is no camouflaging that corrupt intent.”After the hearing, Republican panel member Elise Stefanik of New York called the session “day two of an abject failure” by Schiff. She said Republicans will keep asking about Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s membership on the board of Ukraine energy company Burisma Holdings.Stefanik called impeachment “wishful political thinking” by the Democrats and said no impeachable offenses were discussed at Friday’s hearing.Envoy Says Ukraine Didn’t Try to Aid Clinton (3:09 p.m.)Yovanovitch said that in her view, there was no Ukrainian strategy to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio suggested Trump faced opposition from Ukrainian officials during his 2016 campaign, including in an op-ed article in a Washington publication by the Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S.Most clearly wanted Democrat Hillary Clinton to win, he said. Jordan asked Yovanovitch if Trump’s concern was justified.She said she couldn’t say, but that in her view there wasn’t a Ukrainian strategy to interfere in the U.S. election. Politicians sometimes criticize the policies of other foreign leaders or candidates, but that’s not election meddling, she said.“This happens in politics, and it doesn’t necessarily” constitute interference, Yovanovitch said.Embassy Official Arrives for Closed Hearing (2:56 p.m.)Holmes, the political counselor for the embassy in Ukraine who overheard a phone call between Trump and another diplomat, arrived on Capitol Hill for a private deposition behind closed doors.Including his testimony as part of the impeachment inquiry became especially important after William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, said during his public hearing Wednesday that one of his staff members overheard Trump ask Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, about “the investigations.”Taylor didn’t identify Holmes during the hearing, but officials familiar with the inquiry later confirmed that he was the aide with Sondland at the time.Trump Ally Told Envoy to ‘Go Big or Go Home’ (2:49 p.m.)Yovanovitch said she reached out to U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland when she realized that Rudy Giuliani was maneuvering against her. She said Sondland told her “I needed to. The best thing to do was to send out a tweet, praising the president, that sort of thing.”She said she thought that wasn’t in keeping with her role as an ambassador and didn’t do so.Asked by Democrat Denny Heck of Washington to assess the impact of the situation on Ukraine, she said, “When we engage in questionable activities that raises a question.””It emboldens those who are corrupt, who don’t want to see Ukraine become a democracy, free market economy, a part of Europe, but want Ukraine to stay under Russia’s thrall, and that’s not in our national security interests,” Yovanovitch said.Envoy Cites ‘Chilling Effect’ of Ouster (1:39 p.m.)Yovanovitch said her ouster as ambassador has had a “chilling effect” within the State Department because officials there can’t be sure if the government will support their efforts.“That is a dangerous place to be,” she said while being questioned by Democrat Terri Sewellof Alabama.“It’s been a very, very difficult time,” Yovanovitch said. “There’s a question as to why the kind of campaign to get me out of Ukraine happened, because all the president has to do is to say he wants a different ambassador.”Republican Mike Conaway of Texas sought to show that Yovanovitch hasn’t been harmed by her dismissal from the ambassadorship. He asked if she continues to get respect from her colleagues at the State Department.“I’ve actually received an outpouring of support,” she said.Later, she said that she agrees that presidents “can remove an ambassador at any time for any reason, but what I do wonder is why it was necessary to smear my reputation.”Envoy Aware of Hunter Biden Role on Board (1:16 p.m.)Under questioning by a Republican staff lawyer, Yovanovitch said she arrived several months before the 2016 elections, and that Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma Holdings energy company wasn’t something she focused on. She said she never spoke with him.She was “aware” of the perception problem with Vice President Joe Biden’s son being on the board.Republican staff attorney Steve Castor asked whether Yovanovitch knew that Trump thought that elements in Ukraine’s government were “out to get him” during the 2016 campaign. She said that wasn’t an area of focus while she was ambassador and that she didn’t perceive any such effort during the election.