plz share the willy xenophobia discussion at your leisure i would love to read about it

Right. So.

Willy was drafted in 2014, a top-ten pick with legacy pedigree, and unlike the other two in Toronto's Big Three, took a little longer to develop -- Marner spent his D+1 in the OHL before coming up, Matthews made the team right away, but Willy spent time in the SHL and about a year and a half in the Marlies before joining at the end of the 15-16 season, after Marner was drafted but before Matthews was. Needless to say, expectations of him weren't quite as high, but he was firmly expected to be part of the Big Rebuild, too.

He's also Swedish. The first Europeans in the NHL were Swedish, and to this day the highest proportion of non-North Americans is Swedish. However, in order to understand the Swedes, we have to talk about the Russians.

The 1972 Summit Series is probably the most important single event in the history of hockey -- eight games, the first true best-on-best in the world, since the NHL and the Olympics have always had a fraught relationship and they weren't allowed to attend. If we really wanted to talk about the Summit Series, we could be here for years, but, the point: on this particular world stage, it was finally understood that Europeans -- Russians, but everyone else, too -- played a different style of hockey, one that emphasized a side-to-side possession-based game instead of the Canadian dump-and-chase style. The Euro style involves far less checking. And less fighting.

North American (largely Canadian, but nonetheless) hockey has always had a culture of hypermasculinity around it, and this relative lack of violence, as well as pre-existing stereotypes of the time, gave the impression that Europeans were "soft."

Back to Willy. Go back to look at draft-era Willy, before he learns how to grow facial hair -- not Mitch's baby face, but not Auston's full-grown jawline. A layer of puppy fat that disguises all but the most defined of his muscles. Silky blond hair and a dopey smile. He dresses expensively, breaks into fits of giggles in interviews, doesn't seem to take anything as seriously as he should. Because this is Toronto, and we feel as if we are about to enter a new golden age, we expect the most out of our prospects -- solemnity, hard work, not a flaxen-haired nepotist idiot. Especially not a soft flaxen-haired nepotist idiot.

Willy Nylander, raised and trained on a different continent, doesn't hit much, preferring to carry his puck in than dump it. He's speedy, patient with a shot, would rather make a dangerous chance than one through three lanes of traffic. He doesn't fight, doesn't get mad, scores less when the team's really going, and he held out to the last possible moment in his RFA negotiations. Every single one of these drives people mad -- people here trailing all after Don Cherry.

If you're not familiar with Don Cherry, imagine the worst Leafs uncle you could possibly realize, give him opinions of similar attitude on the rest of the NHL, and then understand that he had a national platform for decades. Cherry, fervent nationalist that he is, touted the "tough" Canadian forechecking style, adored players who would walk off injuries -- never mind their lives afterwards -- and once expressed his disdain for visors (you know, the thing that... protects your eyes... and a lot of your face...) by saying that only the Europeans and Francophones liked them. (He also got kicked off of Hockey Night in Canada for anti-immigrant statements. Yee haw.)

Cherry hated Nylander the entire time, explicitly citing his Swedishness (and implying a lack of toughness, or winning quality, which he equated) as a reason that the Leafs would never win with him. Here's an article from right around draft day with Cherry's opinion -- he says the Leafs, should they choose to contend, should forgo Europeans and instead take Canadians. He also cites Ritchie's high penalty-minute count as a valuable item. (I don't know about you, but generally I think regularly putting your team on the penalty kill is a detriment, not a strength).

Furthermore, there's a poll at the end of this article asking the reader if they think Cherry was right. Most people think he was. He was hugely popular not only because he was a charismatic figure (I keep talking about him as if he's dead; he's not, just no longer working) but because his ideas were popular. People believed, and still very much do, that Swedishness is softness and that softness is bad. And as -- as a Leaf -- arguably one of the most visible Swedes in the NHL, one of those tasked with shouldering the weight of the most known franchise, Willy bore a lot of it.

I think part of the reason I didn't mention it in the original post was because unlike Mitch, Willy doesn't seem to let it get to him a lot -- he's a blissfully oblivious Barbie-doll idiot -- and, again, because expectations on him weren't quite as high. That being said, it's still important to discuss imho !

Rude Britannia: the weird and the silly behind British place names

Long before the Coronavirus outbreak I had a good American friend - a former military veteran I knew from my time in Afghanistan - who having Anglo roots always expressed a desire to drive around rural southern England one summer. Not so much to dig up his Anglo family roots but also get a broad sense of where his ancestors came from. Unlike the British, Americans think a two hour drive as nothing more than a quick trip down to the shops. So I was little unconvinced by his plans to breezily jaunt through the whole of rural Southern England in one summer. But off he went with his wife and kids in tow. By all accounts they had a fun trip but now and again I would get a text showing me a picture of a village sign board with a rude, funny, or weird name such as Shitterton in Dorset, Puddletown also in Dorset. My friend would text ‘Are you guys serious?!’

And yet it’s true. Britain does have some really weird, silly, and very rude names for villages, towns, and even streets. The more rural the more bizarre seems to be the rule of thumb.

Ae Beer Bitchfield Brawl Brokenwind Brown Willy Catbrain Crackpot Cockermouth Dull Fingeringhoe Fryup Great Snoring in Fakenham Grumbla Ham Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch Lost Loose Bottom Matching Tye Mumbles Nasty Nempnett Thrubwell Pity Me Plwmp Scratchy Bottom Shitterton Spunkie Tarty Tomtit’s Bottom Tongue Twatt Upton Snodsbury Ugley Westward Ho! Wetwang

British history didn’t start with the Celtic peoples (Stonehenge didn’t build itself, after all). But the Celtic tribes that arrived during the Iron Age, which started around 800BC, were the first to give a clear linguistic contribution that has lasted to modern times. They came in groups from the continent; those in the north spoke Goidelic (the source of Gaelic), while southerners spoke Brittonic.

Even today, many hills and rivers have kept their Celtic names – especially in the north and west. The Wrekin takes its name from Celtic. So do about two-thirds of England’s rivers: Avon, Derwent, Severn, Tees, Trent, Tyne – and Itchen, which later lent its name to the town Bishop’s Itchington. (Some of these names may even have come from the people who were here before the Celts). Often the names just meant ‘river’ or ‘water’, and sometimes no one knows what they originally meant; in the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, AD Mills calls Severn “an ancient pre-English river name of doubtful etymology”. The River Tame, comes from the Celtic for ‘dark one’ or ‘river’ – as does the more famous River Thames.

There is less Celtic influence in the south and east largely thanks to the Anglo-Saxons. When they invaded in the 6th Century AD, they pushed the Britons to the edges and into the hills. Those who stayed in England were gradually assimilated, rather like the name of the town we start our drive in, Much Wenlock. It gets its Much is from Anglo-Saxon mycel, meaning ‘great’ or ‘much’. Wenlock comes from Celtic wininicas, ‘white area’, and the Anglo-Saxon loca, ‘place’.

The Romans invaded Britain too, even before the Anglo-Saxons, first trying in 55 BC but at last succeeding in AD 43. But their linguistic influence, like their culture, left less of a mark: they built towns and garrison outposts, but they never truly made Britain their home. Roman contributions to British place names come mainly through their Latinisation of pre-Roman names. A Celtic name that had been rendered by earlier Greek visitors as Pretanniké became the Roman Britannia; an ancient name of obscure meaning became Londinium. The other major Roman contribution comes from the Latin castra (‘fort’). Taken into Anglo-Saxon, it became ceaster (‘town, city’, pronounced rather like ‘che-aster’) – which has mutated to chester (Chester, Manchester), caster (Lancaster, Doncaster) and cester (Leicester, Cirencester).

Unlike the Romans, however, the Anglo-Saxons did not come to establish an outpost or colony. They came to move in. The Anglo-Saxons did build forts – the word burh (‘fortified place’) gives Britain all of its –burghs and –burys – but what they really wanted to do was farm, build towns and conduct trade. If they encountered a forest (called a wald, wold, weald, holt or shaw) or a grove (graf, now –grove and –grave), they might clear it to make a leah (now –ly, –lay, –ley and –leigh). They would enclose land to make a worthig (–worth), ham (the source of 'home'), or tun (now –ton and the source of 'town'). Since ham was more common in the earlier years and tun later on, there are more –hams in the south, where the Anglo-Saxons first came, and more –tons in the north and west.

The Anglo-Saxons also liked to name things after themselves. The suffix –ingas (now shortened to –ing(s)) referred to the family and followers of some personage: for instance, Hæsta’s folk settled at Hastings. Many a ham and tun was also named for a person, such as Birmingham, the ham of Beorma’s people (Beormingas). They also named geographical features for themselves, like valleys (denu) such as Rottingdean (the valley of Rota’s clan). And, before converting to Christianity, they named some places after their gods – Wednesbury is named after Woden.

Then the Scandinavians arrived. They started in the 8th Century with raids: Danes from the east and Norsemen, coming around Scotland by sea, from the northwest. In the mid-9th Century, they staged a full-scale invasion and began to settle in the areas they controlled. At the height of Scandinavian power in Britain, they controlled an area known as the Danelaw that covered most of England north and east of a line from Liverpool to the Thames.

Ashby, like Appleby, bears the quintessential mark of a Danish place name: –by, meaning ‘farmhouse�� or ‘village’. Both, however, also bear the marks of the Anglo-Saxons who where there first: the apple and ash trees. Also from the Danes came both (now booth), meaning ‘cattle shelter’; thorp, meaning ‘satellite farm’, now mostly with an excrescent e as in Donisthorpe; toft, meaning ‘homestead’; and thwait, meaning ‘clearing, meadow, or paddock’ – now also with that unnecessary e.

In 1066, the Normans came: Frenchmen, many of whom were descended from assimilated Viking invaders of France. William took over the government and gave ownership of many places to knights who had supported him. Ashby was given to the de la Zuche family; Newton (‘new town or enclosed settlement’) was given to the Burgilons (now Newton Burgoland). The invasion also led to French versions of English originals, such as Rievaulx, translated from Ryedale. There are pure French names that later were shaped by English influence, such as Beamish from beau mes (‘beautiful mansion’), Bewdley from beau lieu (‘beautiful place’) and Ridgemont from rouge mont (‘red hill’). The Normans’ scribes, educated in Latin, also gave Latin additions such as Appleby Magna and Lyme Regis – and even the occasional full name, such as Pontefract (pons fractus, ‘broken bridge’).

But the Norman French did not settle in with the same comfort as the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians, and certainly not in the same numbers. The commoners – made up of Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians and remaining Celts – kept speaking English, which was still evolving and came to add many French words.

In time, English again became the language of rule. The court, which had increasingly intermarried with English speakers, resumed speaking English in the 14th Century; parliament returned to it in the 15th Century. Ultimately, the stubbornness of the Anglo-Saxon language conquered in the end. How else could a ‘south-town coalfield’ become Sutton Coldfield? Wet clearings (water leas) at the west clearing (west leah) become Westley Waterless? A muddy place (slohtre) turn to Slaughter (Upper and Lower)?

And so it is that you can, in 60 miles, go from the Celtic hills, through the Anglo-Saxon and old Celtic towns, across the pre-Celtic, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon rivers, past faint traces of the Romans, cross into Danish territory, and find the French nobility. All in one language: English.

But wherever you go just remember to drive carefully because you just never know what is quaintly etymological or what is curiously literal....

DWCS Episode 3 Primer

Joey

July 8th

Thus far the 3rd season of the Contenders Season has given us four fighters; 1 HW (Yorgan de Castro), 1 MW (Punahele Soriano), 1 BW (Miles Johns), 1 WW (Miguel Baeza). What’s episode three got for us?

Joseph Solecki (7-2, 25 years old, Pro since 2016) vs James Wallace (9-2, 26 years old, Pro since 2015) Lightweights

Joseph Solecki Where He Fight At? ROC and CFFC! Solecki has fought primarily in CFFC. Who’d He Ever Beat? Not anybody necessarily that I'd be familiar with for sure. Record Of Opposition At The Time Of Their Fight? 37-23-1! That's not awful but definitely not exactly the sexiest of records. His two losses are a combined 10-2 (2-0 Cesar Balmaceda, 8-2 TUF Brazil fighter Nikolas Motta). His last fight out, Solecki beat 7-6 Jacob Bohn by decision. Why Is He Here? Eh, I mean Solecki isn't a bad idea on paper. He's a guy who has hung out on the regional circuit and he's a young lightweight. Watching him fight, you can kinda see some upside as a crazy grappling guy. He is quick, has exciting fights and tends to finish them when he gets the chance. He's a fun guy to keep an eye on even if the records presented here are pretty gross.

