One of the Two Password Locked Webpages - Shawn's Desk!

The password for this website is as follows:

that`sTHEpASscOdEx

The website has a habit of lagging, so below the cut is all the important files which can be found by going into the website!

^ This is the background image, the rainbow paperclips as well as his seeming break up with Sam heavily implies that Shawn is gay :]

DSMP suburbia au

Phil, retired rich dad whose oldest son lives in his basement and whose youngest son moved out and lives with his best friend in a house across town. Neighbors with Ranboo and Techno. Syndicate book club.

Wilbur came back from college and is now staying in his fathers basement. He is starting his second food truck startup, he cannot cook. He and Tommy no longer get along because wil got tommy involved in a scandal of his last truck and tommy got shot.

Ranboo (18 y/o with the personality of a wine mom) nosey gossip on the board of everything in town, people pleaser but people don’t hate him because they know he isnt spreading twisted rumors. Rich bc parents died, takes care of Michael at home. Book club. He and Tubbo are married because Tubbo is head of town council and Ranboo wanted to go to the events but also they love eachother/p. They adopted michael together.

Tubbo is the head of town council, and he runs the ice cream parlor. Takes care of michael, married to ranboo. Roommates with tommy sometimes but sometimes lives w/ ranboo. He is very political and people sometimes take a bit to realize how smart he is. Stressed af, cannot drive.

Eret runs the historical society (president of the society) and is on town council. Took in fundy he was a part of the gov when dream was mayor and filed info about health concerns for wilburs truck. He hates how that hurt his friendships and blames himself.

Karl runs town archives. He works a bit obsessively to have accounts of all of the things that happen in the town. He also is a people person and likes starting events and getting the town together.

Technoblade is the librarian and leads a protest group (not against town council bc that's a citizen org but the mayor and stuff but also kinda against the council). Book club, neighbors with Phil and Ranboo. He is antisocial and thinks a lot less town orgs are needed.

Jschlatt is mayor, no one likes him. He took over after dream since he was assistant and so just filled the power vacuum. Pro giving money to the strip malls and doesn’t want to fund the town council.

Hannah is the community planner/runs community garden (she is very pro reggs) she wants to help improve the beauty of the town and focus money on that and reggs.

Puffy is a radio journalist - on the historical society board she keeps track of current events. She is related to foolish but not parent child. She often works with the people in the book club when they do more activist things because she believes that more money should be spent on non profit services.

Niki owns the bakery/cafe - in the book club she is not on any of the boards but she is upset that mayoral gov doesn’t disclose any policy before it is put into effect.. She and Puffy flirt but they are not dating. She and jack are also friends

George: insomniac works in the cafe part of Niki’s business. Worked with dream and now wants nothing to do with gov.

Sapnap is a fireman

Quackity owns the Las Nevadas park and shop strip mall and law agency. He is the town financial chair. 

Foolish, architect and contractor, his business is in Las nevadas park and shop.

Charlie: runs Meat Burgers he's from the city and doesn’t understand the suburbia life.

Fundy: tired and lives off of coffee fresh out of college with a fancy fine arts degree and he work at the parking station in the Las nevadas park and shop.

Purpled: project manager, office in LNPAS

Sam: electrician and computer man

Punz: park ranger and the closest thing the town has to police, never around because he barely has a job.

Dream: used to be mayor but after a scandal where it was uncovered that he was using possession of Tommy’s discs to try to get incriminating info on Wilbur and others he was removed from office, he now owns dream burger, everyones least favorite burger joint.

Ponk: runs a restaurant called lemon life (used to date sam before sam made him fall off a fence and break his arm, he now flirts with foolish)

Bad: Runs Reggs Benedict a breakfast place and diner.

Ant: Runs the pet rescue

Skeppy: jewler

I wrote it too! so READ IT HERE :D

https://archiveofourown.org/works/33068917

REFRESHER ON MY INSIDER SOURCES: BTW, this is Purv aka @p-redux. This is my original Tumblr blog I’ve revived to archive past source info.

In 2014, I first posted my insider source info. I didn’t have a Tumblr blog, so I posted everything on my old Twitter account, all the details the sources gave me then. The fandom, especially shippers, went into an uproar because my source info sunk the ship. The SamCait ship had barely started sailing and I sunk it before it had made it out into open sea. Shippers have never forgiven me for that. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. 

Throughout the years, I’ve reiterated my source info, but summarized it because most people had already heard it, and I didn’t see a need to keep rehashing it. The more time past, the more it became clear Sam and Cait weren’t a couple, and that the info I had shared with the fandom AHEAD of time was true. Cait was seen with Tony a lot. And Sam was seen with different girlfriends or dates. But since I’m turning this account @fortruthseekers into an archive account, I’m going to post the original source DETAILS again, for newbies. This post is going to be LONG, very long, because I go into detail. Read it if you need a refresher on what I said previously about sources, or if you’ve never read the source details before. Click on Keep Reading to find the rest.

Okay, so about sources. REAL sources. I live in Los Angeles and used to be in the industry many years ago. As a result, I still know people in the industry. And just by living in L.A., you meet people who know celebs. In 2014, I got who I call “my original industry source” through a friend who knew I was watching Outlander. And she thought it would be cool for me to talk to this industry person who had Outlander connections. My friend put me in touch with her so we could talk about our common interest. Initially, me talking to the source was just to schmooze about insider info, I wasn’t planning to make it public or create a celebrity insider info account. But I was surprised about how much she knew. At the time many people, including myself, thought Sam and Cait were most likely a couple, when the source told me she knew for sure they weren’t, I was floored. Then after she told me all the details of her interactions with Sam, Cait, and some of the Outlander cast, and the fact that she was friends with one of Cait’s besties, I knew I’d hit a huge source of info. 

At first, the source didn’t want me to make the info public, she didn’t want to get in trouble, but she thought it was important that people knew the truth about whether or not Sam and Cait were a couple. She figured if they knew, then people wouldn’t get their hopes up and be disappointed when Sam and Cait became more famous, and would inevitably be seen with other people. As I said, that original industry source is good friends with one of Cait’s female best friends. And because she’s in the industry, she also had a connection to Sam through his talent agency. So, she had insider info on BOTH Cait and Sam. Jackpot.

Because I knew her full identity and knew I was talking to the real person on her real and blue check verified Twitter account, and my friend had introduced me to her, I could trust that her info was legit. She is also Instagram blue check verified and has made a name for herself in the industry. People would be shocked if they knew who she was. SHE is the one who told me 100% Sam and Cait were not dating and that 100% Sam is not gay.  At first, she didn’t want me to post things publicly, but I begged and she finally relented, as long I would swear I would keep her identity private and would leave out some identifying details. 

So, in 2014, I went public with all the details she told me. And through the years, EVERYTHING she told me turned out to be true. I didn’t have a Tumblr blog at the time, so all my source info was posted on my old Twitter account. I posted every detail of what she told me and I also posted some of her DMs with permission, and name blacked out. Unfortunately, all that is gone because I deleted my old Twitter account a long time ago. 

The main points were: Sam and Cait weren’t a couple and never have been. When I said to her that I knew actors were different than regular people, but that when I saw Sam and Cait talking about watching the wedding scene together, while drinking a bottle of wine, that there was no way they didn’t hook up at some point. She said she’s been around a lot of actors and said Sam and Cait are both natural flirts and very touchy-feely people, and she didn’t see anything out of of the ordinary in their interactions–she reminded me their behavior is the norm when promoting a show. 

She also said Sam isn’t gay per people she’s talked to who know him. She knew the director of Batman Live, the live show Sam starred in years ago. The director was a gay man, and when she asked him if Sam was gay, since he seemed too good to be true and was so good-looking, he said no. And he said he and other crew who were hoping Sam was gay were disappointed that he was straight. The director told her that the reason Sam didn’t seem to have much of a dating history, was because he had always been focused on his career and on working out. And that because he was traveling with the show, there wasn’t time for a committed relationship. Later, we found out that Sam had indeed been dating a woman named Katie Rebekah, but they broke up because she moved from London to Australia, and Sam started to tour with Batman Live. That’s the info I got in 2014. If Sam was gay, the gay director would have told my source and squeed about it.

This source used to work between New York and Los Angeles. She was in New York for one of her TV shows during the July 2014 premiere of Outlander and hung out with Cait and Cait’s bestie, as well as some of the other OL cast and crew. She also had some business meetings with Sam in NY. She confirmed Sam brought Amy Shiels as his “plus one” to the premiere and even skipped out on an unplanned event the cast was invited to because he “had a date.” When they saw him the next day and asked him how his date went, source said Sam replied “It was great!” Even though this source got info from Cait’s bestie…the bestie kept quiet about Cait and Tony, and simply said that Cait and Sam weren’t a couple….I found out about Tony from someone else...more on that later. 

This source did share some info about what Cait thought about Sam. She said that Cait cared about Sam as a costar and friend, and they got along very well.  But Cait said Sam was not her type, that Cait didn’t date actors, and that Cait referred to Sam as “a bro,” and that Cait was not into guys who spent so much time in the gym. She said Cait genuinely liked Sam as a person, but there was not more to it. And that Sam was just a big flirt, and that they were both trying to promote Outlander as much as possible because they knew it was their big break. 

This is also the source who told me that Cait’s friend, the one the source is friends with, didn’t particularly care for Sam. To be very clear: I don’t feel this way about Sam, Cait doesn’t feel this way about Sam, and my source doesn’t feel this way about Sam. In fact, my source said Sam “was lovely” to her and “a sweetheart.” But one of Cait’s besties, just ONE FRIEND–not plural, the friend said that she thought Sam “could be self-absorbed,” and “douchy.” ONE of Cait’s friends said this. No one else said this. And that was way back in 2014. I’m sure Sam has matured since then, as people tend to do as they get older. BTW Cait has a lot of close friends, some of which aren’t well known to fans. Reiterating: Cait doesn’t feel that way about Sam, the source didn’t feel this way about Sam, and I, Purv, don’t feel this way about Sam, nor have I said anything like that about Sam. 

Back to Sam being a natural flirt, remember, even Cait said “he could flirt with a lamppost.” Well, my source said that the times she saw Sam at business meetings, he was always very nice to her and would greet her with a big bear hug, tight enough that she could feel how hard his chest was. He would look down at her, right into her yes, hold her gaze, and smile big at her. And this was a woman he was not interested in romantically. He was just being friendly and sweet. Imagine how high the charm wattage is turned up for a woman he IS interested in. No wonder that Samshine has been hard to resist. This is also the source who said that Sam would always say goodbye to her by saying his now ubiquitous “Let’s get together for a wee dram when you’re in Scotland.” Of course, that “wee dram” never happened. I think that’s just Sam’s people pleasing qualities coming out, never wants to disappoint anyone. The source also said whenever he would text or e-mail her for business related stuff, he was always super enthusiastic and used a lot of exclamation points !!!!!!

Anyway, my original industry source “broke up” with me years ago because she didn’t want to chance anyone finding out who she was, as Outlander got bigger, and as she got bigger in the industry. I still sometimes look at her Twitter and IG all nostalgic, remembering when it all started...ah, memories...

My second major source was my Tony family source. My Tony source is someone from Glasgow who was friends with someone I’d known for awhile. My friend put me in contact with her. The Tony source approached me to tell me that she was shocked to find out a relative of hers (later found out it was her brother) had revealed “the lead actress from that new show Outlander is dating Tony McGill.” She was shocked because she and her family have known Tony and his family for years, all of them growing up in and around Glasgow. Her brother went to school with Tony and his brother, Joe. She then told me the whole backstory of Cait and Tony. She wanted me to keep the info to myself and she had no motivation or intention of making it public. But she finally agreed, after I gave my word that I would protect her identity and I have. 

What she shared with me in late 2014 is that her brother found out their friend, Tony was dating Caitriona Balfe. At the time she said they’d been dating for about 9-10 months, that’s why I always put the start of their relationship around March 2014. She was told that by December 2014, the relationship was “dead serious” between them and that Cait had spent Christmas 2014 in London with Tony and his dad. And then Tony had flown to Ireland with Cait to spend New Year’s Eve and New Year’s with her family and friends (we’ve all seen the pic and video on Donal Brophy’s IG). My source said that Cait and Tony had been friends for 9 years or so at the time (again, this was told to me in 2014) and had met years ago when Tony rented out a room to one of Cait’s friends. They hooked up briefly back then and then remained friends, until it turned romantic again around March 2014. The source said that she and her family knew Tony and his family from back in the day, and she told me what school Tony went to in Glasgow (something I haven’t and won’t make public). She said that Tony had moved from Glasgow years ago and had been living in London for awhile (again, this was told to me in 2014). Also, that he and his brother owned a bar/live music place in London, The Library in Islington (they later opened a second one, The Reading Room, which Cait posted from on IG) and a music production company. And that prior to that, Tony was the band manager for some Scottish bands, most notable, The Fratellis. She described Tony as “fun, clever and hysterically funny.” 

The Tony source came into the picture after I had my Twitter account up, where I was posting insider info given by my first source. I had already posted that Sam and Cait weren’t dating. This second source is the one that filled in the missing puzzle piece I didn’t know was missing and told me she knew WHO Cait was dating. I would have NEVER known the name Tony McGill associated with Cait if not for this source. He was on no one’s radar. And he wasn’t on social media. This source told me details only an insider would know. And I also had her full identity, so I knew she was legit as well. Then ‘lo and behold Tony started showing up places with Cait. There is NO way I would have known about Tony without this inside family source. No way. Of course after my source told me about him, I did look him up online and there was hardly any information about him. Never in a million years would I have linked Tony McGill with Cait on my own. And I mentioned Tony McGill way before he started showing up places with Cait. How could it be that I said sources told me Tony McGill is dating Cait, and then a man identified as Tony McGill is seen out and about with Cait? The only way I knew about Tony is because the source told me. 

Back in the day, when Cait and Tony weren’t yet living together yet, people wondered how they made their relationship work given the sometimes long distances? Well, when they first started dating around March 2014, Cait was filming Outlander Season 1, so Tony would go to Glasgow or Cait would go to London on weekends. Then when Season 1 wrapped and Cait went back to L.A. (where she had been living) in late Sept. 2014, Tony went to L.A. to visit her in October 2014 (both their birthdays are in October, Cait Oct. 4 and Tony Oct. 12, not Oct. 14 like some have said. Libra/Libra bond!). The Fratellis were also in L.A. Oct. 2014 and Tony helped them out with some business stuff, even though he was no longer managing them then. Then, as I’ve already stated, Cait and Tony spent time together Dec. 2014 and January 2015 for the holidays. Then Valentine’s Feb. 2015, Cait flew to London for the opening of Tony’s 2nd bar, The Reading Room. She posted a pic on IG. Then in April 2015, Tony flew to NY to join Cait for the premiere of the second half of Season 1. Eyewitness sources saw him sitting with Cait’s friends at the screening and then with Cait and her friends inside the after party. There was one PUBLIC pic on Twitter of Cait, Tony and Sam. And I and others have been shown private pics of Tony there. Many of us have seen them but we couldn’t make them public because they show the location where they were taken, thus identifying the source who took them, and she would get in trouble with her boss. After that, in May 2015, Cait went back to Glasgow to begin shooting OL Season 2, and this time, she brought her cat, Eddie with her. Per more than one source, Tony pretty much lived in Glasgow after that with Cait. One person who went to Tony’s bars in Glasgow and then reached out to me, said that she had asked about Tony and was told “he doesn’t come around much anymore because he moved back to Scotland.” They then moved into their new place in Glasgow, move out of that one and into a new one in Glasgow, and also have a place in London, and are now married and had their first son. THAT’s how Tony and Cait made it work.

My Tony source also parted ways with me, also due to fear of being found out. She didn’t formally break up with me, the way the original industry source did, she simply ghosted me. But I also see her pop up on Twitter or IG sometimes and get all wistful. Oh well...

After I posted the insider info from BOTH these sources, then people started to contact me with source info. They knew I was Anon and would keep them Anon--win/win. People who went to Hollywood parties, or premieres, or meet and greets, people who saw celebs at the market, or baseball games, or the beach, or at the gym, or walking down the street, or just happened to be at the right place at the right time, started sending me info. From all over the world, wherever Sam and Cait were. And if I could confirm it to be true, I would post it. If I couldn’t completely guarantee it, then I’d say it was speculation. And that’s what I still do. Granted, back in the day, I was somewhat naive, and did get burned and betrayed a few times. I admitted when that happened. I’m much more careful now. But for the most part, the MAJORITY of the info I’ve posted has been ACCURATE. People who have been here for years can corroborate that. I don’t post everything that is shared with me though. And because my sources are actual real humans, they can’t know everything or be everywhere…I don’t always get minute by minute info, that doesn’t mean I don’t have real sources.

As for me also being the first to let the fandom know that Sam was dating Abbie Salt in 2015...I had a couple of Abbie sources. One of them turned out to be super sketchy and once I figured that out, we parted ways. My Abbie sources approached me after I had already established my account as an insider info sharing account. The motivation was to debunk that Cody and Sam were still seeing each other since they no longer were, and Abbie had started seeing Sam. 

BTW: as an aside...I was also the one that, through an eyewitness source, told the fandom that Sam and Cody Kennedy had gone to the Matthew Morrison Halloween party in October 2014, and the source had seen them kissing while waiting for the valet to bring their car around. You don’t know the LENGTHS that Extreme Shippers went to to disprove my source. They even Google Earthed the driveway from the street to the valet and measured it trying to prove that my source could not have seen where Sam and Cody were waiting for their car. Hahahah omg. Except, my source wasn’t on the street, she was right next to them. After all the bullshit from ES, it’s a wonder I’m still here, but here I am...the strongest bitch you’ll ever meet. But I digress...

Anyhoo, back to Sam and Abbie. I had no idea Abbie Salt existed or that she had dated Sam before and was friends with him…until my Abbie source contacted me to tell me that Sam was no longer dating Cody Kennedy and had resumed dating Abbie Salt. Abbie met Sam years ago when her sister, actress, Charlotte Salt starred with Sam in “A Princess For Christmas,” they dated briefly then, and then rekindled their romance in early 2015. Cody Kennedy’s mom later confirmed this by posting publicly in response to a fan Sam and Cody had broken up because “Sam went back to his old girlfriend in London.” Abbie lives in London. Again…I was surprised because I had no idea…but all the info checked out and then whadda you know, Abbie started showing up in Glasgow…in Sam’s flat (IG pics since deleted)…in L.A. in February 2015 at the London hotel, West Hollywood seen and photographed by an eyewitness for Oscars Week parties (the pic is of Sam and the fan, taken by Abbie, fan said Abbie was super sweet)... n NY when he was there for the OL premiere April 2015 (she posted on her IG, since deleted the pics), in Miami when he was there (eyewitness and Miami source proof that they were in Miami together, and NO that was not me, it was a source) and in Barbados together (Barbados source confirmation, and NO that was not me, it was a source, and pics from Abbie and Sam Tweeted he had been in Barbados). After that, Abbie was in Glasgow and Sam in London, where Abbie lives, on several occasions…not to mention she was photographed as his date in Monte Carlo for the TV Film Festival. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the Abbie Salt sources told me about AHEAD of time, then started to spend all that time with Sam. I didn’t even know Abbie existed, how would I have ever known anything about her without sources?

