#but . it is very common esp these days. there is a whole label for it lol

[piplupod]

honestly i wish i didnt know as much as i do about occultism and spirituality because it is so fucking frustrating to see ppl talk about it and they very obviously do not have the knowledge that i have. like i am so open to being wrong, but i see things that ppl are saying and i'm fairly certain that they just ... do not have the depth of knowledge i do, so they say very ignorant things, or draw lines between things in an incredibly (potentially dangerously) overgeneralized way. and i am just sitting here like "oh you have no clue what you are saying right now, do you? you do not realize what you are saying is unfortunately pretty damn wrong." and i have to back away from the screen bc i do not discuss these things anymore due to the brain being constantly ready to dropkick me straight into a mental health crisis

but christ alive i think anyone who engages with spirituality needs to read up on like. essentially Everything they can get their hands on, even if they do not necessarily agree with the ideas being presented, because that way !! you learn !! and you grow to realize what things are borne out of racism and grossly mystifying other cultures and straight up white supremacy and nazi ideology and encouraging psychotic symptoms that lead to mental health crises !!!

#i hate new age spirituality so much. soooo much. 90% of it is just racism repackaged with a pretty bow on top #and nobody realizes bc they do not know what the fuck they are engaging with :))) what the roots of it all actually is !!! #and i do not necessarily blame them but i am so .... its tiring. and disconcerting. and scary. to see all of it being paraded around #esp when ppl accuse you of being ignorant or cruel for criticising smth that is so fucking dangerous or racist hsdgjkl ARGH ARGH ARGH #just bc they themselves do not realize !! it is dangerous and/or racist!! and they assume you must be wrong to criticise them!!! #sorry im just hgdsgjkl. this drives me crazy. i also hope i dont sound egotistical or high-n-mighty #but i do genuinely know i have more knowledge than the average bear (not difficult to though tbh! u just have to read a lot!!) #because i was so fucking fixated on it and went delving into so many books and pdfs and websites and did my own stuff on my own time #for several years #i was DEEP in this stuff (and boy howdy my mental health suffered for it lmfao me when i lose touch w reality almost entirely !!) #AND OBVIOUSLY. not everyone is going to have the same exps i did when they do spirituality stuff #but . it is very common esp these days. there is a whole label for it lol #ALRIGHT IM DONE RANTING NOW. im going to log off from everything for a good long while today to try to reset my nervous system lmfao #sorry for the public yelling and wailing fsdfjkl #pippen needs 2nd breakfast

[youremyheaven]

Hello :) I was reading about Venusians and I kind of feel represented by this energy, maybe not strongly but I do. I don't have any Venus nakshatra in my primary placements, and my question is: if both of my ascendant nakshatra and rasi lords are in venusian nakshatras. Does it have an effect? could it be considered "dominant" or significant in some way? because I never get examples of this. In the community, they always talk about their Big 3, and in research, they give Big 3 examples, and they almost never consider those things as significant, which makes me feel like a wannabe Venusian 😬

Okay first of all , I think we need to ask ourselves why we cling to the idea of "dominance" so much. I've never thought of myself as anything dominant because I feel the effects of my whole chart in different areas/in different ways because that's how it's supposed to be?? (as each planet represents a different area of life?). I think this concept had its origins with Claire's astro beauty research where she associated the planet/nak that had the most physical influence on a person is their "dominant" placement but I think this way of thinking is inherently flawed because as interesting as I find Claire's astro beauty research to be, I don't actually think it holds ground because every person's appearance is a sum of many influences? Anybody can nitpick some common recurring features (esp when the women depicted are mostly just white women) and say xyz nak has caused it. Traditionally different body parts and features are associated with different planets and the astrology of appearance is very much real but it's not a hyper specific science the way Claire makes it seem. It's more like "mercury rules the forehead so many mercurials tend to have bigger foreheads" etc

Anywayyyys, you don't have to be anything "dominant" to relate to some nak or planet's impact. In fact if someone feels one placement more acutely than others, it's probably because of the astrological transits they're experiencing or because they're very spiritually underevolved. I do think a point arrives in one's spiritual journey where you feel completely detached from your chart or equally proximate/distant from every placement. It is the working of the ego that makes one over identify with one placement or another as a way to classify our experiences/personalities. By transcending the ego, we'll stop caring.

I think the whole chart affects an individual not just their big 3 and I take atmakaraka/amatyakaraka/lagna lord/1h & 2h placements/conjunction/debilitated/exalted planets etc into consideration as well.

Also check your d9 chart

You can relate to Venusian energies for so many different reasons (maybe check your dasha? see if you're experiencing Venus mahadasha or antardasha??)

I don't think it's healthy to obsess over dominance and I also don't think it's healthy to want to be any planet/nak?? That's literally the ego at play. Everybody wants to be Venusian but tbh Venus is as full of pros & cons as any other planet, it's not in any way shape or form "better". You can relate to something without labelling yourself as a Venusian? If I had Saturn ak and I related to that placement a lot, I wouldn't start calling myself a Saturnian. At the end of the day, it's all energies and let's not make this an American personality test type fixation

[arctic-hands]

My milk journey has been

First meal: rice porridge with breast milk

Start dropping weight and can't stay out of the bathroom by age seven, get told to avoid dairy so mom buys Lactaid milk for a year. Whole family despises it and Mac and cheese in particular is now terrible and avoided. I'm still very sick anyway

Be diagnosed with Crohn's at age nine. Resume consuming regular dairy

Twelve-ish: begin to feel a little distress at eating ice cream. Does not stop me from accepting a Dairy Queen cheesequake blizzard reward for single handedly winning a science class quiz game that was supposed to be played in teams but no one wanted me. By sheer force of will and remarkable sphincter control for an IBD patient, mange to wait it out get home that day before having a violent reaction.

Thirteen: throw up violently at school after having cheese sticks for my free lunch. Convince myself it was just the greasiness of the meal that set me off

Fourteen: go into high school conceding the point that I'm lactose intolerant. Unsuccessful at lobbying the head principal to provide lactose free strawberry milk. Start paying more money than a lunch would have even cost if I didn't qualify for free lunch at the snack bar for juice or V8 in order to not go thirsty at lunch. Repeatedly throw up when the only option for lunch other than the very popular spicy chicken every Wednesday that I couldn't tolerate mouth-wise or gut-wise was the same cheesesticks that I had in middle school

Sometime later in high school: discover the Meijer's house brand of lactose free milk actually tastes decent.

Seventeen-ish. Find a hair in the carton of Meijer's lactose free milk and swear off it forever. Try rice milk

(Also an aside at seventeen: develop celiac disease and I thanked my lucky stars that it was polite enough to have waited until I was done with wildly ableist school and too old to trick or treat)

I forget which age but I was a fresh and new adult: discover rice milk ice cream. Desperately pretend it tastes and feels like real ice cream.

Shortly after: try coconut milk. It's tasty, but hardly a neutral milk-like taste and doesn't go well when mixed with other ingredients. Coconut milk ice cream is likewise lackluster

Nineteen? Discover the boxed and shelf stable almond milk. Begin to have hope.

Twenty: find out they started making a cartoned and refrigerated almond milk that tastes brilliant

Twenty three? Realize I have forgotten the taste of dairy milk. Almond milk reigns Supreme

Twenty-six: find out what an environmental menace the non-native aimond trees used in American almond milk is to drought-stricken California. Feel guilty but also feel like there's no real way to avoid drinking almond milk

Twenty-eight: Oat milk explodes in the plant milk scene. I ignore this because there's a high likelihood of cross contamination with wheat in both the field crop and in the processing of oats in the same facilities of wheat. No major and common oat milk brands have any gluten free signage

Twenty nine: Oatly converts its American version to gluten free oats brown in dedicated fields and processing facilities. Try it and it's decent. (CAUTION: some celiacs have a reaction to oats themselves regardless of any cross-contamination. I, however, am not one of them.) Become mostly fully converted to oat milk but still keep ordering almond milk when I get an iced coffee because Dunkin and the anarchist coffee shop/bookstore never label which brand of oat milk they use and you're a millennial and despise phone calls

Thirty: Planet Oats is a bit cheaper so I try it on a lark and like it better. Be bummed that it comes in a smaller carton that Oatly and thus is more expensive in the long run. Start putting oat milk in my oatmeal and have a religious crisis because it seems like a decadent and cardinal sin. Remember I'm an atheist and it's okay to be a lil hedonistic and perverse esp where food is concerned

Nearly thirty-one: realize halfway in making this post that it's entirely boring and pointless and is too long for such an uninteresting subject but goddammit I've sunk the cost and will finish this stupid post.

#long post #stupid things #milk #nut milk #plant milk #lactose intolerance #food

[aguacerotropical]

i dont really id as trans in the sense i wouldnt claim it for official govt / institutional shit. Like i would straight up not check it if its too troublesome and i *do* use my birth name constantly, even habitually, bc i just dont care much if its institutional shit and/ or family and i truly get tired of cashiers asking “what?!!” at my chosen name. Bc of these reasons, i dont really use it for admissions anywhere if im taking up space for more marginalized trans ppl.

but when i speak to trans people, esp trans people who dont fit neatly into binary categories, its like “yeah! We relate so much!” which does make me v trans. Cuz if i relate to trans ppl so much and they relate to me, i am defo part of that community and not part of the cis community. (there are also an infinite way of being trans, even if the dominant narrative is the stuck in the wrong body one). And whenever im confronted with a situation complicated by trans-ness (such as being hit on my straight men or strict lesbians) its fairly obvious too that im trans. when having the trans/nonbinary box in a trans friendly place, i do check it.

so my rship to trans-ness is odd, and i think its bc the only thing i have ever strongly ID with is a butch identity. and i think most butches have similar struggles of navigating different levels of masculinity and trans-ness. Like butches defo get dysphoric, the other day i had a nightmare that my hair grew long again and i couldnt cut it. but its a dysphoria not seen as one, since butch is seen as an outgrowth of womanhood, and some butches defo feel that way. I extremely dont, i experience it as a gender outside of womanhood. i still have common struggles with women, obviously, and suffer from misogyny, but its complicated by my obvious masculinity and often takes transphobic turns, such as my abusive friendship with a bi dude who frequently commented on my butchness as a slur. or another dude who used the t-word against me bc my behaviors were still masc despite the short dress and layers of makeup.

Which another level of transness for me is being femme, which i rarely perform, out of boredom and and a desire to play with pretty makeup and fancy jewelry. its nice to surprise ppl with a different get up, some dont even recognize me. but its precisely that, a performance, a sort of very lowkey drag. The second i clean my makeup and put on jeans i feel relief. its nice to be someone else for a night, but not a whole life.

its taken me yrs to figure this out and i only did while talking to transfeminine people and seeing how much we related to each other. it might b useful for someone else whose struggling with identities and labels.

#Trans #butch #nonbinary

[ccsthemovie2]

YUE!!!! yue yue yue

LETS SEE IF I CAN TRANSFER MY DRAFT TO ASK ON MOBILE W/O MESSING UP FORMATTING HORRIFICALLY WOOOOOO

YUEEEEE AN ASK AFTER MY OWN HEART <33 this is, again, super long AND YET NOT THE FULL EXTENT OF MY YUE THOUGHTS, PROBABLY??? this is a fave from a decade back or so this runs DEEP. Why I like them:

yue has just been a lifelong fave tbh. a beautiful and serious anime boy???? AND he’s the moon????? superficials aside, i am always really drawn to characters who struggle with being overly loyal to a sense of authority and deal with figuring out they’re allowed to have individual wants and needs. yue is incredibly ride or die and nearly everyone’s like....maybe don’t die actually!!! and yue says [there was a manga cap here of touya asking yue to take care of himself and yue going >:///.....alright]

it is also really funny how he immediately goes from I WILL KILL YOU to extremely protective i-am-your-angel-dad, both to watch, and to see new friends get into ccs and hear the hype about yue and go oh i cant wait to see your favori-AAAHHH HE PUNCHED TWO TEN YEAR OLDS WHATTT.