James Wallace Where He Fight At? Wallace is one of those dudes who has been pretty much everywhere. Bellator, LFA, V3 Fights and Summit FC; four promotions of various qualities who have at least been holding shows for a good long minute. Who’d He Ever Beat? Kinda nobody of note but kinda sorta some intriguing names? His early career was complete and utter fluff but in his last five fights, Wallace has beaten 6-2 Sean Holden, 3-0 Kaleb Harris and 3-0 Stash Kuyukendall. Maybe not the creme de la creme of MMA but those are at least spiffy records on paper. Record Of Opposition At The Time Of Their Fight? 32-29. Little bit of a yuck city here. Hard to get excited about 32-29 with some serious fluff on here like 8-16 Jimmy Van Horn and 0-4 Henry. His two losses were a combined 4-1. Why Is He Here? Solecki vs Wallace feels like one of those fights where both guys are so close, dare we say virtually identical, that it makes sense they'd be matched up together. Watching Wallace's few fights out there on youtube land, I got a pretty good comp for him I feel; Mickey Gall. He's kind of an uncoordinated striker who has some natural pop that needs refining. He's a BJJ ace first and foremost so he prefers working on the mat and even most of the times off his back. He's squirrelly and athletic but maybe without much purpose behind what he does. This is the sort of guy this show tends to gravitate towards.

Kenneth Bergh (6-0, 30 years old, Pro since 2013) vs Antonio Tricoli (11-3, 28 years old, Pro since 2013) Light Heavyweights

Kenneth Bergh Where He Fight At? There are two places you'd recognize Bergh from. The first is Cage Warriors where he last fought at and the other? TUF! He was a TUF 23 contestant (the same season that gave us Khalil Rountree, Eric Spicely and Andrew Sanchez) although he lost in the "Get in the house" round to Eric Spicely. Who’d He Ever Beat? How's about our old pal Norman Paraisy?! Two time TUF try out and Cage Warriors veteran Norman Paraisay was the last opponent of Bergh; a 2nd round rear naked choke win for the Norweigan. Record Of Opposition At The Time Of Their Fight? 23-11-2. That's probably what you should expect from a big dude who has six pro fights officially. That said if you remove Norman Paraiasy from the mix and his 15-4-2 record, you're left with a not too pretty 8-7 for his combined other five opponents. Why Is He Here? He's a light heavyweight! It's really that simple on paper. Dig a bit deeper and there's cause to be made that Bergh is pretty much what this show is about; he's a fight finisher with all six of his wins coming by submission, he had his failed stint on TUF and then rebounded to beat two pretty tough guys in Brett McDermott and Norman Paraisy by submission and he's still somewhat on the right side of 30 given that he JUST turned 30 this month. The UFC knows who he is based off of TUF as well. The problem I have is that Kenneth Bergh has not fought since June of 2017, ergo he's technically coming into this fight on a two year inactivity streak. Vomitando.

Antonio Tricoli Where He Fight At? Tricoli has a ridiculous amount of fights in promotions you'd know of. Brazilian fans probably know of Imperium MMA and Jungle Fight and American fans should still have found memories of Legacy FC. Tricoli has been at this for a good long minute. Who’d He Ever Beat? His BEST win is actually pretty solid regional MMA wise. Tricoli beat Wendell Oliveira who you may remember from TUF Brazil Season Two and an 0-2 stint inside the UFC (with losses to legitimate top 10 WWs like Darren Till and Santiago Ponzinibbio). Tricoli's three losses are all very solid as you have Dhiego Lima (still in the UFC), Jacob Volkmann (had a long stint in the org) and Brazilian fight circuit veteran Marcelo Barbosa who was 11-3. All good comp. Record Of Opposition At The Time Of Their Fight? 91-46! Tricoli has been around, man! His best win is the aforementioned Wendell Oliveira at 24-9 while his losses were to 18-6 Jacob Volkmann and Dhiego Lima at 10-4. Even Wendell Barbosa is 7-3. Rodrigo Carlos by the way at 20-13 is also one of his wins and Carlos is sort of the universal "Fight everybody" guy in Brazil. Why Is He Here? The natural instinct in me is to look at a dude like Tricoli and assume he's here to test Kenneth Bergh. He's the more shopworn of the two despite being younger, he's fought the better competition but more often than not lost to them, he's quit on his stool in the past against smaller fighters and he's on a decision streak. This feels like a chance to test whether Bergh can get into the UFC. At the same time, male Brazilian MMA is really in a lull in the UFC and Tricoli may be here because the UFC thinks that his 3-0 record at 205 lbs is more a sign of a guy evolving into his best form.

Jacob Rosales (11-4, 23 years old, Pro since 2015) vs Jonathan Pearce (8-3, 27 years old, Pro since 2014) Lightweights

Jacob Rosales Where He Fight At? For being just 23 years old, Rosales is a well traveled dude. He's fought for LFA, RFA, Bellator and Combates. He also fought for Shamrock FC which is sort of a gateway into Bellator as well. Maybe he has tremendous representation but it sure seems like a lot of organizations who know a thing or two about a thing or two like him. His last fight was in FCOC which seems like a nondescript bit of business until you learn they have a CATCHWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP (apparently at 165 lbs). Who’d He Ever Beat? Rosales has packed fifteen pro fights into four years. That probably requires a fair bit of barnacle scrubbing. As such it shouldn't be much of a surprise that Rosales' best win is probably regional veteran Joshua Jones (7-4) or Ivan Castillo (16-10). Record Of Opposition At The Time Of Their Fight? 74-65-1! In fifteen fights, Rosales has packed in some pretty good numbers. His last four opponents alone are 46-35 and the number is somewhat skewered by his last opponent, 15-25 Quinton McConnell. His four losses are a combined 15-10-1 including what looks like a borderline inexcusable loss to 4-7-1 Derion Chapman in 2017. Why Is He Here? On paper I feel like there's a lot of good to be looked at. Rosales is a really young guy who is still fresh in his fighting career, he's on a four fight winning streak vs top competition and big name organizations have brought him in. His third ever pro fight was on an RFA card which again suggests that he's got some followers. Watching the bevy of footage out there (including the loss to Chapman), Rosales seems like the sort of dude Dana White would absolutely fall in love with. He's a hyperactive scrapper by trade who throws with reckless abandon, is more chin than defense with length on the feet and an aggressive ground game. This is the sort of guy Dana White likes. It's not that big of a surprise that he's here. I just don't know how high the upside is if he's letting dudes who are 4-7-1 rock him consistently.

Jonathan Pearce Where He Fight At? Pearce is another guy who has been everywhere so to speak. Valor Fights and Shogun Fights are pretty well known regional orgs in the Northeast and it seems like Pearce has done most of his work in places like Tennessee and North Carolina. He does have two Bellator appearances on his resume as well. Who’d He Ever Beat? Pearce's win/loss record? Not so hot I guess. Jonathan Pearce's opposition is not too great BUT he does have 6-1 Omar Johnson on it. Johnson's record is equally fluffy but he did fight and lose to WSOF/Bellator/LFA veteran Jaleel Willis. That's something. Record Of Opposition At The Time Of Their Fight? 45-20 would be the record of opposition at the time they fought which isn't too bad. To his credit of his eleven fights, only one of his opponents had a losing record. The best fighter is Omar Johnson. Why Is He Here? Pearce is a pretty interesting guy; remove a three fight skid which includes a loss to DWTCS alum Peter Petties and Pearce is 8-0 with wins over some reputable regional competition. He's on the right side of 30, coming into this fight on a four fight finishing streak with some of those wins happening in Bellator. Fighters like him are of value and at the very least wind up on the short notice list when the UFC needs a guy. He also trains with the MMALab and they seem to have an in on DWTCS since a lot of their guys wind up filling spots on it. They're the even further West version of Fortis MMA.

Chris Ocon (4-0, 23 years old, pro since 2017) vs Hunter Azure (5-0, 27 years old, pro since 2017) Bantamweights

Chris Ocon Where He Fight At? With just 4 fights and 2 in the same locale, Ocon has spent most of his time in Tennessee. He's another Valor Fights guy. Who’d He Ever Beat? Nobody really. He's had four fights and they're all against guys you'd never hear of. Record Of Opposition At The Time Of Their Fight? 7-3 combined record for his four opponents. Ocon is SUPER green obviously with just two years into his career and under five pro fights. His best win is actually his pro debut against then 2-1 Dre Miley. Miley has gone on to go 6-2 and I think he might be a bit of a legitimate prospect except he's got an eye issue which IMO would have him far off their radar. Why Is He Here? Chris Ocon is in a weird spot here and it almost feels like one of those cases where even IF he wins, the UFC will be telling him that he's still not ready yet. He's four fights into his career, looks moderately impressive in glimpses and has the tools that would normally get them excited. He's just too raw and in a division like 135 lbs where even the bottom half of the division is quality capable dudes.

Hunter Azure Where He Fight At? After starting most of his career in small regional orgs, Azure has had his last three pro fights at LFA. Who’d He Ever Beat? Nobody really good I suppose. Azure has faced some reputable fighters for a young prospect but nothing that you'd hang your hat on. Record Of Opposition At The Time Of Their Fight?  Azure's five combined opponents are 17-14. To his credit, he fought just one guy with a sub .500 record so at least he wasn't barnacle scrubbing. His best win is probably Jaime Hernandez who was 3-1 at the time with sole loss being to DWCS alum Rico Disculio. Why Is He Here? Hunter Azure is a more polished version of Chris Ocon which makes me wonder if Azure is the guy they expect to find a home for quickly. Azure has been groomed in LFA where he could develop his skills as main card filler. Watching his fights, you can see that he's got a serious lack of  developed tools but a lot of intriguing assets to his game that could in the future lead to him developing into something. He's also yet another MMA lab guy.

Maki Pitolo (11-4, 28 years old, Pro since 2013) vs Justin Sumter (7-2, 29 years old, Pro since 2016) Middleweights

Maki Pitolo Where He Fight At? Maki's been everywhere I suppose. He started his career fighting in Hawaiian orgs and moved his way over to the mid west where he cut his teeth in Victory FC. He's fought in CFFC and Bellator as well. Who’d He Ever Beat? Some good solid regional competition. How do names like Andrews Nakahara (TUF contestant, PFL/WSOF guy) and Justin Guthrie (Bellator and Titan FCvet) sound? Record Of Opposition At The Time Of Their Fight? Maki's been around for a long time and had a lot of fights. His record of opposition at the time of is a really solid 121-56! Not bad at all. Chris Cisnersos and Kassius Kayne appear twice and both guys are reputable; Kayne at the time was 9-2 and then 9-3 when they fought. Maki actually fought Cisneros in his 2nd pro fight when Cisneros was 13-7. They met up again when Maki was 10-4 and Cisneros was 17-9. You also have 28-12 Dakota Cochrane on the same resume as well as 4-2 Andrews Nakahara and 18-8 Justin Guthrie. Why Is He Here? The Maii Pitolo story has been kind of interesting to me at least. So when the UFC started to do work with regional orgs for Fight Pass, they'd fly in a few dudes here or there to be at some events just to promote the synergy. One of those guys was always Maki Pitolo (the other was Jose Torres). It made sense! Maki was a young guy, fighting out of Hawaii, he was the Victory FC welterweight champion and he had a reputation of being your prototypical exciting Hawaiian scrapper. It fell apart from there for some reason. Maki was KO'd in a rematch vs Kassius Kayne and dropped his Victory FC belt. Then he dropped a fight to Dakota Cochrane and he fell off the Victory FC radar. He had a few prelim showings for CFFC and Bellator in 2017 and 2018 plus they tried to get him on the Contender's Series last year. Pitolo on paper is probably an easy sell for Dana and the Contender's Series has been TRYING desperately for like three years now to find one Hawaiian guy. This could be it.

Justin Sumter Where He Fight At? Sumter is a DWTCS alum! He fought last year, taking on Ian Heinisch who is tearing it up in the UFC currently. He's fought for CES and Bellator. Who’d He Ever Beat? No wins you'd be impressed by. His wins aren't too hot but his losses are superb with Tim Caron (DWCS and Bellator vet) and Ian Heinisch (LFA MW champ and current UFC top 15 MW) on there. Record Of Opposition At The Time Of Their Fight? 59-37! That would be the records owned by the opponents of Justin Sumter. Most of that work comes from the likes of 4-0 Tim Caron, 17-16 Roger Carroll and 10-1 Ian Heinisch. Why Is He Here? The general sneaky rule of thumb is if you're a DWCS guy who fights twice and you win on your second go around, you're probably going to get a deal. We've seen Ryan Spann get wiped out in his first fight, come back and win the second one and then get a snazzy new contract  (which he's now 2-0 on). Sumter is a fine fighter and a good guy to give a second chance to.

Likelihood of a contract with a win:

1- Joseph Solecki 2-James Wallace 3- Jacob Rosales 4- Maki Pitolo 5- Justin Sumter 6- Jonathan Pearce 7-Justin Azure 8- Chris Ocon

Robert F. Smith Commencement Address to Morehouse College on May 19, 2019

President Thomas, board of Trustees. Faculty, staff, and Morehouse alumni.

The extraordinary Angela Bassett, and the distinguished Professor Doctor Edmund Gordon.

Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, family, and friends.

And most of all, Morehouse College Class of 2019: Congratulations!

Earning a college degree is one of the greatest and most impressive of life’s accomplishments.

But success has many parents -- and as hard as each of you has worked to achieve what you all have achieved today, you’ve had a lot of help along the way. We are the products of a community, a village, a team. And many of those who have made contributions for you to arrive at this very moment are here with you today.