I also told the fandom about Mackenzie Mauzy and Sam dating via a source who saw them in person, holding hands and leaving together at a Guns N Roses concert in Los Angeles April 1, 2016. A friend of someone I know in L.A. was there and recognized Sam. He told my friend that he’d seen “that Outlander dude, Sam Heughan holding hands with a blonde, leaving the Guns N Roses concert.” At first, I thought it may have been Cody Kennedy, but afterwards, sources came forth to confirm it was Mackenzie Mauzy. Later on, I was contacted by a different Mackenzie source and given more info, which I posted. That Mackenzie source ghosted me too because Mackenzie was probably asking questions as to who was doling out info.  Also, by sheer providence, a fan was in the stands at the Dodgers baseball game in June 2016 and sent me a video of Sam and Mackenzie at the game together. Another source sent me the video of Sam and Mackenzie leaving their hotel together at San Diego Comic Con. I’ll repost all that in the archives. And someone I’ve known for years on Tumblr and trust completely came forward to share that she found out Sam and Mackenzie had broken up from one of Mackenzie’s relatives who live near her. Again, that was also by chance. Life can indeed be stranger than fiction. The relative told her Mackenzie wanted to get married and have kids and Sam wasn’t ready for that yet, so they broke up. That source came forth and identified herself on Tumblr, so that also proves my source info was legit. 

In summary: I was the FIRST to let the fandom know Cait and Sam weren’t dating, Cait was dating Tony, and Sam was dating Abbie, and Sam was dating Mackenzie BEFORE anyone else knew. You can’t do ALL of that simply by scouring social media posts as haters would have you think. It’s just not possible. And reasonable people understand that.

Before Covid-19 hit, people who were attending industry events would contact me and say “Hey Purv, I’m going to the PCA, or the TCA, or the GoldenGlobes, or the Outlander Season premiere and after party, I’ll give you the scoop!” I’d say “Cool, thanks! Send pics or video and let me know what and who you see.” That’s it. No social media searches or data mining needed. There is no conspiracy involved. No one is “feeding” me info from Sam or Cait’s camps or non-shipper or shipper sides to propagate a certain “narrative.” It’s just different people, who are at the right place at the right time, or are privy to certain insider info, sharing it with me because they know I post info for fans who are into that. As I’ve said ad infinitum, I am quite simply THE MESSENGER.

Any questions, send me an Ask or a Direct Message on my MAIN account @p-redux  Thanks!

actually. actually let’s talk about diversity in fantasy let’s give that a go. im mad and im gonna be that way for a while

don’t want to read all this? fair. tldr: fantasy writers who rely not only on the medieval europe model but also hide behind historical accuracy in 2020 (fuck it, from ‘95 onwards) are lazy and unimaginative and should be held accountable no matter how many white 20 year old dudes jerk off to whatever power fantasy is embedded in the plot. so lets chat about that lads. (slightly) drunk rant under the cut

now prelim shit: we know fantasy is used both as escapism and as a way to deal with various traumas via magical metaphor. staples of the genre. even if jk rowling busted out the laziest and at times offensive metaphor for ww2 and racism ive ever seen, she still adhered to time and true tropes. whatever.

so why have we, in this post game of thrones era, become insanely obsessed with realism? i can hear sixty 20-something year old men crying at me rn like oh ohh oh its based off the war of roses oh wahh all medieval fantasy fiction is based off england and the crusades anyway so women should get raped and people of color should be demonized its not racism its xenophobia and also gay people dont exist and disabled people are systematically killed off and if we stretch the magic fixes mental illness thing a LITTLE further we have straight up eugenics.

we all know where the england but myth thing came from. now the thing about tolkien is that while i will always absolutely love lotr, looking at the LAZY state of fantasy? damn i kinda wish he hadn’t revolutionized the genre. the bitch was still racist. he still didnt give a shit abt women (eowyn was just a vehicle to show how much he fucking hated macbeth anyone holding jrrt up as a feminist icon for that needs to sit the fuck down and explain to me why i can count the woman speaking roles in lotr, a story with a name and fleshed out backstory for every minor character, on one hand but thats! another post). he had something to say abt class with sam i’ll give him that but he is still 100% NOT what we need to hold our standards to in 2020. 

i dont want to talk about old school fantasy, like 80s early 90s cause theres literally no point. its sexist, racist, ableist for sure, this we know. david eddings (not even that old school tbh) can rise from the grave and explain himself to me personally and i still wont forgive him for ehlana. 

so let’s talk historical accuracy. quick question. who the FUCK gives a shit? WHO is this elusive got fan who’s out here like blehh actually??? this method of iron production is TOTALLY anachronistic of the time. ummm these vegetables in this fictional world were NOT native to english soil so how are they here? cause i know this is the classic argument but ive never actually met someone who cared about the lack of dysentery as much as they care abt the women getting raped on screen/page. 

god forbid you have to worldbuild for a second god forbid you can’t rely on the idea of fantasy readers already have in their head god forbid you have an original idea god forbid you spend more than two seconds thinking about ur setting (oh i should mention i dont....really blame GoT for its setting cause of how long ago it was og written but trust me i sure as hell blame grrm for writing a 13 yr old giving ‘consent’ to sex with a grown man within the first couple of chapters) 

If we accept the basic premise of fantasy as escapism, and i AM drunk so i will NOT be finding fuckin. quotes and shit for this but come on tolkien said it himself and as much as i’ll drag him he crafted the simplest and most powerful fantasy metaphors on the board rn. But if we know its escapism. If we know. then who is it escapism for? certainly not for me, the gay brown woman who busted through all of GoT in 10th grade. 

modern fantasy lit used as an excuse for that white male power fantasy is literally disgusting. calling historical accuracy is so fucking dumb ESPECIALLY cause we, as ppl in the 21st  century, KNOW women have been consistently written out of the story. poc ppl, gay and trans ppl, anyone with a god forbid disability has been WRITTEN out of history as we know it, INCLUDING the fucking war of the roses so HOW can we hold up testimony we know is flawed to support our FICTIONAL. STORY. just to??? support the white power fantasy?? literally noah fence but if you are a white guy who felt really empowered by every time jim butcher described a woman tell me: how do you think that’ll hold up in classic HisToRiCaL fantasy. you think thats a fucking noble pursuit? or are you grima wormtongue out here. 

(side note: jim butcher stop writing challenge i dont need to know abt every woman on page’s nipples. anyone who hides behind subgenre like that? ‘ohhh its a noir story thats why hes sexualizing everyone’ shut the fuck up an author isnt possessed by a fuckin muse and compelled to bust out 500k they have agency and they have choice and they MADE the choice to reserve said will for none of their female characters)

which brings me to point 2: target audience and BOY is the alcohol hitting me rn but WHO is this for? this isnt the fucking 80s we know poc and other marginalized folk read fantasy FOR the escapism. on god ive had a cosmere focused blog for nearly three years and. im just gonna say it im interacted with A LOT of yall and ive managed to talk to VERY few white straight ppl as compared to everyone else. 

like....who deserves to see the metaphor on homophobia or racism. joanne rowling? the bitch who literally tried to sell us happy slaves and the disgusting aids metaphor and the worst case of antisemitic stereotypes i ever saw in an nyt bestseller? yall think that was for US? or was it for the white guilt crowd. 

literally white people can find any book about them that they can relate to. but hmmm maybe theres a reason gay women care so much about stormlight archive’s jasnah kholin, a brown woman who’s heavily coded as wlw. or kaladin, the FIRST fantasy protag ive ever seen with clinical depression. hmm i wonder why a bunch of millennials are vibing all of a sudden. im not saying sanderson is perfect--but its the best ive seen from a white author tbh

maybe theres a reason a lot of poc vibe with a literary way to express trauma, and maybe thats why i specifically get so pissed when its not done well. theres a REASON books about outcasts pushing through and claiming their own lives are popular with people who arent white and straight and able bodied. Junot Diaz had a point. maybe lets STOP catering to those assholes who think theyre joseph campbell’s wet dream personified. ive lost respect SO many authors who are objectively talented. pat rothfuss can write so beautifully that ive cried to bits of name of the wind but literally i will never pick that series up again (not just because of the felurian. women in general tbh. mostly the felurian ngl) cause 1) i personally KNEW men whod jerk off to that shit and 2) there was no need for it there was no plot reason for ANY of that shit 

so like obviously thers an issue with authors of color specifically not getting recognized for fantasy and genre work but on god??????? im still mostly mad at the legions of white authors churning out the same medieval england chosen one books year after fucking year. have an original thought maybe. also im sorry that you as an author lack the basic empathy needed to examine the way that women? or any group of people that youre explicitly writing about see the world and would specifically see YOUR made up world. 

yes your fantasy should be diverse, but more than that it should be kind. if you as a writer cant respect groups of people who deserve it....what the hell are you doing in a genre that traditionally is about finding ways to express injustice through metaphor? tolkien’s hero was sam. fantasy was NEVER about the privileged. yall know who you are so stop acting so fucking entitled. peace out. 

Herbert Manfred "Zeppo" Marx (February 25, 1901 – November 30, 1979) was an American actor, comedian, theatrical agent, and engineer. He was the youngest of the five Marx Brothers and also the last to die. He appeared in the first five Marx Brothers feature films, from 1929 to 1933, but then left the act to start his second career as an engineer and theatrical agent.

Zeppo was born in Manhattan, New York City, on February 25, 1901. His parents were Sam Marx (called "Frenchie" throughout his life), and his wife, Minnie Schönberg Marx. Minnie's brother was Al Shean, who later gained fame as half of the vaudeville team Gallagher and Shean. Marx's family was Jewish. His mother was from East Frisia in Germany; and his father was a native of France, and worked as a tailor.

As with all of the Marx Brothers, different theories exist as to where Zeppo got his stage name: Groucho said in his Carnegie Hall concert in 1972 that the name was derived from the Zeppelin airship. Zeppo's ex-wife Barbara Sinatra repeated this in her 2011 book, Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank. His brother Harpo offered a different account in his 1961 autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, claiming (p. 130) that there was a popular trained chimpanzee named Mr. Zippo, and that "Herbie" was tagged with the name "Zippo" because he liked to do chinups and acrobatics, as the chimp did in its act. The youngest brother objected to this nickname, and it was altered to "Zeppo". Another version of this story was that his name was changed to "Zeppo" in honor of the then popular "Zepplin". In a much later TV interview, Zeppo said that Zep is Italian-American slang for baby and as Zeppo was the youngest or baby Marx Brother, he was called Zeppo (BBC Archives).

Zeppo replaced brother Gummo in the Marx Brothers' stage act when the latter joined the army in 1918. Zeppo remained with the team and appeared in their successes in vaudeville, on Broadway, and the first five Marx Brothers films, as a straight man and romantic lead, before leaving the team. He also made a solo appearance in the Adolphe Menjou comedy A Kiss in the Dark, as Herbert Marx. It was described in newspaper reviews as a minor role.

In Lady Blue Eyes, Barbara Sinatra, Zeppo's second wife, reported that Zeppo was considered too young to perform with his brothers, and when Gummo joined the Army, Zeppo was asked to join the act as a last-minute stand-in at a show in Texas. Zeppo was supposed to go out that night with a Jewish friend of his. They were supposed to take out two Irish girls, but Zeppo had to cancel to board the train to Texas. His friend went ahead and went on the date, and was shot a few hours later when he was attacked by an Irish gang that disapproved of a Jew dating an Irish girl.

As the youngest and having grown up watching his brothers, Zeppo could fill in for and imitate any of the others when illness kept them from performing. Groucho suffered from appendicitis during the Broadway run of Animal Crackers and Zeppo filled in for him as Captain Spaulding.

"He was so good as Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers that I would have let him play the part indefinitely, if they had allowed me to smoke in the audience", Groucho recalled. However, a comic persona of his own that could stand up against those of his brothers did not emerge. As critic Percy Hammond wrote, sympathetically, in 1928:

One of the handicaps to the thorough enjoyment of the Marx Brothers in their merry escapades is the plight of poor Zeppo Marx. While Groucho, Harpo, and Chico are hogging the show, as the phrase has it, their brother hides in an insignificant role, peeping out now and then to listen to plaudits in which he has no share.

Though Zeppo continued to play it straight in the Brothers' movies for Paramount Pictures, he occasionally got to be part of classic comedy moments in them—in particular, his role in the famous dictation scene with Groucho in Animal Crackers (1930). He also played a pivotal role as the love interest of Ruth Hall's character in Monkey Business (1931) and of Thelma Todd's in Horse Feathers (1932).

The popular assumption that Zeppo's character was superfluous was fueled in part by Groucho. According to Groucho's own story, when the group became the Three Marx Brothers, the studio wanted to trim their collective salary, and Groucho replied, "We're twice as funny without Zeppo!"

Zeppo had great mechanical skills and was largely responsible for keeping the Marx family car running. He later owned a company that machined parts for the war effort during World War II, Marman Products Co. of Inglewood, California, later acquired by the Aeroquip Company. This company produced a motorcycle, called the Marman Twin, and the Marman clamps used to hold the "Fat Man" atomic bomb inside the B-29 bomber Bockscar.[citation needed] He invented and obtained several patents for a wristwatch that monitored the pulse rate of cardiac patients and gave off an alarm if the heartbeat became irregular, and a therapeutic pad for delivering moist heat to a patient.

He also founded a large theatrical agency with his brother Gummo. During his time as a theatrical agent, Zeppo and Gummo, primarily Gummo, represented their brothers, among many others.

On April 12, 1927, Zeppo married Marion Bimberg Benda.[15] The couple adopted two children, Timothy and Thomas, in 1944 and 1945, and later divorced on May 12, 1954. On September 18, 1959, Marx married Barbara Blakeley, whose son, Bobby Oliver, he wanted to adopt and give his surname, but Bobby's father would not allow it. Bobby simply started using the last name "Marx".

Blakeley wrote in her book, Lady Blue Eyes, that Zeppo never made her convert to Judaism. Blakeley was of Methodist faith and said that Zeppo told her she became Jewish by "injection".

Blakeley also wrote in her book that Zeppo wanted to keep her son out of the picture, adding a room for him onto his estate, which was more of a guest house, as it was separated from the main residence. It was also decided that Blakeley's son would go to military school, which according to Blakeley, pleased Zeppo.

Zeppo owned a house on Halper Lake Drive in Rancho Mirage, California, which was built off the fairway of the Tamarisk Country Club. The Tamarisk Club had been set up by the Jewish community, which rivaled the gentile club called The Thunderbird. His neighbor happened to be Frank Sinatra. Zeppo later attended the Hillcrest Country Club with friends such as Sinatra, George Burns, Jack Benny, Danny Kaye, Sid Caesar, and Milton Berle.

Blakeley became involved with the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and had arranged to show Spartacus (featuring Kirk Douglas) for charity, selling tickets, and organizing a postscreening ball. At the last minute, Blakeley was told she could not have the film, so Zeppo went to the country club and spoke to Sinatra, who agreed to let him have an early release of a film he had just finished named Come Blow Your Horn. Sinatra also flew everyone involved to Palm Springs for the event.

Zeppo was a very jealous and possessive husband, and hated for Blakeley to talk to other men. Blakeley claimed that Zeppo grabbed Victor Rothschild by the throat at a country club because she was talking to him. Blakeley had caught Zeppo on many occasions with other women; the biggest incident was a party Zeppo had thrown on his yacht. After the incident, Zeppo took Blakeley to Europe, and accepted more invitations to parties when they arrived back in the States. Some of these parties were at Sinatra's compound; he often invited Blakeley and Zeppo to his house two or three times a week. Sinatra would also send champagne or wine to their home, as a nice gesture.

Blakeley and Sinatra began a love affair, unbeknownst to Zeppo. The press eventually got wind of the affair, snapping photos of Blakely and Sinatra together, or asking Blakeley questions whenever they spotted her. Both Sinatra and she denied the affair.

Zeppo and Blakeley divorced in 1973. Zeppo let Blakeley keep the 1969 Jaguar he had bought her, and agreed to pay her $1,500 (equivalent to $8,600 in 2019) per month for 10 years. Sinatra upgraded Blakeley's Jaguar to the latest model. Sinatra also gave her a house to live in. The house had belonged to Eden Hartford, Groucho Marx's third wife. Blakeley and Sinatra continued to date, and were constantly hounded by the press until the divorce between Zeppo and Blakeley became final. Blakeley and Sinatra were married in 1976.

Zeppo became ill with cancer in 1978. He sold his home, and moved to a house on the fairway off Frank Sinatra Drive. The doctors thought the cancer had gone into remission, but it returned. Zeppo called Blakeley, who accompanied him to doctor's appointments. Zeppo spent his last days with Blakeley's family.

The last surviving Marx Brother, Zeppo died of lung cancer at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage on November 30, 1979, at the age of 78. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean.

In his will, Zeppo left Bobby Marx a few possessions and enough money to finish law school. Both Sinatra and Blakeley attended his funeral.

Cinematic Conversation with Sam Pollard from VideoFest on Vimeo.

Veteran editor, producer, and director Sam Pollard is among cinema's most dedicated chroniclers of the Black experience, the International Documentary Association gave him a career achievement award. His films have garnered numerous awards such as Peabodys, Emmys, and an Academy Award nomination. In 2020.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered today as an American hero: a bridge-builder, a shrewd political tactician, and a moral leader. Yet throughout his history-altering political career, he was often treated by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies like an enemy of the state. In this virtuosic documentary, award-winning editor and director Sam Pollard (Editor, 4 LITTLE GIRLS, MO’ BETTER BLUES; Director/Producer, EYEZ ON THE PRIZE, SAMMY DAVIS, JR.: I’VE GOTTA BE ME) lays out a detailed account of the FBI surveillance that dogged King’s activism throughout the ’50s and ’60s, fueled by the racist and red-baiting paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover. In crafting a rich archival tapestry, featuring some revelatory restored footage of King, Pollard urges us to remember that true American progress is always hard-won. mlkfbi.com/ BLACK ART: IN THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT is directed and produced by award-winning documentarian Sam Pollard (HBO’s “Atlanta Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children”), executive produced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Thelma Golden serves as consulting producer. The film will be available on HBO and to stream on HBO Max.

At the heart of this feature documentary is the groundbreaking exhibition, entitled “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” curated by the late African American artist and scholar David Driskell in 1976. This pioneering exhibition, held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, featured more than 200 works of art by 63 artists and cemented the essential contributions of Black artists in America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The exhibit would eventually travel to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Brooklyn Museum. The film shines a light on the extraordinary impact of that exhibit on generations of African American artists who have staked a claim on their rightful place within the 21st-century art world. hbo.com/documentaries/black-art-in-the-absence-of-light

⚖🎬 #ArtIsAWeapon The new documentary @mlkfbi (now streaming on @amazonprimevideo) exposes how the @fbi harassed, threatened and tried to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the U.S. government's history of targeting Black social justice activists. Watch the trailer: https://youtu.be/Lvfxzht9KUA

__________________

Via www.mlkfbi.com

MLK/FBI is the first film to uncover the extent of the FBI's surveillance and harassment of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Based on newly discovered and declassified files, utilizing a trove of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and unsealed by the National Archives, as well as revelatory restored footage, the documentary explores the government's history of targeting Black activists, and the contested meaning behind some of our most cherished ideals. Featuring interviews with key cultural figures... and directed by Emmy® Award-winner and Oscar®-nominee Sam Pollard, MLK/FBI tells this astonishing and tragic story with searing relevance to our current moment.

__________________

reposted from @mlkfbi

Acclaimed director Sam Pollard exposes a dark truth that changed the course of American history forever...

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered today as an American hero: a bridge-builder, a shrewd political tactician, and a moral leader. Yet throughout his history-altering political career, he was often treated by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies like an enemy of the state. In this virtuosic documentary, award-winning editor and director Sam Pollard (Editor, 4 LITTLE GIRLS, MO’ BETTER BLUES; Director/Producer, EYEZ ON THE PRIZE, SAMMY DAVIS, JR.: I’VE GOTTA BE ME) lays out a detailed account of the FBI surveillance that dogged King’s activism throughout the ’50s and ’60s, fueled by the racist and red-baiting paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover. In crafting a rich archival tapestry, featuring some revelatory restored footage of King, Pollard urges us to remember that true American progress is always hard-won.