Why I don’t:

gotta say it, his clear card hit-fakeout was kinda weird, good thing i have rewritten that scene and can just refer to my personal-writing-folder discord server when need be,

Favorite episode (scene if movie):

JUDGEMEEENNNTTTT AND ALSO THE STUCK IN BIG FORMS EP AAAAHHHHH . episodes ive watched a billion times. when i was a kid i liked judgement bc i was like HES SO COOOL AND MEEEAN YESSS DEFEAT SAKURA WITH HER OWN MAGIC GO GO and now im like HE IS CARRYING OUT A USELESS CEREMONY AND FIGHTING A FIGHT HE CANNOT WIN TO MAKE EVERYONE FEEL LIKE THEY HAVE A CHOICE WHEN SAKURA’S BEEN CHOSEN FROM THE START WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. and to top it ALL off sakura telling him she wants to be his friend and him not taking her offered hand? OUCHH... ;w; big forms ep is HILLARIOUS bc its soooooo AWKWARD. the awkwardness of being at someone else’s house... trying to talk to your host when the ONLY topics you have in common are “i know a few things about your dead crush” and “my other self is YOUR crush”. sakura telling him that her dad insists love can last through reincarnation and eriol specifically being like “give up on clow because he’s dead” later, and he’s spying on this whole ep so he must be rolling around laughing right then. the fact that neither of these couples is healthy whatsoever but everyone’s working with what they have to try and lessen the awkward, and oh no its worse now. kero picking up on the clowtime pattern of “i have to do all the work around here” but honestly its just that it’s kero’s house and yue’s awkwardly hovering and sakura really really doesnt wanna make her intimidating guest do stuff. WHICH IS UNDERSTANDABLE BC ITS SUPER AWKWARD. yue then cleaning the entire kitchen while sakura is cleaning off kero. 10/10 episode.

Favorite season/movie:

sakura card arc!

Favorite line:

when he shows up at sakura’s house and and sakura’s like :0 and hes like get used to it.

Favorite outfit:

the one from that pic i have in my about where he has this light blue hair wrap aaahhhh

OTP:

YUEKITOUYAAAAAAAAAAAA. yukito and touya dating happily and then yue a few years later like OH. I ALSO LOVE HIM. yukito being super supportive and happy of it. yue and touya both feeling like “whats an amazing guy like him doing with someone like me...”. yue going in thinking oh i know what love is and touya raising the bar constantly. its good!!

Brotp:

him and yukito!! two people waking up in their situation scared and upset and stuck together, making the most of it as only they can. i think a lot of them both being like “noooo i want YOU to be happy and comfortable” and trying to do little things for the other when each is taking their turn being active. yue making yukito tea and getting him out of bed when he neeeds to wake up but just feels sluggish, yukito buying little moon decorations for the house he thinks yue would like....aaahhh yukito getting glow in the dark star stickers omg...realizing that there’s no one they’d rather share a life with like that. i think yukito’s the sort of person who doesn’t like to appear uncertain and takes his time being sure before communicating, and theres a sense of pride on yue’s part that he’s the only person, often not even touya, who gets to hear yukito put his thoughts together and be that sort of sounding board. yukito “growing up” in a big “often”-empty house i think leads to him talking to the air a lot, and now that’s yue!!

him and sakura, too!! slowly taking her up on her offer of friendship!! there’s an amazing bit soon after judgement where just her asking frantically if he’s okay??? if he’s SURE he’s okay???? after getting hurt protecting her makes him stop and stare....the switch flipped he is her dad now. i want him to feel like he can talk to her, especially about the Before Times, weigh the things he thinks are too heavy for a child against the things he wants to be heard, maybe see her face and be like oh boy i got it wrong sometimes. and also the knowledge that this is a friendship they chose for themselves!! that they were Predicted to mean different things to each other, but it would be something inappropriate and draining and a cruelty to carry out. this is an unpaved road!! if i keep going on and on i will go on all day but HIM AND KERO!!! HIM AND THE CARDS!!!! HIM AND LI, AND TOMOYO, AND oh just let him be surrounded by friends!!!!

Head Canon:

extremely touchy. like the first thing he did when he showed up for judgement was grab sakura’s face and i think thats just how he is. i think nobody in the clowsehold had any awareness of personal space and yue got so steeped in it that he is just like that now. big on affectionate hair ruffles esp with the kids and putting-an-arm-around-people that he’s barely aware of. it makes yukito a little sad to know that he and yue can never really connect like that but if he hugs himself yue will feel it so it works out!!

Unpopular opinion:

(gets up on stage) clowyue!! (half the crowd boos half the crowd cheers) was HORRIBLE (the cheering/booing crowd halves switch confusedly) essentially i really like to think about the wreckage and then healing from the sort of toxic imbalanced ambiguously requited never-labeled faux-relationship feelings-yoyo i imagine it to have been. but that means i need to acknowledge it happened. unfortunately most people who make ship content do so because they like it, and most people who dont make ship content do so because they dislike it. can you believe it?

A wish:

go to therapy please

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen:

DO NOT SEPARATE THEM

5 words to best describe them:

ok he looks very polite

My nickname for them:

moonboy...

#ask #why didnt u just publish ur draft? uhm. because.

[peter-lurk-ass]

If you feel up to it, what are some of the more common fetishist headcanons you see in fandom? I would like to avoid them in the future and I intend to do my own research, but I'd like to hear your opinions too.

Ooh I always feel up to discussing that, no worries.

I'll try to summarise it concisely; but I wrote an essay on it as well, which I will link at the end. It's mostly focused on yaoi, but it applies to a lot of general fandom stuff. Anyway, here I go:

-Projection of heteronormativity:

Making one of the characters more fem, soft, and more recently nb or even make him a trans guy. But never both. Enforcing typical top/bottom tropes as well (tops being tough men and bottoms uwu soft boys). That actuzlly seems to allow a lot of women to identify with the "bottom" and project themselves onto the gay couple. Will often eventually adopt a child in fetishist's fanwork who is often a little girl(another form of projection) as having a kid is top Heteronormativity goals

-Focus on sexuality: general hypersexualisation

Making the characters' sex lives particularly kinky; ignoring boundaries, writing non-con based on a character's internalised homophobia(he only says no bcse he doesn't realise he's gay, but really he wants sex), A/B/O dynamics: Again hyper focused on sex + Reproduction- Makes the whole dynamic a kink (and also heteronormative as fuck, not to mention transphobic)- Also links gay sex to animalistic behzviour. Not cool. Sex used as a symbol of domination.(frequent dom/sub). Association of shame to gay sex (very shy, bashful character who blushes all the damn time)

-Representation of the characters' sexualities:

The characters will rarely be headcanon'd as gay(often bi, as in, hetero but with an exception for the other character of the ship), or be open about being gay/bi/pan, there will be a focus on internalised homophobia or homophobia in general(violent depictions of it with no cathartic purpose) VS almost no rep/consideration of the characters interacting with their own community. Outright disrespect of canon labels (gay charas made bi, ace made allo ect...) is also frequent. I will add that if a m/m character is represented- and they like him- They can reinterpret his sexuality as straight outside of a specific ship. (AC syndicate had that with Jacob, or DAI with Dorian Pavus)

-Misogyny: homophobia and so fetishism is comorbid with misogyny. (The tropes above would be considered quite misogynistic in a m/f pairing) and as such female characters are too often "fangirls" or "obstacles". The last categories attracting very vicious hatred towzrd said fem character for daring to interfere with the m/m couple. (Ive seen that A LOT)

-General disregard of LGBTIA+ rep, in favour of shipping:

For that one; take a look at the good omens fandom. Consider how many fans have complained about the blatant queerbait.

Very little. I myself left tumblr after a... backlash on the topic. Often fetidhists just don't care about actuzl impact of the work so long as they got their ships and "subtext" (thry will tho, use queerbait to justify harassement when there was none: Klance shippers)

And in general ship wars are a good rep of that; esp between m/m ships. No care for rep at all. Their only issue is with their ships.

I'm not saying all of the tropes above are inherently due to fetishism - But it's important to question why you have those HC about m/m characters, and consider if it could be harmful!

Here's the 'essay' :

#tomato answers #grumpycharmander #fetishism #long post

[thisnerdsadventures]

i graduated.

i graduated yesterday from MIT!! with a BS in computer science and engineering :)  a few of my friends and i celebrated over zoom with my mom in the background as they played video after video on the commencement live stream while only taking 10 minutes to scroll through our names lmao. the ceremony was done and done after 12pm PST, and i spent the rest of the days watching suits.

cw: protests, police brutality

I wanted to spend a good amount of this post talking about how it feels to graduate and what I’ve learned over the past 4 years. I’m still going to do that, but I want to start with how I felt this morning, as I watched protest videos on Twitter and tapped through an endless stream of call to action posts on Instagram. In the hours around commencement, I didn’t feel as happy as I should’ve, probably because the world we are graduating into is an actual Hot mess. We should’ve graduated onto Killian Court, with the sun out and hope and optimism with the world smiling upon us, but instead we graduated at home, separated by a global pandemic that our country refuses to take seriously and surrounded by protests and anger and racism, sent out into a world where people refuse to take a virus that has killed over 100,000 people in the US seriously and where a white police officer can literally kill an unarmed black man on the streets in broad daylight and nothing will happen without an actual public uproar. 

Frustrated, helpless, sad, angry are a few of the things I’m feeling. I feel frustrated because I know the community I grew up in and currently am in is a part of the problem. (For those of you who don’t know, I grew up in Orange County, California, which is surprisingly conservative for California, and has a lot of middle to upper class Asian and white people who are the types to denounce things like affirmative action, black lives matter, taxing the wealthy. Obviously not everyone here is like this, but actions like this make me remember why i wanted to leave :/ -- https://www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/gt7ift/oc_sheriff_department_raises_blue_lives_matters/) And I feel helpless because I don’t know how to help - if we were back on campus, we’d take the T out to Park St or even just walk there to Boston Common protesting, marching to City Hall, but we’re dispersed now, and not as many of us can drive out to the nearest big city protest, esp with COVID. So it begs the question of what we can do from our laptops, our homes?

Here’s some links that I’ve seen recently and have found really great:

Where you can donate, and where you can learn, a summary.

The Minnesota Freedom Fund is an organization that helps pay for immigration bonds and bails, but I think they’ve recently posted that they’ve gotten a lot of donations, and are now encouraging people to donate to other local organizations [x] and George Floyd’s family [x]. 

As an Asian-American, I recognize the privileges in society that we benefit from, and it’s our responsibility to stand up in solidarity now and actively fight anti-Blackness today. Here is an awesome Medium post I read yesterday, listing out some of the ways we can help -- https://medium.com/awaken-blog/20-allyship-actions-for-asians-to-show-up-for-the-black-community-right-now-464e5689cf3e

One thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is how much anti-blackness actually appears in our own families and communities - I know I’ve heard many many racist comments from the people around me, so now more than ever, it’s important to have these conversations and educate one another on how we can do better. Another thing I found really interesting was reading about where the model minority myth came from, why it exists, and the damage it does. NPR article. tl;dr educate one another, educate oneself

I also just stumbled upon this google doc that is so in depth, so if you want to read more about more actions you can take, look here -> [x]

welp. that’s all i can really say on that, or at least I think the links do a better job.

1) So going off of that, the first thing i guess i can say MIT did for me was instill a drive to action. I remember before college, I was mostly in this socal bubble, shit in the world definitely happened (ok maybe not global pandemic level) but we didn’t see its effects as much. When I moved to Boston and started meeting people from different backgrounds, that changed. These people here are so inspiring in the way that they don’t sit around or mope or ignore the problem, they choose to do something about it, whether its a pset, the next MIT admin shitshow, or COVID. They go up and beyond what’s expected for them to make the world the better place, and I think that’s something i learned to do a bit of.

2) Another thing I learned was to forgive myself - we all have to forgive ourselves for being less perfect and for whatever dumb stuff we’ve done in the past. Like you might not even realize it’s happening to you, but taking stuff out on yourself way harder than you should might be a product of you just being angry at yourself for mistakes in the past. Everyone wants to be perfect, that’s just a product of who we are as people, a product of the environment we’re in. But the sooner we forgive ourselves for not being perfect, the faster we can move to growing and being better.