So, first and foremost, graduates of the class of 2019, please stand and join me in recognizing the love and commitment of those who have been with you on this long and hard journey!

Graduates, standing here before you is one of the great honors of my life. And I am so proud to share it with my mother, Dr. Sylvia Smith, a lifelong educator and the greatest role model of my life, who is here today.

This is the first of three graduations in my family this week. One of my daughters graduates from NYU, another graduates from high school and is headed off to Barnard in the fall, and my niece is graduating from my alma mater, Cornell, next weekend. So I want to thank the Morehouse administration for perfectly timing today’s festivities in advance of them so that I could be here.

Morehouse was built to demand excellence and spur the advancement and development of African American men. I have always been drawn to its rich history, and I am optimistic for its bright future.

The brothers from Morehouse I’ve met -- or revered at a distance -- understand the power of this education and the responsibility that comes with it. Willie Woods, Morehouse’s Chairman of the Board, is one such man. Thank you, Chairman Woods.

In our shared history -- as a people, and as a country -- the Morehouse campus is a special place. The path you walked along Brown Street this morning to reach this commencement site was paved by men of intellect, character, and determination.  

These men understood that when Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, he wasn’t saying it bends on its own accord. It bends because we choose to put our shoulders into it together and push.

The degree you earn today is one of the most elite credentials that America has to offer. But I don’t want you to think of it as a document that hangs on a wall and reflects what you’ve accomplished up till now.  

No. 

That degree is a contract -- a social contract -- that calls on you to devote your talents and energies to honoring those legends on whose shoulders you and I stand.

Lord knows you are graduating into a complex world. Think about what we have faced in just the years you spent as Morehouse students:

We have seen the rise of Black Lives Matter, lending voice to critical issues that have been ignored by too many for too long.

We’ve seen the Me Too movement, shining a spotlight on how far we still have to go to achieve real gender equality.

We’ve also seen the unapologetic public airing of hate doctrines by various groups.

We’ve seen the implications of climate change become impossible to ignore and become ever more severe.

Our connected world has grappled with new questions about security, privacy, and the role of intelligent machines in our work and lives.

And we’ve witnessed the very foundation of our political system shaken by the blurring of the sacred line between fact and fiction… right and wrong.

Yes, this is an uncertain hour for our democracy and our fragile world order. But uncertainty is nothing new for our community.

Like many of yours, my family has been in the United States for 8 or 9 generations. We have nourished this soil with our blood. Sown this land with our sweat. Protected this country with our bodies. And contributed to the physical, cultural, and intellectual fabric of this country with our minds and our talent. And yet, I am the first generation of my family to have secured all my rights as an American.

Think about it:

1865 was the first time that most African American families had a hint of access to the first and until now, greatest wealth-generating platform of America -- land.

The Freedmen’s Bureau was supposed to deliver 850,000 acres of land to the formerly enslaved, a program that was then canceled and replaced with a Freedman’s Savings Bank…which was then looted.

Essentially that recompense was reneged upon. We didn’t have broad access to the Homestead Act nor Southern Homestead Act where 10% of the land in the U.S. was distributed for no more than a filing fee.

It wasn’t until 1868, after the passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th amendment, that my family actually had a birthright to be American Citizens.

Then, when America decided to create a social safety net for its citizens in 1935, they created a Social Security program.

Yet that program excluded two categories of workers: maids and farmworkers, which effectively denied benefits to two-thirds of African Americans, and 80% of Southern African Americans.

It wasn’t until 1954 that my family had a right to equal education under protection of the law -- guaranteed by Brown v. Board of Education.

And while the 15th Amendment gave my family the right to vote -- the men, at least -- starting in 1890, those rights were rolled back in the South and remained suppressed until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Even today, more than a half-century after that, the struggle to ensure true integrity at the ballot box is still very much alive.

All of these landmark extensions of our rights -- and subsequent retrenchments -- set the stage for a new policy of forced desegregation utilizing school bussing that went into effect when I reached the first grade in my hometown of Denver, Colorado.

Our family lived in North East Denver, and back then, Denver, like most other American cities, remained extremely divided by race, both politically and geographically.

In my community, my neighbors were mostly educated, proud, hard-working, and ambitious. They were dentists, teachers, politicians, lawyers, Pullman porters, contractors, small business owners and pharmacists.

They were focused on serving the African-American community and providing a safe and nurturing environment for the kids in our neighborhood.

They were on the front lines of the Civil Rights movement. They were sacrificing their sons to the Vietnam War. They mourned the death of a King, two Kennedys and an X.

Despite all they gave, they had yet to achieve the fullness of the American Dream. But they continued to believe it was only a matter of time -- if not for them, then surely for their children.

I was among a small number of the kids from my neighborhood who were bussed across town to a high-performing, predominantly white elementary school in South East Denver. Every morning we were loaded up on bus number 13 -- I’ll never forget it --and taken across town to Carson Elementary.  

That policy of bussing only lasted through my fifth-grade year, when intense protests and political pressure brought an end to forced bussing. But those five years drastically changed the trajectory of my life.

The teachers at Carson were extraordinary. They embraced me and challenged me to think critically and start to move toward my full potential. I, in turn, came to realize at a young age that the white kids and the black kids, the Jewish kids and the one Asian kid were all pretty much the same.

And it wasn’t just the school itself -- it was my community back home that embraced and supported our opportunity. Since most of the parents in my neighborhood worked, a whole bunch of us walked to Mrs. Brown’s house after school and stayed there until our parents returned home from work.  

Mrs. Brown was incredible. She kept us safe, made sure we did our homework the right way, gave us nutritious after school snacks, and taught us about responsibility. And because her house was filled with children of all ages, I suddenly had older kids as role models who were studying hard and who believed in themselves. Mrs. Brown also happened to be married to the first black Lt. Governor of our state, so we saw the possibilities first hand.

Amazingly, almost every single student on that number 13 bus went on to become a professional.  I am still in touch with many as they make up the bedrock of their communities today. They are elected officials, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, professors, community organizers, and business leaders.

An incredible concentration of successful black men and women from the same working-class neighborhood. Yet when I look at my other folks from the extended neighborhood -- those who didn’t get a spot-on bus number 13 -- their success rate was far lower -- and the connection is inescapable.

Everything about my life changed because of those few short years. But the window closed for others just as fast as it had opened for me.

That’s part of the story of the black experience in America: getting a fleeting glimpse of opportunity and success just before the window is slammed shut.

The cycle of resistance to oppression, followed by favorable legislation, followed by the weakening of those laws, followed by more oppression, and more resistance, has affected and afflicted every generation.

And even as we’ve seen some major barriers come crashing down in recent years, we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn’t acknowledge just how many injustices persist.

Where you live shouldn’t determine whether you get educated. Where you go to school shouldn’t determine whether you get textbooks. The opportunity you access should be determined by the fierceness of your intellect, the courage of your creativity, and the grit that allows you to overcome expectations that weren’t set high enough.

We’ve seen remarkable breakthroughs in medical research, yet race-based disparities in health outcomes still persist. You are 41% more likely to die of breast cancer if you are an African-American woman in America today than if you are white.

You are 2.3 times more likely to die of prostate cancer if you are an African-American man than if you are white.

If you are African-American, you are more likely to be stopped by the police, more likely to be issued a ticket after being stopped, and more likely to be threatened with the use of force than if you are white.  

This is our reality. This is the world you are inheriting.  

Now, I am not telling you these things because I am bitter or because I want you to be bitter.  

I don’t call upon you to be bitter, I call upon you to make things better. Because the great lesson of my life is that despite the challenges we face, America is an extraordinary country. Our world is getting smaller by the day. And you are equipped with every tool to make it your own.

Today, for the first time in human history, success requires no prerequisite of wealth or capital -- no ownership of land, or natural resources, or people.

Today, success can be created solely through the power of one’s mind, ideas, and courage. Intellectual capital can be cultivated, monetized, and instantaneously distributed across the globe.  

Intellectual capital has become the new currency of business and finance -- and the promise of brainpower to move people from poverty to prosperity has never been more possible.

Technology is creating a whole new set of on ramps to the 21st century economy, and together we will help assure that African Americans will acquire the tech skills and be the beneficiaries in sectors that are being automated.

Black men understand that securing the bag is just the beginning -- that success is only real if our community is protected, if our potential is realized and if our most valuable assets -- our people -- find strength in owning the businesses that provide economic stability in our community.

This is your moment, graduates. Between doubt and destiny is action. Between our community and the American Dream is leadership. Your leadership. Your destiny.

This doesn’t mean ignoring injustice, it means using your strength to restore order.

And when you are confronted with racism, listen to the words of Guy Johnson, the son of Maya Angelou, who once said that, “Racism is like gravity, you got to keep pushing against it without spending too much time thinking about it.”  

So…how do you seize your American Dream? Let me get specific. Let me give you five rules that I live by. 

The first rule you need to know is that nothing replaces actually doing the work.

Whenever a young person tells me they aspire to be an entrepreneur, I ask them why. For many, they think of it as a great way to get rich quick. Invent an app, sell a company, make a few million before you’re 25.

Look, that can happen, but it’s awfully rare. The usual scenario is that successful entrepreneurs spend endless hours, days, and years toiling away for little pay and zero glamor.

And in all honesty, that is where the joy of success actually resides. Before I ever got into private equity, I was a chemical engineer, and I spent pretty much every waking hour in windowless labs doing the work that helped me become an expert in my field.

It was only after I put in the time to develop this expertise and the discipline of the scientific process that I was able to apply my knowledge beyond the lab.  

Greatness is born out of the grind. Embrace the grind. A thoughtful and intentional approach to “the grind” will help you to become an expert in your craft. When I meet a black man or woman who is at the top of their industry, I see the highest form of execution. That’s no accident. There’s a good chance it took that black leader a whole lot more grinding to get to where they are.

I look at the current and former black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies whom I admire, and they blow me away every time I met with them. Bernard Tyson, Ken Frazier, Ken Chenault, Dick Parsons, Ursula Burns, the late Barry Rand. They may not have attended Morehouse, but they have the Morehouse attitude.

They knew that being the best means grinding every day. It means putting in the ten thousand-plus hours necessary to become a master of your craft.

Muhammad Ali once said, “I hated every minute of training, But I thought to myself, suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.”

Grind it out -- and live your life as a champion.

My second rule to live by is to take thoughtful risks.

My Granddad took a particular interest in my career, and he couldn’t have been prouder of my stable engineering job at Kraft-General Foods. For him, to have that kind of job security at my age was a dream come true.  

When I told him I was thinking of leaving for graduate school, he was beyond worried. Then, you can imagine how he worried some years later when I told him I was going to leave Goldman Sachs, where I had achieved a good level of success, to start my own private equity firm focused on enterprise software.

I respected my Granddad and his wisdom, his thoughtfulness, and his protectiveness over me. But I had also done my homework. I calculated my odds of success, and importantly, I knew that one of the fundamental design points of achieving the American Dream was to be a business owner.

So I decided with confidence that I was willing to make a big bet on the one asset I had the most knowledge of: myself.  

There are always reasons to be risk-averse. Graduating from Morehouse can make you risk-averse, because the path you’re on, if you stick to the more conservative choices, is still pretty darn good.

That doesn’t mean you should gamble with your career or careen from job to job just because the grass appears to be greener. But it does mean that you should evaluate options for taking business and career risks…do the analysis, and trust your instincts.

When you bet on yourself -- that’s likely to be a pretty good bet!

My third rule is to be intentional about the words you choose.

I know Morehouse has taught you that you what you say carries with it enormous power.

Be intentional about the words you speak.  

How you define yourself.

What you call each other.

The people you spend time with.

And the love you create.

All of this matters immensely. It will define you.

My fourth rule -- which is my favorite -- is to always know that you are enough.

I mentioned that before going into investment banking at Goldman Sachs, I worked in applied engineering for Kraft General Foods. And I loved it!

Until one day I was at a meeting with a number of department heads in my division and as we went around the conference table discussing the divisions most important strategic initiatives, I realized that of the top six, I was leading five of them.

I was half the age of everyone, yet I knew I was making just a third as much as anyone else in the room. And I said to myself, I’m either doing something very right or very wrong. Truthfully it was a bit of both. So, it became a lesson in realizing my worth and self-worth.

It isn’t just about salary, though that always matters. It’s also about demanding respect from others -- and from yourself. A realization and respect for all of the skills and talents you bring to the table.

When you have confidence in your own worth, you’ll become the one to raise your hand for the hard assignment that may mean putting in time on nights and weekends, but also means you’ll be gaining incremental skills and experiences to enhance your craftsmanship.

Earn your respect through your body of work. Let the quality of your work product speak of your capabilities.

Know that you are only bound by the limits of your own conviction.

You are Morehouse Men. There is no room on this earth you can’t enter with your head held high. You will likely encounter people in your life, as I have, who want to make you feel like you don’t belong... but when you respect your own body of work, that is all the respect you need.

In the words of the great Quincy Jones and Ray Charles, “Not one drop of my self worth depends on your acceptance of me.”