@fieldofvision @ifcfilms

#MLKFBI #IFCFilms #SamPollard #Documentary #MLKDocumentary #AmericanHypocrisy #WhiteSupremacy #AmericanHistory #DrMartinLutherKingJr #JEdgarHoover #FBI

#TraScapades #MLKDay #BlackGirlFilmGeeks

BARMM launches 1st Bangsamoro Dev’t Plan

#PHnews: BARMM launches 1st Bangsamoro Dev’t Plan

COTABATO CITY – The Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) government launched here on Thursday its first Bangsamoro Development Plan (BDP), marking another major milestone in the Bangsamoro peace process. 

“Despite the unfortunate circumstances brought by the pandemic, I am extremely optimistic that the BDP 2020-2022 will help the Government of the Day in materializing our shared hopes and aspirations for the Bangsamoro,” BARMM Chief Minister and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) chairman Ahod ‘Al Haj Murad’ Balawag Ebrahim said during the launch.

Ebrahim said BARMM wishes to create an environment that “promotes people-centered policies and programs.”

“We wish to begin a culture that gives the investors, the constituents and other significant partners trust with the regional government,” he added.

Composed of 13 chapters, the BARMM’s BDP is aligned and consistent with the Philippine Development Plan (PDP), the country's economic and development blueprint. It articulates the overall socio-economic direction of the BARMM from 2020 to 2022 and beyond.

The eight development goals identified in the BDP aim to: 1) to establish the foundations for inclusive, transparent, accountable, and efficient governance; 2) to uphold peace, security, public order and safety, and respect for human rights; 3) to create a favorable enabling environment for inclusive and sustainable economic development; 4) to promote Bangsamoro identity, cultures, and diversity; 5) to ensure access to and delivery of quality services for human capital development; 6) to harness technology and innovations to increase socio-economic opportunities and improve government services; 7) to increase strategic and climate-resilient infrastructure to support sustainable socioeconomic development in the Bangsamoro Region; and 8) to improve ecological integrity, and promote and enhance climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction to sustain resilience of communities in the Bangsamoro.

Continued support to Bangsamoro gov’t

BARMM Executive Secretary, Minister Abdulrauf Macacua praised the Bangsamoro Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) under the leadership of Director General Mohajirin Ali for spearheading the formulation of the plan, saying it is “a step to achieve your desired goals. Goal without a plan is just a wish.”

The National Economic Development Authority (NEDA), represented by Undersecretary Mercedita Sombilla said “the NEDA along with the entire national government is fully committed to support all implementation of BDP, as well as the successful transition of the region to a developed Bangsamoro.”

“We are committed to work with you every step of the way, not only for the Bangsamoro but for the entire country,” Sombilla added.

The NEDA is the BPDA’s counterpart in the national government and as such, provided the latter with technical advice in the crafting of its BDP.

The Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP), represented by its Chief of Staff and spokesperson, Assistant Secretary Wilben Mayor, delivered Presidential Peace Adviser Carlito Galvez Jr.’s congratulatory message for the BARMM government.

“Our hats off to the BARMM government, to the Bangsamoro Parliament, to the Bangsamoro Economic and Development Council, and the Bangsamoro Planning and Development Authority for the hard work, dedication and determination you have shown as you fulfill your crucial mandate,” Galvez said.

He noted despite difficulties the BARMM government faced in the crafting of the BDP, it continued to forge ahead and complete the formulation of the plan.

“We know that things have not been easy for the past two years. You had to confront many challenges during the transition process. But these trials did not stop you from achieving your goals,” Galvez said.

Galvez said the BDP “also signifies the commitments you have made under the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB) and the Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro (FAB).”

Galvez also pointed out that The GPH and the MILF, through its Joint Task Forces on Camps Transformation (JTFCT), are also about to complete the crafting of Camps Transformation Plans (CTPs) for all government-acknowledged MILF-Bangsamoro Islamic Armed Forces (MILF-BIAF) camps.

“These CTPs are anchored on the BDP to ensure that these once conflict-affected areas are transformed into peaceful and productive communities,” he said.

Int’l peace partners committed to Bangsamoro gov’t, peace process

Representatives of international donor agencies – the European Union (EU), Australian Embassy, International Organization for Migration (IOM), United Nations Populations Fund (UNFPA), Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), The Asia Foundation (TAF), Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (CHD) and United States AID (USAID) -- who took part in the BDP’s virtual launch commended the BARMM government for coming up with its own BDP, as they reaffirmed their continued commitment to support the region’s development.

“It is important to have an inclusive approach and to bring in all stakeholders. We will continue supporting the Bangsamoro region for years to come. You can rely on us and we will remain with you over the next years,” Christoph Wagner of the EU said.

Sheona McKena of the Australian Embassy said the BDP “outlines a clear plan for inclusive work in the region,” they are delighted to see that “the Bangsamoro Government has recognized the protection of the most vulnerable sectors.”

On behalf of the United Nations and the IOM, Kristin Dadey congratulated the Bangsamoro government, pointing out the BDP “outlines the needs and aspirations of the Bangsamoro people, and it is a powerful driver of sustainable development for communities.”

“We know that this will be a contribution not only in governance in Bangsamoro but especially to the peace process. All of these have been because of the gains of the peace process for the Bangsamoro and that is something that we continue to strive the gains of,” said Iona Gracia Jaijali, country representative of CHD.

Also among those who expressed their support to the Bangsamoro Government were Rena Dona, assistant representative of UN Population Fund; Eigo Azukizawa, chief representative of JICA; and Sam Chittick, country representative of TAF.

Other BARMM officials who were present during the launch were Bangsamoro Parliament speaker Pangalian Balindong Sr., Development Academy of the Bangsamoro (DAB) president Norodin Salam, Minister of Interior and Local Government Naguib Sinarimbo, BARMM cabinet secretary Mohd Asnin Pendatun, and representatives from different BARMM ministries and offices. (PR)

***

References:

* Philippine News Agency. "BARMM launches 1st Bangsamoro Dev’t Plan ." Philippine News Agency. https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1120870 (accessed November 05, 2020 at 11:52PM UTC+14).

* Philippine News Agency. "BARMM launches 1st Bangsamoro Dev’t Plan ." Archive Today. https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1120870 (archived).

Twitter post made on June 29th, 2023. This post is in character as Shawn in HR! The screenshot is from the upcoming IEYTD 3: Cog in the Machine, which includes Roxana Prism as well as 3 other members of the Agency.

I have the image down below as a gif, and while in the original post it is a GIF, it makes no difference having the photo still.

Their Car Beat Hitler’s Racers, but Who Owns It Now?

To put it mildly, all three were underdogs.It was the 1930s, and the French automaker Delahaye was struggling to stay afloat. Compared with the Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union teams generously financed by the Third Reich, Delahaye’s entries into racing competitions were underfunded and underpowered.Then, as it is now, auto racing was dominated by men, but the American heiress Lucy O’Reilly Schell had a passion for it. And a bank account to back it up.And René Dreyfus, a French racer who had notched key victories, and a Jew, was losing opportunities as Nazi-bred anti-Semitism spread across Europe.But together, these unlikely elements — financed by a highly determined Ms. Schell — formed a team that not only won a million-franc race for French automakers in 1937 but beat Hitler’s much more powerful cars in a celebrated Grand Prix event the next year, at least temporarily restoring French pride.Their story is told in “Faster,” a new book by Neal Bascomb that also delves into an enduring mystery — which of two American collectors owns the winning car today.“Lucy Schell was an absolute force of nature,” Mr. Bascomb said in an interview. “She and her husband were top-ranked Monte Carlo rally drivers. She was the first woman to fund the development of her own Grand Prix racing team, in the 1930s. Imagine what that took.”Their racing team, Écurie Bleue, fielded just four Delahaye 145 Grand Prix racers. The cars were powered by a new 4.5-liter, 245-horsepower V-12 engine with a functional alloy body that Dreyfus said in his autobiography was the “most awful-looking automobile I ever saw.” They weren’t expected to win, but did, taking that so-called Prix du Million in 1937. Only French automakers were eligible, and Delahaye won the timed trial, in a lightened 145, by defeating Bugatti (which suffered mechanical problems) at the Autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry outside Paris.The next year, the same team and quite likely the same car won the Pau Grand Prix on the Pyrenees’ northern edge, beating the hard-charging Germans Rudolf Caracciola and Hermann Lang in a Silver Arrow Mercedes-Benz W154 with more than 400 horsepower.The French course was twisty, which cut into the Germans’ power advantage. Also, the two Mercedes-Benz cars were less fuel-efficient than the Delahaye, which meant more frequent pit stops. When Caracciola pitted on Lap 52, Dreyfus took the lead, and won the race with a lead of almost two minutes over Mercedes. There was pandemonium in France, Mr. Bascomb wrote, though it didn’t last: “Throughout the rest of the 1938 season, Mercedes dominated.”But Dreyfus was named the Racing Champion of France. Hitler was furious, and was rumored to have sent a team to France to find and destroy the winning Delahaye.The book has been optioned to be made into a movie, and it is certainly a cinematic read, made more so by a contemporary addendum. The four Delahaye 145s are all in the United States, three in California owned by Peter Mullin, a premier collector of French cars. But the fourth, and possibly the Pau and Million Franc winner, is in Englewood, N.J., and owned by a similarly respected collector and frequent Pebble Beach and Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance winner, Sam Mann.The history of racecars, with their frequent swapping of parts and even bodies, can be confusing. Mr. Mullin is convinced he owns the star car, and has amassed considerable documentation. And Mr. Mann has not one but two relevant cars — the chassis he believes belongs to the French race winner, but with an elegant art-deco cabriolet body by the French coachbuilder Franay, and a Delahaye 135M chassis with a timeworn but relatively recent racing body that once graced the other car. One looks the part, but it’s the other that is the actual competition contender.The New Jersey cars occupy pride of place in a second-floor display area that includes many other French marques, including Voisin, Bugatti and Delage. The cabriolet looks like a Champs-Élysées cruiser, and was displayed at Pebble Beach in 2015 — where it won its class and was chosen “most elegant convertible.” It also won prizes at the Amelia Island concours in 2017, where its history plaque identified it as the former V-12 Grand Prix winner, adding that it was sold to a private client in 1945, rebodied by Franay, then seized by the French government when the client was charged with wartime collaboration. Bought back by Franay, it was then sold to its first owner, “rumored to be Prince Rainier of Monaco,” but quite possibly someone less famous.This is not in dispute: In 1987, Dreyfus drove this car onto the Montlhéry track to commemorate the famous race’s 50th anniversary. The sports car body then on it, put there by a previous owner, was transferred to the 135 chassis after Mr. Mann’s purchase circa 1997. To complete the swap, Mr. Mann restored the Franay cabriolet coachwork to the 145.In New Jersey, Mr. Mann lifted the hood and showed the triple-carbureted V-12 that, he believes, carried Dreyfus to victory. Started up and driven out of its resting place, the car sounds nothing like a boulevardier, with the popping and spitting and pouring out smoke and brimstone.Mr. Mullin talked about the provenance of his car, with chassis number 48711, in an interview. There’s more in the Mullin Automotive Museum’s book, “French Curves,” written by the board member Richard Adatto.It is, understandably, a convoluted tale, but Mr. Mullin said: “The car was buried in France during the war, then it was on the grounds of the Montlhéry racetrack, then at the owner’s chateau. That this was the Million Franc car was unambiguously confirmed by the Department of Mines in France after I bought it in 1987.” A handwritten document from that agency, after a test at Montlhéry, says, “The vehicle tested (the Millionth vehicle) is chassis and engine number 48.711.”Mr. Mullin paid $150,000 for a car in pieces, with the front part of the bodywork missing, and had it restored in England over four years. “It’s very well balanced and a dream to drive,” he said.The Delahaye, with what Mr. Mullin said turned out to be a later Type 155 engine, is now one of many prizes permanently housed at the Mullin museum in Oxnard, Calif. That collection includes two other ex-Lucy Schell 145s that were later bodied for road use by the well-known coachbuilder Henri Chapron.Mr. Mullin said that Dreyfus, who settled in New York and became the celebrity owner of Le Chanteclair French restaurant in Manhattan, was “an extraordinarily talented driver” and a gentleman who “was not aggressive, except on the track. I was lucky to know him.” Dreyfus’s New York Times obituary in 1993 noted that he placed 10th at the Indianapolis 500 in 1940, and added that his restaurant “for 25 years was one of the more popular stops for international auto racers.”Despite their competing claims to the star car, the two collectors are longtime friends. “I know Peter thinks he has the correct car, and he cares more about it than I do, but we’re relying on documentation from the Delahaye club,” Mr. Mann said. “It’s a lifelong exploration, and at the end of the day it’s almost impossible to tell which car is the real one.”André Vaucourt, who has served as historian/archivist for Club Delahaye, established a timeline that traces the car through the Million Franc win, the victory at Pau, another win (without any German entries) in the Cork Grand Prix, an appearance at the Paris Auto Salon in 1946 and eventually through several owners to Mr. Mann.“It’s a war fought to a stalemate,” Mr. Bascomb said. “Both sides have advanced their experts. Both sides have produced reams of material — photographs, archival documents, supporting testimonies. Neither side has given an inch.”He added that it was common practice, especially in small operations such as Écurie Bleue, for parts to be swapped between cars — engines, brakes, even steering wheels. “If I was to bet,” Mr. Bascomb said, “I’d say they both own a piece of the car that beat Hitler.” Read the full article

%news%

New Post has been published on %http://paulbenedictsgeneralstore.com%

Meet the 36 rising stars of Madison Avenue revolutionizing advertising

BI High

The rising stars of Madison Avenue.

Publicis Media; RPA; Droga5; January Digital; Ruobing Su/Alternate Insider

This story requires our BI High membership. To read the fat article, simply click on right here to order your deal and fetch access to all outlandish Alternate Insider PRIME tell.

Right here are 36 rising stars of Madison Avenue, where Alternate Insider recognizes emerging skill in marketing and marketing.

They span a vary of roles in media and creative to boot as approach, legend administration, skill, neuroscience, and inclusive construct.

They reach from dilapidated advert agencies and consulting corporations, Hollywood skill agencies entering into marketing and marketing services and products, and specialty agencies catering to inform-to-user brands.

Click right here for extra BI High reviews.

Introducing the rising stars of Madison Avenue.

Whether rising step forward creative campaigns, environment up complicated knowledge stacks for purchasers, or using technology to reach shoppers in new strategies, these younger marketing and marketing mavens are shaking issues up on Madison Avenue and past.

Criteria and methodology

Right here is the 2nd year Alternate Insider is recognizing rising skill in advert agencies across departments. (To survey closing year's checklist, head right here.)

The folks on this year's checklist are below age 36 and signify a vary of roles and backgrounds, including media and creative, but moreover approach, legend administration, skill, neuroscience, and inclusive construct. They reach from dilapidated advert agencies to boot as consulting corporations like Deloitte Digital and Hollywood skill agencies like UTA that are extra and extra extra competing with them.

The checklist is in step with agency and look for nominations, their awards and campaigns, their impact on their corporations, and their doable to be trade leaders. We moreover gave preference to those who haven't looked on this checklist earlier than.

Ola Abayomi, 34, Droga5

Abayomi, legend director.

Ola Abayomi

In two years, Abayomi has left her price on some of Droga5's most high-profile work for The Unique York Cases and HBO, serving to the agency sweep two Tall Prix awards at the Cannes Lions, a Orderly Clio award, and a D&AD Humanitarian Succor Award.

She oversaw an wide "Game of Thrones" campaign for the present's remaining season, which incorporated such aspects as a Orderly Bowl advert with Budweiser and Wieden+Kennedy and a scavenger hunt referred to as "Quest for the Thrones," blood force.

She moreover spearheaded the Cases' "The Reality Is Value It" campaign, which highlighted the newspaper's deep reporting on components like immigration and ISIS.

Morgan Aceino, 32, Deutsch LA

Acieno, VP, approach director.

Morgan Acieno

In Aceino's 5 years at Deutsch, she's grown its client roster by serving to carry in Behr Paint, Canada Dry, Mott's, and Squirt as purchasers and moved the needle for present brands she works on including the Keurig-Dr Pepper portfolio.

Most right this moment, she led a stamp-awareness campaign for Dr Pepper referred to as "Fansville," which resulted in a 3.4% pick in buck gross sales following the campaign, with 67% of Dr Pepper drinkers pronouncing it made them desire to drink extra of the soda, in step with Deutsch.

The agency credits Aceino with luring Verizon's longtime spokesman to Whisk and for rising Uber's first nationwide stamp campaign. She's active in the agency's mentorship program, Nourish.

Emma Barnett, 31, Wieden+Kennedy

Barnett, artwork director.

Wieden + Kennedy

Nike struck gold with campaigns like "Dream Loopy" and "Dream Crazier" that unparalleled athletes like Colin Kaepernick and Serena Williams in 2019.

Thought to be one of many folks at the wait on of the campaigns is Barnett, an artwork director for its Portland-essentially based agency Wieden+Kennedy.

Barnett started her career there as a studio designer earlier than changing into a junior artwork director after which an artwork director on the Nike legend.

She drove other gargantuan Nike campaigns including "Dream Extra" and "In no diagram End Successful," celebrating the US girls soccer workers's World Cup pick. 

Maggie Bryan, 33, Stink Studios

Bryan, director of UX construct.

Maggie Bryan

Bryan became impressed to head into user journey construct when she started making advert hoc tools to learn her blind grandmother are living independently.

As Stink Studios' director of UX construct, she's mixed creative, approach, and dilapidated UX for purchasers like Chobani, The Wall Road Journal, Facebook, and Google.

In 2019, she led UX Blueprint on "Stonewall With out a sign of ending, a pop-up by Google and The LGBT Neighborhood Middle that honored the Stonewall riots using WebGL technology, augmented actuality, and archival movies and photos.

Frank Cartagena, 34, and Sam Shepherd, 33, of 360i

Cartagena and Shepherd, executive creative directors.

Frank Cartagena and Sam Shepherd

Cartagena and Shepherd fetch won extra than 50 awards including the ANDYs, Cannes Lions, Clios, D&AD, and the One Display in their decade-long careers and helped 360i pick 9 out of 10 new enterprise pitches in 2019.

Their present accolades encompass a Tall Prix in radio and audio at the Cannes Lions International Competition of Creativity for his or her Amazon Alexa potential "Westworld: The Maze" for the HBO present; a D&AD Yellow Pencil in illustration for Absolut; and a Gold Pencil at One Display for his or her Absolut comedy TV campaign.

Their easiest known work involves the 2012 campaign "Hashtag Killer" for the charity Water is Existence at DDB; and 2015's "The Drinkable Book," which became named Time top 25 inventions of the year. They're moreover cowriting a book on how one can break into marketing and marketing.

Nathalie Con, 30, Giant Spoon

Con, VP, approach director.

Nathalie Con

Giant Spoon is well-known for doing gargantuan stunts for brands like HBO and Warner Bros. that brought their on-screen screen properties to lifestyles.

But Con is the agency's approach whiz, and she developed its proprietary job it calls The Bridge that helps purchasers form an technique to rob shoppers.

Con helped Giant Spoon pick 16 retainer and mission-essentially based purchasers and developed approach for brands including Uber, NBC, Adobe, Primitive Navy, Facebook, Pinterest, Warner Brothers, and Netflix.