3) We are all pretty valuable people. It angers me to no end when people settle for less than they should, whether it's out of fear that something else might not come along, or they just don’t know their own self-worth. A big example of that is how often people will accept lowball offers and fail to negotiate salaries at all. And it drives me up the wall that it happens to people I know and love because it makes me wonder if they can see how much they really are worth. So much of our time at MIT is spent just wondering if we’re enough. But once you leave the MIT bubble, you realize how open you options are, and that maybe we should spend more of our time advocating for ourselves and believing in our own worth than letting people define that for us.

4 and 5) i learned that moving too quick to label people as completely good or completely bad never ends well. Same goes for companies, organizations, issues, everything. This was a hard lesson to learn, I had to learn it, relearn it, unlearn it, learn it again, and I made mistakes after mistakes after mistakes. When confronted with a bit of bad, I closed my doors, thinking I had all the good in the world I needed. But what I really needed was perspective. That maybe there was some x, y, and z, and those were bad, but there was also a, b, c, d, f, g and those were all so, so good. I can get pretty angry in the moment - I did this again just the other day, when I was projecting my anger towards someone to the whole two year relationship. But this time, I had another friend watching my situation on a balcony three floors up who heard and listened to all the good they had done for me and reminded me about it. This is why its points 4 and 5, that its also so important to have friends around that will listen to you, not just during the bad, but also the good, so they can tell you when you’re being irrational and to really be there for you when you dont even know you need someone to be there.

6) one of the things i learned the hard way was how to know when someone is your friend, and how to know when friends truly have your back. something that my experiences have shown me (and 11.011, ngl) is that when it seems like someone has your back, they might not, and when they have to choose sides, they may very well not choose yours. But here’s the thing I have learned: when faced with that, good close friends do not leave. They show up. Do friends fight? hell yeah. and they apologize and grow from it. They confide in you and answer your call at 1am. They know you better than you know yourself, so when you start losing sight of your true self, they remind you. There is no condition to your friendship, no prereq. When a crisis happens like COVID, they show up, they help you pack, they calm you down when you’re panicking, and if they’re not there in person, they reach out, they ask how you’re doing, and they offer support. When you graduate, they send you surprise gifts or join your zoom party or at the very least, remember the date and text you congratulations. Turns out, good, real friends are hard to find in this world, but it’s important to remember to not give up on finding them. it might take a couple years longer than you had thought it would for finding friends in college, but that’s ok. someone once told me that although the journey was hard, it led me to this point, and that that’s what made it worth the struggle.

So yeah, graduating was a lot to deal with. I’ll be back in the fall for my masters and im starting my internship in 2 weeks, so there will still definitely be updates on this nerd’s adventure!

#MIT #college #reflection #appblr #m

[stereostevie]

Jazz musicians have always placed a premium on “saying something.” Technique, training, and theory will only get you so far, and may even lead you in the wrong direction; what matters is the ability to hit on an emotion or an idea that feels at once familiar and revelatory—to speak a common language in a decidedly uncommon way.

From this standpoint, few musicians have said more than the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, the son of a school-cafeteria cook and a city employee, Sanders moved to New York in 1962, at the height of jazz’s postwar avant-garde—also known as “free jazz” or “the new thing”—which was spawned by the late-fifties experiments of the saxophonist Ornette Coleman and the pianist Cecil Taylor. Sanders’s début album, recorded in 1964 for the ESP label, garnered little attention, but his playing caught the ear of John Coltrane. Coltrane invited Sanders to join his band in 1965. The following year, Impulse!, the label that had been exhaustively documenting Coltrane’s evolution, gave Sanders another chance to record as a leader. The result was the surging and expansive “Tauhid,” an album that positioned Sanders as both Coltrane’s foremost disciple and an artist with ideas of his own.

Coltrane died in 1967, and Sanders recorded some with his widow, Alice Coltrane, a multi-instrumentalist and composer, before returning to the studio for Impulse! two years later, with his own group. The resulting album, “Karma,” set the template for a remarkable five-year run. While remaining as fiery as ever, Sanders had developed an interest in soaring, magisterial melodies, and the rhythms of his recordings, while dense and multi-layered, often hewed toward a steady groove. He also incorporated unexpected elements: non-Western instruments, yodelling by the sui generis vocalist Leon Thomas. As the title of “Karma” suggests, Sanders, like Coltrane, felt that music had a spiritual dimension. “The whole musical persona of Pharoah Sanders is of a consciousness in conscious search of a higher consciousness,” Amiri Baraka later wrote.

Subsequent Impulse! releases, such as “Jewels of Thought,” “Thembi,” and “Black Unity,” extended a musical quest that has now, in one form of another, lasted more than fifty years. But for someone who has said so much through music, Sanders has said very little to the press, doing only a handful of interviews in the course of his career. I spoke with Sanders earlier this fall, in Los Angeles, where he had just celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday by playing two shows in the area. Sanders still projects a distinctly Southern brand of soft-spokenness, one that’s equal parts humility and aversion to fuss. Although he is an acknowledged master who has been honored at the Kennedy Center, he speaks of himself—and seems to sincerely regard himself—as just another working musician trying to make a living.

We talked about his beginnings as a musician, his approach to recording over the years, and his collaborations with jazz legends. But Sanders was more inclined to reflect on the challenge of finding a good reed than to dilate on his legacy. What really mattered, it seemed, was his feeling that he could never get it right. Over the course of the conversation, it became clear that he wasn’t being compulsively hard on himself or willfully oblivious. Rather, he was still searching, possibly for something that he knew he would never find.

The interview has been edited and condensed.

You just had your seventy-ninth birthday—happy birthday!

Thank you.

What keeps you going, musically? Why are you still out there touring?

Well, I still try to make a living. I haven’t retired. I’m not working that much, but, you know, jobs come through.

What are you trying to accomplish artistically at this point?

Right now, I don’t even know myself!

Your sets these days touch on all the different things you’ve explored in your career. I saw you play in Portland earlier this year, and you played some standards and ballads as well older, more open-ended material, like “The Creator Has a Master Plan,”1 from “Karma.”

I just play whatever I feel like playing. It’s hard to keep a band together these days, so I never know most of the time who’s going to be in the band. Whoever I decide to use, if I can use them, well, that’s it!

Let’s go back to the beginning. Before you took up the saxophone, you played the clarinet in church?

I started playing drums first.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Then I wanted to play clarinet. I went to church every Sunday, and there was this memo up in church that someone had a metal clarinet. That person just passed away maybe a few days ago. He was about ninety-three or ninety-four. That’s how I got my first instrument. Seventeen dollars!

When did you switch to saxophone?

Well, in high school I was always trying to figure out what I wanted to do as a career. What I really wanted to do was play the saxophone—that was one of the instruments that I really loved. I started playing the alto. It’s similar to the clarinet—if you can play the clarinet, you can play the saxophone.

Why did you switch to tenor from alto? What did you like about the sound?

Tenor was the most popular instrument at that time to get work. I would rent the school saxophone. You could rent it every day if you wanted to. It wasn’t a great horn. It was sort of beat-up and out of condition. I never owned a saxophone until I finished high school and went to Oakland, California. I had a clarinet, and so I traded that for a new silver tenor saxophone, and that got me started playing the tenor. The minute I bought it, I wanted an older horn, so I traded my new horn for an older model.

I read that you went to Oakland because you were studying art and you were going to go to art school.

I was painting all the time, pictures. I got into music very late. I used to do all that kind of work.

Have you painted at all since then?

No, I haven’t done anything for many, many years. I’ve wanted to go back into it, but I just haven’t.

After just a couple of years in Oakland, you moved to New York. Had you decided to focus exclusively on music?

I had to get it all together. I didn’t know enough about lots of things—basic things. I knew I needed to get some studying in, in order to get into playing saxophone, because I wanted to play jazz. So I had to cut out a lot of activities that I was doing and spend more time practicing scales and stuff like that.

Is it true that you were homeless when you first moved to the city?

I didn’t have nowhere to stay. Everybody was talking about, “You should go to New York.” They said, “That’s the place to go!” So that’s the reason I went to New York. I hitchhiked a ride to New York.

What year was this?

1962.

So, when you get there, the avant-garde—or whatever you want to call it—is in full swing. It’s been three years since Ornette Coleman’s residency2 at the Five Spot.3 Sun Ra has moved the Arkestra4 from Chicago to New York. Were you following all of this?

I didn’t know what was going on. I was trying to survive some kind of way. I used to work a few jobs here and there, earn five dollars, buy some food, buy some pizza. I had no money at all. I used to give blood and make fifteen dollars or ten dollars or whatever. I had to keep eating something.

But you managed to establish yourself as a musician.

I always wanted to work with my own band, so I got some guys together and started working down in New York, in Greenwich Village. I could pick up a few little weekend jobs. You had to do something to survive.

Who was in that band with you, your first band?

I would ask around for some musicians, and we played—I didn’t even hardly know their names.

Was Billy Higgins5 in that band? I read that you two knew each other—and that he was homeless, too.

Billy Higgins, he would come around in that location a lot, in the Village. I met him, and I heard him play. On occasion, we kind of talked a little bit about the music, and I found out how great he was. I started listening to some of his recordings. Like I said, all the time, I was still trying to find some type of job or work—it didn’t matter whether it was playing music or whatever it was. There was one time I got a job being a chef, cooking, in order to survive.

You started working with the Arkestra in 1964, and then, in September, 1965, you joined Coltrane’s band.6 That was a lot of people’s first exposure to you. Do you know why he chose you?

I don’t even know the reason myself. I don’t feel like he needed me or another horn. I think he just felt like he was going to do something different.

What was it like to work with him? There’s an idea of him as this saint-like figure.

His whole demeanor reminded me of a minister. He didn’t act like a lot of musicians that I’ve met in my life. John, he was always extremely quiet. He didn’t say anything unless you asked him something. I never asked him anything about music.

Really?

Never.

But he was making a conscious choice to work with younger musicians.

He always had some kind of a way of looking to the future, like a kaleidoscope. He saw himself playing something different. And it seemed like he wanted to get to that level of playing—I don’t know if it was a dream that came to him, but that’s what he wanted to do. I couldn’t figure out why he wanted me to play with him, because I didn’t feel like, at the time, that I was ready to play with John Coltrane. Being around him was almost, like, “Well, what do you want me to do? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

He always told me, “Play.” That’s what I did.

What was your relationship with him like?

I loved being around him because I don’t talk that much, either. It was just good vibes between us both. We were just very quiet. All the time that I’d been listening to John, I’m hearing something else, just being around him. He would never start some kind of conversation—he would say something, but it wouldn’t last that long. He never would elaborate, or go deep into it. He said a few words, and that was it.

Was he funny at all? Did he ever joke around?

He had a sense of humor about him, I think. One time, Jimmy Cobb was playing with him, and his stick got loose, and it went across to John and hit him, or something. John said, “Yeah, he’s just trying to get back at me.”

His sense of humor was in his music. Sometimes he’d remind me of Monk.7 John would play things Monk would play, but it was a little bit different, faster. I’d turn around and look and say, “Oh. O.K.”

Monk’s music is definitely humorous, but I don’t think many people hear that in Coltrane.

He got a lot of stuff from being around Monk. He didn’t sound like Monk, but he understood the humor.

After John passed away, you continued recording with Alice Coltrane.8

You know, her playing was amazing. I loved what she was doing. But I always felt like what I was doing wasn’t good enough. Maybe I was playing a little bit more dominant than what she wanted—she seemed more intellectual than I was. But I tried to play something close to the concept that she was doing.

At one point, I had told her, “I don’t know if you like the way I’m playing or not. I don’t know whether this fits, or what.” She said, “You’re doing O.K. Just keep on playing. Keep on blowing.”

Around this time you also start leading your own bands, and you start recording for Impulse! as a leader. Did you feel like you knew what you were doing then?