You are enough.

The fifth lesson and final lesson for today is as follows:

We all have the responsibility to liberate others so that they can become their best selves -- in human rights, the arts, business, and in life.

The fact is, as the next generation of African-American leaders, you won’t just be on the bus, you must own it, drive it, and pick up as many as you can carry along the way.

More than the money we make, the awards, or recognition, or titles we earn, each of us will be measured by how much we contribute to the success of the people around us.

How many people will you get onto your bus number 13?

We need you to become the elected officials who step up and fix the laws that engender discrimination and who set a tone of respect in our public discourse.

We need you to become the c-suite executives who change corporate culture, build sustainable business models, and make diversity and inclusion a core and unshakeable value.

We need you to become the entrepreneurs who will innovate inclusively, expand wages for all Americans, and lower the unemployment rate in our communities.

We need you to be the educators who set the highest standards and demand the resources needed to deliver on them and inspire the next generation.

We need you to invest in the real estate and businesses in our communities and create value for all in that community.

No matter what profession you choose, each of you must be a community builder. No matter how far you travel, you can’t ever forget where you came from.

You are responsible for building strong, safe places where our young brothers and sisters can grow with confidence… watch and learn from positive role models, and believe that, they too, are entitled to the American Dream.

You Men of Morehouse are already doing this. Your own Student Government, in fact, sends students on a bus to underserved communities around the country to empower young black men and women to seize their own narrative and find power in their voices.

This is exactly the kind of leadership I’m talking about.

Remember that building community doesn’t always have to be about sweeping change. But it does have to be intentional.  

You can’t just be a role model sometimes. I’m cognizant of the fact that whenever I’m out in public, people are observing my actions. The same goes for you.  

Building community can’t be insular.  

The world has never been smaller, so we need to help our communities think bigger.  

I’ve invested particularly in internship programs, because I’ve observed the power of exposing young minds to the opportunity out there that they don’t see in their own neighborhoods.  

Help those around you see the beauty of the vast world out there, and help them believe that they, too, can capture that dream.

And remember that community can be anywhere.  

Back in the 1960s and ‘70s, community was a few blocks around where I grew up. Today, we, you can create communities of people anywhere in the world. Merging the physical and digital communities will be one of the great opportunities you have and you will have have in the years going forward.

Finally, don’t forget that community thrives in the smallest of gestures. Be the first to congratulate a friend on a new job, buy their new product first, and post on social media about how great it is, and also be the first to console them when they face adversity.  

Treat all people with dignity, even if you can’t see how they can be of help to you.  

And most important of all, whatever it takes, never, ever forget to call your mother. And I do mean call – don’t text, a text doesn’t count!

Speaking of mothers, allow me a point of personal privilege to end with a story that speaks volumes about mine.

In the summer of 1963, when I was just nine months old, my mother hauled my brother and me 1,700 miles from Denver to Washington, DC so that we could be there for a Morehouse Man’s historic speech.  

My mother knew that her boys would be too young to remember that speech, but she believed that the history we witnessed that day on the National Mall would always be a part of the men we would one day become.  

And Mom was right, as usual. I still feel that day in my bones, and it echoes all around us here at Morehouse.

Decades after that cross-country trip, I had the privilege to take my granddad with me to the opposite side of the National Mall to celebrate the inauguration of the first African-American president.

As we sat in the audience on that cold morning, he pointed to a window just behind the flag, in the Capitol Building and he said, “You know, grandson, when I was a teenager I used to work in that room right there, in the Senate Lounge, I used to serve coffee and tea and take hats and coats for the senators.” He said, “I recall looking out that window during Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration.”

He said, “Son, I did not see one black face in the crowd that day – so here we are, you and I, watching this.”

He said, “Grandson, you can see how America can change when people have the will to make change.”

The beautiful symmetry of our return to the Nation’s Capital under such different circumstances was not lost on us -- the poetry of time and soul that Lincoln called the “mystic chords of memory" resonated in both of our hearts.

You cannot have witnessed the history I have, or walked the halls of Morehouse for four years as you have, without profound respect for the unsung everyday heroes who, generation after generation, little by little, nudged, shoved, and ultimately bent that “arc of the moral universe” a little closer to justice.

This is the history and heritage you inherit today. This is the responsibility that now lies upon your broad shoulders.

True wealth comes from contributing to the liberation of people. The liberation of the communities we come from depends on the grit and greatness inside you.

Use your skills, your knowledge, your instincts to serve -- to change the world in the way that only you can.

You great Morehouse Men are bound only by the limits of your conviction and creativity. You have the power within you to be great, be you. Be unstoppable, be undeniable, and accomplish the things no one ever thought you could.

You are well on your way. I’m counting on you to load up your bus and share that journey.

Let’s never forget what Dr. King said in the final moments of his famous sermon at Ebenezer Baptist, “I want to be on your right side or your left side, in love and in justice and in truth and in commitment to others, so that we can make of this old world…a new world.”

Graduates, look to your right side and your left. Actually, take a moment. Stand up, give each other a hug. I am going to wait.  

Men of Morehouse, you are surrounded by a community of people who have helped you arrive at this sacred place on this sacred day.

On behalf of the eight generations of my family who have been in this country, we are going to put a little fuel in your bus.

Now, we’ve got the alumni over there. This is a challenge for you.

This is my class -- 2019. And my family is making a grant to eliminate their student loans. Now, I know my class will make sure they pay this forward. And I want my class to look at these alumni, these beautiful Morehouse brothers -- and let’s make sure every class has the same opportunity moving forward -- because we are enough to take care of our own community.

We are enough to ensure we have all the opportunities of the American Dream. And we will show it to each other through our actions, through our words, and through our deeds.

So, class of 2019:

May the sun always shine upon you.  

May the wind always be at your back.  

And may God always hold you in the cradle of Her hands.

Now go forth and make this old world new.

Congratulations!

Listening Post:  The Fall Singles Box Set

Over nearly four decades, 32 studio albums, around a dozen labels and a dizzying array of line-ups, the Fall has been a source of endless fascination, amusement, irritation, astonishment and enjoyment to a healthy minority of Dusted writers.  Centered around the irascible,unpredictable, absolutely inimitable Mark E. Smith, the Fall has been churning out singles since most of us started buying them, and, unlike other youthful obsessions, continues to do so, right up to the current moment.  So, when we heard that Cherry Red was putting out a massive seven-disc, 117-track singles collection, we were intrigued.  We were also a little daunted.  We decided to listen to it together, or at least at the same time, as much as we could, and talk about it in this listening post. As usual, some of us were long-time fans, others were new to the Fall and a couple were, shall we say, not convinced. Contributors included Jennifer Kelly, Bill Meyer, Justin Cober-Lake, Ben Donnelly, Ian Mathers, Mason Jones, Michael Rosenstein and Marc Medwin.  

Jennifer Kelly:  Hey, so I thought I'd kick this thing off book club style with some discussion questions -- though of course, as in any book club, you are free to ignore the questions and talk about other stuff as long as you don't get too loaded on white wine.  

So how are we feeling about the size and scope of the box set?  I think for the vast majority of people it will seem like a LOT of Fall, but a couple of die-hards in my circle are mad because things are missing.  (One of them owns NINE separate versions of "Hit the North," just to give you an idea of the scope of the thing.)   

The first two discs are, in my view, a pretty superb greatest hits collection (with some caveats because some of their great songs weren't  A sides or even singles).  I knew most of this stuff already, but had never heard the first two ("Bingo Master's Break Out" and "It's the New Thing") and a couple of the others.  I guess I'd vote for "Cruisers Creek" as my favorite of the old favorites, how about you guys?

I'm also struck by how great the Brix years were.  How much impact do we think band members besides MES had on the music, and which were the most important?

Bill Meyer: These are excellent questions and I will get to some of them in the next couple days. “Bingo Masters Breakout” is a singalong song in my house, my wife has been fond of that one since we first heard it c. 1983.  

Crain Scanlon's rhythm guitar and Steve Hanley's bass kept the Fall honest through some pretty grim production decisions in the mid1990s. Hell, Scanlon's hacked up guitar — which was the most battered thing I've seen on stage except for Terrie Ex's guitar — was a totem of humility. It was a sad day when Scanlon figured out how to play anonymous, competent lead guitar. 

Another notion to consider - Over the evolution of the Fall, there have been hard reactions AGAINST the influence of group members. I think that Brix was an antidote to the influence of Marc Riley. The late 1990s resurgence was a response to the departure of Scanlon and Hanley. And the relative anonymity of early 2000s bands was, I think, all about Smith not letting a band have too much ownership of the sound. 

I realize I'm talking about the Fall, not the singles set, but I'll get to that soon

Justin Cober-Lake: Speaking as a casual fan with just a few scattered albums, the size and scope of this box are intimidating and a little perplexing. The Fall have always been prolific and, especially with the lineup changes, it's hard to keep up with them in any sort of knowledgeable way unless you're committed. Getting this many tracks at once is overwhelming. That said, why complain about too much music. This box isn't meant for me (I'd be well served by a two-disc set with a quality essay in the liner notes). But I imagine it's pretty great for the people it's for, unless they have most of this material already. 

 The ideal listener for this set would be someone who knew just enough about the Fall to decide they wanted to jump in all the way, but didn't want to pick up old albums willy-nilly. What you need is here, covering about 25 years of music. Getting through it all in a way that gets me a better understanding of the band has been a challenge; the ability to listen to lots of Fall without repeating stuff has been a treat. I haven't found my era, my lineup or my 45-minute mix, and I doubt that I will, but that says as much about me as it does about the set. 

Bill Meyer: Yeah, this thing is immense. I've been on board the Fall wagon since 1981, and it's still kind of overwhelming, but that is because it is just so big. The Fall has used the single format intensively since about 1978, that's a whole lot of singles. And because they have been around so long, your mileage is likely to vary drastically according to the era.  

Jennifer Kelly: And I've run into a couple of people who find this set entirely insufficient.  

Hard core Fall people are a special breed. 

Justin Cober-Lake: This is maybe starting to shift away from the music, but from a collecting/curating (and marketing) point of view, would this material have benefited from getting, say, three separate boxes, each larger than 1/3 of this one, to get in those various mixes? Would that benefit fans or the sets to be more complete and in chunks, or would that have just served a tiny handful of fans with no real audio benefit. As fun as demos and properly alternate versions are, I've realized I'm seldom interested in hearing the radio edit that's exactly the same but missing three seconds at the end, even for my favorite acts. If this is a set specifically targeting hardcore fans, maybe it's an error not to be truly complete, even if that would have many restructuring how the material was compiled.

Bill Meyer: We definitely want to balance the "why, I was listening to this when I still had my first set of adult teeth!" opinions with some fresh reactions.

Jennifer Kelly: How many sets of teeth have you gone through, Bill?

Ben Donnelly: Mark E Smith has gone through one, at least.

Bill Meyer: That's between me and my dentist. But I did have a conversation recently with a guitarist who has had records on Homestead, Thrill Jockey, and other labels who shared that they are on their second round of implants.  And one thing I wrote about in an earlier Fall review - maybe the Peel Sessions box that I covered for Dusted? - is thinking that I heard Smith take advantage of the looseness of the fit of his plate to get a certain kind of slur.

He had enough left, at least until this past year, to hang his plate on. I gather that the health problems that led to the cancellation of American dates this summer and Euro/UK dates this fall started with a tooth removal that led straight into respiratory problems, which are still keeping him off the stage as of November 2017.

Jennifer Kelly: The last few records have definitely upped the spittle factor.

Bill Meyer: Very true.

Justin Cober-Lake: Maybe as a way to invite new listeners in and to orient our readers, how would some of you more experienced Fall fans recommend approaching this breadth of music? A quick survey of a few tracks of each disc, trying to cover various eras? Put the whole thing on shuffle? Dedicate a few dozen hours to watching the group move through its decades?

 Jennifer Kelly: The first two discs are all the A-sides, so that's a pretty good survey of the best and most listened-to material the band's done.  

I would pick one or two that you like (or hate) and talk about why. 

Bill Meyer: Disc three is A-sides too, beginning in about 1999. I've particularly appreciated it because I stopped getting Fall 7"s a little before the start of disc three, so there are songs or at least mixes that I've never heard. "Theme From Sparta F.C. #2" turns an already punchy song into a proud, rocking anthem. I might never feel that righteous about a football club, but when this song is on I want to. 

The clock restarts with disc four, tracing the history with b-sides. I haven't really digested the more recent stuff, but disc four has songs that stand among their very best. "I'm Into C.B." is masterpiece of building tension with a rumbling groove, shards of guitar, and untouchable lyric about the causes and consequences of mundane obsession. In more recent decades Smith's let himself get away with incomprehensible bluster, but back in the early 80s he was a potent and economical lyricist.  

Per Justin's question, I think that there's no perfect way to collect this music, because the perfect form is the original single. So forget about perfection; the sequence of discs one-three makes unassailable sense and charts the band's progress over time quite handily. It's an incomplete story because some of the Fall's greatest songs are pretty long, and some of their albums benefit perversely from fucked-up antics that don't make it onto a-sides very often (although you'll definitely get the idea of what I'm talking about from "Distilled Mug Art (mix 15)."  