Carrie Dino, 34, Mekanism

Dino, media director.

Carrie Dino

Mekanism has evolved from a producing firm to creative agency, and Dino became accountable for adding media and analytics to the combine.

Because the agency's first fat-time media rent, Dino grew the employees to 15 and Mekanism's managed media budget by 250% year over year, in step with the agency.

Dino's workers led media campaigns including "There is Factual Inner" for dish soap Way and "The Unique Similar earlier" for cannabis firm MedMen. The campaigns grew Way's family penetration by 2% and ended in MedMen's advert film being screened across extra than 250 film monitors around the country.

She moreover designed a cobranded partnership between millennial media firm Betches and Franzia Wines and a branded tell deal animated Eos and TikTok.

Meryl Draper, 29, Quirk Ingenious

Draper, founder and CEO.

Meryl Draper

Draper launched Quirk Ingenious, a Brooklyn, Unique York, agency focusing on video campaigns, to capitalize on the upward thrust of inform-to-user brands and their ask of for faster, leaner marketing and marketing.

The agency works with DTC brands including Each day Harvest, LOLA, Keeps, and Dia&Co, and longstanding brands like Western Union, to leverage social media, TV, and OTT.

Draper became named in Adweek's "Ingenious 100," The Drum's "50 Below 30," whereas Quirk Ingenious looked on Adweek's quickest-rising agencies checklist in 2019.

Jason Huie, 32, Nissan United, TBWAChiatDay

Huie, predictive analytics.

Jason Huie

Most brands exercise marketing and marketing combine modeling to expose purchasers on how they would maybe maybe still exercise their advert bucks. But Huie created a mannequin for Nissan United, Omnicom's unit dedicated to Nissan that genuinely projected gross sales and earnings.

Nissan can now predict enterprise outcomes reminiscent of gross sales and earnings with 97% accuracy, in step with the agency. The predictive modeling moreover helped the car maker lower 32% from its media budget, create sale targets, and address stock complications.

Julian Jacobs, 33, UTA Advertising

Jacobs, cohead.

Julian Jacobs

As marketers turn to nontraditional marketing and marketing like streaming TV, the lines between Hollywood and Madison Avenue fetch began to blur. Jacobs straddles these worlds as UTA Advertising's cohead, working with brands like Frequent Motors, Lyft, and Procter & Gamble on branded tell and distribution.

Overseeing UTA Advertising's client approach, operations and new enterprise efforts, Jacobs has helped add as a minimum 5 new purchasers and grown his workers to over 25 folks across Los Angeles and Unique York previously year. He served on the 2017 Cannes Lions Leisure Jury and became acknowledged as one in every of Hollywood's "Unique Leaders" by Diversity in 2016.

Chip Johnson, 35, Publicis Sport & Leisure

Johnson, VP.

Chip Johnson

Johnson has brought new approaches to media and sports activities activations for Publicis purchasers including Frequent Motors, Samsung, and Visa.

Because the level person for Samsung's partnerships with diversified sports activities leagues, he self-discipline up its college soccer partnership with ESPN and brokered a deal that brings the 2020 Nationwide Championship Game to fans in native 4K choice. He led its speedy replay sponsor address the MLB and its foray into VR for the NBA, MLB, and the Olympics.

He obtained the NFL, the MLB, the NHL, and even the Olympics social groups to make exercise of Samsung telephones to rob tell from their respective league video games, culminating in ESPN filming two studio reveals "Extremely Questionable" and "Pardon the Interruption" exclusively on Samsung devices.

He moreover oversees Visa's splendid three splendid sports activities partnerships in the US, including FIFA, the NFL and the Olympics.

Harsh Kapadia, 34, VMLY&R

Kapadia, executive creative director.

Harsh Kapadia

VMLY&R credits Kapadia's management for making it the splendid new enterprise driver for WPP, with over $50 million in new enterprise in the well-known six months of 2019, and serving to it pick new enterprise including Unique Steadiness, Legoland, and the United Nations.

Most right this moment, he helped launch Google's new Pixel 4 phone via a partnership with Domino's where folks fetch been delivered pizza bins alongside with a "top class topping" — which became genuinely the new Pixel 4 — to promote the phone's aspects.

Kapadia's career has spanned agencies including JWT Mumbai, JWT Melbourne, VMLY&R Unique York, and VMLY&R London, and he has served on trade award juries including the Cannes Lions and D&AD.

He's moreover fascinated by the Ingenious Equals program that helps moms return to the employees.

Alicia Kolman, 29, Zenith

Kolman, director of tech and knowledge approach.

Zenith

Kolman self-discipline up Zenith's knowledge hub referred to as the International Efficiency Media Middle, which makes exercise of client knowledge to construct overarching strategies and playbooks for disciplines like paid search, website positioning, and influencer marketing and marketing.

She created a curriculum that teaches workers the fundamentals of efficiency media and knowledge, including media tagging, client structure, programmatic and knowledge administration — an technique that became even adopted by a shopper. She's change into the expert serving to purchasers navigate their tech stacks.

As a member of Zenith's enterprise construction workers, she's helped it pick new enterprise previously year and trained regional groups in workplaces across London, Sao Paulo and Singapore. Outside of work, she's active in She Runs It, an organization that promotes girls in the promoting and marketing trade.

Steph Loffredo, 33, Tall

Loffredo, social strategist.

Tall

Loffredo ended in trade dialog about girls's access to healthcare and the stigma around periods by rising "Hooha," a vending machine that dispenses tampons.

She created the machine after profitable an inner fellowship that encourages workers to incubate new tips, leading a workers of six workers to construct and construct the machine.

Hooha machines fetch since been installed at 18 world occasions and conferences including the Cannes Lions and SXSW 2019 and generated ardour from six well-known CPG corporations, in step with the agency. They've won 5 trade awards, including "Tech PR Campaign of the Yr" by trade publication The Drum.

Angelo Maia and Ricardo Franco, 33, of R/GA

Maia and Franco, creative directors.

Angelo Maia and Ricardo Franco

Longtime creative partners who right this moment jumped ship to R/GA from TBWA/Chiat/Day Unique York, Maia and Franco swept the awards circuit in 2019, profitable 16 Cannes Lions awards, "Most effective in Self-discipline" at the One Display, three Yellow Pencils at D&AD, and 4 Golds at the Clios, among others.

Thought to be one of their most unparalleled campaigns is "Billie Jean King Your Shoes" for Adidas, which transformed sneakers into Billie Jean King's iconic blue-and-white-striped kicks to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the Fight of the Sexes.

They moreover made waves for his or her campaign "The False Newsstand" for the Columbia Journalism Overview that build counterfeit news headlines on the covers of what gave the impact to be accurate magazines to present how folks in most cases fragment counterfeit news with out verifying it.

In 2019, they created a vacation situation for Samsung in partnership with "Superstar Wars" where a rescue canine with a uncommon resemblance to Chewbacca seeks an owner.

Christina Mallon, 31, WundermanThompson

Mallon, inclusive construct lead.

WundermanThompson

Mallon became diagnosed with a uncommon create of ALS quickly after starting at Gray at age 22, leaving her with out the utilization of her palms. That led her to change into an recommend for fogeys with disabilities and an inclusion strategist, serving to corporations promote merchandise and services and products that are accessible to all.

She grew inclusive construct awareness across WundermanThompson, serving to it construct the well-known Alexa potential for fogeys with disabilities. She has moreover spearheaded inclusive marketing and marketing campaigns for purchasers including Microsoft and Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive.

She moreover helped launch the Hilfiger line itself, working with folks with disabilities. The campaign featured an inclusive solid and crew, including a legally blind director, and the flicks had closed-captioning for fogeys with listening to impairments and image-descriptive audio for fogeys with imaginative and prescient impairments. Adaptive clothing now makes up 20% of Tommy Hilfiger's children clothing gross sales and the campaign work for the line won three Cannes Lions in 2019, in step with the agency.

Mallon is a founding companion of Originate Model Lab, a nonprofit incubator pondering rising purposeful and trendy clothes and niknaks for fogeys with disabilities.

Kayla Miller, 35, PHD

Miller, managing director, efficiency media.

Kayla Miller

In 2019, Miller led retaining firm Omnicom's effort to construct knowledge a extra intrinsic a part of the legend and media planning.

She oversaw the migration of 200 efficiency and marketing and marketing science experts from Omnicom Media Neighborhood's search and knowledge divisions to PHD's legend groups, and ensured that those groups conventional knowledge to list media spending.

She moreover created a mannequin that makes exercise of first-social gathering knowledge to attenuate advertisers' programmatic advert spending. That approach lower the price of Carnival Corp.'s advert rates by up to 30% and reduced the price per acquisition of its online reserving by 12%, in step with the agency.

Furthermore, Miller helped Delta grow its user prospect pool through the use of website visits and engagement that helped the airline beat its gross sales targets, resulting in 108% earnings pacing for the year, per the agency.

Josh Millrod, 35, Noble Other folks

Millrod, neighborhood approach director.

Josh Millrod

Millrod has been key to Noble Other folks rising its reasonable deal measurement by 42% and securing multiyear deals with two of its splendid purchasers since he joined the neutral store in 2017.

He's fascinated by almost the total new-enterprise efforts, serving to it add Postmates, Oscar Smartly being, Crowdstrike, MoneyLion, PointsBet, Shutterfly, Whoop, Smartsheet, Zola, Equinox, and BJ's Wholesalers in 2019, after a dozen new accounts in 2018.

Millrod leads day-to-day communications for purchasers including Venmo and Zola and doubled the number of strategists on his workers previously year. For Venmo, he led the debut of its physical debit card and branded cost buttons that fetch been integrated into apps like Uber and Seamless. For Zola, he led the "Like Notes" campaign that resulted in extra than 900 accurate be pleased letters being written and mailed around the field.

Millrod is moreover a licensed creative arts therapist, and he splits his time between the agency and a non-public tune-remedy put together, where he treats younger adults with trauma-connected disorders.

Brian Moore, 33, Droga5

Moore, creative technology director.

Brian Moore

Moore's job is to explore technology as a creative medium, which has led him to construct some  weird — and most incessantly weird — initiatives to reach wait on out of Droga5.

These incorporated the "Rage Rider," a scooter for Offended Birds that's powered no longer by batteries but by folks's screams and a chip-and-dip bowl for Philadelphia Cream Cheese that makes exercise of machine finding out to detect double dippers.

Renata Neumann, 29, Intestine Miami

Neumann, senior producer.

Renata Neumann

Because the head of the manufacturing division at Intestine Miami, Newmann oversaw the Orderly Bowl spots for Burger King, Budweiser, and Indulge in in 2019, including Burger King's that comprises Andy Warhol drinking a Whopper, its first Orderly Bowl advert in decades.

She's labored on other brands over time including Coca-Cola, Dove, and Google, including Dove's award-profitable "Proper Beauty Sketches" and the Cannes Lions Tall Prix-profitable "Google Dwelling of the Whopper."

Her work has won awards at the Clios, the One Display, D&AD and El Ojo de Iberoamerica, and extra than 71 Cannes Lions, including a Titanium, Train and Promo&Activation Tall Prix.

Files Oruwari, 32, IBM iX

Oruwari, journey strategist and UX researcher.

Files Oruwari

As an journey strategist and UX researcher, Oruwari combines enterprise and user wants for brands including MetLife, Bank of The United States, Deliver Farm, and Medtronic.

A self-taught studio artist and illustrator, she's performed new user-centric construct practices across the enterprise, right this moment rising a platform for MetLife to fulfill tiny-enterprise owners' insurance coverage wants, to illustrate.

She is moreover redesigning Bank of The United States's digital buyer provider platform for its treasury purchasers to streamline the legend administration journey, overhauling the strategy of retaining signers on an legend using a signature card so that purchasers can peek and manage signers and change signature permissions in accurate time.

Steven Panariello, 33, BBDO Unique York

Panariello, managing director, EVP, and senior director.

Steven Panariello

Panariello is BBDO Unique York's youngest EVP and worldwide senior director, overseeing its GE and Bacardi accounts that encompass such liquor brands as Bacardi, Bombay Sapphire, St-Germain, and Dewar's.

The agency credited him with serving to Bacardi create colossal quantity and gross sales boost globally, in spacious part thanks to a replace in how the firm keep up a correspondence with millennials.

Panariello shifted Bacardi's heart of attention from TV to experiential, social, and digital campaigns, reminiscent of "Live Strikes," a ballot-driven tune video campaign on IGTV and "Front of the Line," a tune video lens on Snapchat. Most right this moment, he led "Beat Machine," a campaign on YouTube that transformed the keyboard into an editing desk.

He became right this moment promoted to managing director of BBDO Unique York, leading the agency's visual construct and social capabilities groups and new enterprise initiatives.

Marc Parillo, 30, Gale Companions

Parillo, approach director and chief of workers.

Gale Companions

Parillo brought administration-consulting journey at Visual show unit Deloitte to Gale, serving to build its agency-meets-consultancy mannequin.

He's labored for purchasers in monetary services and products, automotive, retail, and gaming using Gale's platform referred to as Alchemy, which makes exercise of purchasers' knowledge to list their marketing and marketing.

For on line casino chain Accommodations World Genting, he conventional buyer segmentation to aim folks in step with their interests, resulting in a new loyalty program and messaging. The on line casino saw a 40% expand in hotel bookings and 300% boost in buyer engagement rates which potential that, in step with Gale.

He's moreover helped Chipotle with its loyalty program and performed a new incentive compensation construction and a doable client tracking software at Gale.

Cecilia Parrish, 33, The Martin Company

Parrish, planning director.

Cecilia Parrish

Whether it be making men elope via the streets in their lingerie for Hanes to promote body positivity, or having Wiz Khalifa launch a new tune by strategy of an Oreo cookie document player, Parrish has performed an element in some of The Martin Company's most culturally forward campaigns right this moment.

She's moreover helped the agency pick key accounts including DoorDash and CarMax. Her work helped Oreo grow 9.4% year to this level, in step with the agency, and CarMax's new anthem and positioning led 2nd-quarter gross sales to height at $5.2 billion, per CarMax.

Megan Piro, 33, Johannes Leonardo

Piro, head of communications planning.

Johannes Leonardo

Piro's potential to carry media pondering to Johannes Leonardo's creative job has resulted in one of the well-known most agency's most compelling work this year, like its campaign for Volkswagen referred to as "Howdy Gentle," which addressed the firm's diesel emissions scandal.

Piro led the communications opinion that incorporated gargantuan TV moments like NBA and NHL video games and the US Originate, and YouTube and Twitter, among other digital platforms.

Volkswagen saw an 8.6% expand in overall belief of the stamp which potential that, in step with the carmaker.

Genevieve Robles, 33, Forsman & Bodenfors

Robles, director of skill journey.

Genevieve Robles

Robles has helped change into the agency's technique to recruitment, pay, efficiency overview, and worker engagement.

She introduced a platform to learn rent underrepresented skill and started a reverse-mentorship program at the agency that pairs workers from numerous generations, skillsets, and genders.

To handle unconscious bias, she developed a scorecard for the agency to standardize the hiring job and build the handle a candidate's qualifications.

Hanna Samad, 30, RPA

Samad, supervisor, digital approach.

RPA

Samad has been promoted three cases previously two years at RPA and now handles its splendid legend, Honda.

Contemporary examples of her work encompass Honda's "Final Fetch Smartly Card" campaign, which conventional augmented actuality; a motorsports influencer campaign for Honda that boosted engagement by 130% year-over-year; and a new communications technique for La-Z-Boy that ended in an elevated return on advert exercise.

She right this moment introduced a approach that improves the agency's potential to promote complicated, unsuitable-channel campaigns to purchasers, which contributed to a well-known pick for the agency and is being integrated into all its creative pitches and displays.

Andy Tamayo, 28, and Alexander Allen, 26, of David Miami

Tamayo, senior artwork director, and Allen, senior copywriter.

Andy Tamayo and Alexander Allen

Tamayo and Allen's work for purchasers including Coca-Cola, Burger King, and Budweiser has won extra than 25 global awards, including the Clios, El Ojo, D&AD, the One Display, and 10 Cannes Lions.

They fetch been the employees at the wait on of "Try No longer To Hear This," the well-known audible print commercials by Coca-Cola that release the sound associated with opening a Coke bottle. They moreover labored on Burger King's "BK Bot" and two Orderly Bowl spots — Budweiser's "Wind In no diagram Felt Greater" and Burger King's "#EatLikeAndy."

Most right this moment, they've brought in new enterprise for David from Mondelez.

Lindsay Wade, 28, Warmth, Deloitte Digital

Wade, senior strategist.

Lindsay Wade

Wade started at Warmth Unique York in 2017 as its fifth worker and has had an instantaneous hand in its boost to 55 workers, leading approach for upwards of $4 million in new enterprise earnings.

Her approach won Warmth Unique York its first stamp redesign mission for The Crimson Door Salon & Spa, now referred to as Mynd. She helped boost its enchantment to youthful shoppers by promoting the postulate of self-care.

She moreover conventional her knowledge chops to learn a nationwide healthcare firm keep up a correspondence with its people over 65 in a natural, less interruptive potential.

She moreover led the overview on "The Warmth Take a look at," a mission that confirmed having numerous casts in commercials positively affects corporations' stock designate and buyer perception. The overview became broadly lined and she's been invited to fragment it at SXSW 2020.

Arthur J. Warren, 31, and Matt McNulty, 29, Goodby, of Silverstein & Companions

Warren, senior copywriter, and McNulty, senior artwork director.

Goodby, Silverstein and Companions

Of their year and a half of at the San Francisco agency, the pair has helped it pick new enterprise from Boston Beer Co.'s Sam Adams and If truth be told brands. They moreover labored on purchasers including Doritos, Pepsi, Xfinity, and Liberty Mutual, with two Orderly Bowl spots.

McNulty and Warren fetch been the forces at the wait on of Doritos' Orderly Bowl advert in 2019 starring Likelihood the Rapper and the Backstreet Boys. They wrote the self-deprecating "Is Pepsi Okay?" advert for Pepsi that comprises Steve Carell, Cardi B, and Lil Jon. Their work has moreover been acknowledged at Cannes, the One Display, the Clios, and Communication Arts.

Drew Weigel, 35, Tactic

Weigel, executive producer.

Drew Weigel

Tactic has established itself as an expert in rising gamified visual reviews on cell apps and web-essentially based AR experiences, and as executive producer, Weigel has been key to its boost.

He has launched AR experiences for brands like Living Wine Labels, Jack Daniel, and Coca-Cola that comprises its polar bears. His work on Living Wine Labels ended in extra than 4 million app downloads, an reasonable user engagement time of three minutes, and a 200% gross sales expand for the stamp, in step with Tactic.

Earlier, Weigel labored on VR campaigns for Water is Existence, Heineken, Chevy, Microsoft, Facebook, and Oculus. He won a Sports Emmy for Outstanding Technical Fulfillment for his work on the VR documentary journey, "Note My Lead: The Chronicle of the 2016 NBA Finals."

Tierney Wilson, 31, January Digital

Wilson, managing director.

Tierney

As January Digital's managing director, Wilson keeps the agency working whereas overseeing relationships and earnings for half of of its splendid purchasers, which are price extra than $70 million in annual media exercise.

She's moreover accountable for extra than a third of the agency's purchasers and elevated their budgets by 30% year-over-year in 2019. She moreover developed an analytics product that's contributed to 100% of present client boost in 2019, in step with the agency.

Her workers grew 150% previously year and saw a document eight promotions.

More: BI High Digiday Deal Aspects BI Graphics

Chevron iconIt indicates an expandable part or menu, or most incessantly earlier / next navigation suggestions.