No, I don’t think I was really ready. But I had to go on anyway, and study while I was trying to get it all together. I knew I had to be better than what I was. I had to keep moving. I learned a lot from John. I remember I used to talk to Philly Joe Jones.9 I talked to a lot of different people.

On those Impulse! records, you’re experimenting a lot with non-Western instruments, finding ways to use vocals in a freer context, and getting into more groove-oriented rhythms. Were you thinking through things in advance or just figuring them out in the studio?

We just worked it out while we was there. That kind of spontaneous move.

You started working with some musicians who people didn’t know well at the time, like Leon Thomas,10 Lonnie Liston Smith,11 Sonny Sharrock.12 What were you looking for when you heard them?

I was looking for musicians who played with lots of energy. I wanted to be able to play that way myself. In order to do that, I had to find musicians to work with who had that kind of energy.

You were making incredibly intense music during this period, on albums like “Jewels of Thought” and “Thembi.” Was that just where your head was at that time—constantly in a kind of heightened state?

I don’t know. I was still trying to reach for something, I didn’t know what.

Today people call this music “spiritual jazz.” But it wasn’t like anyone sat down at a table and said, “Let’s invent this whole new kind of music.”

It just happened. That’s the way I look at it. It just happened. I was never satisfied with my playing, for a long, long time. Still sort of have problems like that.

Still? Do you feel like you’ve ever had a moment, or a record, where you’ve been, like, “I got this one right”?

No.

Really?

I used to hear other bands, other groups, when they were making a recording. And a lot of musicians I’d hear would be working on one song maybe for, could be a week, or a few weeks. Make sure everything is right.

You, on the other hand, were recording two or three albums a year with Impulse! Was that how often the label wanted you in the studio?

Well, they wanted a certain number of records a year, being signed with somebody. The thing you don’t want to do is make them too close together, playing the same way as you were before. You’ve got to do something fresh. Some people like to wait for that kind of thing to happen.

But that’s not how you approached it.

I just felt like going in there and doing what I wanted to do.

Would the label give you any direction, or were they hands-off?

They tried to let you know how many songs to play. I just kind of ignored it. Sometimes, I would just play one tune for the whole side. I just kept on playing, like it was a suite. Looking from one thing to another. If you’re in the song, keep on playing.

Did you rehearse?

No, we never rehearsed.

Did you ever do more than one take?

Maybe on a few things we did, something where I didn’t really like the way I first got started up and started out playing. But whenever I heard it back, I kind of liked it, so I said, “Well, I should have kept it.” Anyways, it’s too late now.

It kind of taught me something else. It made me think, Why do I have to do it this way? Let’s keep on playing until it all comes together. That’s what we did. That’s what I always do. You know, try to keep on creating.

You’ve mentioned several times now having not liked how your playing sounded—this seems tied into the idea of your always searching for something new. Is there any recording where you’re happy with your sound?

I haven’t made it yet. Sometimes on my horn, a couple of notes, I’m feeling satisfied with it, but the rest of the notes just is not sounding right. So I’m still working on that.

I have a problem with finding the right reeds, and the right mouthpiece, the right horns. I used to buy boxes of reeds, and if they don’t play right I’d just throw them right on the floor, put them in the trash. Maybe a box of threes, or a box of fours. They never sound the same.

Do you think most musicians think this way? Are you all just perfectionists?

I don’t know. I know when I listen to other musicians, they sound beautiful to me. When I hear myself playing, I sound like… They sound beautiful. I just wonder, what are they all using?

What do you listen to these days?

I haven’t been listening to anybody.

Not even older stuff?

I haven’t been listening to anything.

I listen to things that maybe some guys don’t. I listen to the waves of the water. Train coming down. Or I listen to an airplane taking off.

Have you always been listening for sounds like that?

I’ve always been like that, especially when I was small. I used to love hearing old car doors squeaking…. Maybe it’s something you’re really into, then maybe you’ll get a sound like that. I just wondered, Would that be a good sound?

Sometimes, when I’m playing, I want to do something, but I feel like, if I did, it wouldn’t sound right. So I’m always trying to make something that might sound bad sound beautiful in some way. I’m a person who just starts playing anything I want to play, and make it turn out to be maybe some beautiful music.

When you were first in the public eye, with Coltrane, people didn’t get that.

I don’t know if I got it myself.

Do you go back and listen to your recordings?

Yeah, I look at them sometime. I’ll change it up if I’ve been playing something that I’ve maybe played before.

The goal is to never repeat yourself?

I try not to, but it seems like I do at times. Then I stop playing and catch myself and say, “Let me try something else.” It’s almost like I play one idea and then I just try to look at it, like, “O.K., I’m going to try to see if I can play it backward.”

People still associate you with the kind of music you were making in the sixties and seventies. But over the years you started doing a lot more traditional playing.

Well, I was trying to do a lot of things—like ballads. I was playing a lot of those before I came to New York, before I started recording. Maybe I just kind of slowed down a little bit. A whole lot.

What are your favorite ballads to play?

I like “Berkeley Square.”13 I feel like I haven’t played enough on it. Every time I play it, I try to play something different.

It makes me think of Coltrane’s “Ballads.” People were surprised by that record, because they didn’t think of him as that kind of player.

John always loved to play ballads. He played some ballads when I was working with him, when he kind of opened up more freely. On some jobs I did with him, he played a ballad every now and then. Then he got back in his spaceship and took off again.

That’s where he was. You never knew what he was going to do next until he did it. He just started playing himself, and we all just start coming in. Whatever time we felt like we were needed, we came in.

Do you still feel like that? Like you have no idea where you’re headed and are just going to see where the music takes you?

A lot of time I don’t know what I want to play. So I just start playing, and try to make it right, and make it join to some other kind of feeling in the music. Like, I play one note, maybe that one note might mean love. And then another note might mean something else. Keep on going like that until it develops into—maybe something beautiful.

#alice coltrane #avant garde jazz #free jazz #john coltrane #pharoah sanders

[phoenixfire-thewizardgoddess]

have i mentioned how much i hate the ridiculous way they trap you into taking up shitty jobs, through employment agencies?

like, they will call you or email you at any time with a position no matter how bad it is... and you have to accept it, because if you refuse to at least apply, you lose any governmental assistance for up to 10-12 weeks in penalty for non-compliance.

i mean, the three day life-stealing courses on ‘how to talk to people’ and ‘how to identify fire is bad (work safety)’ are embarrassingly degrading enough that they’re mandatory, but the system they’ve made has literally put people in dangerous positions

for example, an agency kept sending people out to do ‘a trial week’ with a certain restaurant that was basically using these people for free labour, one per week for ages. No one got the position (or feedback) in like 6 months, and this was considered the fault of the people sent out there... rather than blatant exploitation? 

in another case, someone was sent out to the middle of nowhere for a ‘receptionist position’. it was a brothel. they didn’t want a receptionist. no one bothered to google it before pressuring a young lady into going out there. nor did they go with her (which they are required to do under the circumstances). she returned well enough, but that was an easily avoidable scenario, had anyone cared to do their damn job properly.

and the other thing they do isn’t terrible in theory, but execution is very dangerous. they line people up to go out and work for either the council, or charities, free labour and experience right? well, sure, but a lot of people were getting hurt pretty severely because the people in charge of them in the charities were volunteers with no workplace health and safety training. especially at charity A, where my sibling actually ended up with such a severe injury to their shoulder (from being forced to move something with only two people that clearly needed about five or mechanical aid whilst being ‘supervised by a fucking idiot considered competent by sheer fact of being at the charity for like three weeks- a common tale) that it took nearly a year to heal. during which time they were penalised for non-compliance... 

and of course, non-compliance means you have to reapply for: assistance (financial), health care cards, any additional things like Tax A & B (for peeps with kids). also they may slap you with a debt during this time, bc some rich idiot went, ‘hmmm, who will have money if we take it away entirely as a penalty? aha! the poor! yes, give them a debt.’ #fucking genius mate #good job

it’s a domino situation that will never effect the idiots who dreamed it up bc they’re wealthy enough to avoid it all. guaranteed if the minister for unemployment or the PM had to sit in centrelink for six hours to hand in a small book of a form, and then be told ‘no, you missed a page’ or ‘why have you not included parental earnings in this? ...maybe bc we’re both adults susannabeth chadworthingtonne the third. 

then again, sometimes you get penalised for no reason, system error, which kickstarts the whole process over again as you scream unto eternity. but the thing is if these people mess me over, then i do have someone i can ask for assistance, a lot of people do not. and they’re the ones who are in the most trouble if they’re found non-compliant. 

i mean, it’s not a good system.

there needs to be more leeway here. you should be able to say, ‘i see you’ve been pressing (X) position on everyone here regardless of skillset, and removing their assistance if they say no. i am not suited to that position, nor was the last person you approached, have you considered doing your job properly?’

for example, if you are a social worker in a hospital, and a patient needs support with say living at home, and another needs assistance with mobility. you find things to work with them, not tell them they have to use company H, which might be solely about cleaning once per week, or they can just die alone. you feel me?

the whole ‘we have this one position, let us force everyone here to apply or we remove their assistance’ thing is a bit frustrating. because one size fits all, or god help you, has never been that productive of a system. there are people trying to find employment that have twice the degrees, others who barely know english, heavily pregnant ladies have turned up, people who are barely literate... and even a few people who were significantly impaired. and i do not say this in a rude way but, the difficulty they had understanding their ‘obligations’ makes it very clear that if they were forced into a position, either they would not hold it long or they could be taken advantage of and not realise it. 

it’s simply a bad system because it doesn’t cater to the different demographics. and, the people employed to run them are either lovely but ineffective, or the rudest people on earth. 

it seems universal, too. speaking with some people using different agencies, you hear their similar stories of that one employee, usually female, who loses her mind at everyone. >can’t speak english? she’ll scream at you in an angry tone until you ‘get it’. >try to point out you can’t attend something bc you have no transport into town bc taxis are hella expensive (a significant concern in rural areas)? god help you >ask why you have been assigned a ‘how to talk to people’ course in the middle of your placement? get yelled at for ‘thinking you’re better than others’

and, this is bitterness about this one lady but hear me out. the rules in our region are apply for, or follow up with, twenty jobs per month. This was based on an average calculated by jobs available in a huge mini-city not that far away; bearing in mind there are not always twenty positions available, you do have to get creative. (I hear, in the capital city, sometimes they can push the number to 50 jobs/month but there are more opportunities to apply there.) they will accept an almost complete sheet in certain months when there is a predicted employment shortfall. >however, this one woman was a living nightmare. if you filled the sheet, she’d hand you a new one and tell you ‘complete this by the deadline, or i will have your assistance removed’. and she would, btw. once four 67 jobs in a month, mid-final placement, just to ensure i had continuing cash to pay for rent + living whilst completing my degree bc the centrelink computers fucked up and put me on jobseeker in the last three months. she was awful. apparently randomly left and never came back one day, and i would not be surprised if she’s in a ditch somewhere, with that attitude, so good riddance.

the other issue is that they have this anonymous nonsense that i think needs to be lifted. ‘apply for this position in hospitality’ their emails say, 

sure, if you have a client that basically says, ‘fuck you, why should i  have to search for jobs? i’m not doing that!’ then that’s a good enough reason to have a discussion with them about mandatory conditions pertaining to their receiving assistance. and if they remain non-compliant, or get abusive, then you defs need to respond to that correctly.

but it just feels like a lot of the system was put in place without really thinking through how it will affect people. and it needs to be redone with greater emphasis on dealing with individual strengths and needs, allowing for them to provide more compatible opportunities (esp. in rural areas where jobs are scarce af, and it’s not hard to match people) rather than throwing everyone at it to meet quotas, and being surprised when the employers reject all but like one, bc no one else is qualified. as if it is the fault of the people forced into it, that they were not selected, and are then labelled as ‘not trying hard enough’.