Ben Donnelly: My hints for cracking The Fall, because they are a bowl of nuts with hard shells and lots of bitter pith that requires some work to crack and enjoy.   

Dive in anywhere. The continuities to their sound — twangy garage riffs, glib synthesizer textures — make shuffling through their catalog less jarring than other bands that have passed through these decades. As Justin observes, the material can be scattered, intimidating and perplexing, so popping them out like bingo balls isn't going to violate the intent. One of the cliches about the band that holds up, stated by John Peel: "They are always different; they are always the same." 

The lyrics may seem improvised and stream-of-consciousness, but Mark E Smith is adamant about the work he puts into them. The longer you inhabit his world of language, the more the language starts to click. Here's the lyrics for all the singles, as best as fans could transcribe them:   http://thefall.org/discography/singles.html

 Wire, the other long-running and perpetually creative art-punk band, deconstructs rock —  creating mannerist investigations, commenting on commentary. There's a temptation to draw parallels. But The Fall is not a meta-rock band. They are not deconstructing rock, even if they frequently sound like they're coming apart at the seams. They're just a rock band, dedicated to singles alternating with albums, frequent cover versions of old pop, and the commitment to a line up of guitar, bass, drums and keys. Albums have hooky numbers, experimental digressions, and winding epics, like very mangled versions of Sgt. Pepper's, White Light/White Heat or Station to Station.  

One of the other cliches about the band, stated by Mark E Smith, is "If it's me and yer granny on bongos, it's The Fall." Which implies it's all about MES, but collaboration is key to how he's kept the operation running. I don't think many of the dozens of Fall members would describe him as a generous collaborator exactly, but his method of creation depends on others. You never get unadulterated Mark E Smith. There's always admixture.

Eric McDowell: As an uninitiated Fall listener, it's pretty great to find myself privy to this discussion. I especially appreciate the permission to simply start listening without overthinking it, since my obsessive completism has definitely had me trapped between wanting to hear the whole Fall discography in order and feeling completely overwhelmed at the prospect of undertaking that project.  

To be fair, caving to compulsion, I did start with disc one. So I can only speak to a small part of the collection so far. But what I had somehow underestimated was how damn fun this stuff would be to listen to. Maybe it has more to do with letting go of my usual habits — or the fact that this is a set of singles, without the regulated ups and downs of album arrangement — but to my ears, it's just good listening. Gonna try to keep the baggage at bay while I move on to disc two...   

Bill Meyer: The Fall gained respect with good reason; they had great hooks, a bizarrely compelling singer, and a primitive groove that just would not quit from the get go. No need to lug baggage when you can just pick up on the songs. 

Mason Jones: I've never been a particularly big fan of the Fall despite appreciating the band's accomplishments. The approach has been remarkably consistent despite the changes, as others have mentioned, but somehow that hasn't resulted in the band sounding dated, which almost seems like an impossibility. Perhaps the primitivism that Bill mentions is partly responsible: when you start from a compellingly simple (yet so hard to get right) premise, layer on MES's uniqueness, and just run with it, there's no place to go except straight ahead. Yet a lot of bands have tried the idea of "don't mess with a good thing" and wound up left behind as times change. It doesn't feel like that's happened to the Fall, which is a bit mysterious. With all of these singles laid out now, perhaps their path will show itself, but I'm not so sure...

Justin Cober-Lake: Ben's points are very helpful here, and I think the Peel quote is spot-on. Fans and reviewers tend to talk in terms of the changes between albums or lineups, but it's that continuity of central focus that stands out. Listening to everything in order as presented by the box does start to highlight the overarching view. Going from one era of the Fall to another is far less jarring (or even noticeable) than going from, say, The Clash to Sandinista to Combat Rock. The MES Granny Bongos album isn't exactly Elvis Costello genre experimentation (and that's neither criticism nor praise). 

May as another way to get into things (and if this is derailing or tangential, feel free to delete/ignore and move on), imagine someone came to you and said, "So, the Fall is your favorite band? What should I listen to to understand why?" Is something like, "the first disc of this set" a reasonable answer? Is this a band that fans fell for instantly or did it take a lengthy of singles and albums for something to cohere? 

To be fair, anyone would answer similar questions with, "To get [my favorite band], you need to hear these songs, but don't forget how to this entire album fits in, and you only see what's really going on if you see the late stuff over here...." Some bands can be reasonably well captured by a single-disc "best of". Would that approach reveal the essentials of the Fall?

Jennifer Kelly: I think the first disc is a reasonable answer.  However, as Bill mentioned, these are singles and as a result, at least for the Fall, relatively tight, cohesive statements.  You don't get into the squirrelly bits as much (though they're there), and there are none of the long hallucinatory cuts that are also very representative of this band.  (For an example of this, I'd start with "Hip Priest.") 

The things I like about the Fall, more or less in order.  

The tight, rhythmic underpinning.  Whatever granny was playing on her bongos really moves, bass is almost always awesome, too.

The weird way of incorporating whatever's passing through musically -- punk, post-punk, pop, electro-clash, dance, rockabilly, literally anything, into an aesthetic that is completely recognizable as the Fall.

And in a similar sense, the lyrics, which weave so many cultural references in that listening to these discs is like an oral history, at least of the silly parts of the last 30 or 40 years.  

M.E.S.'s spectacular disdain, his ornery-ness, his willingness to bite the hand that feeds him, see "500 Bottle of Wine"  

I find myself laughing out loud about once every three tracks, because the Fall is just such a pisser, willing to say and play any god-damn thing, but completely what it is, regardless.  

Justin Cober-Lake: Just after I read this note, I laughed at "Marquis Cha Cha," and then realized that's probably a great example of what I like in the Fall, or what I would like if dug deeper and was more familiar. The track has a surprising groove to it, just hinting at a relevant globalism. Smith has some wry lyrics, and at least one moment that's genuinely funny ("You educated kids know what you're on about / You've been oppressed for years"), all of which disguises the song's disturbing elements. It feels particularly Fall-y to me, or at least does the things the Fall does that Jenny describes as the four things she likes about them.

Ben Donnelly: I was going to suggest the one with "Hip Priest" as well, Hex Enduction Hour, in part because they way "Hip Priest" was worked into the end of Silence of the Lambs makes it slightly familiar to most people, making it an example of the oddest aspects of The Fall planted deep in popular culture. But there's a whole bunch of good answers here, and I was content for a long time with owning one album (Bend Sinister) and one singles compilation (458489 A Sides). 

 My favorite LPs would be Hex, This Nations Saving Grace, The Unutterable, The Real New Fall Album.  

Ian Mathers: I haven't had time to get too much into this yet, but I do think the first 1 or 2 (or even 3, if you've got time and patience) discs make for a decent intro, although I might still direct budget conscious listeners to the two-disc 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong: 39 Golden Greats compilation, which was the first time anything even approaching wide-ranging/definitive enough came out. But I honestly feel that, unlike most bands I like, nearly anything can be a good intro. To date myself a little, I read about the Fall long before I was able to find any of their work in stores (primitively enough, the only way I would have been able to hear them at the time). And even then, although I'd check every music store I went to for them, there wouldn't even be a title card for the Fall. Then one day one of those dodgy CD resellers that haunts university campuses showed up at my school with exactly one, battered, garish Fall CD in stock: 1992's Code: Selfish, represented here by the great political/dance-rock doggerel of "Free Range", track 13 of disc 2. It is not at all a terribly representative record for the band, but it's all I had to listen to and even though no other opening track of theirs sounds like a bunch of church bells tossed in a bin and chucked down the stairs (love you, "The Birmingham School of Business School") by the time music became more, err, accessible (and I moved to a place with better stores) I still felt prepared for the vast sprawl of their oeuvre. And now, in retrospect, I feel like I could have started from the grottiest, earliest singles here, or the bilious pomp of something like "Hip Priest", and been just as well prepared.  

And by prepared I mean both that the Fall's work seems in some way to be holographic - any small chip off the ol' block somehow recapitulates the whole - and that I kind of knew I was going to love pretty much all of it. There are some dodgy/crappy Fall releases out there, but I'm still basically/theoretically on board, or at least would rather listen to that than many other outfits. This box represents a mammoth investment of time, but for me it pays you back immensely - not everyone needs (to take some semi-random examples) "I'm Into C.B.", "No Bulbs", "Blood Outta Stone", or "I Wake Up in the City" in their life but I feel richer for it.  

To answer one of the questions Jenny asked earlier, probably my favourite of the old singles on those first discs is actually the first Fall song I ever heard and the only one I had the chance to hear before Code: Selfish, when I stumbled onto the video for "Hit the North" on TV.

I just love that farty synth bass/horn sound, and all the screaming. Really! And this also ties into the question of collaboration, because as much as I've liked songs from across the length and breadth of their music plenty of the people in the "Hit the North" video (and a few others) make up the core of what I'm always going to (unfairly?) think of as the "real" or "true" Fall, not just MES (a singular figure, and more on that in a minute) but Brix, Steve Hanley, Craig Scanlon, and Paul Hanley. In some ways this idea is a mirage, in multiple senses; not only are there others who contributed to albums during this period (Marc Riley, Simons Rogers and Wolstencroft, Karl Burns, special shout out to Dave Bush, later of Elastica, for his work on my beloved Code: Selfish), and not only is is doubtful how long that group of people actually worked as a functional unit and not only is the current lineup (who all joined in 2006) the longest-serving stable incarnation, the fact still remains that in not just the music but the pictures and videos I was able to find as a younger person getting into the band they're who I think of as the Fall. The "granny on bongos" comment is absolutely true for better and worse, but one of Smith's undeniable talents is in putting together good bands (or else he's just obscenely lucky). Yes, with almost any other vocalist many of these songs would be worse off, and it's the alchemy between MES as a sui generis front man and the music that makes the Fall what they are, but often thinking about the band mostly begins and ends with the front. 

With one already-oft-mentioned exception, I'm sure my favorite Fall LPs are pretty conventional within the world of Fall fans (no order):

Code: Selfish, Hex Enduction Hour (remove that pointless racial slur up top and this is basically perfect), The Wonderful and Frightening World Of... (the 16-track North American CD version with all the bonus tracks...), This Nation's Saving Grace ("Paint Work" might secretly be my favorite Fall song), and Bend Sinister.

 As for MES: Here's someone who on the one hand is probably one of the best front man of his era/generation, often super compelling when singing. And on the other hand it's impossible not to notice that he seems deeply unpleasant, has been accused of and/or gotten in legal trouble for domestic abuse, bullying, racism, alcholism, assault, etc. and none of its really ever made very much headway (although with him ailing recently, if we are witnessing the end of the era I wonder what kind of dam is going to break in the wake of his passing, whenever that happens). I fell in love with the Fall, and heard album after album, long before I heard of anything worse from Smith than just eccentricities, and while I admit these things are a big part of why I don't think I'd buy a concert ticket or provide other direct financial support in the future, this is a case where I seem to be unwilling to ditch the work (as opposed to my inability to listen to Swans in recent years, my complete lack of interest in revisiting Louis CK's work, etc etc.). You can find recent interviews with, for example, Brix where she doesn't shy away from describing unacceptable, abusive behaviour by Smith to her and others, but she also seems to love the band and her work with the band and doesn't seem to want anyone to stop listening.  

It's something I certainly wish wasn't true and something I won't defend, and it definitely has changed how and when I recommend the Fall to others, but ultimately aside from really blatant moments like wincing at "The Classical" it hasn't necessarily stopped me from listening myself.  

Bill Meyer: Yeah, MES comes across as deeply unpleasant, and for that reason I have not so far read any of the Fall books. It's interesting to note that people he has mistreated come back and work with him again. Prime example - his ex-wife Brix re-joined the band in the mid-1990s. I saw them then and she wasn't just a hired hand, she brought more energy to the performance of what I consider some of their more problematic material than he did. Smith is like David Thomas, Lou Reed, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis, to name a few other bandleaders who have treated their collaborators terribly only to have those people come back and play with them again, in this respect: they can know they are being treated badly, and feel very bad about it, but also know that they are part of something singular and great. They come back to be part of that thing, and they make it great by participating. When things fall out of sync (the first album after Marc Riley left, the last album with Brix before the divorce, the last records with Scanlon/Hanley, Reformation post-TLC) you get records that are weaker than the songs that make them up.

Michael Rosenstein:  I am just slightly scratching the surface here and find it all disorienting in so many ways. It is just not the way I am used to listening to music and not the music I am used to listening to. Sure I've heard about the Fall, but never, as far as I can remember, consciously listened to anything of theirs. My thoughts are based on a super-cursory listen which is really about all this musters for me. That is absolutely all about me and my musical tastes and not at all about the music. The first disc seems to stick the most with me, but really only because it sounds like what I expected them to sound like. It sounds very much stuck in the late 70s early 80s post-punk music that I have a passing familiarity with (The Slits, Pop Group/Rip Rig and Panic, Gang of Four ("Peel Sessions" or "Entertainment",...) though certainly messier than Wire. It hits all the tropes I would expect and does so with a shambolic energy that is passingly engaging. But by the time they are hitting the late 80s, they've lost me altogether. (The old man in me is starting to think "this all kind of sounds the same") and spot checking the third disc is a bit of a slog.  