“People are critical, but that doesn’t mean” that a government is trying toundermine a campaign, she said. “Our own U.S. intelligence community has conclusively determined that those who interfered in the election were in Russia.”Nunes Says Envoy Lacks First-Hand Knowledge (12:35 p.m.)Top committee Republican Devin Nunes said, “I’m not exactly sure what the ambassador is doing here today,” adding that Yovanovitch “is not a material fact witness to any of the accusations being hurled at the president.”Under questioning by Nunes, she affirmed that she wasn’t involved in Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy or Vice President Mike Pence’s later meeting with Zelenskiy. She also said she hasn’t spoken to Trump or acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney this year.Envoy Calls Trump Tweet ‘Intimidating’ (10:36 a.m.)Yovanovitch said that it is “intimidating” that Trump tweeted an attack on her while she is testifying to the Intelligence Committee.Told by Chairman Adam Schiff that Trump had just written that everywhere she went “turned bad,” she said, ”I don’t think I have such powers.””I actually think that where I’ve served over the years I and others have made things demonstrably better, both for the U.S. and the countries I served in,” she said.Schiff asked, “Now the president in real time is attacking you. What effect do you think that has on other witnesses’ willingness to come forward and expose wrongdoing?”“It’s very intimidating,” Yovanovitch said.“Some of us here take witness intimidation very, very seriously,“ Schiff responded.Yovanovitch also said she had asked the State Department for a public statement of support while false stories were being spread about her work in Ukraine.She said State Department official David Hale told her that the department wouldn’t issue a statement because “the president might issue a tweet contradicting that.”“They were concerned about a tweet by the president of the United States?” asked Democratic committee lawyer Dan Goldman, who was conducting the questioning.“That’s my understanding,” Yovanovitch said.Envoy Says Trump Comment Sounded Like Threat (10:15 a.m.)Yovanovitch said she was “shocked, appalled, devastated” when she learned that Trump called her “bad news” and said she would “go through some things” during his July 25 call with Ukraine’s president.“It didn’t sound good. It sounded like a threat,” she said. “I wondered what that meant. It concerned me.”Yovanovitch also said she felt “terrible” when she was recalled to the U.S.“No real reason was offered as to why I had to leave and why it was being done in such a manner,” she said. “It’s not the way I wanted my career to end.”She said she had been told return to Washington at once. She was told “there were concerns up the street,” which she believed referred to the White House. Yovanovitch said she argued against the return, but eventually did go to Washington.Trump Attacks Yovanovitch During Testimony (10:06 a.m.)During Yovanovitch’s testimony, Trump wrote on Twitter: “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”Yovanovitch Says Ukraine Policy in Disarray (9:49 a.m.)Yovanovitch said corrupt forces in Ukraine sought to remove her, and said she was “amazed” they found allies among Americans.“Our Ukraine policy has been thrown into disarray, and shady interests the world over have learned how little it takes to remove an American ambassador who does not give them what they want,” she said.“Such conduct undermines the U.S., exposes our friends, and widens the playing field for autocrats like President Putin,” she said.“I remain disappointed that the department’s leadership and others have declined to acknowledge that the attacks against me and others are dangerously wrong,” she said, in a clear swipe at Secretary of State Michael Pompeo.“This is about far, far more than me or a couple of individuals. As Foreign Service professionals are being denigrated and undermined, the institution is also being degraded. This will soon cause real harm, if it hasn’t already,” she said.Yovanovitch Says Claims About Her Untrue (9:40 a.m.)Yovanovitch called “untrue” the allegations that she “told unidentified embassy employees or Ukrainian officials that President Trump’s orders should be ignored because ‘he was going to be impeached’ -- or for any other reason.”She also said the Obama administration “did not ask me to help the Clinton campaign or harm the Trump campaign, nor would I have taken any such steps if they had.”Regarding Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, she said that she had “minimal” contact with him.“I do not understand Mr. Giuliani’s motives for attacking me, nor can I offer an opinion on whether he believed the allegations he spread about me,” she said.Envoy Describes Service Regardless of Party (9:32 a.m.)Yovanovitch opened her testimony by describing herself as an American citizen “who has devoted the majority of my life, 33 years, to service to the country that all of us love.“She said her job in the foreign service is to carry out the policies of the president “regardless of which person or party was in power.”