#i have done everything asked of me and never complained but i'm sick of them demanding i go for this one position #can't get retail in the area bc employers focus on my degree #can't get a sw position bc they are desperate for senior practitioners in the region and new grad opportunities are often taken by graduates #i lost my chance to take up a position at the hospital bc it took over 6 months to get my award which was the most important document #so tired of life #death would legit be easier but i'd probs fistfight the reaper at this point just to make sure no one said i went quietly #i should point out they switched me to jobseeker during the last three months of my degree so i was constantly fielding their nonsense #then too #as if i didn't have enough on my plate with final placement and thesis things

[antthonystark]

tbh there definitely are some problems with shadowhunters like izzy's yin fen storyline and how every black shadowhunters has turned into a villian but it isn't racist every single time something bad happens to a poc. it would be if the only characters who had to suffer were poc but every character on the show gets hurt at points and like...... idk there is bad stuff that needs to be acknowledged but not everything is a problem.

note: i just basically used this ask to let out all my opinions on this issue, but i sort of broadly agree with some of what you said but not necessarily as a whole. also this is incredibly long, so don’t feel the need to read all of it! 

essentially: i don’t think shadowhunters is racist in any significant capacity, and while i’m never gonna go after people for critically analyzing or evaluating the show if that’s what they want to do, at the end of the day, personally, i don’t think nit-picking at it is a really productive thing to do. esp when there’s a lot of…. well, actual racism in the media. 

See, the thing is, a lot of the stuff that people are calling“problematic” in a racial sense, to me, is just indicative of a positiverace-blind casting ethos in the show. Now, race-blindness is not generally a good thing when talkingabout race, but when it comes to casting, I personally agree with it, in termsof having open casting calls for characters that don’t have to be race-specific(e.g. for Izzy or Luke, who are racially ambiguous in the source material, butnot for Magnus or Maia, who are clearly and importantly Asian and mixed-racerespectively in the books). Because of this ethos, Shadowhunters is an incredibly diverse show.

I guess I should probably includehere that I’m a person of colour myself as a disclaimer? I of course don’tspeak for all people of colour, but that does (or should) go without saying.

I think my general opinion on raceand Shadowhunters is that I think it does racial diversity extremely well. Ithink characters of colour are given great storylines and personalities (withone slight exception that is the one that you’ve mentioned and I’ll get intothat in a minute), and I like that they are able to afford a diversity in moralcharacter and moral alignment to characters of colour that many shows cannot simply because they don’t have enough actual,well-written, non-stereotyped diversity to begin with. I also think the waycharacters of colour are positioned in the narrative is not looked at enough,and instead they are looked at in isolation and without narrative context whichleads to oversimplified and inflammatory comments regarding Shadowhunters beingracist, which I highly and heartily disagree with. No show is going to beperfect in its depiction of racial minorities, but I think Shadowhunters is oneof the best ones out there and certainly the best one I’ve ever watched.

Also, I talked about the racialallegory in Shadowhunters here and also here, so I’m not going to get intothis  on this ask, but basically I thinkthat people don’t really know what allegory means and take it way too far atface-value - in that they think it should correspond perfectly with real-life social structures, which it doesn’t - which is not the purpose of allegory, and I think people criticizingthe casting of certain roles as POC despite them being the “oppressor class” inthe allegory (which is quite a loose allegory anyway) is a bit hypocriticalseeing as I think diversity in general is more important than casting based onan allegory that is already encoded in the narrative irrespective of castingdecisions.

BUT. Let’s get into it now! I’m goingto start with some number-crunching as a fun activity to illustrate theimportance of comparison groups, because science is important guys.

In order to kinda work through thisinformation and opinions you’ve presented here (because I’d like to think I’mthe type of person to admit when I’m wrong about something), I did some very rudimentary number-crunching.Taking all the main and recurring cast members on the show as listed onWikipedia (and I included Cleophas just because I feel like some conversationsare surrounding her), I did the math using the following 26 characters(specifically non-mundane characters):

White (10): Clary, Jace, Alec, Valentine, Jocelyn, Hodge,Lydia, The Inquisitor, Blackwell, Sebastian

POC (16): Isabelle, Simon, Luke, Magnus, Raphael, Meliorn,Camille, Maryse, Robert, Dot, Pangborn, Alaric, Maia, Victor Aldertree,Cleophas, Raj

Preliminarily, there are 6 more POCcharacters in the main/recurring cast compared to white characters, so it trulyis a show that represents diversity, if nothing else. So I think that’s quitenice.

Also, in terms of broad moralalignments, 50% of the whitecharacters are depicted as clear antagonists, and every absolute antagonist (Valentine, Imogen, Sebastian) is white(the remainder are Hodge and Blackwell the henchman). The remaining 5 are goodto ambiguous.

Comparatively, out of our 16 POC,there is much more moral ambiguity as I’ve assigned it, but anyone who iseither depicted as absolutely antagonistic or as more ambiguously antagonisticcomprises of 31% of the POCcharacters, and none of them are thevillain (who are the 3 mentioned above). I included Camille, Maryse (astretch), Pangborn, Aldertree (still sorta ambiguous but mostly evil), Cleophas(again, still somewhat ambiguous). I didn’t include Raj because I labelled himas ambiguous/lawful neutral, but including him still it jumps to 37.5%, still less than the proportionof white characters who are clearly antagonistic. The remainder are (62.5% - 69%) ambiguous to good.

Of course, as I said, this is arudimentary and over-simplified analysis, but the purpose thereof is toremember that there is no claim that can really be validated without acomparison group – you can’t say that POC are disproportionately villainizedwhen you don’t account for the control proportions, which in this case would benon-POC or white people who actually have a slightly higher proportionalvillainization than do the POC characters.

But now, onto the fun stuff! Let’sactually analyze things with narrative context.

Let’s begin with the big one, whichis Isabelle and the yin fen. Like Isaid earlier, I feel like this is…not thebest plotline to give their major Latina character, overall. I’m hesitant to utterlycondemn it until I see its full arc play out, though, because I feel like wehaven’t seen enough of it for me to condemn it as fully racist (since I seethat word as being quite a weighty accusation still). The disclaimer of coursebeing that I’m not Latinx, so I would of course defer to Latinx people’sopinions first and foremost. But if I might give my opinion, I do think thereare some mitigating factors (again, depending quite a bit on how things playout).

I think the key differentiation herebetween the portrayal and the harmful stereotype is that, in terms of how it’snarratively structured, it’s very clearly an antagonistic machination againstIsabelle (on the part of Aldertree) rather than some inherent characteristic ofthe Latina Isabelle that gives her the substance abuse problems. (The latterbeing the harmful stereotype.) It’s not great, admittedly, but I think itprovides a small but not insignificant mitigation, because in this way itdoesn’t negate all of the wonderful ways in which Isabelle defies harmfulstereotypes – that this plotline does not define who she is, but rathersomething that was unfairly and deceptively doneto her. (Which I think is also a slightly better way of portraying people withsubstance abuse problems, because it’s much more true to life of addictioncompared to the more common “people with drug addictions = inherently worthlesspeople” trope).

Also, it’s not a great plotline as Ikeep saying, and I think they could have done something different with her, butI also like that she has her own autonomous storyline? Compared with seasonone, where she largely played the support system of characters like Clary andAlec. I like that we see her struggle and suffer as any main character shouldget the chance to do – and ultimately grow – because Izzy is by no meansreduced to a one-note character through this plotline, and it actuallyhighlights some of her character struggles – drug or no drug – such as herinability to admit defeat and ask for help when she needs it.

Again, these are mitigating factorsto a storyline that does play into harmful stereotypes, so I’m not saying itentirely salvages or entirely excuses it, but it’s – as usual – a bit morecomplex than “racist fucking pieces of shit!!” or “not racist shut up!!!!!”

Regarding the rest of what you’vesaid plus what a lot of other people are saying, another thing that’s importantto consider is that I think using screentime as an absolute measure ofnarrative equality is a bit of a flawed paradigm, esp. when it comes to showthat juggles a lot of mains and side characters as well. While screentimeshould absolutely be considered, I think there’s an equal weight that should begiven to a character’s place and position in the narrative, and theirsignificance thereof.

In this case, I’d like to use Luke asan example. I saw a few recent complaints about Luke not getting enoughscreentime, and I can totally respect that (and would love to see Luke get morescreentime). But I think people think that this means the show is making himirrelevant, and I just don’t see that as being the case at all? When it comesto narrative positioning, Luke is in the extremely key position that is usuallygiven to the main protag – he’s the literary foil of Valentine. I mean, that’smy interpretation – he’s the Dumbledore to Val’s Voldemort, if you will. He’smuch more the perfect foil to Valentine than either Clary or Jace, who arerepeatedly highlighted in connection – rather than in contrast – to Valentine.Thus, to the main story arc, Luke is much more significant than a characterlike, say, Alec or even Izzy, because, just as an example, Alec’s narrative andemotional involvement in the main villain arc is usually tangential, connectedto it through Jace more than anything.

That’s one example, but I feel likepeople tend to oversimplify certain notions to just “amount of screentime”which is one measure, of course, and a significant one, but not generally thewhole story.

I think that most characters ofcolour in the story are given really critical parts in terms of how they’repositioned in the narrative structure and overall plotline that I think isreally gratifying – they’re not tangential, there’s not expendable, they’re notthere to just support the white protag and then get out of there. Like Cleophasfor example, they’re given complex motivations of their own that have norelation to the white protags (like Cleophas or like Maia), and they’re alsogiven crucial, pivotal moments in the episodes.

I liked Cleophas’ position in thenarrative and I loved the struggle between Luke and Cleophas – a clash ofvalues, of ideals, a pained family history – it was just so rich anddeliciously complex to me, in a way that relationships between 2 POC are rarelyif ever depicted. Had she been straight-up evil, I think it would have beenanother story, but she was a complicated and extremely dynamic character with aset of uncompromising principles. Personally, I find all of this that much moregratifying (and not racist) than just “this character is a good person and aperson of colour this is the rep that I want and deserve” (but MUCH MORE onthis in the next section).

And then, I mean, there’s some stuffthat’s just…not … racism. Like,there’s – it’s just not. Like, I saw one person going “oh Valentine had theupper hand in the fight against Luke so that means racist” like lol if any oneof the protags could beat Valentine in a fight then he wouldn’t be a veryeffective villain now would he? That’s just being silly. Also, I saw one persongoing “oh, they made Simon and Maia’s date all about the white girl’sfeelings!! racism!!” like lol, I’d rather have Maia be like “hey man you’restill into this girl so I’m not going to let you string me along here” becausehaving Maia puppy after Simon while he’s into Clary would be a lot moredemeaning, wouldn’t it? And speaking of Clary, don’t get me started on the “lolClary is a white saviour!!” thing. Like. You keep using those words but I don’tthink they mean what you think they mean.

Furthermore and most significantly of all, as I alluded to earlier, one of the mostimportant things about POC representation is that it should not feed intostereotypes. Like, there’s nothing inherently wrong with having POC playantagonistic roles provided that (a) they are not the only antagonists and (b)that they are not playing into and supporting harmful stereotypes about thatgroup of people. Because people can shout “Representationmatters!” until they’re blue in the face, but if they don’t understand why it matters, then it makes nodifference. It matters to show young people of all colours and races that theybelong in and have an important place in the media that they consume andinteract with, and it matters to show allpeople that people of colour are as dimensional, complex, multifaceted, andimportant as white people. I think Shadowhunters accomplishes both of thosegoals amazingly well.  Again, is itperfect? Nope. Does it try? Yes. Does it accomplish a great deal? Yes. Shouldit be condemned? Not at all.

To illustrate, let me use Raj as anexample. As a South Asian myself, I’m pretty aware of how we’re stereotyped. IfRaj was like Raj (lol) from the Big Bang Theory who was shown in the narrativeto be desexualized and unattractive and socially incompetent, or a characterwho was shown to be backwards and sexist, or excessively cheap, or something like that – I’d take a hugeissue with it. I mean, those are pretty extreme to show you what I’m talkingabout, but these types of things can creep into portrayals of POC subtly butinsidiously. I think that’s why the Izzy/yin fen thing is indeed something thatcan be seen as “problematic” for sure.