It has made me think about how singles functioned in the late 1970s/1980s in particular, something that just wasn't on my radar because of what I was listening to at the time. I've been talking to friends who were grabbing these as they came out, searching out singles because that was the only way to get a glimpse of this kind of stuff in the US. That notion of the hard search for music being leaked out in small doses is SO different than how people listen now.  

In the end, this is an intriguing listening exercise for me but nothing jumps out enough to entice me to really dig in more deeply. I am absolutely not the audience for this box, and really wouldn't even be the audience for a single-CD very, very, very best of comp. Now back to looking out my window watching the snow and digging very deeply in to John Cage's "Winter Music" which is totally my jam.  

Jennifer Kelly: I think it's important that we are able to disagree civilly -- and I do disagree with almost everything in your post -- and I imagine we have some readers who do not like the Fall.  

The main risk is that MES reads your post and incorporates it into some sort of a song later, a la "Portugal."  

Mason Jones: I agree, I think if we can dig into more detail, this could be a valuable and interesting inclusion. I think I agree with some of your thoughts, and not others, since I'm not a Fall fan but do enjoy parts of the catalog.  

Bill Meyer: I certainly appreciate the inclusion of non-partisan and skeptical perspectives. The point about how people received music in the heyday of indie singles vs how they access music now - and also how the potential consumers of 7 CD archival boxes relate to other dominant modes of music consumption- that's best discussed when I am not typing with a thumb. Maybe later or maybe you can all take it past me.   

Michael Rosenstein: I’d be curious to understand the parts you disagree with. My comments are so casually subjective based on a cursory listen to music totally outside my wheelhouse. My guess is that any “disagreement” would be rooted in the fact that I did some lazy listening (which I completely agree with.)

Jennifer Kelly: Well for instance, comparing the Fall to the Slits.  The two bands sound completely different.  There's a lot of reggae in the Slits, for instance, and next to none in the Fall.  

Or the Pop Group, again, completely different thing, lots more chaotic and less rhythmic.   

Gang of Four, okay, maybe at the most superficial level, though if you listen to this stuff seriously that would be like saying that blue is sort of like green.  To me, they're both primary colors.   (Ed note: Jennifer Kelly is apparently not aware that green is NOT a primary color.)  

 Also yes, the Fall did seem to get looser and more distended as the years went on, but I would never attach the word "shambolic" to something as boxed in and paranoiac and just mental as later fall.  Shambolic, to me, means trippy and open-ended and accepting of whatever the path leads to, which is not a quality I would associate with the Fall at all.

 Michael Rosenstein: Got it. Yeah. That was incredibly lazy on my part and has everything to do my admittedly limited listening in this area. It is exactly the same as someone with minimal exposure to free jazz piano playing saying that some pianist reminds them of Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra (who have almost nothing, stylistically to do with each other). When I say that this is what I was expecting to hear, I only meant that it fit in the tiny little box that I have for that kind of listening.  

These are the concerns I have in having my comments included other than really saying that I took a listen, wasn't won over, and went back to my wheelhouse. Which really just proves my narrow listening habits more than anything else.  

Bill Meyer: But the Fall did record in the same or similarly appointed studios, worked with similar gear. Part of the sound we associated with late 70s post-punk has to do with gear and studio technique (or lack there-of), and the early Fall stuff shares the same cheap amps, cheap guitars, and cardboard-y drum sounds as a lot of other inexpensively recorded post-punk. What do you think, Michael, are you hearing that sound rather than genre elements?  

Michael Rosenstein: Thanks Bill - That gets to where I was going a lot more clearly. When I said:

The first disc seems to stick the most with me, but really only because it sounds like what I expected them to sound like. It sounds very much stuck in the late 1970s early 1980s post-punk music that I have a passing familiarity with

I was talking much less about stylistic synergies than about an overall sound. This for me is more about setting context than it is about any notion of "this sounds like that." There is a boomy quality and evenness of sonic field (with all of the instruments playing equally within the mix) that jumps out. While the way the groups operate are stylistically distinct, and the densities of sound are very different, listening to the way that the mix operates on something like Rip Rig and Panic's "Knee Deep In Shit" sets me up to hear "Roche Rumble."

 I'll stick with this:

But by the time they are hitting the late 1980s, they've lost me altogether. (The old man in me is starting to think "this all kind of sounds the same") and spot checking the third disc is a bit of a slog.

Jenny, it is interesting to hear you talk about them getting "looser and more distended". In thinking it through, maybe a better response to the earlier stuff for me is that I hear a rawness in it that isn't quite there for me in the VERY limited spot checking of the later stuff.

 Marc Medwin: OK, I was half thinking of not getting involved at all, OK, more than half, but a toe in the water:

I expected to hate this stuff.  I'm only listening to disc 1 now.  I'm smiling, grinning actually.  For me, the band that comes to mind is the Adverts, maybe it's already been discussed and not really that close at all, I haven't read back through all of these posts yet.  I find the keyboard hook on "It's the New Thing" absolutely irresistible!  

Just a quick bit of context: So far, my favorite song by the Fall has been “Pat-Trip Dispenser,” which, once I get it in my head, I find myself singing all day long, growling it in the shower, I think the lyrics are pure earthy genius!  From what I'm hearing now, I have a hell of a lot of catching up to do!!  

Jennifer Kelly: I've hit the last two discs this week, which admittedly, are not as fun as the first three, but I've been mesmerized by "Hittite Man," lately, and in looking up the lyrics, found this pretty amazing site called The Annotated Fall.  http://annotatedfall.doomby.com/

Groundhog Day

February 2nd, 2018

The Groundhog was never wrong.

More often than not, though, the opposite of his prediction came true--especially with the many groundhogs spread throughout North America. Some of them may see their shadow, some may not.

Either way, The Groundhog himself was never wrong. 

Mother Nature had assigned him the duty of predicting how much winter would be left before spring could come because the inter-season squabbling between Winter and Spring, specifically in Canada and the US (the former more than the latter), had gotten very bad. It was a foolproof plan, really. Or rather, it would be. 

There was just one problem.

Neither season listened.

A small crowd was gathered around the burrow, waiting for the groundhog to appear. None of them seemed to notice the white-cloaked figure off to the side, watching the burrow with sharp blue eyes. She held a warm drink and sipped it, lips pursed. She looked cold and calculating, eyes darting up to the sky and back to the burrow.

“It’s overcast,” a chipper voice said. 

“A north wind could clear those clouds any moment now.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“I don’t control the winds,” the white cloaked figure said, hand lightly touching her collarbone, feigning hurt, as if the figure that had suddenly appeared beside her had insulted her gravely.

“Yes you do.” the second figure sniffed, staring up at the sky as well. People seemed not to notice her, either. A remarkable feat, really, considering the flowers that were growing in her orange hair and how leaf like her dress (also covered in flowers) was.

“I would never go so far as to sabotage the hard work The Groundhog lays down for us all.”

“I doubt that,” the redhead said, frowning.

“Well I’m not the one who never listens to The Groundhog in the first place!”

“You take that back!”

She sipped her warm drink. “No thank you.”

“You’ll be taking it back when I get to start early.”

“Just because you got to start early last year doesn’t mean it will be the same this year.”

“The weather says otherwise, sis.”

“Are you quite sure, sister dear? Because if I’m not mistaken, that’s a break in the clouds,” the white cloaked figure said, a delicate smile on her face as she sipped her drink.

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes. Oh look! It’s Willie himself right now!”

“Oh no. No, no no!”

Sure enough, the groundhog by the name of Willie had emerged from his burrow, and was sniffing around, stretching.

“He could still ignore his shadow, you know,” the redhead said, green eyes squinting from the sudden sunlight reflecting off of the snow.

“Then why is he rushing back into his burrow, Spring?”

Spring gasped. Sure enough, Willie had seen his shadow and headed back into the burrow.

“Oh, puddles!” Spring said, stomping her foot.

“Language!” her sister replied, a small smirk on her face.

“I had already started to melt everything! There was mud! The birds were up! Squirrels were rushing around! I finally pushed out your awful cold fronts! Ou, puddles, puddles, puddles!”

Her sister laughed. “Well, that makes Phil and Willie both yeses for a long winter, and you know they’re the official word from The Groundhog himself.”

“The other groundhogs have all said I should come early!”

“See, you’re already starting! Winnipeg Wyn said more winter,” she began, her hot drink floating beside her as she ticked the groundhogs off on her fingers one by one. “Violet in Vancouver was too busy still hibernating to even come out and predict if I stay or not which really speaks for itself, don’t you think? And now, Wiarton Willie has said that there are six more weeks of winter. You know the rules, Spring. I get to stick around.”

Spring was flushed. “Winter you are the worst sister I have, I swear!”

“You’re too kind,” Winter replied. “Now then, I best be off! I have a cold front to bring back and some flurries to scatter, especially here in Ontario. Ta for now Spring darling, see you in six weeks!” 

“Ou she is infuriating!” Spring said, with a jaunty foot stomp. She crossed her arms and huffed as the press moved about and the Mayor coddled Willie. “I should be arriving early all over Canada.”

Spring took a few breathers, calming herself down. Winter was sticking around this year? Fine. The Groundhog had said so and she didn’t want to get Mother upset.

But she sure as heck wouldn’t make it easy for Winter.

---

February 4th, 2018

“I thought I may find you hanging around here, Aunt Spring.”

Spring sighed. Of course her first mark had to be one of his snows. Clearing her throat and putting on her usual happy-go-lucky face, she smiled. “Jack, hello! Why would you think I would be hanging around here, of all sprites?”

“Well,” Jack said, leaning on a tree and crossing his arms, “It’s a bit of a story, really. You see, this was supposed to be a lovely snowfall. Not quite a blizzard, but enough snow to cover the ground in a good few centimetres of the lovely soft easy-to-shovel snow that sparkles in the light and makes everything seem new. My personal best, aside from the whiteout blizzards of course.” His winning grin turned into a grimace. “Until they become sentient, of course. Nonetheless!” he continued, kicking off the tree and making his way over to his Aunt, hands in his suit pockets. “I came, did my job, admired my work and just as I was about to head out noticed that something was not quite right.”

Spring gasped. “Not quite right? Whatever do you mean?”

“I think you know full well what I mean, Aunt Spring.” He stopped in front of her toe to toe, serving her with a deadpan look as he reached out and let a few of the snowflakes land on his palm. He straightened up and looked at them very carefully. “They’re a little too runny.”

“Runny? What, like eggs?”

“No, more like rain,” he replied, raising an eyebrow.

“Those look like your trademark flakes to me,” Spring said, with a tiny toss of her head, short waves bouncing. “Nothing seems off, they look right as rain!” She giggled at the pun.

“Ah, yes,” Jack said, straightening up and chuckling. He blew the snowflakes off of his palm and watched as they rejoined the rest of the snow billowing about. “That’s the problem. It’s wet snow,” he said, glaring at Spring now.

“My favourite kind,” Spring simply replied.

“It’s hard to shovel, it soaks the gloves and turns all of the lovely, lovely white snow into slush,” he spat the last word, pointing down at the dirty road in front of them. A car sped by, a gross squelch sound sending slush flying at the two sprites. “I hate slush,” he added, waving his hand. The slush that had landed on his suit went flying.

“Well I can assure you Jack, this had nothing to do with me. Absolutely nothing,” Spring said with a smile. 

“Sure. Nor did the freezing cold front disappearing yesterday, lifting the extreme cold warning in the GTA, have anything to do with you.”

Spring just smiled.

Jack smirked, his shoulders dropping, his chill air back in place. “I assume then that you heard the good news?”

“Hmm?”

“Six more weeks of winter!”

“Hmm.”

“Very exciting, of course. Mother and I are working overtime and Jacqueline is pitching in as well.”

“Going full force for this year’s winter then?”

“Yup.”

“Ah. I see.”

“Let me put it bluntly for you, Aunt Spring. You can try all you want to warm things up but I can assure you, this winter it will not be easy for you.”

“Then let me put it bluntly for you, Jack Frost.” She walked until she was toe-to-toe with him and looked right up at him, her resolve steely. “You can try all you want to stop me from making things mild but I can assure you, it will not be easy for you.”

Jack grinned. “I do so love a challenge, Aunt Spring.”

[A/N: Heyo so surprise, a new sorta smile shot!!! For the past 3 years I always picture the struggle here in Eastern Ontario between spring and winter leading up to April with Spring and Winter (personified, my own OCs I’ve had for a little while in case people don’t quite follow CS) fighting over control, and it always gives me giggles. 

I decided this year I’d go through with it! It always begins with The Groundhog's decision, because when Winter gets to stick around Spring makes sure it isn’t easy, and when Spring gets to arrive early, winter immediately puts Jack and Jacqueline to work in order to do everything possible to prolong winter time. 