Debunking the Myths of Robert Capa on D-Day

I want to give you a brief overview of an investigation that began almost five years ago, led by me but involving the efforts of photojournalist J. Ross Baughman, photo historian Rob McElroy, and ex-infantryman and amateur military historian Charles Herrick.

Our project, in a nutshell, dismantles the 74-year-old myth of Robert Capa’s actions on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the subsequent fate of his negatives. If you have even a passing familiarity with the history of photojournalism, or simply an awareness of twentieth-century cultural history on both sides of the Atlantic, you’ve surely heard the story; it’s been repeated hundreds, possibly thousands of times:

Robert Capa landed on Omaha Beach with the first wave of assault troops at 0630 on the morning of June 6, 1944 (D-Day), on freelance assignment from LIFE magazine.

He stayed there for 90 minutes, until he either inexplicably ran out of film or his camera jammed.

During that time he made somewhere between 72 and 144 35mm b&w exposures of the Allied invasion of Normandy on Kodak Super-XX film.

Upon landing back in England the next day, he sent all his film via courier to assistant picture editor John Morris at LIFE’s London office, instead of delivering it in person.

This shipment included pre-invasion reportage of the troops boarding and crossing the English Channel, the just-mentioned coverage of the battle on Omaha Beach, and images of medics tending to the wounded on the return trip.

When the film finally arrived, around 9 p.m., the head of LIFE’s London darkroom, one “Braddy” Bradshaw, inexplicably assigned the task of developing these crucial four rolls of 35mm Omaha Beach images to one of the least experienced members of his staff, 15-year-old “darkroom lad” Denis Banks.

After successfully processing the 35mm films, in his haste to help Morris meet the looming deadline Banks absentmindedly closed the doors of the darkroom’s film-drying cabinet, which inexplicably were “normally kept open.” Inexplicably, nobody noticed that Banks had closed them.

As a result, after “just a few minutes,” that enclosed space with a small electric heating coil on its floor inexplicably became so drastically overheated that it melted the emulsion of Capa’s 35mm negatives.

Notified of this by the horrified Banks, Morris rushed to the darkroom, discovering that eleven of Capa’s negatives had survived, which he “saved” or “salvaged,” and which proved just sufficient enough to fulfill this crucial assignment to the satisfaction of LIFE’s New York editors.

That darkroom catastrophe blurred slightly the remaining negatives, “ironically” adding to their expressiveness. Furthermore, as a result of the overheating, the emulsion on those eleven negatives inexplicably slid a few millimeters sideways on their acetate backing, resulting in a visible intrusion of the film’s sprocket holes into the image area.

Robert Capa, D-Day images from Omaha Beach, contact sheet, screenshot from TIME video (May 29, 2014), annotated.

That standard narrative constitutes photojournalism’s most potent and durable myth. From it springs the image of the intrepid photojournalist as heroic loner, risking all to bear witness for humanity, yet at the mercy of corporate forces that, by cynical choice or sheer ineptitude, can in an instant erase from the historical record the only traces of a crucial passage in world events.

Jean-David Morvan and Séverine Tréfouël, “Omaha Beach on D-Day” (2015), cover

Moreover, it represents, arguably, the most widely familiar bit of folklore in the history of the medium of photography — one that appears not only in histories of photography and photojournalism, in biographies of and other books about Capa, but in novels, graphic novels, the autobiographies of such famous people as actress Ingrid Bergman and Hollywood director Sam Fuller, assorted films, and even in videos of Steven Spielberg talking about his inspirations for the opening scenes of his film Saving Private Ryan, not to mention countless retellings in the mass media.

Charles Christian Wertenbaker, “Invasion!” (1944), cover

An early version of this story started to circulate immediately after D-Day, made its first half-formed appearance in print in the fall of 1944, and received its full formal authorization with the publication of Capa’s heavily fictionalized memoir, Slightly Out of Focus, in the fall of 1947. Since then it’s been reiterated endlessly, either by John Morris or by others quoting or paraphrasing Capa’s or Morris’s version of the tale. It gets retold in the mass media with special frequency on every major celebration of D-Day — the 50th anniversary, the 60th, most recently the 70th. In short, it has gradually achieved the status of legend. That this legend went unexamined for seven decades serves as a measure of its appeal not just to photojournalists, to others involved professionally with photography, and to the medium’s growing audience, but to the general public.

For 70 years, despite the many glaring holes in it, no one questioned this story — least of all those in charge at the International Center of Photography, which houses the Capa Archive. These figures have included the late Cornell Capa, Robert’s younger brother and founder of ICP; the late Richard Whelan, Robert’s authorized biographer and the first curator of that archive; and Whelan’s successor in that curatorial role, Cynthia Young.

Ironically, two celebrations of the 70th anniversary of Capa’s D-Day images provoked our investigation. The first came as a flattering profile of John Morris, written by Marie Brenner for Vanity Fair magazine. Morris served as assistant picture editor in LIFE’s London bureau for that magazine’s D-Day coverage, and in this Brenner piece he recounts his version of the Capa-LIFE D-Day myth once more. Shortly thereafter, on May 29, 2014, TIME Inc. — the corporation that had commissioned and published Capa’s D-Day images back in 1944 — posted a video at its website celebrating those photographs, which some refer to as “the magnificent eleven.”

A division of Magnum Photos, the picture agency Capa founded with his colleagues in 1947 (the same year he published his memoir), produced that video for TIME. The International Center of Photography licensed the use of Capa’s images for that purpose. And none other than John Morris, by then 97 years old and living in Paris, provided the voice-over, his boilerplate narrative of those events. In short, this video involved the combined energies of the individual and institutional forces involved in the creation and propagation of this myth — what I came to define as the Capa Consortium.

The Capa Consortium, Keynote slide, © 2015 by A. D. Coleman

Assorted elements of those two virtually identical versions of the standard story, Brenner’s and Time Inc.’s, struck J. Ross Baughman as illogical and implausible. The youngest photojournalist ever to win a Pulitzer Prize (in 1978, at the age of 24), Baughman is an experienced combat photographer who has worked in war zones in the Middle East, El Salvador, Rhodesia, and elsewhere. As the founder of the picture agency Visions, which specialized in such work, he’s also an experienced picture editor. Ross contacted me to ask if I would publish his analysis at my blog, Photocritic International, as a Guest Post. I agreed.

In the editorial process of fact-checking and sourcing Baughman’s skeptical response to the standard narrative provided by Morris in that video, my own bulls**t detector began to sound the alarm. I realized that Baughman’s critique raised more questions than it answered, requiring much more research and writing than I could reasonably request from him. I decided to pursue those issues further myself.

This immersed me in the Capa literature for the first time. Speaking as a scholar, that came as a rude awakening. The most immediate shock hit as I read through a half-dozen print and web versions of Morris’s account of those events — in Brenner’s 2014 puff piece, in Morris’s 1998 memoir, and in various interviews, profiles, and articles — and watched at least as many online videos and films featuring Morris rehashing this tale. I realized that the only portion of this story that Morris claimed to have witnessed firsthand, the loss of Capa’s films in LIFE’s London darkroom, could not possibly have happened the way he said it did.

In retrospect, I cannot understand how so many people in the field, working photographers among them, accepted uncritically the unlikely, unprecedented story, concocted by Morris, of Capa’s 35mm Kodak Super-XX film emulsion melting in a film-drying cabinet on the night of June 7, 1944.

Anyone familiar with analog photographic materials and normal darkroom practice worldwide must consider this fabulation incredible on its face. Coil heaters in wooden film-drying cabinets circa 1944 did not ever produce high levels of heat; black & white film emulsions of that time did not melt even after brief exposure to high heat; and the doors of film-drying cabinets are normally kept closed, not open, since the primary function of such cabinets is to prevent dust from adhering to the sticky emulsion of wet film.

No one with darkroom experience could have come up with this notion; only someone entirely ignorant of photographic materials and processes — like Morris — could have imagined it. Embarrassingly, none of that set my own alarm bells ringing until I started to fact-check the article by Baughman that initiated this project, close to fifty years after I first read that fable in Capa’s memoir.

This is one of several big lies permeating the literature on Robert Capa. Certainly Capa knew it was untrue when he published it in his memoir; he had gotten his start in photography as a darkroom assistant in Simon Guttmann’s Dephot photo agency in Berlin. And Cornell Capa also knew that; he had cut his eyeteeth in the medium first by developing the films of his brother, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and David Seymour in Paris, then by working in the darkroom of the Pix photo agency in New York, then by moving on to fill the same role at LIFE magazine before becoming a photographer in his own right. My belated recognition of that fact led me to ask the obvious next question: If that didn’t happen to Capa’s 35mm D-Day films, what did? And if all these people were willing to lie about this, what were they covering up?

So, building on Baughman’s initial provocation, I began drafting my own extensions of what he’d initiated — and our investigation was launched.

In December of 2017 I published the 74th chapter of our research project. You’ll find all of it online at my blog; the easiest way to get to the Capa D-Day material is by using the url capadday.com. During these years I have become intimately familiar with a large chunk of what others have written and said about Capa and his D-Day coverage.

In my opinion, the bulk of the published writing and presentations in other formats (films, videos, exhibitions) devoted to the life and work of photojournalist Robert Capa qualifies as hagiography, not scholarship. Capa’s own account of his World War II experiences, Slightly Out of Focus, consistently proves itself inaccurate and unreliable, masking its sly self-aggrandizement with wry humor and self-deprecation. Morris’s memoir repeats Capa’s combat stories unquestioningly, adding to those his own dubious saga of the “ruined” negatives.

Richard Whelan, “This Is War! Robert Capa at Work” (2007), cover

Richard Whelan’s books, widely considered the key reference works on Capa, simply quote or paraphrase Capa and Morris uncritically, perhaps because they were sponsored, subsidized, published, and endorsed most prominently and extensively by the estate of Robert Capa and the Fund for Concerned Photography (both controlled by Capa’s younger brother Cornell) and the International Center of Photography, founded by Cornell, who also served as ICP’s first director.

Produced in most other cases under Cornell’s watchful eye or the supervision of one or another participant in the Capa Consortium, the remainder of the serious, scholarly literature on Robert Capa has almost all been subject to Cornell’s approval and reliant on either the problematic principal reference works or on Robert Capa materials stored in Cornell’s private home in Manhattan, with access dependent on his consent. Consequently, it constitutes an inherently limited corpus of contaminated research, fatally corrupted by its unswerving allegiance to both its patron and its patron saint. Such bespoke scholarship becomes automatically suspect.

Cornell Capa, interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein, 1980, screenshot

The second failing of this heap of compromised materials resides in its reliance on untrustworthy and far from neutral sources: Robert Capa, with a demonstrated penchant for self-mythification; his younger brother Cornell, a classic “art widower” with every reason to enhance his brother’s reputation; and Robert’s close friend and Cornell’s, John Morris, whose own stature in the field premises itself on the Capa D-Day legend. Only Alex Kershaw’s unauthorized Capa biography, Blood and Champagne, published in 2002, maintains its independence from Cornell’s influence, but at the cost of losing access to the primary research materials and consequently reiterating the erroneous information in the accounts of Capa, Morris, and Whelan. Virtually everything else published about Capa, including those stories in the mass media that appear predictably every five years along with celebrations of D-Day, unquestioningly presents the prevailing myth.

This Capa literature suffers from a third fundamental flaw: Those generating it (with the exception of Capa himself and his brother Cornell), have no direct, hands-on knowledge of photographic production, no military background (significant in that Robert Capa’s most important work falls under the heading of combat photography), and no forensic skills pertinent to the analysis of photographic materials. Nor were they encouraged by their patron, Cornell Capa, to make up for those deficiencies by involving others with those competencies in their projects. Instead, their privileged relationship to the primary materials, along with the availability of a prominent and well-funded platform at ICP, enabled them to effectively invent whatever suited them, pleased their benefactor, and served their purposes.

Responsible Capa scholarship, therefore, must begin by distrusting the extant literature, turning instead to the photographs themselves and relevant documents that the Capa estate and ICP do not control and to which they therefore cannot prohibit access. Those materials lie at the core of our research project.

Here’s a short summary of what we’ve found:

Capa sailed across the English Channel on the U.S.S. Samuel Chase.

According to the official history of the U.S. Coast Guard, fifteen waves of LCVPs (commonly called Higgins boats) carrying troops left the U.S.S. Samuel Chase for Omaha Beach that morning. Capa almost certainly rode in with Col. Taylor and his staff, the command group of Company E of the 16th Infantry Regiment, U.S. 1st Division, to which Capa had been assigned. They constituted part of the thirteenth wave.

That wave arrived at the Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach at 8:15, a half hour after the last of the 16th Infantry Regiment’s nine rifle companies. We can see from Capa’s images that numerous waves of troops preceded them.

Using distinctive landmarks visible in Capa’s photos, Charles Herrick has pinpointed exactly where Capa landed on Easy Red: the beach at Colleville-sur-Mer. Gap Assault Team 10 had charge of the obstacles in that sector. An existing exit off this sector made it possible to reach the top of the bluffs with relative ease. Col. Taylor would become famous for announcing to the hesitant troops he found there, “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die — now let’s get the hell out of here,” and urging them up the Colleville-sur-Mer draw to the bluffs.

Robert Capa, CS frame 4, neg. 32, detail, annotated

Fortuitously, that stretch of Easy Red represented a seam in the German defenses, a weak point at the far end of the effective range of two widely separated German blockhouses. Both cannon fire and small-arms fire there proved relatively light — one reason for the success of Gap Assault Team 10 in clearing obstacles in that area. This explains why, contrary to LIFE’s captions and Capa’s later narrative, his images show no carnage, no floating bodies and body parts, no discarded equipment, and no bullet or shell splashes. This also explains why the Allies broke through early at that very point.

Capa did not run out of film, nor did his camera jam, nor did seawater damage either his cameras or his film. In his memoir, Capa first implies that he exposed at most two full rolls of 35mm film — one roll in each of his two Contax II rangefinder cameras, 72 frames in all — at Omaha Beach. By the end of that chapter, this has somehow grown to “one hundred and six pictures in all, [of which] only eight were salvaged.” John Morris claims he received 4 rolls of Omaha Beach negatives from Capa. We find no reason to believe that Capa made more than the ten 35mm images of which we have physical evidence.

Capa made the first five of those images while standing for almost two minutes on the ramp of the landing craft that brought him there. In them we see Capa’s traveling companions carrying not small-arms assault weapons but bulky oilskin-wrapped bundles, most likely radios and other supplies for the command post they meant to establish.

Capa made his sixth exposure from behind a mined iron “hedgehog,” one of many such obstacles protecting what Nazi Gen. Erwin Rommel called the “Atlantic Wall.” He made his last four exposures — including “The Face in the Surf” — from behind Armored Assault Vehicle 10, which was sitting in the surf shelling the gun emplacements on the bluffs.

Capa described Armored Assault Vehicle 10, which appears on the left-hand side of several of his images, as “one of our half-burnt amphibious tanks.” In fact, it was a modified American tank, a “wading Sherman,” not amphibious (merely waterproofed to the top of its treads) and not burnt out; later images made by others of that stretch of Easy Red show this tank undamaged, closer to the dry beach, and apparently in action. Taken in conjunction with the known presence at that point of Gap Assault Team 10, the large numeral 10 on this vehicle’s rear vent suggests that it was a so-called “tank dozer,” one of which landed with each demolition team that morning. The U.S. Army had modified these tanks by adding detachable bulldozer “blades,” so that they could clear the debris after the engineers blew up the obstacles.

Not incidentally, both the time and place of Capa’s arrival on Easy Red contradict the current identification of Huston “Hu” Riley as “The Face in the Surf” in Capa’s penultimate exposure on Easy Red, as well as the earlier identification of “The Face in the Surf” as Pfc. Edward J. Regan. Both these soldiers arrived at different times than Capa, and on different sections of the beach. Thus the identity of “The Face in the Surf” remains unknown.

After no more than 30 minutes on the beach, and perhaps as little as 15 minutes there, Capa ran to a landing craft, LCI(L)-94, where he took shelter before its departure around 0900.

Capa claimed that he reached the dry beach and then experienced a panic attack, causing him to escape from the combat zone. We must consider the possibility that he suffered from what they then called “shell shock” and we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But we must also consider the possibility that, even before setting forth that morning, Capa made a calculated decision to leave the battlefield at the first opportunity, in order to get his films to London in time to make the deadline for LIFE’s next issue; if he missed that deadline, any images of the landing would become old news and his effort and risks in making them would have been for naught.

No fewer than four witnesses place Capa on this vessel, LCI(L)-94. The first three were crew members Charles Jarreau, Clifford W. Lewis, and Victor Haboush. According to Capa, once he reached LCI(L)-94 he put away his Contax II, working thenceforth only with his Rolleiflex. One of the 2–1/4″ images he made while aboard this vessel, published in the D-Day feature story in LIFE, shows Haboush assisting a medic treating a casualty.

Robert Capa, “Untitled (Medics at Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944).” Annotated screenshot from magnumphotos.com. Victor Haboush indicated by red arrow.

The fourth witness to Capa’s presence on LCI(L)-94 was U.S. Coast Guard Chief Photographer’s Mate David T. Ruley. Ruley, a Coast Guard cinematographer assigned to film the invasion from the vantage point of this vessel, coincidentally documented its arrival at the very same spot at which Capa landed, recording the same scene from a perspective slightly different from Capa’s at approximately the same time Capa made his ten exposures.

Robert Capa, “The Face in the Surf” (l); David Ruley, frame from D-Day film (r)

Ruley’s color footage appears frequently in D-Day documentaries. Charles Herrick and I verified that these film clips described conditions at that same sector of Easy Red while Capa was there. Ruley’s name on his slateboard at the start of several clips enabled us to learn a bit more about him and his assignment.

Robert Capa, center rear, aboard LCVP from USS Samuel Chase, with camera during transfer of casualty, D-Day, frame from film by David T. Ruley

Most importantly, this resulted in the discovery of brief glimpses of Capa himself, holding Ruley’s slateboard in one scene and photographing the offloading of a casualty from LCI(L)-94 to another vessel in the second clip. These are the only known film or still images of Capa on D-Day, the only film images of him in any combat situation, and among the few known color film clips of him.

Robert Capa holding cinematographer’s slate aboard LCI(L)-94, D-Day, frame from film by David T. Ruley

Cinematographer David T. Ruley, illustrations for first-person account of D-Day experiences, Movie Makers magazine, 6/1/45

By noon the battle there was largely over, and Capa had missed most of it.

He made the return trip to England aboard the U.S.S. Samuel Chase.

Arriving back in Weymouth on the morning of June 7, Capa had to wait for the offloading of wounded from the Chase before he got ashore sometime around 1 p.m. He sent all his film via courier to picture editor John Morris at LIFE’s London office, instead of carrying it himself to ensure its safe delivery and thus enable Morris to face with confidence the imminent, absolute deadline of 9 a.m. on June 8.

As a result, Capa’s films did not reach the London office till 9 p.m. that night, putting Morris and the darkroom staff in crisis mode.

Capa’s shipment included substantial pre-invasion reportage of the troops boarding and crossing the English Channel, his skimpy coverage of the battle on Omaha Beach, and several images of the beach seen from a distance, made while departing on LCI(L)-94, as well as photos of medics tending to the wounded on the return trip aboard the Chase.

In addition to several rolls of 120 film, and a few 4×5″ negatives made on shipboard with a borrowed Speed Graphic, Capa sent Morris at least five rolls of 35mm film, and possibly a sixth.

These include two rolls made while boarding and on deck in the daytime, two more of a below-decks briefing, a (missing) roll of images made on deck at twilight during the crossing, and the ten Omaha Beach exposures, plus four sheets of sketchy handwritten caption notes.