But I don’t take issue with Raj’sportrayal (it’d be cool to see more of him though) because there’s no harmfulsocietally-engrained stereotype that we’re snarky or slightly unlikeable, so aDesi, mouthy, maybe somewhat insensitive half-angel warrior is not a portrayalthat I find racist or harmful in any significant way. Actually, it’s kindarefreshing. Hell, I’m snarky and significantly unlikeable,and South Asian, so Raj is like. my dude. Nor is Raj the only Shadowhuntershown to follow orders to a point that is considered immoral or “against” theprotagonists – Alec is, Lydia is, Aldertree is, Maryse and Robert are as well.

I hope that gets my point across when I say “mean character of colour”=/= “racist portrayal”. You wanna think critically, my dude. Think about aportrayal and think, “what effect isthis having that does something to support racism in any larger context outsideof this show?” and if you’re coming up blank, then….you’re probably good.

I’m most comfortable talking aboutRaj being South Asian, but we’re right up there next to the Southeast/EastAsians so let’s take Magnus as another great example. Magnus takes harmfultropes associated with South/east/East Asian men and destroys them. Rather thanbeing submissive and desexualized, he is repeatedly shown as one of (if notthe) most powerful characters on the show, and is one of the most individualistcharacters who doesn’t bow to any institution or will except his own, and he’srepeatedly shown to be extremely sexually attractive in the narrative. Not onlythat, he’s a complex and well-rounded character in many, many different wayswith a rich backstory, and he is repeatedly shown to be his own character withstories independent of his relationships with any of the other protags.

A final one I want to mention isMeliorn. As someone who was raised Muslim and comes from a Muslim family (stilla closeted atheist), I’m very sensitive to portrayals of Arab people (oftenMuslims) since they are far-and-away one of the most stereotyped as terrorists or similar such roles. But Meliornis depicted as a very peaceful, meditative, powerful being with strong earthlyconnections – and it’s just so far from any stereotype that I really appreciateit.  

That’s just a couple of examples,but, more than that, I think one of the things that is the best about how Shadowhunters portrays people of colour is one ofthe things that other people seem to use as a detractor towards it. That is,that they are all complex. I likecharacters that have complex or ambiguous moralities. I don’t want charactersof colour to all be perfect loveable angels, because the whole point of goodrepresentation to me is to show audiences that we are people.

We can be characters that could havebeen white people – that, essentially, we can play characters that are notwritten as “Asian” or “Black” or “Latin” but that are excellent,well-conceived, well-rounded, unstereotyped characters that could have easilybeen written for and played by white people, but aren’t, because POC have a right to exist in the exact same spacesas do white people. (But still and significantly – SH doesn’t ignore theexisting ethnicities of the actors they cast, having Iz, Raphael, and Simonspeak Spanish; making references to Magnus’s Southeast Asian culture andupbringing; even having Maia briefly mention the problems of police and blackyouth; and of course the allegorical implications of Downworlders.)

And that’s why I like Shadowhunters,because it executes this concept beautifully, and that’s why I will yell tillI’m blue in the face about how it’s not racist. There’s no point in over-criticizing a show that does so much good when there’s so much bad out there, in my opinion. pick your battles fam. 

#...and that's what's up #ummmm lol this is like 3000 words long part of me is hoping just no one will read it cause i dont wanna deal with it but #yeaaah #shadowhunters #mavra and the discourse #mine:meta #discourse // #Anonymous #it was too long to read over so i didn't so i'm pretty sure by the end i stopped making sense

[stormyrecords-blog]