This year, Phil and Willie, the American and Canadian Groundhogs (the most popular ones, a the very least) respectively, decided that we would get 6 more weeks of winter--so we get to watch a very frustrated Spring throw a bud or two into the winter time things! It’ll focus on Canada and America specifically, more so in Canada because uh, I’m from here heh. I’ll be updating this with the weather, whenever it gets crazy, up until March-ish when Spring is officially here. I hope you all enjoy this! ya girl slacked on this so ah, ah well]

A Small Works Cited:

Info on Groundhog Day results in Canada: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/groundhog-day-2018-1.4516220

Info on Groundhog Day in NA for those unfamiliar with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day

A Long Weekend in Fort Bragg, CA

Hi there everyone!Elisa and I decided to spend a long weekend on the Northern California Coast near Fort Bragg.  Fort Bragg sits on the coast just north of the quaint seaside town of Mendocino.  The County of Mendocino was immortalized by Willie Nelson and Lee Ann Womack who sang the great song "Mendocino County Line", a personal favorite of mine.

Mendocino is now very famous for producing some amazing wines.  I am partial to the Pinot Noir wines from the area.  But on this trip, our focus was going to be abalone.  We would be joining our niece Amberly and her fiancé Christian who along with several of their friends annually celebrate the re-opening of abalone season by diving for the tasty muscles in the kelp beds right off of the Mendocino Coast.  They would be roughing it by tend camping at Van Damme State Park.  We on the other hand would be "roughing it" in our Legacy Motorhome just up the road in Fort Bragg.

Fort Bragg was originally occupied by Native Americans but in the mid-1800's the Indians would be resettled onto a reservation near the mouth of the Noyo River.  A military garrison would be opened nearby by Horatio Gibson, who would name the fort after one of his commanders, Braxton Bragg.  By the 1890s the Indians would abandon the reservation and the military would leave shortly thereafter, but the town would remain and a growing lumber industry would propel the Fort Bragg to prosperity.  Fort Bragg would experience a boom in 1906, when the lumber industry would be called upon to help rebuild San Francisco after the great earthquake of 1906.  Today, the lumber industry has moved to other places and Fort Bragg's focus is now on tourism.  The beauty of rugged coastline is certainly a great draw, but just off the coast are the beautiful redwoods.  This is what makes Van Damme State park such a great spot, it has access to the coast but sits among the trees in a large sprawling state park.  There are also countless quaint B&B's and cozy Inns that line scenic Hwy 1 from Point Arena to Fort Bragg.

Getting to Fort Bragg was the most challenging part of our trip.  For starters, we were late preparing for our trip, because we had to take Elisa's brother to a number of different doctor's appointments.  Then, our little Hyundai that we tow behind our motorhome would have a problem and end up in the shop.  So we would have to make arrangement s to rent a car from Enterprise up in Fort Bragg.  We left Martinez, CA at around 10:30 AM and the trip would usually only take about 4 hours.  Unfortunately, we would be tied up in traffic on Hwy 37 near Napa Valley.  We were leaving on a Thursday, so there shouldn't be traffic in Napa Valley, but apparently Route 116 was closed and we would be re-routed to 101 just past San Rafael and we would then be caught in the Pentaluma traffic.  Bottom line is that the journey would take over 5-1/2 hours.  We had an appointment to pick up our rental car at 4:00pm and we weren't going to make it.  We called ahead and the gal working the desk suggested we not take Hwy 128 and instead stay on 101 to Willits and then take Hwy 20.  it worked out, and we would arrive by 4:25 just before she was closing for the day.

We had a difficult time reserving as spot for our 38' motorhome on this first weekend of August.  That's because it is the first weekend after the opening of Abalone season and apparently everyone who as camping - except us - was diving for the little buggers.  We did end up finding a spot at Woodside RV park.  it's not the most scenic and well equipped park we've been in but we did get a nice pull through spot.  By the time we got settled into our spot, we needed to begin thinking about dinner. Elisa had picked up some great looking ribeye steaks before we left so that problem was solved and we had a great dinner. The next day, we would spend some time exploring Fort Bragg and taking a long walk with our dogs Oreo and Bella on Glass Beach.  Glass Beach is a popular tourist spot just north of Fort Bragg, and as the name suggest, the beach is abundantly covered with beach glass.  The interesting story is how the beach came to be covered in glass.  From the 1860 through the 1950's the town of Fort Bragg would dispose of their garbage by first burning it on the beach and then dumping it directly into the ocean.  Over time, the ocean would decompose the discarded items and expel the diestrus all along the shoreline.  The glass from bottles and jars that were thrown into the ocean would become broken sanded smooth by the tides and then deposited along the beach.  Nowadays, much of the glass has been picked by tourists and locals and while there is still a lot of glass it is nowhere near as plentiful as it once was.  There are signs everywhere, asking people not to take the glass but most of the folks we saw out there were filling their pockets and pails with the glass gems.  At this rate, they're gonna have to come up with a new name for this beach.

Later that Friday evening we wold drive down to Van Damme State park and connect with Amber and Christian and we would get some quality time in with our newest Grand-Niece Kirsten.  She is only about 4 months old but this is her second camping trip.  What a trooper.  Earlier in the day, Christian had been out with the rest of the gang diving for abalone.  He would report that there were lots of them out there but they were relatively small.  We would arrive just in time to see his friend John running the abalone through a meat grinder so that they could make abalone won-tons and abalone pizza.  Others in the group were slicing, pounding, breading and frying abalone.  We would find abalone in salads and tacos. We brought along some Italian sweet sausage and some Bockwurst sausages to round out the faire.  Everything was delicious.    We would call it a night around 10:00 and make our way back up to Fort Bragg, which is just 15 minutes up Hwy 1.

On Saturday, we would sleep in until about 9:00 in the morning, this was partly due to the fact that our little dog Bella decided to wake us up at about 4:00 am so she could go out to the bathroom.  Once that was done, she decided that everyone else should wake up and join her.  It took awhile to get there back to sleep so, we would make up for it by sleeping in.  After we had a hearty breakfast of eggs, hash browns, breakfast sausage and toast, we would head back to Glass Beach for another walk.  It would be low tide, so Elisa wanted to head down to the tide pools to look or critters.  After spending a couple hours looking at the seals and sea lions just off the shoreline and exploring the tide pools we would head down toward our campground to explore the Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden.  They would be having a art festival and beer and wine tasting at the gardens.  It was very crowded.  The gardens are very deceiving from the entrance, it looks like it will be relatively small so my expectations were low.  But once we got beyond the entrance, we were amazed by how large the gardens were.  It was beautiful.  They are known for their collection of rhododendrons and dahlias.  The rhododendrons were not in bloom but the dahlia's were beautiful.  The grounds wind their way from Hwy 1 all the way down to the beach, about 3/4 of a mile.  On this day, open spaces in the park would be occupied by artists exhibiting their work.  In between the artists were different vintners and brewers of craft beer.  It made for an entertaining afternoon.  

Later that evening we would make another pass through Van Damme State Park to see Amber, Christian and baby Kirsten.  They were all so cute dressed in their Where's Waldo costumes, which was this years theme for the abalone fest.  Even Lizzie the black lab would be sporting a Waldo classic white and red striped shirt.  We wouldn't be staying for the abalone on this night as we wanted to try Luna Trattoria in Fort Bragg, a highly rated Italian restaurant.  We would get there by 8:00pm and they were packed.  Apparently, the great reviews aren't just hype.  Chef Massimo and his wife are from Northern Italy and they lovingly prepare authentic dishes that include fresh made pastas and local seafood.   We ordered a starter to share, Polenta with a meat sauce.  it was perfectly prepared, the polenta was sautéed so that it was a little crispy on the outside but soft and creamy on the inside.  The meat sauce was also delicious.  For our entree's Elisa would order their gluten free fusilli with a creamy red sauce with salmon.  It was excellent.  I would go for the mixed grill with oven roasted potatoes.  The grill platter would have a 4oz skirt steak that was accompanied with a spicy Italian sausage and house made pork sausage.  They were drizzled with a nice tomato and garlic aioli that paired nicely with it.  The potatoes were to die for.  We declare Luna Trattoria as a "must go".  Check it out if you find yourself in Fort Bragg.

On Sunday morning we would pack-up and head back home.  It took us 5 hours again to get home, but the drive back was beautiful.  We would wind our way along the coast on Hwy 1 and then head inland on Hwy 128.  We would go from the rugged coast to redwood forests and then to rolling hills lined with oak trees and then into wine country Alexander Valley straddles  Mendocino and Sonoma counties and it produces some fabulous wines.  

It was a short but fun trip.

Week 10 - Photography in London

1. “The worst drought in half a century has hit parts of East Africa affecting more than 10 million people.”

I believe that this part of the text best illustrates this photo. The man in the red is shading himself from the hot sun indicating the drought that is occuring. The mood on his face also shows how much of a burden this has been on him and his people. The part about being the worst drought in half a century is really illustrated by the hardships they are facing. 

2. The image brings this aspect to life. A photo is worth a thousand words and it is much easier to see the mood and struggle that goes along with this drought. Words are essential in spreading information, but the viewer gets emotionally attached after seeing a photo like this. 

3. Everyone interprets things in a photo differently. I think the point of view of the photo and the mood have an impact on how each person views the text. This is because the photo gives you a more in-depth idea of what life is actually like in a drought and how it affects innocent people that are struggling.

1. “Child refugees from Somalia are dying of causes related to malnutrition either during the journey or very shortly after at aid camps.”

2. The photo looks like it could’ve been taken at an aid camp. The child also looks somewhat malnourished based on his body and mood. The image gives a clear illustration of what could be a child refugee from Somalia and the struggle that occurs for these kids as they try to seek help with their famillies.

3. The point of view of the photo really has a dramatic impact on the photo. The fact that the child is staring right into the camera makes me feel bad for him. The fact that the background is blurred out makes it more intense because it makes the viewer’s eyes look back into the kid’s face because there isn’t much else to look at. 

1. “Acute malnutrition has reached 37% in some parts of north east Kenya”

2. This photo is very effective at making the viewer feel empathy for people in this situation. This photo is clearly about malnutrition which links well with the text because the child is clearly not eating enough. He looks so small and unhealthy and the image makes you think of what someone included in the 37% is like. 

3. I would say that this photo reminds people that small children are suffering from this drought as well. The fact that children are struggling (and not solely adults) makes people feel more empathetic about the situation and makes it look worse. 

1. Thousands of families have travelled for days across scorched scrubland from Somalia to Kenya, including barefoot children with no food or water after their crops and livestock were destroyed by drought.”

2. The image goes well with this aspect of the text because the image is depicting the families traveling with livestock. The image depicts what is left of the livestock and the quest for safety and comfort that they are on. It also shows the great deal of people who are affected. 

3. The image gives a precise idea of how people are traveling. Even though this photo was probably taken around dusk, the dust and and tree coverage emphasize the difficulties of traveling by foot do avoid the drought. The point of view of the photographer makes the viewer feel as if he is included in the photograph. 

Leader Image - #3

I think that the third photo gives the best depiction of the article. This photo does the best job at showing the impact that the drought has had on the people. The fact that there is nothing significant in the background puts all of the attention on him and makes him look lonely and like he is fending for himself in a time of desperation. It really gets people’s attention when you see something like that. 

My Life in the time of Covid19

Exhibition Analysis

Slack Power, 2006 by Hank Willis Thomas

Smokin’ Joe Ain’t J’Mama, 2006 by Hank Willis Thomas

The Liberation of T.O.: “I’m not goin’ back to work for massa’ in dat darned field!”, 2005 by Hank Willis Thomas

O.J. Dingo, 2007 by Hank Willis Thomas

Something to Believe In, 2007 by Hank Willis Thomas

Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008 by Hank Willis Thomas

These are the five photos that are found on the website from the link. There are actually 80 total in the series. There are no dates for each specific photo, but they were all taken between 1968-2008

1. The photos were primarily taken for black people to highlight how corporate advertising agencies visualize black people. The images were originally advertisements targeted at black people, but Thomas eradicated the text and slogans which made people have a different perception of the images.

2. The perception of masculinity has changed dramatically since the 1960s. Before this era, it was a lot less common to see a man that doesn’t choose to embody strength and assertiveness. These photographers were able to document how that stereotype has slowly been eliminated from society. The photos in the exhibit show that there is a spectrum of masculinity and various ways to embrace it. There are many forms of masculinity and that notion has changed over time. When I see some of these images, I think of the courage and fearlessness that goes along with challenging typical appearances of a man. This is more than just standing up for gay people. It examines various aspects of masculinity such as the power of men compared to women, black compared to white, and how age can impact masculinity as well, which is often overlooked.

3. I think that Catherine Opie’s series High School Football (2007-2009) was worthy of praise because it shows a range of masculinity in a fairly recent time and shows how American football players have different appearances. She captures portraits of teen males that are tall and muscular, short and skinny, white and black, buzzed hair and hair down to their chest. I thought that she did a great job of displaying the different types of ways that people present themselves nowadays and still be so similar. The following three photos are examples of some from the series:

Stephen, 2009 by Catherine Opie

Devin, 2008 by Catherine Opie

Rusty, 2008 by Catherine Opie

__________________________

4.