All of these films — including all of Capa’s Omaha Beach negatives — got processed normally, without incident. The surviving negatives, housed in the Capa Archive at ICP, show no sign of heat damage. Thus no darkroom disaster occurred, no D-Day images got lost … and none got “saved” or “salvaged.”

In his memoir, Capa wrote that by the time he got back to Omaha Beach on June 8 and joined his press corps colleagues, “I had been reported dead by a sergeant who had seen my body floating on the water with my cameras around my neck. I had been missing for forty-eight hours, my death had become official, and my obituaries had just been released by the censor.” No correspondent has ever corroborated that story. No such obituary ever saw print (as it surely would have), no copy thereof has ever surfaced, and no record of it exists in the censors’ logs. Purest fiction, meant for the silver screen.

So much for the myth.

We learned a few other things along the way:

LIFE magazine ran the best five of Capa’s ten 35mm Omaha Beach images in the D-Day issue, datelined June 19, 1944, which hit the newsstands on June 12. (The other five were all mediocre variants of the ones they published.)

“Beachheads of Normandy,” LIFE magazine feature on D-Day with Robert Capa photos, June 19, 1944, p. 25 (detail)

The accompanying story claimed that “As he waded out to get aboard [LCI(L)-94, Capa’s] cameras got thoroughly soaked. By some miracle, one of them was not too badly damaged and he was able to keep making pictures.” That wasn’t true, of course. Capa returned immediately to Normandy, landing back there on June 8 and continuing to use the same undamaged equipment with which he’d started out.

No sheet of caption notes for Capa’s ten Omaha Beach images in Capa’s own hand exists in the International Center of Photography’s Capa Archive. Presumably he provided none. Morris himself must have provided some — drafted hastily on the night of June 7 — for both the set that he sent to LIFE and the set that he provided to the press pool; that was required of him by his employer and by the pool. As for the captions that appeared with Capa’s pictures in the June 19 issue, Richard Whelan writes, “Dennis Flanagan, the assistant associate editor who wrote the captions and text that accompanied Capa’s images in LIFE, recalls that he depended on the New York Times for background information, and for specifics he interpreted what he saw in the photographs.”

Thus the wildly inaccurate captions that (to use Roland Barthes’s term) “anchor” Capa’s images in LIFE’s D-Day issue, and on which most subsequent republications of these images rely, either got revised from John Morris’s last-minute inventions in London or written entirely from scratch by someone in the New York office, even further removed from the action.

LIFE’s captions indicated that the soldiers seen gathered around the obstacles were hiding from enemy fire. That was also untrue. Instead, we discovered that their insignias identify them as members of Combined Demolitions Unit 10, part of the Engineer Special Task Force, busy at their assigned task of blowing up the obstacles planted in the surf by the Germans in order to clear lanes for the incoming landing craft, so that they could deposit more troops and materiel on the beachhead.

Robert Capa, D-Day negative 35, detail, annotated

The demolition team that cleared this section of Omaha Beach, Easy Red, had more success than all the other demolition teams combined. In many ways, they saved the day for the Allies — at a high cost: these engineers as a group suffered the highest casualty rate of any class of troops on Omaha Beach. Capa’s failure to provide caption notes for these exposures resulted in 70 years of misidentification of these heroic engineers as terrified assault troops pinned down and hiding behind those “hedgehogs.”

We learned that ICP had a habit of obstructing any research into the life and work of Robert Capa that did not conform to Cornell Capa’s and Richard Whelan’s censorious requirements. ICP refused to allow British military historian Alex Kershaw to access any of the materials in the Capa Archive, and refused to grant his publishers permission to reproduce any Capa images in his unauthorized biography, published in 2002. ICP also refused to allow French documentary filmmaker Patrick Jeudy to use any of the primary Capa materials they controlled in his remarkable 2004 film, Robert Capa, l’homme qui voulait croire à sa légende (“Robert Capa: The Man Who Believed His Own Legend”). Upon the film’s release, Cornell Capa persuaded John Morris to sue Jeudy in France, in an unsuccessful attempt to block its distribution.

Robert Capa, “ruined” frames from D-Day, June 6, 1944. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

We also discovered that TIME Inc. had authorized the creation of unlabelled digital fakes of Capa’s supposedly “ruined” and discarded Omaha Beach negatives, for insertion into that May 2014 video commissioned from Magnum in Motion, the multimedia division of Magnum Photos, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of D-Day. Our disclosure of this deception forced TIME to acknowledge the fakery and revise that video overnight.

Richard Whelan, “Robert Capa: In Love and War” (2003), screenshot

Finally, we discovered that Capa’s authorized biographer, the late Richard Whelan, lied outright about the emulsion sliding on Capa’s D-Day negatives (among other things). And Cynthia Young, his successor as curator of the Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography, not only repeated his lie but plagiarized it in a 2013 text of her own.

Cynthia Young, “The Story Behind Robert Capa’s Pictures of D-Day,” June 6, 2013, screenshot from ICP website 2014–06–12 at 11.38.23 AM

Many of Capa’s rolls of film from the 1940s — and not just those he made on D-Day — show the exposure overlapping the sprocket holes. This resulted from a mismatch between Kodak 35mm film cassettes and the design of the Contax II, the camera Capa used that day, and not from any damage to the films.

Top: Contax camera loaded with shorter Kodak cassette showing sprocket holes being exposed. Bottom: Capa negative shown with proper orientation as it would have appeared in the camera. Note exposed sprocket holes. Top photo © 2015 by Rob McElroy.

Since the Capa Archive at ICP houses all those negatives and their contact sheets, both Whelan and Young have known this all along. Given the official position that first Whelan and now Young have occupied at ICP, they are de facto the world’s foremost authorities on Robert Capa. As such they represent, with regrettable accuracy, the deplorable condition of Capa scholarship in our time.

Cynthia Young, “Morning Joe,” MSNBC, 6–13–14, screenshot

The myth of Capa’s D-Day and the fate of his Omaha Beach negatives falls apart as soon as one compares its narrative to the military documentation of that epic battle. It collapses entirely when one examines closely the physical evidence — those photographs and their negatives.

The promulgation of that myth by the Capa Consortium, all of whose members have a vested financial and public-relations interest in furthering the myth, has proved itself calculated, systematic, duplicitous, and self-serving. Its voluntary dissemination by others, including reputable scholars and journalists, has shown those authors as lazy, careless, and professionally irresponsible. The Capa D-Day myth serves as a classic example of the genesis and evolution of a falsified version of history that, with its emphasis on the exploits of individual actors, distracts us from paying attention to the machinations of the corporate structures through which information must pass and get filtered before reaching the public — powerful institutions with agendas of their own.

I would like to think we have made a sufficiently convincing case that no one can credibly tell the standard Capa D-Day story again, at least not without acknowledging our contrary narrative. After all, our investigation forced a reluctant John Morris, the most energetic and vocal proponent of the legend, to recant its central components on Christiane Amanpour’s CNN show in the fall of 2014.

Most recently, in a Lensblog piece published in the New York Times on December 6, 2016 — just a day before his 100th birthday, and months before his death in Paris in July 2017 — Morris once again admitted that he’d never actually seen any heat-damaged 35mm negatives; that Capa may have only made the ten surviving images; and that he may have stayed on Omaha Beach only long enough to make them.

As for the institutions involved in perpetuating the myth: On June 6, 2016, ICP published this post on the institution’s Facebook page: “During the D-Day landing at Omaha beach, Robert Capa shot four rolls of 35mm film — only 11 frames survived. By accident, a darkroom worker in London ruined the majority of the film.” Since then, grudgingly, as a result of my public prodding, ICP has begun at last to make available to researchers the papers of Cornell Capa, promising to also permit access sometime in the near future to the papers of Richard Whelan, along with the Jozefa Stuart interviews from the early 1960s on which Whelan based much of his work.

Yet, as recently as October 2018, Cynthia Young published this statement in a special issue of the French newspaper Le Monde: “Capa, surrounded by explosions of bombs and bursts of machine guns, took photos in the water for a short while. … He expected his films to have been damaged by the water — he was squatting in the sea, troubled and agitated, tinged with blood. A few weeks later, he learned that all but ten images had been destroyed in the darkroom or during the shooting.” (My translation — A.D.C.).

Cynthia Young, “Les deux icônes de Capa,” Le Monde Hors-Série, 50 images qui ont marquél’histoire, October 2018, pp. 78–79

So there’s more work to be done on this subject. For the time being, our investigation has drawn to a close. In this country, though the Society of Professional Journalists honored our team with the 2014 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Research About Journalism, our work has received little attention, aside from a feature article in the official journal of the National Press Photographers Association, an article so rife with conflict of interest that the watchdog website iMediaEthics published a lengthy dissection of it. We have had better luck abroad; the project went viral in France in the summer of 2015, resulting in extensive coverage there in major periodicals and TV stations, as well as responses in Spain, Italy, the U.K., Brazil, and elsewhere.

Vincent Lavoie, L’Affaire Capa. Le procès d’une icône, 2017

I take heart from the fact that the two most recent books on Capa respond in different ways to our investigation. One, a graphic novel by Florent Silloray, published originally in France and now available in English, is (so far as I know) the only book on Capa of any kind to omit entirely the story of the darkroom disaster in London. The other, a meditation by French-Canadian Vincent Lavoie on the challenges to Capa’s 1937 “Falling Soldier” image, concludes with what its author and publisher must have felt was an obligatory commentary on our parallel research.

It took 70 years and the collaborative energies of powerful institutions and individuals to embed this fable in our cultural consciousness. Clearly, we still have much work to do if we hope to dislodge this fiction from the mythology of photojournalism and photo history — not to mention the larger D-Day myth into which it has become so thoroughly woven. But at least that process has begun — just in time for the 75th anniversary of D-Day, coming up in June 2019.

With minor revisions, this is the complete text of a lecture delivered on Friday, March 2, 2018 at the Society for Photographic Education 55th Annual Conference at the Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia, PA.) Its first English-language publication was in Exposure, the journal of the society.

About the author: A. D. Coleman has published 8 books and more than 2500 essays on photography and related subjects. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Formerly a columnist for the Village Voice, the New York Times, and the New York Observer, Coleman has contributed to ARTnews, Art On Paper, Technology Review, Juliet Art Magazine (Italy), European Photography (Germany), La Fotografia (Spain), and Art Today (China). His work has been translated into 21 languages and published in 31 countries. In 2002 he received the Culture Prize of the German Photographic Society, the first critic of photography ever so honored. In 2010 he received the J Dudley Johnston Award from the Royal Photographic Society (U.K.) for “sustained excellence in writing about photography.” In 2014 he received the Society for Photographic Education’s Insight Award for lifetime contribution to the field, and in 2015 the Society of Professional Journalists SDX Award for Research About Journalism. Coleman’s widely read blog “Photocritic International” appears at photocritic.com.

source https://petapixel.com/2019/02/16/debunking-the-myths-of-robert-capa-on-d-day/

Debunking the Myths of Robert Capa on D-Day

I want to give you a brief overview of an investigation that began almost five years ago, led by me but involving the efforts of photojournalist J. Ross Baughman, photo historian Rob McElroy, and ex-infantryman and amateur military historian Charles Herrick.

Our project, in a nutshell, dismantles the 74-year-old myth of Robert Capa’s actions on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the subsequent fate of his negatives. If you have even a passing familiarity with the history of photojournalism, or simply an awareness of twentieth-century cultural history on both sides of the Atlantic, you’ve surely heard the story; it’s been repeated hundreds, possibly thousands of times:

Robert Capa landed on Omaha Beach with the first wave of assault troops at 0630 on the morning of June 6, 1944 (D-Day), on freelance assignment from LIFE magazine.

He stayed there for 90 minutes, until he either inexplicably ran out of film or his camera jammed.

During that time he made somewhere between 72 and 144 35mm b&w exposures of the Allied invasion of Normandy on Kodak Super-XX film.

Upon landing back in England the next day, he sent all his film via courier to assistant picture editor John Morris at LIFE’s London office, instead of delivering it in person.

This shipment included pre-invasion reportage of the troops boarding and crossing the English Channel, the just-mentioned coverage of the battle on Omaha Beach, and images of medics tending to the wounded on the return trip.

When the film finally arrived, around 9 p.m., the head of LIFE’s London darkroom, one “Braddy” Bradshaw, inexplicably assigned the task of developing these crucial four rolls of 35mm Omaha Beach images to one of the least experienced members of his staff, 15-year-old “darkroom lad” Denis Banks.

After successfully processing the 35mm films, in his haste to help Morris meet the looming deadline Banks absentmindedly closed the doors of the darkroom’s film-drying cabinet, which inexplicably were “normally kept open.” Inexplicably, nobody noticed that Banks had closed them.

As a result, after “just a few minutes,” that enclosed space with a small electric heating coil on its floor inexplicably became so drastically overheated that it melted the emulsion of Capa’s 35mm negatives.

Notified of this by the horrified Banks, Morris rushed to the darkroom, discovering that eleven of Capa’s negatives had survived, which he “saved” or “salvaged,” and which proved just sufficient enough to fulfill this crucial assignment to the satisfaction of LIFE’s New York editors.

That darkroom catastrophe blurred slightly the remaining negatives, “ironically” adding to their expressiveness. Furthermore, as a result of the overheating, the emulsion on those eleven negatives inexplicably slid a few millimeters sideways on their acetate backing, resulting in a visible intrusion of the film’s sprocket holes into the image area.

Robert Capa, D-Day images from Omaha Beach, contact sheet, screenshot from TIME video (May 29, 2014), annotated.

That standard narrative constitutes photojournalism’s most potent and durable myth. From it springs the image of the intrepid photojournalist as heroic loner, risking all to bear witness for humanity, yet at the mercy of corporate forces that, by cynical choice or sheer ineptitude, can in an instant erase from the historical record the only traces of a crucial passage in world events.

Jean-David Morvan and Séverine Tréfouël, “Omaha Beach on D-Day” (2015), cover

Moreover, it represents, arguably, the most widely familiar bit of folklore in the history of the medium of photography — one that appears not only in histories of photography and photojournalism, in biographies of and other books about Capa, but in novels, graphic novels, the autobiographies of such famous people as actress Ingrid Bergman and Hollywood director Sam Fuller, assorted films, and even in videos of Steven Spielberg talking about his inspirations for the opening scenes of his film Saving Private Ryan, not to mention countless retellings in the mass media.

Charles Christian Wertenbaker, “Invasion!” (1944), cover

An early version of this story started to circulate immediately after D-Day, made its first half-formed appearance in print in the fall of 1944, and received its full formal authorization with the publication of Capa’s heavily fictionalized memoir, Slightly Out of Focus, in the fall of 1947. Since then it’s been reiterated endlessly, either by John Morris or by others quoting or paraphrasing Capa’s or Morris’s version of the tale. It gets retold in the mass media with special frequency on every major celebration of D-Day — the 50th anniversary, the 60th, most recently the 70th. In short, it has gradually achieved the status of legend. That this legend went unexamined for seven decades serves as a measure of its appeal not just to photojournalists, to others involved professionally with photography, and to the medium’s growing audience, but to the general public.

For 70 years, despite the many glaring holes in it, no one questioned this story — least of all those in charge at the International Center of Photography, which houses the Capa Archive. These figures have included the late Cornell Capa, Robert’s younger brother and founder of ICP; the late Richard Whelan, Robert’s authorized biographer and the first curator of that archive; and Whelan’s successor in that curatorial role, Cynthia Young.

Ironically, two celebrations of the 70th anniversary of Capa’s D-Day images provoked our investigation. The first came as a flattering profile of John Morris, written by Marie Brenner for Vanity Fair magazine. Morris served as assistant picture editor in LIFE’s London bureau for that magazine’s D-Day coverage, and in this Brenner piece he recounts his version of the Capa-LIFE D-Day myth once more. Shortly thereafter, on May 29, 2014, TIME Inc. — the corporation that had commissioned and published Capa’s D-Day images back in 1944 — posted a video at its website celebrating those photographs, which some refer to as “the magnificent eleven.”

A division of Magnum Photos, the picture agency Capa founded with his colleagues in 1947 (the same year he published his memoir), produced that video for TIME. The International Center of Photography licensed the use of Capa’s images for that purpose. And none other than John Morris, by then 97 years old and living in Paris, provided the voice-over, his boilerplate narrative of those events. In short, this video involved the combined energies of the individual and institutional forces involved in the creation and propagation of this myth — what I came to define as the Capa Consortium.

The Capa Consortium, Keynote slide, © 2015 by A. D. Coleman

Assorted elements of those two virtually identical versions of the standard story, Brenner’s and Time Inc.’s, struck J. Ross Baughman as illogical and implausible. The youngest photojournalist ever to win a Pulitzer Prize (in 1978, at the age of 24), Baughman is an experienced combat photographer who has worked in war zones in the Middle East, El Salvador, Rhodesia, and elsewhere. As the founder of the picture agency Visions, which specialized in such work, he’s also an experienced picture editor. Ross contacted me to ask if I would publish his analysis at my blog, Photocritic International, as a Guest Post. I agreed.

In the editorial process of fact-checking and sourcing Baughman’s skeptical response to the standard narrative provided by Morris in that video, my own bulls**t detector began to sound the alarm. I realized that Baughman’s critique raised more questions than it answered, requiring much more research and writing than I could reasonably request from him. I decided to pursue those issues further myself.

This immersed me in the Capa literature for the first time. Speaking as a scholar, that came as a rude awakening. The most immediate shock hit as I read through a half-dozen print and web versions of Morris’s account of those events — in Brenner’s 2014 puff piece, in Morris’s 1998 memoir, and in various interviews, profiles, and articles — and watched at least as many online videos and films featuring Morris rehashing this tale. I realized that the only portion of this story that Morris claimed to have witnessed firsthand, the loss of Capa’s films in LIFE’s London darkroom, could not possibly have happened the way he said it did.

In retrospect, I cannot understand how so many people in the field, working photographers among them, accepted uncritically the unlikely, unprecedented story, concocted by Morris, of Capa’s 35mm Kodak Super-XX film emulsion melting in a film-drying cabinet on the night of June 7, 1944.

Anyone familiar with analog photographic materials and normal darkroom practice worldwide must consider this fabulation incredible on its face. Coil heaters in wooden film-drying cabinets circa 1944 did not ever produce high levels of heat; black & white film emulsions of that time did not melt even after brief exposure to high heat; and the doors of film-drying cabinets are normally kept closed, not open, since the primary function of such cabinets is to prevent dust from adhering to the sticky emulsion of wet film.

No one with darkroom experience could have come up with this notion; only someone entirely ignorant of photographic materials and processes — like Morris — could have imagined it. Embarrassingly, none of that set my own alarm bells ringing until I started to fact-check the article by Baughman that initiated this project, close to fifty years after I first read that fable in Capa’s memoir.

This is one of several big lies permeating the literature on Robert Capa. Certainly Capa knew it was untrue when he published it in his memoir; he had gotten his start in photography as a darkroom assistant in Simon Guttmann’s Dephot photo agency in Berlin. And Cornell Capa also knew that; he had cut his eyeteeth in the medium first by developing the films of his brother, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and David Seymour in Paris, then by working in the darkroom of the Pix photo agency in New York, then by moving on to fill the same role at LIFE magazine before becoming a photographer in his own right. My belated recognition of that fact led me to ask the obvious next question: If that didn’t happen to Capa’s 35mm D-Day films, what did? And if all these people were willing to lie about this, what were they covering up?

So, building on Baughman’s initial provocation, I began drafting my own extensions of what he’d initiated — and our investigation was launched.