“I had no other agenda other than to pursue our stated foreign policy goals,” Yovanovitch said.Before she began her testimony, Schiff called on the administration to release a number of withheld documents, including notes kept by Bill Taylor, current envoy to Ukraine. He also said he hopes Trump will explain why he told Vice President Mike Pence not to attend Zelenskiy’s inauguration.Nunes Reads Transcript of Initial Trump Call (9:26 a.m.)Top committee Republican Devin Nunes, during his opening remarks, read the newly released transcript of Trump’s April phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskiy congratulating him on his election as Ukraine’s president.Zelenskiy called Trump a “great example” and invited him to attend the inauguration. Trump responded that at the least, a “great representative” would attend.Nunes also said the witnesses being brought before the impeachment hearings are giving second-hand accounts. “In other words, rumor,” he said.“I’ll note that House Democrats vowed they would not put the American people through a wrenching impeachment process without bipartisan support -- and they have none,” Nunes said. “Add that to their ever-growing list of broken promises and destructive deceptions.”Trump is watching only Nunes’s remarks, said White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham.“The president will be watching Congressman Nunes’ opening statement, but therest of the day he will be working hard for the American people,” she said in a statement.Nunes Says Democrats Aim to ‘Topple’ Trump (9:16 a.m.)The committee’s top Republican, Devin Nunes, opened by accusing Democrats of mounting an “operation to topple a duly elected president.“Nunes just four years ago became the youngest-ever chairman of the Intelligence panel. He was a member of Trump’s transition team, and he’s also a fierce partisan. In the session of Congress, Nunes and other Republicans led a two-year effort alleging that the FBI and Department of Justice opened their investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign in order to hurt Trump.Schiff Says Envoy Viewed as ‘Obstacle’ (9:13 a.m.)Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said in his opening statement that Yovanovitch was recalled from her post because “she was considered an obstacle to the furtherance of the president’s personal and political agenda. For that she was smeared and cast aside.”Getting rid of her “helped set stage for an irregular channel that could pursue the two investigations that mattered so much to the president, the 2016 conspiracy theory, and most important, an investigation into the 2020 political opponent he apparently feared most, Joe Biden,” Schiff said.Schiff Opens Second House Public Hearing (9:08 a.m.)Committee Chairman Adam Schiff opened the hearing by describing Yovanovitch’s recall to Washington in April “because she did not have the confidence of the president.”The hearings have vaulted Schiff to the national stage, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi picked him over House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler to take the leading role. In Wednesday’s hearing, he and other Democrats got what they wanted from the testimony of two career, nonpartisan diplomats who helped frame the impeachment inquiry.House Committee Opens Second Public Hearing (9:06 a.m.)Committee Chairman Adam Schiff gaveled in the panel’s second hearing, with Yovanovitch’s testimony to begin shortly.Yovanovitch to Testify About Her Ouster (6 a.m.)The public will hear for the first time from Yovanovitch about what she experienced as Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, maneuvered for her ouster.Yovanovitch testified in private on Oct. 11 that she was called back to Washington after a “concerted campaign” by Trump and his allies, including Giuliani, according to a transcript released later.Because she left Ukraine in May, she lacks direct knowledge of Trump’s effort during a July 25 phone call to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for an investigation of Joe Biden and his son.Yovanovitch testified that she felt threatened by the way Trump spoke about her on that call, which was documented by a White House memo later made public. Trump called her “bad news” and said “she’s going to go through some things.”Catch Up on Impeachment CoverageKey EventsTrump showed a group of Republican senators a transcript of his April 21 call congratulating Zelenskiy on his election as the president of Ukraine. Trump had said Wednesday he planned to release a summary of the call as soon as Thursday, though he hasn’t yet done so.The Gordon Sondland transcript is here and here; former special envoy Kurt Volker’s transcript is here and here. Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch’s transcript is here and here; the transcript of Michael McKinley, former senior adviser to the secretary of State, is here. The transcript of William Taylor, the top U.S. envoy to Ukraine, is here and here. State Department official George Kent’s testimony is here and here. Testimony by Alexander Vindman can be found here, and the Fiona Hill transcript is here. Laura Cooper’s transcript is here; Christopher Anderson’s is here and Catherine Croft’s is here.Taylor’s opening statement is here; Kent’s statement is here. Yovanovitch’s opening statement is here.