oct 12th new arrivals

stormy records13306 michigan avedearborn, mi 48126 313-581-9322 we are selling tickets for the Detroit  A Go Go fest in late october. this is a festival celebrating the soul music of detroit, with all kinds of live performances and dj events. tickets are $35 for each night, or you can get a 4 night pass for $100. dates are Oct 25, 26, 28, and 28. performances held at BERT'S WAREHOUSE THEATREmore info at   http://www.detroitagogo.com/ please remember all tickets are cash only so many amazing used lps in right now!!! we have clash london calling $40, sandinista $35 jesus and mary chain psychocandy first american pressing $40from beyond soundtrack, stooges raw power second pressing from 1973 beautiful condition $70, germs what we do is secret first pressing $75, miles davis tribute to jack johnson 1970 sealed original $100dead kennedys - all originals, frankenchrist $40, plastic surgery disasters $30, bedtime for democracy $40, live lp called skate board party from 1982 $30jerry garcia solo live show 1987 $30kiss double platinum $30zappa weasels ripped my flesh $20, apostrophe $17all the kiss solo lps - originals with no posters $16.99 eachfirst 4 yngwie j malmsteem lps and 2 alcatrazz lpsbowie - diamond dogs $17, aladin sane $18, young americans $19, station to station $19, space oddity $25 in on friday KURT VILE - Bottle It Incd $14.99double lp in gatefold sleeve $27.99, limited blue vinylUsing past albums as points of departure, Bottle It In heads off in new directions, pushing at the edges of the map into unexplored territory: Here be monster jams. He revels in the minutiae of the music—not simply incorporating new instruments but emphasizing how they interact with his guitar and voice, how the glockenspiel evokes cirrocumulus clouds on “Hysteria,” how Kim Gordon’s “acoustic guitar distortion” (her term) engulfs everything at the end of “Mutinies,” how the banjo curls around his guitar lines and backing vocals from Lucius to lend a high-lonesome aura to “Come Again.” THE FALL - I Am Curious Oranj gatefold sleeve, orange vinyl $23.99According to Mark E. Smith in his book, Renegade, “We adapted the title from a Swedish porno film--I am Curious, Yellow. I was trying to make the point that we all share some kind of common knowledge that’s within ourselves; that comes out in all sorts of things. Some people call it a gene pool. It’s as if you already know subconsciously about historical incidents. You don’t have to have been taught it. It’s in-built. At the time I wanted to put this across, basically as a loose explanation of what was happening in Belfast: it’s in the head and bones and there’s nothing you can do about it. I was on a roll at the time. I’m rarely short of ideas, and I’m not into preserving them much, either. If it’s in your head and you’ve got the right people around you then there’s no better time to tell the story.” *Contains replica of original ballet program from the performance at Sader Wells Theatre PIXIES - Come On Pilgrim It's Surfer Rosa30th anniversary edition $43.99Three LP edition out on September 28th 2018 with new artwork reimagined by original designer Vaughan Oliver and the bonus disc, Live From The Fallout Shelter - one of the earliest recordings of the band, a radio concert that first aired in late 1986 on WJUL-FM in Lowell, MA. Three CD package will be released October 26th. Tim Blake: Blake's New Jerusalem  $39.99 LP"Mastered & cut at Abbey Road studios. Fully restored artwork and liner notes withexclusive interview. Esoteric Recordings are pleased to announce the release of a newly re-mastered 180 gram vinyl lp edition of the classic 1978 ambient masterpiece Blake's New Jerusalem by Tim Blake. Tim first came to prominence as a member of Gong, where his synthesiser experimentation and mastery was demonstrated on albums such as Flying Teapot, Angel's Egg and You. He would also join Hawkwind from 1979 - 1980 and from November 2007. After departing Gong in 1975 he teamed up with French lighting designer Patrice Warrener to form Crystal Machine, pioneering the use of lasers and synthesisers in a live setting. Blake's debut solo album, Crystal Machine, was originally released in 1977 on the French experimental label Egg. Tim followed this with arguably his finest work, Blake's New Jerusalem in 1978. Unlike his previous work, the album featured songs and the lengthy title-track would dominate the album's second side. New Jerusalem also featured the guest appearance of Jean-Philippe Rykiel on mini-moog. Tim Blake would later perform both 'Lighthouse' and 'New Jerusalem' as a member of Hawkwind when he joined the band the following year. Now regarded as a truly pioneering work, Blake's New Jerusalem has been newly re-mastered and cut at Abbey Road studios for this first ever 180 gram vinyl LP reissue, which is a facsimile of the original 1978 Egg LP release." AYLER TRIO, ALBERTSpiritual Unity LP  $27.992018 repress. LP version. 180 gram virgin vinyl. Pressed in the United States with original artwork restored. Spiritual Unity, recorded on July 10, 1964, is the album that made Albert Ayler and ESP-Disk' famous (or, in some people's eyes/ears, infamous). Mr. Ayler had already recorded in Europe and, in February '64, in New York, but this was the first album on which neither he nor his collaborators held back. It was also ESP's first jazz recording. Spiritual Unity presented a new improvisation paradigm: looser structure, less regard for standard pitch, and no obligation to present a regular beat. Ayler's sound was unprecedented, much rawer than any other jazz of the time. Sometimes it was expressed in squalls of untempered sound, sometimes in outbursts of poignant spontaneous melody. Meanwhile, under and around the leader's unfettered self-expressions, bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray reinvented the roles of their instruments. Marcos Valle -  Nova Bossa Nova CD $15.99Up until Nova Bossa Nova, Marcos Valle's first release for Far Out Recordings originally released in 1997, Marcos Valle hadn't released an album for well over a decade. After 1983, he resented the way the music industry had changed with commercialization and new demands curtailing his creative freedom. This was until 1994 when Marcos met Far Out Recordings boss Joe Davis and they recorded a track for Far Out's first Friends From Rio album. This new collaborative partnership resulted in a new solo album, which commenced recording in 1996. Nova Bossa Nova brought Marcos bouncing back into the '90s, slotting nicely in place alongside the acid jazz movement as well as a voracious new demand for Brazilian music on dancefloors from London to Tokyo. It was witnessing the London club scene's growing appetite for Brazilian music, as well as a lack of new sounds coming out of Brazil at the time, that a young Joe Davis put in a proposal to record a new album with one of his musical idols. Joe wanted to facilitate an album which would combine the latest technologies and production techniques, with live to analog tape recording: a Marcos Valle album tailor-made for London's clubs. Always open to modern influences and possibilities, Marcos agreed to the project, and Joe and his production partner Roc Hunter flew to Rio in '96. The record wasn't released until '98, as the original ½ inch tapes were stolen from Far Out's London studio, meaning parts of the album had to be re-recorded. Nova Bossa Nova was unveiled at the peak of the of the Brazilian movement, the record would also prove to be something of a revolution, inspiring a new generation of artists like Bebel Gilberto, Sabrina Malheiros, Da Lata, and Bossacucanova, who continued to fuse Brazilian influences with modern electronic sounds. The album takes a panoramic view of Valle's career, which was so fundamental in defining the standard of bossa back in the sixties and continues to do so to this day. "Nova Bossa Nova", the album's title track is an update on Marcos's trademark style, developing a more modern, funkier sound. Other gems include the dancefloor ready re-work of his 1970 hit "Freio Aerodynamico", and the smooth instrumentals "Bar Ingles", a jazz fusion looper, and the sun-soaked samba "Nordeste". Doris Norton -  Artificial Intelligence LP $25.99Artificial Intelligence (1985). Apple's first music "endorsement" (Norton was also later a consultant for IBM) and early Roland affiliate, Doris Norton is one of the most important women pioneer in the use of synths and in the early electro/computer music. While the beat-oriented style of Norton's music aligns her with such global fellow-travelers as Yellow Magic Orchestra and Kraftwerk, her championing of the personal computer as a tool for self-sufficient musical creativity also connects her to musicians such as Pietro Grossi, Laurie Spiegel, and the League of Automatic Music Composers. Norton's predilection for the bright, glossy timbres of early digital instruments also recalls Hubert Bognermayr and Harald Zuschrader's bizarre Erdenklang (1982). A year on from Personal Computer (MNQ 120LP, 2018), Norton released Artificial Intelligence in 1985, setting a step up in her deep electronic music research and innovation. "The whole album was composed and programmed only with the alphanumerical keyboard of the computer. The total of the notes and coded events takes to the number 124,648: of these 123,827 were coded with 'step time' procedure and the rest with real-time procedure. Having reduced the keyboard, Norton used only a hexaphonic JX.8P with memory processed by her and interfaced to the computer. No drums were used, neither electronic nor much less acoustic. All the rhythms were obtained by A.D.A. conversions and processing of wave ranges with the use of expanders with a very special handling of envelopes, frequency, resonance, and noise. Doris Norton fed the computer the parameters of vowels and consonants of her own voice, like A, O, U, E, D, and N, through an A.D.A conversion card. By processing these values and assembling them in phonemes in hundreds of different combination, at various compressed resolutions she was able to make the computer sing a complete song in a totally human way (with the voice of Doris). Many other synth sounds resulting from A.D.A. conversions are present in Artificial Intelligence, amongst these: pipe organ, plate, electric discharge, iron beat, birds, dog, harp, and woods, all sampled and handled by the computer. Artificial Intelligence is a perfect example of how human intelligence can bend the coded 'artificial intelligence' to its own will." --ComputerMusik, 1985. VA: She Devil OST CD $19.99"28 tracks forming the rambunctious soundtrack for this cult movie featuring angst-ridden girls with guns in an exceedingly hokey plot line. With dialogue snippets and a host of brash confrontational juvenile delinquent anthems - all taken from the wild and exotic side of the Cramps' crazy collection - it's an epic B-movie. With a cavalcade of tunes about killers, mean women, everyday madness, tongue-tied tantrums, motorcycle mayhem, peroxide-sporting vagabonds and a hopped-up Model Ford. Including cuts from Jerry Lee Lewis, Jackie Dee, Sonny Burgess, Sparkle Moore, Gene Simmons, Marie Knight and a whole host more. Remastered from the original sound sources with sleevenotes by MOJO magazine's Dave Henderson." Joy Division: Peel Session LP $19.99One of post-punks most important and influential groups, Joy Division is captured here in their purest form, performing live in a BBC studio for legendary rock & roll broadcaster John Peel. Recorded over the course of three sessions between January -- November 1979, with the band performing both fan favorites and introducing several yet-to-be-released new songs, the intimacy and immediacy of the recordings is nothing short of stunning." Parliament: Osmium LP $19.99This is the one that started it all, the 1970 debut disk by George Clinton's groundbreaking funk racketeers Parliament. All of the extravagant, idiosyncratic elements are in place here -- lysergic-dosed soul, wild guitars, deep grooves, over-arching experimentation -- combining to create an altogether unprecedented collection of typically free thinking, almost unhinged workouts. A funk milestone of epic proportions." Loren ConnorsUnaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations Vol. 10 LP $32.99Before the spectral, romantic electric guitar miniatures for which he is celebrated today, Loren Connors recorded a string of nine solo acoustic guitar improvisations under the name of Loren Mazzacane between 1979 and 1980. The records feature Loren's contorted impressions of Delta and country blues, persistently kneaded into sidelong guitar excursions entangled with wordless, mournful vocal utterances, hummed and moaned in imitation of the dogs that often howled outside his window. Originally released on Loren's own Daggett Records (named after the street he lived on in New Haven), these LPs slipped into obscurity after Daggett's distributor went bankrupt, forcing the guitarist, who didn't have a car, to dispose of their unsold stock rather than drag the records home without transportation. Now, thanks to a recording found by Unseen Worlds's Tommy McCutchon in the archives of Columbia University, Blank Forms presents the tenth volume of the series. Recorded in Woodstock, in front of a live audience at the Creative Music Studio (the improvised music nonprofit founded by Karl Berger, Ornette Coleman, and Ingrid Sertso), Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations Vol. 10 provides a welcome addition to the canon of Loren's early solo releases and is the first contemporary vinyl publication of material from his Daggett Street period. As with the original Daggett records, the LP is issued in handmade covers with paste-on art featuring a replica of a recent drawing included in Loren's October 2018 art exhibition Wild Weeds, presented by Blank Forms. One of the world's most singular guitarists, Connors is among few living musicians whose prolific body of work can be said to be wholly justified in its plenitude. On more than 100 records across almost four decades on labels like Table of the Elements, Drag City, Ecstatic Yod, and his own Daggett Records, Connors has wrung distinctive shades of ephemeral blues from his guitar, its sound ever-shifting while remaining unmistakably his own. From his early, splintered take on the Delta bottleneck style through his song-based albums with Suzanne Langille and on to the painterly abstraction that defines his current work, Connors has earned the admiration of many, leading to collaborations with the likes of John Fahey, Jim O'Rourke, Keiji Haino, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Alan Licht, and Jandek. Creative Music Studio is an ongoing organization that engages musicians and listeners from all backgrounds to deepen and broaden their musical sensitivity, expression, and understanding through workshops, recordings, and concerts worldwide. VA: Graveyard Tramps Eat 2x10"  $27.99In the late '80s, a now legendary LP by the name of Forbidden City Dogfood was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. What few folks knew was that Forbidden City Dogfood was actually less than half of the compilation made by Cramps frontman Lux Interior. Here, for the very first time, the entire recording is now available. Fully complete and weighing in at well over an hour of crazy, whacky sounds from the Maestro of Mad himself. Remastered from the original source, these obscure rockabilly, surf, and R&B tracks will wow you now as they did then -- interspersed with B-movie trailer clips and wigged-out voice-overs, you just know it's better than good! Features J Buck & The Blazers, The Kingpins, Florence Pepper, Jack Costanzo, Rick McGuire, Homer Denison Jr., Rod McKuen, The Dynamos, The Phantoms, The Sliders, Wes Dakus & The Rebels, The Rivingtons, The Sparkles, The Merced Blue Notes, Grady O'Neal, Andre Williams, The Crystals, Kenny Henkle's Friends, The Invictas, Buddy Miller, and J.J. Jackson. 2x10" in an edition of 1,000. UPCOMING EVENTS AT TRINOSOPHES Hey folks! An unexpected broken foot set back our re-opening this week, but we will resume regular hours on Tuesday, with new fall hours being announced soon. For now, we are open 9am to 4 pm Tuesday through Saturday. Of corse, with the Detroit Art Book fair happening this weekend, we will be open 10-6 Saturday and 11-4 Sunday. UPCOMING EVENTS AT TRINOSOPHES Friday, October 12: Kuzu (Dave Rempis, Tyler Damon  and Tashi Dorji) with Spectrum 3 KUZU is a hard-charging but patient trio that came together in the fall of 2017, after saxophonist Dave Rempis, a stalwart of the Chicago improvised music scene, worked with both Tashi Dorji (guitar) and Tyler Damon (drums) individually as part of a lengthy solo tour of the U.S. that he undertook in the spring of that year. Dorji and Damon’s work as a guitar/percussion duo has become well-known, a highly refined and specific language developed through relentless touring and recording over the last few years, with a sound that straddles improvised music, rock, and any number of as-yet-undefined territories. These two provide an incredibly fresh take on the possibilities inherent to spontaneous composition. Superimposing Rempis into this mix was a logical next step after the relationships they’d forged individually. The trio’s forthcoming debut record Hiljaisuus (“silence” in Finnish…) is slated for release on the well-known Astral Spirits label in summer 2018, to be followed by two separate tours of the United States in late summer and fall.   Musically, these three create a highly focused pallet of sounds. At times, spacious gestures carve up the canvas with the austerity of a calligrapher, while at others those sparse gestures build into an unstoppable tsunami of energy. Those waves are never impulsive or impetuous though, they ebb and flow logically and patiently out of simple and clearly defined sources. This trio pursues every gesture with tenacity, passing them back and forth until they’ve explored every facet of an idea.Opening the show is Detroit's own Spectrum 3 (Shelton, Peterson, Baljo). Doors at 8pm$10-20 admission Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 13 & 14: Ditto Ditto presents The Detroit Art Book Fair One of the biggest annual events that we host, Ditto Ditto's Detroit Art Book Fair is two days of dozens of vendors selling rare and small-press publications, artist and poetry chap-books and art books of all kinds. It runs from noon until 6pm Saturday and Sunday. Free! Monday, October 15:  Sessa (São Paulo, Brazil), DJ Scott Z, Electric Otto's Funk FactorySergio Sayeg (AKA Sessa) is a long-time fixture of Afro-Brazillian music scenes in both North America and Brazil – working as a collaborator with New York guitar legend Yonatan Gat or as co-founder of São Paulo psych-funk combo Garotas Suecas, as just  a few examples. Now at long last, Sessa is debuting his work as a solo artist that evidences his deep connection to styles like Tropicalia and samba. Sessa’s songs are sung in the vain of Caetano Veloso with melodic flourishes not unlike those of Arthur Verocai and Tom Jobim, however, the music gets a deliberately minimalist treatment rarely found in contemporary Brazilian music. Sessa performs solely with female background vocalists and Afro-Brazilian percussionists. While the songs often deal with subjects such as the sensual body in times of digital excess, the music points to new, more subtle directions for Brazilian pop in 2018 – a deep, minimalist, understated, almost insinuated use of the endlessly rich textures and rhythms that defined the songwriting history of Brazil – one which Sessa now joins as one of the most promising new voices.Doors 8 pm$12 admission COMING SOON11/25: The Bridge (France/Chicago) 12/1 Chris Tysh book launch12/13: Doug Hammond solo!12/15:  Doug Hammond!   With John Dana, Rod Williams and Marcus Elliot R ELATED 10/17: 6 pm Detroiter set  inaugurates  Edgefest at Kerrytown Concerthouse (Piotr Michalowski, Abby Alwin, Joel Peterson, Ken Kozora, Kenn Thomas, Mike Khoury, Dave Hurley) EL CLUB TICKETS!!! El Club tickets for sale!! cash only, no service charges!! sun ra arkestra wed oct 17th  $30lil ugly mane sat oct 20th $20particle, tropidelic  sun oct 21st $15prof tue oct 23rd 8pm $15evidence, oddisee thurs oct 25th $25gus dapperton sat oct 27th $15porches, girlpool sun oct 28th $18 low mon nov 5th 8pm $20roky erickson tues nov 6th $20wild nothing sat nov 10th 8pm $20har mar superstar sun nov 25th 8pm $18 ryley walker thurs dec 6th 8pm $13hablot brown sun dec 16th $8 julia holter wed feb 27th $17

[realhealthresource]

The Perfect Diet Shownotes: http://www.realhealthresource.com/podcasts/#/the-perfect-diet

What is the perfect diet? This is the billion dollar question today that everyone is googling, and everyone has their own (often strong) opinion. Is it ketogenic? Is it vegetarian? Is it paleo? Is it low carb? Is it six small meals/day? Should I fast?

What if the the answer is - YES!

I don’t subscribe to any one dietary “camp”, I think many different diets have great benefits, and I think that dietary variety is incredibly important. Our ancestors didn’t eat the same things every day, or every season, and they certainly didn’t eat bananas in the winter! This podcast episode talks about the pros and cons of all of these dietary shifts and how you can combine them to create what I consider - The Perfect Diet.

Three Necessary Steps Towards a Perfect Diet

I talk about these 3 steps in further detail in the podcast, but here is an overview:

Step #1 - Eat Real Food I talk about this all the time, for most people it does not matter which diet plan you intend on following, JUST EAT REAL FOOD FIRST. This means no: - Processed Foods - nothing from a box or bag - Additives - Real Food often doesn’t have an ingredients list (what goes into a tomato?) - Food Dyes - Trans fats (vegetable oils) - Added sugar, salt, etc. Read your food labels closely, or buy food with no labels!

Step #2 - Make your Real Food Diet ANTI-INFLAMMATORY Some “real foods” aren’t that great, so that is just step #1. Next you need to avoid the real foods that can be inflaming your body and creating a leaky gut. This includes: - Gluten / Grains (corn, etc) - Dairy (esp. Conventional dairy) - Soy - Vegetable Oils (Canola, corn, cottonseed, soybean, safflower) - Conventional Meat or Animal Products (feedlot cattle beef, caged chickens)

Step #3 - Eat the Highest Quality Available Quality matters. This food is going to become you! In the podcast I mention how this is often the hardest step - buying the more expensive option. Our brains fight against this very hard, but I do recommend buying the highest quality, which often means it costs more. A COUPLE DOLLARS MORE. Look up the cost of chronic disease and it’s in the 6-figure range, that could buy a heck of a lot of organic produce and grass-fed meat! - Organic is Best (Check www.ewg.org to see the 2018 Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen) - Canned is good (cans do have BPA linings!), frozen is better, fresh is best - Local food will have a higher nutrient density than food that traveled 100s of miles - Wild-caught Fish (cold-water is best, salmon, anchovies, sardines are best options) - Grass-fed Beef - Free-Range or Pastured Chicken or Eggs

WHAT TO EAT: So, what does that leave me to eat? Tons of options! No matter the season or your health goals you always want a high variety for a broad spectrum of antioxidants, phytonutrients, and prebiotics. Try to eat every color of the rainbow every day, and focus on bright colors and strong flavors (garlic, ginger, onion, cinnamon, cayenne, curcumin, etc).