In December of 2017 I published the 74th chapter of our research project. You’ll find all of it online at my blog; the easiest way to get to the Capa D-Day material is by using the url capadday.com. During these years I have become intimately familiar with a large chunk of what others have written and said about Capa and his D-Day coverage.

In my opinion, the bulk of the published writing and presentations in other formats (films, videos, exhibitions) devoted to the life and work of photojournalist Robert Capa qualifies as hagiography, not scholarship. Capa’s own account of his World War II experiences, Slightly Out of Focus, consistently proves itself inaccurate and unreliable, masking its sly self-aggrandizement with wry humor and self-deprecation. Morris’s memoir repeats Capa’s combat stories unquestioningly, adding to those his own dubious saga of the “ruined” negatives.

Richard Whelan, “This Is War! Robert Capa at Work” (2007), cover

Richard Whelan’s books, widely considered the key reference works on Capa, simply quote or paraphrase Capa and Morris uncritically, perhaps because they were sponsored, subsidized, published, and endorsed most prominently and extensively by the estate of Robert Capa and the Fund for Concerned Photography (both controlled by Capa’s younger brother Cornell) and the International Center of Photography, founded by Cornell, who also served as ICP’s first director.

Produced in most other cases under Cornell’s watchful eye or the supervision of one or another participant in the Capa Consortium, the remainder of the serious, scholarly literature on Robert Capa has almost all been subject to Cornell’s approval and reliant on either the problematic principal reference works or on Robert Capa materials stored in Cornell’s private home in Manhattan, with access dependent on his consent. Consequently, it constitutes an inherently limited corpus of contaminated research, fatally corrupted by its unswerving allegiance to both its patron and its patron saint. Such bespoke scholarship becomes automatically suspect.

Cornell Capa, interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein, 1980, screenshot

The second failing of this heap of compromised materials resides in its reliance on untrustworthy and far from neutral sources: Robert Capa, with a demonstrated penchant for self-mythification; his younger brother Cornell, a classic “art widower” with every reason to enhance his brother’s reputation; and Robert’s close friend and Cornell’s, John Morris, whose own stature in the field premises itself on the Capa D-Day legend. Only Alex Kershaw’s unauthorized Capa biography, Blood and Champagne, published in 2002, maintains its independence from Cornell’s influence, but at the cost of losing access to the primary research materials and consequently reiterating the erroneous information in the accounts of Capa, Morris, and Whelan. Virtually everything else published about Capa, including those stories in the mass media that appear predictably every five years along with celebrations of D-Day, unquestioningly presents the prevailing myth.

This Capa literature suffers from a third fundamental flaw: Those generating it (with the exception of Capa himself and his brother Cornell), have no direct, hands-on knowledge of photographic production, no military background (significant in that Robert Capa’s most important work falls under the heading of combat photography), and no forensic skills pertinent to the analysis of photographic materials. Nor were they encouraged by their patron, Cornell Capa, to make up for those deficiencies by involving others with those competencies in their projects. Instead, their privileged relationship to the primary materials, along with the availability of a prominent and well-funded platform at ICP, enabled them to effectively invent whatever suited them, pleased their benefactor, and served their purposes.

Responsible Capa scholarship, therefore, must begin by distrusting the extant literature, turning instead to the photographs themselves and relevant documents that the Capa estate and ICP do not control and to which they therefore cannot prohibit access. Those materials lie at the core of our research project.

Here’s a short summary of what we’ve found:

Capa sailed across the English Channel on the U.S.S. Samuel Chase.

According to the official history of the U.S. Coast Guard, fifteen waves of LCVPs (commonly called Higgins boats) carrying troops left the U.S.S. Samuel Chase for Omaha Beach that morning. Capa almost certainly rode in with Col. Taylor and his staff, the command group of Company E of the 16th Infantry Regiment, U.S. 1st Division, to which Capa had been assigned. They constituted part of the thirteenth wave.

That wave arrived at the Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach at 8:15, a half hour after the last of the 16th Infantry Regiment’s nine rifle companies. We can see from Capa’s images that numerous waves of troops preceded them.

Using distinctive landmarks visible in Capa’s photos, Charles Herrick has pinpointed exactly where Capa landed on Easy Red: the beach at Colleville-sur-Mer. Gap Assault Team 10 had charge of the obstacles in that sector. An existing exit off this sector made it possible to reach the top of the bluffs with relative ease. Col. Taylor would become famous for announcing to the hesitant troops he found there, “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die — now let’s get the hell out of here,” and urging them up the Colleville-sur-Mer draw to the bluffs.

Robert Capa, CS frame 4, neg. 32, detail, annotated

Fortuitously, that stretch of Easy Red represented a seam in the German defenses, a weak point at the far end of the effective range of two widely separated German blockhouses. Both cannon fire and small-arms fire there proved relatively light — one reason for the success of Gap Assault Team 10 in clearing obstacles in that area. This explains why, contrary to LIFE’s captions and Capa’s later narrative, his images show no carnage, no floating bodies and body parts, no discarded equipment, and no bullet or shell splashes. This also explains why the Allies broke through early at that very point.

Capa did not run out of film, nor did his camera jam, nor did seawater damage either his cameras or his film. In his memoir, Capa first implies that he exposed at most two full rolls of 35mm film — one roll in each of his two Contax II rangefinder cameras, 72 frames in all — at Omaha Beach. By the end of that chapter, this has somehow grown to “one hundred and six pictures in all, [of which] only eight were salvaged.” John Morris claims he received 4 rolls of Omaha Beach negatives from Capa. We find no reason to believe that Capa made more than the ten 35mm images of which we have physical evidence.

Capa made the first five of those images while standing for almost two minutes on the ramp of the landing craft that brought him there. In them we see Capa’s traveling companions carrying not small-arms assault weapons but bulky oilskin-wrapped bundles, most likely radios and other supplies for the command post they meant to establish.

Capa made his sixth exposure from behind a mined iron “hedgehog,” one of many such obstacles protecting what Nazi Gen. Erwin Rommel called the “Atlantic Wall.” He made his last four exposures — including “The Face in the Surf” — from behind Armored Assault Vehicle 10, which was sitting in the surf shelling the gun emplacements on the bluffs.

Capa described Armored Assault Vehicle 10, which appears on the left-hand side of several of his images, as “one of our half-burnt amphibious tanks.” In fact, it was a modified American tank, a “wading Sherman,” not amphibious (merely waterproofed to the top of its treads) and not burnt out; later images made by others of that stretch of Easy Red show this tank undamaged, closer to the dry beach, and apparently in action. Taken in conjunction with the known presence at that point of Gap Assault Team 10, the large numeral 10 on this vehicle’s rear vent suggests that it was a so-called “tank dozer,” one of which landed with each demolition team that morning. The U.S. Army had modified these tanks by adding detachable bulldozer “blades,” so that they could clear the debris after the engineers blew up the obstacles.

Not incidentally, both the time and place of Capa’s arrival on Easy Red contradict the current identification of Huston “Hu” Riley as “The Face in the Surf” in Capa’s penultimate exposure on Easy Red, as well as the earlier identification of “The Face in the Surf” as Pfc. Edward J. Regan. Both these soldiers arrived at different times than Capa, and on different sections of the beach. Thus the identity of “The Face in the Surf” remains unknown.

After no more than 30 minutes on the beach, and perhaps as little as 15 minutes there, Capa ran to a landing craft, LCI(L)-94, where he took shelter before its departure around 0900.

Capa claimed that he reached the dry beach and then experienced a panic attack, causing him to escape from the combat zone. We must consider the possibility that he suffered from what they then called “shell shock” and we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But we must also consider the possibility that, even before setting forth that morning, Capa made a calculated decision to leave the battlefield at the first opportunity, in order to get his films to London in time to make the deadline for LIFE’s next issue; if he missed that deadline, any images of the landing would become old news and his effort and risks in making them would have been for naught.

No fewer than four witnesses place Capa on this vessel, LCI(L)-94. The first three were crew members Charles Jarreau, Clifford W. Lewis, and Victor Haboush. According to Capa, once he reached LCI(L)-94 he put away his Contax II, working thenceforth only with his Rolleiflex. One of the 2–1/4″ images he made while aboard this vessel, published in the D-Day feature story in LIFE, shows Haboush assisting a medic treating a casualty.

Robert Capa, “Untitled (Medics at Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944).” Annotated screenshot from magnumphotos.com. Victor Haboush indicated by red arrow.

The fourth witness to Capa’s presence on LCI(L)-94 was U.S. Coast Guard Chief Photographer’s Mate David T. Ruley. Ruley, a Coast Guard cinematographer assigned to film the invasion from the vantage point of this vessel, coincidentally documented its arrival at the very same spot at which Capa landed, recording the same scene from a perspective slightly different from Capa’s at approximately the same time Capa made his ten exposures.

Robert Capa, “The Face in the Surf” (l); David Ruley, frame from D-Day film (r)

Ruley’s color footage appears frequently in D-Day documentaries. Charles Herrick and I verified that these film clips described conditions at that same sector of Easy Red while Capa was there. Ruley’s name on his slateboard at the start of several clips enabled us to learn a bit more about him and his assignment.

Robert Capa, center rear, aboard LCVP from USS Samuel Chase, with camera during transfer of casualty, D-Day, frame from film by David T. Ruley

Most importantly, this resulted in the discovery of brief glimpses of Capa himself, holding Ruley’s slateboard in one scene and photographing the offloading of a casualty from LCI(L)-94 to another vessel in the second clip. These are the only known film or still images of Capa on D-Day, the only film images of him in any combat situation, and among the few known color film clips of him.

Robert Capa holding cinematographer’s slate aboard LCI(L)-94, D-Day, frame from film by David T. Ruley

Cinematographer David T. Ruley, illustrations for first-person account of D-Day experiences, Movie Makers magazine, 6/1/45

By noon the battle there was largely over, and Capa had missed most of it.

He made the return trip to England aboard the U.S.S. Samuel Chase.

Arriving back in Weymouth on the morning of June 7, Capa had to wait for the offloading of wounded from the Chase before he got ashore sometime around 1 p.m. He sent all his film via courier to picture editor John Morris at LIFE’s London office, instead of carrying it himself to ensure its safe delivery and thus enable Morris to face with confidence the imminent, absolute deadline of 9 a.m. on June 8.

As a result, Capa’s films did not reach the London office till 9 p.m. that night, putting Morris and the darkroom staff in crisis mode.

Capa’s shipment included substantial pre-invasion reportage of the troops boarding and crossing the English Channel, his skimpy coverage of the battle on Omaha Beach, and several images of the beach seen from a distance, made while departing on LCI(L)-94, as well as photos of medics tending to the wounded on the return trip aboard the Chase.

In addition to several rolls of 120 film, and a few 4×5″ negatives made on shipboard with a borrowed Speed Graphic, Capa sent Morris at least five rolls of 35mm film, and possibly a sixth.

These include two rolls made while boarding and on deck in the daytime, two more of a below-decks briefing, a (missing) roll of images made on deck at twilight during the crossing, and the ten Omaha Beach exposures, plus four sheets of sketchy handwritten caption notes.

All of these films — including all of Capa’s Omaha Beach negatives — got processed normally, without incident. The surviving negatives, housed in the Capa Archive at ICP, show no sign of heat damage. Thus no darkroom disaster occurred, no D-Day images got lost … and none got “saved” or “salvaged.”

In his memoir, Capa wrote that by the time he got back to Omaha Beach on June 8 and joined his press corps colleagues, “I had been reported dead by a sergeant who had seen my body floating on the water with my cameras around my neck. I had been missing for forty-eight hours, my death had become official, and my obituaries had just been released by the censor.” No correspondent has ever corroborated that story. No such obituary ever saw print (as it surely would have), no copy thereof has ever surfaced, and no record of it exists in the censors’ logs. Purest fiction, meant for the silver screen.

So much for the myth.

We learned a few other things along the way:

LIFE magazine ran the best five of Capa’s ten 35mm Omaha Beach images in the D-Day issue, datelined June 19, 1944, which hit the newsstands on June 12. (The other five were all mediocre variants of the ones they published.)

“Beachheads of Normandy,” LIFE magazine feature on D-Day with Robert Capa photos, June 19, 1944, p. 25 (detail)

The accompanying story claimed that “As he waded out to get aboard [LCI(L)-94, Capa’s] cameras got thoroughly soaked. By some miracle, one of them was not too badly damaged and he was able to keep making pictures.” That wasn’t true, of course. Capa returned immediately to Normandy, landing back there on June 8 and continuing to use the same undamaged equipment with which he’d started out.

No sheet of caption notes for Capa’s ten Omaha Beach images in Capa’s own hand exists in the International Center of Photography’s Capa Archive. Presumably he provided none. Morris himself must have provided some — drafted hastily on the night of June 7 — for both the set that he sent to LIFE and the set that he provided to the press pool; that was required of him by his employer and by the pool. As for the captions that appeared with Capa’s pictures in the June 19 issue, Richard Whelan writes, “Dennis Flanagan, the assistant associate editor who wrote the captions and text that accompanied Capa’s images in LIFE, recalls that he depended on the New York Times for background information, and for specifics he interpreted what he saw in the photographs.”

Thus the wildly inaccurate captions that (to use Roland Barthes’s term) “anchor” Capa’s images in LIFE’s D-Day issue, and on which most subsequent republications of these images rely, either got revised from John Morris’s last-minute inventions in London or written entirely from scratch by someone in the New York office, even further removed from the action.

LIFE’s captions indicated that the soldiers seen gathered around the obstacles were hiding from enemy fire. That was also untrue. Instead, we discovered that their insignias identify them as members of Combined Demolitions Unit 10, part of the Engineer Special Task Force, busy at their assigned task of blowing up the obstacles planted in the surf by the Germans in order to clear lanes for the incoming landing craft, so that they could deposit more troops and materiel on the beachhead.

Robert Capa, D-Day negative 35, detail, annotated

The demolition team that cleared this section of Omaha Beach, Easy Red, had more success than all the other demolition teams combined. In many ways, they saved the day for the Allies — at a high cost: these engineers as a group suffered the highest casualty rate of any class of troops on Omaha Beach. Capa’s failure to provide caption notes for these exposures resulted in 70 years of misidentification of these heroic engineers as terrified assault troops pinned down and hiding behind those “hedgehogs.”

We learned that ICP had a habit of obstructing any research into the life and work of Robert Capa that did not conform to Cornell Capa’s and Richard Whelan’s censorious requirements. ICP refused to allow British military historian Alex Kershaw to access any of the materials in the Capa Archive, and refused to grant his publishers permission to reproduce any Capa images in his unauthorized biography, published in 2002. ICP also refused to allow French documentary filmmaker Patrick Jeudy to use any of the primary Capa materials they controlled in his remarkable 2004 film, Robert Capa, l’homme qui voulait croire à sa légende (“Robert Capa: The Man Who Believed His Own Legend”). Upon the film’s release, Cornell Capa persuaded John Morris to sue Jeudy in France, in an unsuccessful attempt to block its distribution.

Robert Capa, “ruined” frames from D-Day, June 6, 1944. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

We also discovered that TIME Inc. had authorized the creation of unlabelled digital fakes of Capa’s supposedly “ruined” and discarded Omaha Beach negatives, for insertion into that May 2014 video commissioned from Magnum in Motion, the multimedia division of Magnum Photos, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of D-Day. Our disclosure of this deception forced TIME to acknowledge the fakery and revise that video overnight.

Richard Whelan, “Robert Capa: In Love and War” (2003), screenshot

Finally, we discovered that Capa’s authorized biographer, the late Richard Whelan, lied outright about the emulsion sliding on Capa’s D-Day negatives (among other things). And Cynthia Young, his successor as curator of the Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography, not only repeated his lie but plagiarized it in a 2013 text of her own.

Cynthia Young, “The Story Behind Robert Capa’s Pictures of D-Day,” June 6, 2013, screenshot from ICP website 2014–06–12 at 11.38.23 AM

Many of Capa’s rolls of film from the 1940s — and not just those he made on D-Day — show the exposure overlapping the sprocket holes. This resulted from a mismatch between Kodak 35mm film cassettes and the design of the Contax II, the camera Capa used that day, and not from any damage to the films.

Top: Contax camera loaded with shorter Kodak cassette showing sprocket holes being exposed. Bottom: Capa negative shown with proper orientation as it would have appeared in the camera. Note exposed sprocket holes. Top photo © 2015 by Rob McElroy.

Since the Capa Archive at ICP houses all those negatives and their contact sheets, both Whelan and Young have known this all along. Given the official position that first Whelan and now Young have occupied at ICP, they are de facto the world’s foremost authorities on Robert Capa. As such they represent, with regrettable accuracy, the deplorable condition of Capa scholarship in our time.

Cynthia Young, “Morning Joe,” MSNBC, 6–13–14, screenshot

The myth of Capa’s D-Day and the fate of his Omaha Beach negatives falls apart as soon as one compares its narrative to the military documentation of that epic battle. It collapses entirely when one examines closely the physical evidence — those photographs and their negatives.

The promulgation of that myth by the Capa Consortium, all of whose members have a vested financial and public-relations interest in furthering the myth, has proved itself calculated, systematic, duplicitous, and self-serving. Its voluntary dissemination by others, including reputable scholars and journalists, has shown those authors as lazy, careless, and professionally irresponsible. The Capa D-Day myth serves as a classic example of the genesis and evolution of a falsified version of history that, with its emphasis on the exploits of individual actors, distracts us from paying attention to the machinations of the corporate structures through which information must pass and get filtered before reaching the public — powerful institutions with agendas of their own.

I would like to think we have made a sufficiently convincing case that no one can credibly tell the standard Capa D-Day story again, at least not without acknowledging our contrary narrative. After all, our investigation forced a reluctant John Morris, the most energetic and vocal proponent of the legend, to recant its central components on Christiane Amanpour’s CNN show in the fall of 2014.

Most recently, in a Lensblog piece published in the New York Times on December 6, 2016 — just a day before his 100th birthday, and months before his death in Paris in July 2017 — Morris once again admitted that he’d never actually seen any heat-damaged 35mm negatives; that Capa may have only made the ten surviving images; and that he may have stayed on Omaha Beach only long enough to make them.

As for the institutions involved in perpetuating the myth: On June 6, 2016, ICP published this post on the institution’s Facebook page: “During the D-Day landing at Omaha beach, Robert Capa shot four rolls of 35mm film — only 11 frames survived. By accident, a darkroom worker in London ruined the majority of the film.” Since then, grudgingly, as a result of my public prodding, ICP has begun at last to make available to researchers the papers of Cornell Capa, promising to also permit access sometime in the near future to the papers of Richard Whelan, along with the Jozefa Stuart interviews from the early 1960s on which Whelan based much of his work.

Yet, as recently as October 2018, Cynthia Young published this statement in a special issue of the French newspaper Le Monde: “Capa, surrounded by explosions of bombs and bursts of machine guns, took photos in the water for a short while. … He expected his films to have been damaged by the water — he was squatting in the sea, troubled and agitated, tinged with blood. A few weeks later, he learned that all but ten images had been destroyed in the darkroom or during the shooting.” (My translation — A.D.C.).

Cynthia Young, “Les deux icônes de Capa,” Le Monde Hors-Série, 50 images qui ont marquél’histoire, October 2018, pp. 78–79

So there’s more work to be done on this subject. For the time being, our investigation has drawn to a close. In this country, though the Society of Professional Journalists honored our team with the 2014 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Research About Journalism, our work has received little attention, aside from a feature article in the official journal of the National Press Photographers Association, an article so rife with conflict of interest that the watchdog website iMediaEthics published a lengthy dissection of it. We have had better luck abroad; the project went viral in France in the summer of 2015, resulting in extensive coverage there in major periodicals and TV stations, as well as responses in Spain, Italy, the U.K., Brazil, and elsewhere.