\--With assistance from Daniel Flatley, Laura Litvan, Billy House and Evan Sully.To contact the reporter on this story: Steven T. Dennis in Washington at [email protected] contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at [email protected], Laurie AsséoFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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RENO, Nev. -- Rep. Mark Amodei was not prepared for the backlash from his fellow Republicans when he said Congress needed to "follow the facts" and look into whether President Donald Trump should be impeached.Newspapers declared he was breaking ranks. Conservative constituents branded him a traitor: "I'm Brutus, and Trump's Julius Caesar," he said. In short order, he was forced to explain himself to the Trump campaign's political director, top House Republicans and the acting White House chief of staff. All had the same question: "What the heck are you doing?"As evidence mounts that Trump engaged in an intensive effort to pressure the leader of Ukraine to investigate a political rival, Amodei is one of a growing number of Republicans who, while not explicitly endorsing the Democrats' impeachment inquiry, are at least indicating an openness to it. None have said Trump should be impeached. But neither are they defending him.It is a politically delicate but increasingly common approach among independent-minded lawmakers like Amodei, who are working to balance their fear of inviting Trump's wrath -- and that of the party base -- with a deep anxiety that there is more to be revealed about the president, some of it potentially indefensible, and the knowledge that history will hold them accountable for their words and actions.In Michigan, Rep. Fred Upton told an audience at the Detroit Economic Club that while he did not support an impeachment inquiry, "there are legitimate questions" about Trump's interactions with Ukraine, and he had no problem with Democrats' efforts to get more information."We need to know what the answers are," he said.In Texas, Rep. Will Hurd -- who is retiring, and therefore perhaps feeling liberated to speak his mind -- has called on the House to investigate the "troubling" allegations against Trump, though he cautioned against a rush to impeachment. In Pennsylvania, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick said he thinks law enforcement should investigate. In Illinois, Rep. Adam Kinzinger said, "I want to know what happened here."In Maine, Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican whose seat is seen by Democrats as especially vulnerable, also criticized Trump's decision to call on China to investigate a political rival. "It's completely inappropriate," she told the Bangor Daily News on Saturday.And in Utah, Sen. Mitt Romney, who has emerged as a lonely voice criticizing Trump's dealings with Ukraine, and last week called the president's appeal for foreign help investigating the Bidens "wrong and appalling," appears to have company. Before a whistleblower's complaint against Trump was made public, a fellow Utahan, Rep. John Curtis, introduced a resolution calling for the White House to release it, and he has said he is "closely monitoring the formal inquiry."On Saturday, in a warning shot to Republicans who might cross him, Trump lashed out at Romney on Twitter, calling him a "pompous 'ass' who has been fighting me from the beginning" and using the hashtag IMPEACHMITTROMNEY."As they distance themselves from Trump, these Republicans -- some in swing districts in tight reelection races -- are also taking care to distance themselves from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who they say rushed into the impeachment inquiry. For the most part they are refraining from directly criticizing the president, who has branded the investigation a "witch hunt" and a "hoax."But neither are they adopting the language of their leaders, whose strategy centers on attacking Pelosi, branding the inquiry politically motivated and changing the subject to Biden and his son Hunter, whose work for a Ukrainian energy company fed Trump's accusations of a nefarious web of corruption involving one of his top political foes. More than a dozen House Republicans have remained silent."It's a matter of following their conscience and saying what they will be happy defending to their children in later years," said Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, adding, "Some of them are following the rule that if you can't say anything good about your president, you should not say anything at all."These Republicans still account for a small minority of the 197 in the House. But their comments, at a time when polls show public support for the impeachment inquiry is growing, are the first hint at cracks in party unity. They also offer echoes of the path the party took during the impeachment proceedings against Richard M. Nixon, when even the staunchest defenders of the president eventually abandoned him."My sense is that if there were a secret ballot vote on impeachment it would garner significant Republican support," said David Wasserman, who tracks House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, citing "my private conversations