High Fiber Vegetables - I give a more extensive list on the podcast episode, but below are some examples. This part of the diet should have a robust amount and variety of dark, green, leafy veggies. - Arugula - Asparagus - Bell Peppers (if nightshades aren’t an issue) - Broccoli - Brussels Sprouts - Cabbage - Collard Greens - Cucumber - Eggplant (if nightshades aren’t an issue) - Garlic - Ginger Root - Jicama - Kale - Lettuces - Mushrooms - Onions - Parsley - Radishes - Snow Peas - Spinach - Spaghetti Squash

Healthy Fats - This is where the majority of your calories should come from. Fat is the most energy dense food, and good healthy fats are essential for healthy hormones, healthy cells, healthy blood sugar, and a healthy life. - Nuts (almonds, macadamia, pecans, walnuts, cashews - raw, unsalted, soaked is best!) - Seeds (flax, hemp, chia, sunflower, sesame) - Avocados/avocado oil - Olives/olive oil - Coconut Products (oil, flakes, MCT oil) - Grass-fed butter or ghee - High-Quality Meat (grass-fed beef, free-range eggs, wild-caught fish)

Proteins - General Rule: 20g/meal for men, 15g/meal for women, can vary depending on size and exercise level but most people. This rule is very general. Someone lean and exercising hard would require a whole lot more than that for daily intake, this is for the general American. - You are what you eat, and what it has eaten! Only buy high quality protein. Low quality protein is one of the most inflammatory foods, high quality protein is a superfood.

Higher Carb Foods in Moderation - Squash, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, beans - Low glycemic fruits like berries (raspberry, strawberry, blueberry) and Granny Smith apples

WHEN TO EAT: Variation is incredibly important with diet. Daily, weekly, and seasonal variations are very important! Think about the way your food grows and what would be available to your ancestors. For example, they wouldn’t eat a banana in the winter time. Our ancestors varied their diet with the seasons based on what was growing. This means that during periods of time they followed more a low-carb diet (winter, when the light cycles are shorter and carbs don’t grow as much) and they would be in ketosis.

WHEN TO NOT EAT: I’m a huge fan of fasting, and I think it’s an incredibly important part of The Perfect Diet. The most common method which I discuss in the podcast is intermittent fasting, which essentially means going longer in between meals. Most people do this by skipping breakfast and keeping their food intake within a 8-10 hour window, which means the remainder of the day they are fasting (14-16 hours). There are many ways to do intermittent fasting which I discuss in the podcast.

Periodically I think it’s a great idea to fast for longer. We often encourage going 4 days, sometimes we encourage bone broth fasting for gut healing, sometimes we encourage strict fasting for blood sugar healing, but fasting heals. Our ancestors would periodically fast too in between meals or when food wasn’t available. I have a past podcast episode interviewing a patient who has done two 28-day water only fasts, check it out!

Show notes: http://www.realhealthresource.com/podcasts/#/the-perfect-diet

via Real Health Podcast | Dr. Taylor Krick

#IFTTT #Real Health Podcast | Dr. Taylor Krick

[yongshapiro3182-blog]

Challenged Athletes Groundwork Get access to For Athletes Grant System Function Open Through.

Klean Athlete ® is a line from NSF Qualified for Sport ® dietary supplements certified free from outlawed pollutants and materials. In the event you loved this informative article and you would love to receive more info with regards to bonsportslive.info kindly visit the webpage. And also, our team desire moms and dads to really feel really good about choosing Athletic State Pittsburgh given that that is actually the finest as well as greatest value sporting activities efficiency instruction for sportsmens that also takes place to drive the very best quantifiable results." Mentioned Michelle Leibow, Head of state from Athletic Republic Pittsburgh. I have actually been Paleo for 4 months-- again a healthy and balanced" model, eating lots of vegetables (which I truly really love). Disabled Athlete Athletics Organization books the right to terminate your accessibility to any type of or every one of the Communication Solutions at any moment without notice for any type of main reason whatsoever. I have to do with 4 years overdue to this discussion, but if you are still vegetarian and also still struggling I 'd enjoy to help.

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[southparkcoven]

Craig Tucker

Mun Information

NAME: Harvey

AGE: 22

PRONOUNS: he/him

TIMEZONE: CST (Central Standard Time)

RP EXPERIENCE: going on 10 years

ACTIVITY LEVEL: i work full-time overnight, but have access to my phone during work hours. starting classes in the spring

OTP/NOTP: i’m not even picky. i like cryle a lot, but anything else with craig idm

DISCORD: harvey#3357

ANYTHING ELSE: i’d like to think i’m pretty laidback and chill.

  Muse Information

NAME: Craig Tucker

AGE: 17

GENDER: Cis-male

SEXUALITY: Gay

BIRTHDAY: January 25th, 2000 (Aquarius)

OCCUPATION: Student, Cashier at the retro diner off of main st

SPECIES: Witch

POWER: Clairvoyance/Divination

CHARACTER APPEARANCE:

FACECLAIM: Matthew Bell [ x ] [ x ]

Craig Tucker stands at a whopping six-foot-two, weighing about 150 pounds. He participates in track and field during the spring, therefore retaining a rather lean physique on top of his lengthy legs. If given a body type label, he would be considered on the bridge between ectomorph and mesomorph. His hair is a soft black color, kept in a taper-fade cut with a loose side-part, and he has brown-green hazel eyes. He had his nose broken once in middle school from horsing around on a longboard, and a few scars littered on his arms and knees from childhood rough housing, falling off of bikes, etc.

  CHARACTER HISTORY:

Craig’s clairvoyance has actually been something he’s been able to tap into since he was a young child, however he found the capability rather unsettling after he vividly predicted the death of their first family dog –  to which they haven’t had a dog since – at the age of four. He never told anyone about the things he’d seen, not even his parents, therefore it became fairly easy to start pushing his divination to the background in attempt to ignore it. It never really left, but this resulted in his premonitions becoming much less intense. He’d prefer it be a lot more dull, anyways. However… after the incident in Peru, the Pandemic, Craig’s capability became revitalized and he was back at the first square he’d been avoiding all these years. Regardless, he still kept this matter private, not caring to share any of his visions, no matter who it involved. It wasn’t everyone’s business how much he knew, how much he knew that little blonde girl in kindergarten –what was her name?– was going to walk in front of that bus without looking. She was going to die, squashed flat in front of the entire school. And so she did. It’s now high school, the divination won’t leave, and Craig has already resigned to his fate –much to this utter dismay. While he’s at it, he might as well try to figure out how to control the damned thing as to prevent it from being a continuous nuisance. He really has nothing to go off of in order to get things under control, so all he can do is make it up as he goes. It’s a work in progress.

  1) Craig was taken to inpatient over in Denver for a good two months during a severe episode of depression he experienced the middle of his sophomore year. He’s since been diagnosed with a mood disorder and has refused to see any doctors following. The situation caused him distress about his own mental health internally, but he’s really afraid of finding out what’s actually going on with him. But, since he internalizes a lot of his emotions, the unaddressed stress had caused his clairvoyance to heighten –especially in the form of nightmares or viewing only negative outcomes. Craig became more reclusive during this time, growing apart from all of his friends and family. Because of his reluctance to talk about his issues, everyone just assumed it was part of the depression he was struggling with. It took that full year for things to finally go back to how they had been before the episode, and for Craig to get back to his usual self again. The incident should have taught him that shadowing his emotions is dangerous not only for his mental health but also for his already haywire ESP. 2) Dating Tweek for about five years before they both mutually called things off really helped Craig mature in a more positive light. He’s learned a great deal about how to handle more hectic and stressful situations, being emotionally supportive ( to the closest extent he’s capable of being, Craig struggles with empathy ), listening and understanding, etc. The two of them ended up mutually breaking things off, not ending on a sour note in the slightest, and Craig believes that’s due a lot in part by their willingness to understand one another throughout.

  As far as social life, Craig remains within the same group of friends he’s been around since elementary school. There’s not much room to roam around anyways. He’s stuck more to himself over the years, however, withdrawing but not alienating. He’s usually seen hanging around Tweek, Kyle, Kenny, or his cousin Red. His family life remains pretty uneventful. The common parental arguments here and there, a threat of divorce once or twice… maybe three times. Craig tries to ignore most of that bullshit, keeping an eye on his sister throughout these trying times. It doesn’t appear to him that his parents will separate anytime soon, and likely won’t until his sister is out of high school at least. If not, then they’re shitty parents for putting that on her.

  CHARACTER PERSONALITY

POSITIVE TRAITS: Pragmatic, Candid, Inquisitive, Capable Leader, Rational.

NEGATIVE TRAITS: Cynical, Stubborn, Apathetic, Cold, Reckless.

MBTI: INTP

TYPE ENNAEGRAM: 5w4 (548)

ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Neutral

Once a hot-headed kid who wouldn’t back down from a good fight, Craig Tucker has mellowed out starting in fifth grade onward. His relationship with Tweek really aided in his maturity throughout middle school, helping him become more intune with other people on top of knowing some of their immediate futures ( that was already intimate enough ). Craig has retained a lot of his apathetic and cynical demeanor regardless, still blunt and rational. The one thing that’s been revving inside of him since high school is his sense of adventure. Unlike in his childhood, Craig Tucker desires to go out and do something nonsensical, something extraordinary. It wasn’t until after his brief period of hospitalization that he became restless, maybe anxious to break from the ordinary. He retains a deep interest for space, the unknown, even the paranormal, ironic to his otherwise cynical and realistic demeanor. There’s somewhat of a rift between two sides of Craig and he’s almost fed up with it.

*SEE ABOVE FOR POWERS

  ROLEPLAY SAMPLE:

        Weekend shifts were the worst shifts because everyone else gets these days off and swamp to cute places like the retro diner off of Main Street. It’s only five after lunch hour and Craig already wishes he was locked dead in the freezer until next shift came to check. The place was full of families and teens as per usual at a time like this. One group of girls hadn’t even ordered anything the whole half hour they’d been sitting there, only then realizing that these tables weren’t waited at. Another family of four ordered, what felt like all of the menu, and complained three separate times about it taking more than fifteen minutes for their entire order to be served.

        Craig was tired, just like he was every single time lunch hour rolled around without fail. The bags under his eyes were never more prevalent as he stood there at the cash register, monotonously reciting his customer service role. His ultra obvious enthusiasm is a real kicker with the guests, they really love to watch a deadpan kid tap a touchscreen and swipe their cards. He’s a sight to behold.

        Speaking of sights to behold… a hot second of a break settles in as everyone in the building has placed their order and no longer require Craig’s immediate assistance. Rubbing the heel of his hand into one of his eyes, the dark-haired teen glances off to the right, free eye settling on a small kid with an open cup in his hands. And before he can even blink, a vivid series of pictures plays out in front of his eyes. The kid appears to be running with the cup in his hands, soda sloshing around violently as he does so, only to spill some of the sticky liquid on the floor in front of him. Unsurprisingly, it looks like the kid slips and falls straight onto his front, mouth banging into the floor with an ugly slapping noise. Craig already knows this ends in him having a mess of coke and red to clean up.

        All of this imagery plays moments before the kid actually does do a sprint forward, spilling his drink in the process, only to slip and slam his face into the hard floor. And, as promised, there’s blood to clean up. Just wonderful.

       With a very, very deep sigh to drown out the shrieks of the child on the ground, Craig Tucker leaves his spot at the front counter in order to retrieve the mop and bucket. Hey, at least he saw it coming.

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