Vincent Lavoie, L’Affaire Capa. Le procès d’une icône, 2017

I take heart from the fact that the two most recent books on Capa respond in different ways to our investigation. One, a graphic novel by Florent Silloray, published originally in France and now available in English, is (so far as I know) the only book on Capa of any kind to omit entirely the story of the darkroom disaster in London. The other, a meditation by French-Canadian Vincent Lavoie on the challenges to Capa’s 1937 “Falling Soldier” image, concludes with what its author and publisher must have felt was an obligatory commentary on our parallel research.

It took 70 years and the collaborative energies of powerful institutions and individuals to embed this fable in our cultural consciousness. Clearly, we still have much work to do if we hope to dislodge this fiction from the mythology of photojournalism and photo history — not to mention the larger D-Day myth into which it has become so thoroughly woven. But at least that process has begun — just in time for the 75th anniversary of D-Day, coming up in June 2019.

With minor revisions, this is the complete text of a lecture delivered on Friday, March 2, 2018 at the Society for Photographic Education 55th Annual Conference at the Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia, PA.) Its first English-language publication was in Exposure, the journal of the society.

About the author: A. D. Coleman has published 8 books and more than 2500 essays on photography and related subjects. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Formerly a columnist for the Village Voice, the New York Times, and the New York Observer, Coleman has contributed to ARTnews, Art On Paper, Technology Review, Juliet Art Magazine (Italy), European Photography (Germany), La Fotografia (Spain), and Art Today (China). His work has been translated into 21 languages and published in 31 countries. In 2002 he received the Culture Prize of the German Photographic Society, the first critic of photography ever so honored. In 2010 he received the J Dudley Johnston Award from the Royal Photographic Society (U.K.) for “sustained excellence in writing about photography.” In 2014 he received the Society for Photographic Education’s Insight Award for lifetime contribution to the field, and in 2015 the Society of Professional Journalists SDX Award for Research About Journalism. Coleman’s widely read blog “Photocritic International” appears at photocritic.com.

from Photography News https://petapixel.com/2019/02/16/debunking-the-myths-of-robert-capa-on-d-day/

NPA rebel's body exhumed in Bohol

#PHnews: NPA rebel's body exhumed in Bohol

CEBU CITY – Authorities in Bohol exhumed on Thursday a decomposing body of a suspected member of the New People's Army in Barangay Rizal, Batuan town in Bohol, an Army officer said.

The body of a certain "Ka Willy" who is also known as "Dax" and "Ar-Ar", 43, was recovered at around 8 a.m. in Sitio Tubod Soso by members of the Bohol Provincial Police Office’s Scene of the Crime Operation (SOCO) and the 47th Infantry “Katapatan” Battalion.

1st Lt. Elma Grace Remonde, civil military operations officer of 47th IB, said the body of the suspected NPA rebel was discovered after Crisologo "Ka Sam" Guimaras, a suspected terrorist who was captured during the encounter between the troops of the battalion and NPA members in Sevilla town last June 26, revealed to them the burial site.

“Upon hearing from him (Guimaras) that Ka Willy was buried somewhere in Barangay Rizal, the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the 47th IB proceeded in the area for exhumation,” she said.

Rizal Barangay chairman Rolando Pataca and some members of the media in Bohol witnessed the exhumation of the remains around 200 meters away from the captured enemy's lair in Batuan.

Guimaras told authorities that Ka Willy was the vice squad leader of Squad 3, Bohol Party Committee led by Domingo Compoc or “Commander Cobra”.

Based on accounts, Ka Willy wanted to apply for a leave sometime in 2019 so that he could see his family in Negros for it was already nine years since he left them and joined the armed movement in the mountains.

However, Compoc allegedly rejected his request to go home together with some of his companions.

Remonde said authorities could not ascertain which province in Negros Island is Ka Willy’s address but they are now investigating his place of origin based on the revelations of Guimaras.

The Army officer said Ka Willy could not have gone home to see his family alone as he was not capable of taking a trip without a companion, considering that he could neither read nor write.

Investigators are now checking if Ka Willy shot himself in August of 2019 out of desperation or was murdered.

The SOCO team is working to establish the true identity of the dead rebel. (PNA)

  ***

References:

* Philippine News Agency. "NPA rebel's body exhumed in Bohol." Philippine News Agency. https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1109223 (accessed July 17, 2020 at 04:44AM UTC+14).

* Philippine News Agency. "NPA rebel's body exhumed in Bohol." Archive Today. https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1109223 (archived).

Liberalism is dead and what to do about it

From our overstocked archives Sam Smith, 2011 - As I was listening recently to a Bob Edwards interview with Kirsten Downey, biographer of the New Deal labor secretary, Frances Perkins, it struck me that the first woman ever to hold cabinet office in American history had played a key role in getting more accomplished than the last three decades of American liberalism combined - things like the Civilian Conservation Corps, Public Works Administration, Social Security, federal insurance for bank accounts, welfare, unemployment insurance, child labor laws, bargaining rights for labor, restrictions on overtime, a 40 hour work week and a minimum wage. Perkins’ colleagues in the New Deal also brought us legal alcohol, regulation of the stock exchanges, the Soil Conservation Service, national parks and monuments, the Tennessee Valley Authority, rural electrification, the FHA, a big increase in hospital beds, and the Small Business Administration. Add to that the numerous achievements of the Great Society including bilingual education, civil rights legislation, community action agencies, Head Start, job Corps, the national endowments for arts and humanities, Teacher Corps, anti-poverty programs, nutrition assistance, Medicare and Medicaid. Next to this, post-1980 liberalism seems at best pathetic and at worst a major betrayal of its own past. Even the otherwise crummy Nixon administration did better – bringing us EPA, affirmative action, the Clean Air Act, the first Earth Day, indexing Social Security for inflation, Supplemental Security income, OSHA, and healthcare reform. Future historians seeking to learn why America so easily surrendered its democratic traditions and constitutional government to a rabid right will find plenty to study in the rise of a liberal aristocracy that became increasingly disinterested in its own historic values. Like all aristocracies, it came to exist primarily to protect itself, had an impermeable faith in its own virtue, and held in contempt those who did not share its values or accept its hegemony. For many years, 20th century liberalism was saved from becoming an aristocracy because of the dominance of constituencies such as labor, European socialists and ethnic minorities. By the 1980s, however, these constituencies - thanks in no small part to successful liberal policies - had advanced socially and economically to the point that they no longer functioned as a massive reminder of what liberalism was meant to be about. With the end of the Great Society, Democrats began a steady retreat from liberalism climaxing in Clinton and Obama with their systematic dismantling of liberal programs and paradigms. As Glen Ford, editor of the Black Agenda Report, put it recently, “President Obama seems positively eager to dismantle the safety nets put in place in the thirties and strengthened by a black-led movement in the sixties.” Among the greatest victims of this retreat have been economic decency, social democracy and civil liberties. It was not that the new liberal aristocrats actually opposed them; it just didn't matter much to them. Liberalism was no longer a matter of masses yearning to breathe free, but of boomers yearning for an SUV and millennials for a new I-Something. While there were still repeated expressions of faith in a declining number of icons such as diversity, abortion, and the environment, the fact was that the liberal elite had become far more characterized by its capacity for self-defense than by its concern or action for others. Most striking was the disappearing interest in those at the bottom. Liberal city councils went after the homeless, pandered to developers, and engaged in other forms of socio-economic cleansing. The Clinton administration attacked welfare in a manner once limited to the Republican right; prison populations soared without a murmur from the liberals; Democrats supported without question a cruel and unconstitutional war on drugs; they joined the war on two centuries of public education; and liberal media aristocrats prided themselves in faux realpolitik and patronizing prescriptions for the masses. Obama gave freely to the banks but hardly noticed the foreclosed. The trend produced remarkable twists of liberal values. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus backed the war on drugs; the leaders of NOW repeatedly defended a sexually predatory male in the White House. And liberal academia provided all purpose justification through the magic rationalization of postmodernism. Through it all, the liberal aristocracy was the dog that didn't bark. Just as Sherlock Holmes' creature failed to warn of an intruder, so America's liberal leadership failed repeatedly to warn of infringements of civil liberties, of unconstitutional acts and legislation, or to rise to the defense of people beyond its own class. When the liberal aristocracy backed the war on drugs, happily sacrificed national and local sovereignty to multinational corporations, yawned as the Clintons disassembled their own former cause, and looked the other way as Obama expanded the police state, it was clear that this atrophied elite would not handle a real crisis. Thought without action is the coitus interruptus of the mind, which may be why liberals produced so few progeny. A politics so heavily grounded in intellectual considerations as opposed to human experience, runs the constant risk of losing its bearings. A wiser approach was espoused by Julius Nyerere who argued that the true revolutionary acted as one of thought and thought as one of action. Another great African activist, Nelson Mandela, credited cattle farming rather than universities as his inspiration. Moving herds around, he explained, had taught him how to lead from behind. Too great an intellectual bias turns citizens into data -- economic or sociological aggregates rather than human organisms. And it produces bizarre, incomprehensible, ineffective legislation like the current health care law. Politics involves real people and it helps to speak real people talk. Many liberals have a tin ear for their presumed constituency. This involves more than a choice of words; the over-refined language is clouded with abstractions while disdaining the anecdotes and metaphors that every good preacher knows is the easiest way to propel a message. I sometimes think that liberalism died when, in the last few decades, its advocates started talking about “infrastructure” instead of public works. The language of obfuscation added to the divide between liberals and others. Thomas Jefferson said that people "by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: “1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. “2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise, depository of the public interests." There is little doubt as to which of these parties many liberals belong. Rhetoric notwithstanding, too often those leading liberal America believe they were born to rule. In fact, their profound self-assurance on this score helps to explain another anomaly of liberals and leftists: the frequency with which you will find them -- Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are names that spring to mind -- cavorting with those whose politics should be an anathema. The reason is simply that the blood of their entitlement is thicker than that of their ideology. What really ties Washington together and unites it against the rest of the country is not policy but a common understanding of the sort of person who should be in charge. Now the economy has fallen, our world status collapsed, our Constitution tattered, and our civil liberties deteriorating by the day. And in the place of a quietly incompetent alliance between conservative and liberal elites, we now find a rabid Republicanism rising unlike anything seen before – the most extremist mainstream party in our history. The collapse of liberalism, of course, is only one cause – less important, to be sure, than the cult of Reaganism, reckless capitalism or Citizens Unite, perhaps the worst Supreme Court decision ever. But this much we know: you cannot win in the eighth or ninth round if you give up in the first or second. At the very least, liberal disintegration opened doors sooner and wider through which the rabid right could easily enter. And there are scary precedents. For example, Article 48 of the constitution of the Weimar Republic stated, "In case public safety is seriously threatened or disturbed, the Reich President may take the measures necessary to reestablish law and order, if necessary using armed force. In the pursuit of this aim, he may suspend the civil rights described in articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153, partially or entirely. The Reich President must inform the Reichstag immediately about all measures undertaken . . . The measures must be suspended immediately if the Reichstag so demands." It was this article that Hitler used to peacefully establish his dictatorship. And why was it so peaceful and easy? Because, according to historian Thomas Childers, the 'democratic" Weimar Republic had already used it 57 times prior to Hitler's ascendancy. There are eerie similarities between Article 48 and the Patriot Act and warrantless powers being granted law enforcement in America. Yet traditional liberals have been astonishingly passive in the face of this huge assault on the Constitution. And get incensed if you mention the word facism. Progressives, populists, Greens, socialists and others fed up with the bipartisan crisis of our politics need to make a clearly visible break with dysfunctional liberalism and define a new way of approaching our problems. Here are a few things that could help it happen: - Put economic issues at the top of the list. If you review the historical examples above you will find an overwhelmingly concern for improving the economic life of ordinary Americans. Today’s liberals, if they care, don’t have much in the way of suggestions; witness the stimulus program that overwhelmingly favored Wall Street over ordinary Americans. - If you wish to win people’s support, argue with them, encourage them, heal them, teach them but don’t insult them. Raise hell against the big guys but don’t abuse the ordinary citizen. Show them the way, not the door. Today’s liberals repeatedly castigate those they should be recruiting. - Build communities not clubs. Liberalism used to be street theater. Now it’s a private club. You can’t build a movement with a club. - Stop federalizing everything. There’s no evidence that it works and people don’t like it. Adopt the principle that government should be carried out at the lowest practical level and you’ll be surprised how many new friends you make. - Elaborate processes, data collection and rule-making are crummy substitutes for effective policies. Yet they define liberal politics today. - Encourage reciprocal liberty: I can’t have my liberty if you don’t have yours. So some get their guns; others get abortion. It’s part of the essential nature of being an American: sharing space with those with whom you don’t agree. - Build new constituencies issue by issue. Many of your allies will disagree with you on other things but so what? One of the reasons that liberals are in such trouble is that they support diversity of skin color but not of thought. Besides when people come together on one issue they discover that the things that divided them aren’t as important as they thought. - A major cause of violence in America is the completely failed drug war. Liberals have largely ignored this issue. - Bring back labor unions, the most positive non-governmental institution in America’s past century. Yes, they need to improve their act, but that won’t happen until more people get involved. Encourage them to take new approaches such as pre-organizing the non-unionized on, say, a AARP model or creating co-ops as the USW is currently looking into. But fight against the assault on the folks who brought you the weekend. - Stop supporting wars just because a Democratic president is leading them. Imagine if the money we’re spending in Afghanistan was being used to help the American economy, its schools, its transportation and the less fortunate. Both our economy and our lives would be much better. - Help small business. Neither of the two major parties do, so you can make a lot of new friends this way. And, along the way, end corporate personhood. - Unrig our elections. End campaign bribery by public financing and make it constitutionally clear that corporations are not persons. Press for instant runoff voting. - Keep it simple. Remember that the media is not comfortable with complexity. - Give it a name. You know, something simple like the Dunkin Donuts Party that even the media can understand. That’s just a short list of the sort of things that would separate a new left from liberalism. Groups of disaffected progressives, Greens and issue activists could use the Internet to compile a short list policies that would define a new movement for a post-liberal era and start to rewrite the political chart. As it stands, we know that liberals hate Palin, Bachman, and the Koch Brothers. But what they really stand for remains a mystery. If you think there are not enough of us to create a new movement with clear goals, consider this: over the past few years polls have found that a majority of Americans support: Gay marriage, opposition to the drug war, legalizing marijuana, ending corporate personhood, increasing taxes on the wealthy, leaving Social Security alone, ending capital punishment, universal health coverage, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, doing something about climate change, and public campaign financing, Further, resolutions critical of the Patriot Act have been passed in 378 communities in 43 states including six state-wide resolutions. On many of these issues, traditional liberals have often been lazy, passive, indifferent, opposed or afraid to do anything. And the media has kept this real majority view well hidden. We need to change this, but we can’t do it by looking the other way or hiding under the table. You can’t do it sucking up to Democratic presidents who expand wars and send welfare to Wall Street instead of helping those in real trouble. You can’t do it pretending that we’re not losing our civil liberties. Traditional liberalism must be put to sleep and replaced with something that recovers the spirit and ideals that it lost or discarded along the way. The liberal approach has become elitist; the alternative is populist. One draws from European history and thought; the other is rooted in American experience. One favors a centralized state and believes in the beneficence of large bureaucracies; the other is skeptical of grand institutions and keeps pulling decisions back towards the community based democracy. One seeks confrontation; the other consensus. One is polar; the other holistic. One is rational; the other spiritual. And one is dead, and the other is still waiting to be born. at 8/02/2018

<!– //www.cnbc.com/staticContent/showads.js –>

HOME

EDITION

News

Economy

Finance

Health Care

Real Estate

Wealth

Autos

Earnings

Energy

Life

Media

Politics

Retail

Commentary

Special Reports

Asia

Europe

CFO Council

Markets

Pre-Markets

U.S.

Asia

Europe

Stocks

Commodities

Currencies

Cryptocurrency

Bonds

Funds

ETFs

Investing

Buffett Archive

Trading Nation

Trader Talk

Financial Advisors

Personal Finance

Etf Street

Futures Now

Options Action

Portfolio

Watchlist

Stock Screener

Fund Screener

Tech

Mobile

Social Media

Enterprise

Gaming

Cybersecurity

Tech Guide

Make It

Entrepreneurs

Leadership

Careers

Money

Specials

Primetime

Video

Top Video

Latest Video

U.S. Video

Asia Video

Europe Video

CEO Interviews

Analyst Interviews

Full Episodes

Shows

Watch Live

CNBC U.S. Business Day

CNBC U.S. Primetime

CNBC Asia-Pacific

CNBC Europe

CNBC World

Full Episodes

Podcasts

More

Politics

U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has subpoenaed a key assistant of long-time Donald Trump advisor Roger Stone, two people with knowledge of the matter said, the latest sign that Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election is increasingly focusing on Stone.

The subpoena was recently served on John Kakanis, 30, who has worked as a driver, accountant and operative for Stone.

Kakanis has been briefly questioned by the FBI on the topics of possible Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the WikiLeaks website, its founder Julian Assange, and the hacker or hackers who call themselves Guccifer 2.0, one of the people with knowledge of the matter said.

Mueller has not scheduled a grand jury appearance for Kakanis, the person said.

WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 each published emails and other documents from the Democratic Party in 2016 that U.S. intelligence agencies say were hacked by Russian operatives in an effort to tip the election in favor of then Republican nominee Trump.

Michael Becker, Kakanis’ lawyer, did not respond to multiple requests for comment and Mueller’s office declined comment.

In an emailed statement to Reuters on Friday, Stone said he believed that Mueller’s scrutiny on him stemmed from “misapprehensions and misconceptions” created by the media, and that he would ultimately be exonerated of any alleged wrongdoing.

“I sincerely hope when this occurs that the grotesque, defamatory media campaign which I have endured for years now will finally come to its long-overdue end,” wrote Stone, one of Trump’s closest political advisors in the years before he ran for president.

During the 2016 Republican primaries, a Stone political action committee paid more than $130,000 to an entity called “Citroen Associates” for “voter fraud research and documentation” and “research services consulting,” according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Florida state records identify the owner of Citroen Associates as John P. Kakanis.

The subpoena handed to Kakanis is the latest development suggesting that Stone, an early Trump backer whose reputation as an aggressive political operative dates back to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, is being looked at by Mueller.

Reuters reported earlier this week that FBI agents working for Mueller delivered two subpoenas to Jason Sullivan, a social media and Twitter expert who worked for Stone during the 2016 campaign, and that agents told him Mueller’s team wanted to question him about Stone and WikiLeaks.

Some of Stone’s comments during the elections have prompted questions from investigators in Congress, and others, about whether he had advance knowledge of the Democratic Party material allegedly hacked by Russian intelligence and sent to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who published it.

Stone, including in an appearance before the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee last September, has repeatedly said he never got any hacked emails from Assange or WikiLeaks or Russians, and that he never passed any hacked emails to Trump, his campaign or anyone else.

Mueller is investigating whether Russia meddled in the presidential election and if Moscow colluded with the Trump campaign. Both Russia and Trump deny collusion.

Other Trump associates who have been questioned by Mueller, including former campaign advisors Sam Nunberg and Michael Caputo, have also been asked about Stone and WikiLeaks.

“They asked me about Roger’s businesses – who he worked with prior to the 2016 election. They asked me about Roger’s tax returns,” Nunberg said in a phone interview earlier this week, adding that he believed Mueller was stepping outside his mandate in casting such a wide net around Stone’s activities.

via The Trump Debacle