with Republican members of Congress who believe he is wildly unfit to be president. "But, Wasserman added, "They can't say that in public, or else their political careers would be torpedoed by one tweet from the Oval Office."Here in Nevada, Amodei, 61, a garrulous former federal prosecutor who led Trump's 2016 campaign in Nevada, is choosing his words carefully.During a candid hourlong conversation that included a tour of his lovingly restored red-and-white Chevy Silverado flatbed truck (model year 1988 -- the same year he switched his party registration from Democrat to Republican), he sounded mystified at the uproar he created. He votes with Trump nearly 99% of the time, but described himself as a "process guy" who believes in congressional oversight."I just think you have to respect the process," he said. "I think you need to be transparent, and you need to tell the truth."He said he was not a fan of Pelosi's process and said she should have put the inquiry up to a vote of the full House. And he lamented that the word "inquiry" has become politically toxic for Republicans -- a lesson he learned after he shared his views with local reporters, one of whom wrote that he backed the House inquiry but was withholding judgment on whether Trump "crossed the legal line."The characterization was accurate, Amodei said, but it sparked an uproar when news media outlets (including The New York Times) called him the first Republican who had broken ranks to support an impeachment investigation. He quickly recalibrated, issuing a statement making clear he did not support Trump's impeachment."I now know 'inquiry' is a special word in the impeachment thesaurus," he said wryly, "which I'm still looking for on Amazon, but I haven't found."Still, anti-Trump voices within the Republican Party have been emboldened by comments like Amodei's. Republicans for the Rule of Law, the main initiative of the conservative anti-Trump group Defending Democracy Together, is spending more than $1 million to run television ads on Fox and MSNBC, calling on Republicans to "demand the facts" about Trump and Ukraine.The campaign began last week with ads in five districts -- including Amodei's, Upton's and Fitzpatrick's -- and will expand this week to target 12 Republican senators and 15 members of the House."Given where they've been, for congressional Republicans to say, 'Well, we need to see all the facts,' is a pretty important step forward," said Bill Kristol, the conservative commentator and a founder of Defending Democracy Together.Polls have shown a steady rise in support for the Democrats' impeachment inquiry, with a majority of Americans approving of it. But sentiment is split along party lines. A recent CBS poll found that nearly 9 in 10 Democrats approved of the inquiry, and two-thirds strongly approved, as compared with just 23% of Republicans."Overwhelmingly, Republicans oppose the impeachment inquiry," said Ayres, the pollster. "They want their Republican elected officials to defend the president and protect him from his many enemies."But for Republicans in swing districts who have tight reelection races, like Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, defending Trump at all costs is not an option. In Washington state, for instance, Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler, who represents a district Democrats have targeted, has echoed Amodei, saying that while there is not yet evidence of impeachable offenses, for the "sake of this nation, we should all follow a process that does not put conclusions before facts."Here in northern Nevada, though, sentiment runs strong in favor of Trump. Amodei's district stretches south from Reno, past the cattle ranches and casinos that line the road to the state capital, Carson City, and into largely rural areas like Douglas County, where members of the local Republican women's club were having their monthly luncheon last week."I think it's a scam and it's a witch hunt, just like Trump says," said Gloria Darrington, 77, expressing the views of many here when she said she believed Democrats were simply continuing a long-running quest to undo the results of the 2016 election."He lives in a very Republican area, and he ought to be listening to his Republicans," Elinor Lindberg, 83, said of Amodei.Amodei, the only Republican in Nevada's congressional delegation, is not in danger of losing his seat to a Democrat. But he is in danger of drawing a Republican primary challenger from the right, and already some well-known Nevada names -- Adam Laxalt, the former attorney general who ran for governor last year, and Danny Tarkanian, a businessman -- are being bandied about.Amodei sounded unworried. He said some Democrats in his district have been thanking him for his open-mindedness."I am a member of the legislative branch -- I defend that institution," he said, adding, "Quite frankly, if you don't believe in the processes of your own institution, what are you doing there?This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

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