Practicing Golf Swing from the series Pictures from Home (1986) by Larry Sultan

a. In this photo, Sultan most likely cropped out furniture from the rest of the living room to make it more focused on his father (the man in the photo). Also, it emphasizes the fact that the carpet is turf and his father is swinging his golf club in the living room. Golf is commonly perceived as a game for old people and also it’s not physical, showing how he has lost strength. He took the photo from this point of view to show that his father is inside on a sunny day conveying that he is possibly inside because elderly people are more affected by the heat. I think that he took the photo with him posing like that because it gives a clear shot of his skinny arms and legs, while showing the short shorts which are more feminine traits. He is conveying how when men get older, they begin to lose their masculinity because of those reasons. 

b. The subject is the photographer’s father. Even without knowing that from research, you would assume they have a personal connection because they’re in a home together. 

Beaufort West Police Station. Beaufort West, South Africa. 2006. by Mikhael Subotzky.

a. The photographer depicted the two main subjects when one is mad at the other. He does this by capturing the photo as the police officer points at the criminal with a stern look on his face. Also, he chose to include the other person watching the situation to show that the police officer was being very serious. Another thing that I noticed was that the police officer has his hat on up and sideways and ammo across his chest which is different from most cultures so he wanted to document that. The light in the room is coming from above and makes the room look small and trapped. He chose to partially include the cell in the background to indicate that this scene was taking place at a jail. Also, in my opinion, I envision the light coming from the window in the back cell to show that this scene is at night, when most crime happens, so these three guys probably just got back to the station after being arrested at night. They’re all also wearing street clothes rather than jumpsuits which goes along with that point. 

b. The photographer is probably just trying to document different scenes that occur at the jail so he probably doesn’t have much of a relationship with these people. He could possibly have met the officer before, but not the criminals.

Untitled from the series Soldiers, 1999 by Adi Nes

a. The photographer left a few things in this photo on purpose. The subjects are the ones sleeping on the bus, but he included the gun to explain the scene better. You know that they are soldiers because the guy standing up is carrying an assault rifle and once you see that, you can understand why they are wearing green (commonly associated with military). He chose this point of view and lighting to signify how tired they all are in the middle of the day. I’m not entirely certain why he cropped the bottom right corner of the photo the way that he did, leaving only a small part of the person’s head in the photo. 

b. The photographer probably doesn’t have much of a relationship with these people although the photo is staged so he probably altered the scene somewhat to depict the scene the way that he wanted . He has much experience taking photos of people in the military, but from his point of view, he looks makes you feel like you are a soldier and looking back at your fellow soldiers. 

“I support the debunking of Jackson, but not because he was a bad American—rather, because he was a typical crooked Democrat. Jackson established the Democratic Party as the party of theft. He mastered the art of stealing land from the Indians and then selling it at giveaway prices to white settlers. Jackson’s expectation was that those people would support him politically, as indeed they did. Jackson was indeed a “man of the people,” but his popularity was that of a gang leader who distributes his spoils in exchange for loyalty on the part of those who benefit from his crimes.” Dinesh D’souza So lets start by quickly reviewing who and what the Democratic Party of the United States really is. The early Democratic Party was a huge supporter of slavery. So much so they launched a civil war with the Republican North that still holds the record for killing the most Americans. Its founder Andrew Jackson made his money expropriating Indigenous land and selling it to white settlers with their political support being part of the deal. He sent the Cherokee to their death on the Trail of Tears. The Jim Crow laws designed to continue to disenfranchise Black Americans from the late 1800’s until the 1960’s were enacted uniquely by Democratic state and local governments. The Souther Democrats are also inextricably linked to the KKK. Old habits die hard. In the modern era the Democrats produced William aka (Slick Willy) and Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama. William Jefferson Clinton was one of only two US Presidents ever impeached, he kept the job because blowjobs are not legally sex apparently. Currently all three are being investigated by the Attorney General of the United States. Hillary Clinton is again under investigation for her private email server and its 30k deleted emails. It also seems Ms Clinton tried to steal the 2016 US election by hiring political fixer firm Fusion/GPS to have Andrew Steele and various other agents of foreign powers produce a political hit piece. They then fed that through disgraced and censured former FBI director James Comey to the US intelligence community and the press knowing it was false. Democratic operatives in the FBI and Justice department used it to start a three year 30 million dollar taxpayer funded attempt to influence the US election and then carry out a type of coup against Donald Trump. Barrack Obama while still President signed off on all of this knowing his own party had produced it and authorized the surveillance of Trump while a candidate of the opposing party. Billy boy is under investigation for His and his Clinton foundations role in pay for play activities while his wife was secretary of state involving the Uranium One sale. This scandal interestingly enough involves Canadian mining exec and Liberal mega donor Frank Giustra “Integrity B.C. says of the 16 people honoured with the distinction on Tuesday, six donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the B.C. Liberal Party, as well as other political parties…..Frank Giustra: $81,500 in individual donations and a further $138,800 in corporate donations though his companies Lionsgate Entertainment and Thunderbird Films .” Giustra top middle The Democratic takeover of the Liberal Party seems to begin in earnest at the turn of the new century. Dalton McGinty’s disastrous rise to power in Ontario was engineered almost entirely by US Democratic party political operative David Axlerod. Axlerod would go on to lead Barrack Obama’s rise to power in 2008. Alongside our friend Gerald Butts he is credited with McGinty’s win. They would meet again. David Axelrod, a political adviser to the Democratic Party in the United States. Mr. McGuinty traveled to Chicago to look at ways to deal with negative campaigning.”…. https://ift.tt/356EVuJ Gerald Butts, also worked in the Liberal leader’s office when Axelrod was offering his wisdom to McGuinty from 2000 to 2002. https://ift.tt/2IqVisc McGinty’s successor Wynne ran the same kind of data driven campaign with the help of her US backers. “In many ways, the campaign was a showcase of modern electioneering in all its data-driven banality. Convinced that turnout would be as low as it was three years ago, when 48.2 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots, the parties dispensed with wide-band messaging aimed to attract a broad base of support. Instead, they deployed sharply divisive policies intended to motivate their most reliable supporters into going to the polls—a method as logical as it was cynical.” https://ift.tt/320Ppdb In 2014 Axlerod’s former partner Tom Lindenfeld, was convicted of corruption. “A Washington political consultant and former partner of David Axelrod has pleaded guilty to wire fraud in federal court and may cooperate with prosecutors in a long-running probe linked to powerful U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, Pennsylvania Democrat.” https://ift.tt/2Old049 Fast forward to 2013 when Justin Trudeau begins his run for the leadership of the Liberal party, Butts and Axlerod are reunited David Axelrod, Obama’s senior strategist, worked a decade ago with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, when the Liberal politician was still in opposition and looking for ways to take power from the Conservatives. And some of the top people in the Trudeau leadership campaign, including Gerald Butts, also worked in the Liberal leader’s office when Axelrod was offering his wisdom to McGuinty from 2000 to 2002.” https://ift.tt/2AO3j6o Axlerod is the man on the left Axlerod is quite likely behind the scenes of the current campaign as he addressed the 2018 Liberal convention in Halifax on Liberal Strategy telling them “Re-election campaigns — like the one the Trudeau Liberals will embark on next year — hang on a government’s ability to convince voters that it still represents positive change, Barack Obama’s chief campaign strategist David Axelrod said Friday.” And thus “Choose Forward” was probably born When not working to manipulate Canadian elections Dave relaxes by running a political consulting business with Karl Rove the man who put George W Bush in office and helped launch the Iraq war. What fun. https://ift.tt/2VlJ0GH In fact Axlerod was not alone in 2015 hundreds of American Democratic operatives streamed across the border. They would run much of the Liberal 2015 campaign at all levels.As a plan B they also seem to have dug their tentacles into the NDP as Jagmeet Singh’s rather tepid attempt at a “Dreams of My Father” type campaign book. One of the most notable foreign operatives is Obama Deputy campaign runner from 2012 Jennifer O’Malley Dillon. She was so central to Justin’s rise to power that she gave the keynote speech at the 2014 Liberal convention that saw the golden boys assumption of the liberal throne. O’Malley Dillon runs Precision a high end company that caters to “Fortune 50” companies and political campaigns all over the world. In their own words from a press relase they issued on receiving several awards for subverting our democracy. “But the foundation of the Liberals’ victory was laid well before the actual campaign began. In fact, LPC was hard at work building the infrastructure necessary to run a data-driven, grassroots-focused, tech-savvy, and cutting-edge campaign long before the public, or the media was engaged. By optimizing their analytics and voter-targeting processes before the writ was called, Trudeau and his team methodically equipped themselves with the knowledge and understanding of the electorate needed to make smart, strategic decisions at crunch time, especially important for the allocation of limited resources.” https://ift.tt/31WwL6c “Partner and co-founder Jen O’Malley Dillon led Precision’s work for LPC, designing and orchestrating an energized campaign effort that leveraged the same tools and strategy that yielded extraordinary success during President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012.Having served as deputy campaign manager of Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign –and architect of its data and field strategy and operation –O’Malley Dillon brought a battle-tested approach to bear on behalf of the LPC in Canada, crafting a sophisticated, data-driven field operation to build capacity, engage volunteers, and to drive voters to the polls on Election Day” https://ift.tt/2MkXbI7 In case any of this election data stuff sounds familiar it is essentially the same thing Cambridge Analytica was accused of. And it worth noting that Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie also worked for Trudeau’s Liberals “A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalized political advertisements.” https://ift.tt/2FEoLPU https://ift.tt/2ONjjKv While touting their “progressive” credentials Ms O’Malley Dillon and her company Precision perform the same function for some of the largest, nastiest corporate players on earth Promotional materiel from the precision website Ms. O’malley Dillon is now running the campaign of noted drunk driver Beto O’Rourke. The Democrats have been sending the Obama’s both scurrying across the border constantly since the SNC scandal broke trying to prop up their puppet. In 2017 I interviewed a very well respected Canadian Combat Veteran David Macleod. David started his 20 years with the Canadian Army as an Infantryman serving as a Peacekeeper in Cyprus, Bosnia and Kosovo. He went on to hold senior Intelligence and planning positions with major formations earning a Unit Commanders commendation for the Afghan mission. He detailed to me how he was approached cold by representatives of the Liberal party in 2014. He had never been a member of the Liberal’s but had a very high profile in the Veterans community then raging at the Harper government over our treatment. Based on the voluminous and sincere promises made to him on the treatment of veterans and other issues he agreed to run for the Liberal nomination in his riding. Dave told me his rival for the nomination, whom he quite liked, was a longtime Liberal activist and party member. David found out after his nomination win that before the ballot the Liberal Party called every card carrying Liberal in the district and told them to vote for him, he was the candidate the Party “needed”. He was disheartened by the undemocratic nature of his nomination but justified it at the time as “well that’s how the sausage gets made”. He decided to ruck up and carry on. So its off to Ottawa for new candidate training. He arrives and is shocked by the fact that most of the trainers are young Americans that worked on Barrack Obama’s 2009 campaign. He is also shocked to be receiving up to 15 E-mails a day with orders to cut and paste certain statements on social media at specific times of day. You can still see this behavior in Liberal Party social media constantly. His input on Party policy was not required or accepted. When he and another candidate tried to ask questions around disagreements they had with the Liberal backing of Bill C-51 they were forcefully silenced. He was being top down directed to ignore the needs and wants of the people who had trusted him to represent them and adhere absolutely to the Party line. David MacLeod took his duty toward the people of his riding with the same level of commitment he showed through 20 years of honorable service. He resigned the nomination before the federal election in 2015 saying about C-51, “The Act is a very disturbing piece of legislation that undermines Canadian democracy and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms,”. But his disgust was actually far more global. By 2017 he wanted to tell his story and pitched it to several media outlets. But no one wanted to throw shade at the golden glow coming off le beau Justin at the time. Canadians are suffering through political , economic, and societal interference on an unprecedented scale by Foreign Agents with connections to the US Democrats and the massive private “Foundations” that support their nation shattering agenda. Much of the plethora of foreign funding deployed to defeat the Conservatives and land-lock Canadian energy come through entities like Tides and the Rockefeller fund both with integral ties to the US Democratic party. A prime example are democratic operatives Joe Solomon and sister Linda Solomon-Wood. Joel Solomon has spent the better part of two decades completly taking over Vancouver cicvic and eventually BC provincial politics. He used the same massive pile of private foundation funds funneled through Tides Canada and a plethora of sock puppets. He put Vision Vancouver in city hall headed by his protege Gregor Robinson. He has recently funded the Green party, and thus was the Kingmaker for the current BC government. His sister is Keeping busy pumping out endless streams of pro Liberal propaganda out through the nauseating National Observer which received over 400 000$ in government contracts from the Liberals. The Alberta Government has just started an inquiry into this same funding stream in relation to land-locking Canadian energy. We need a full investigation of all of this and enact robust legislation to remove and prevent it. This foreign interference is the very textbook definition of an actual National Security threat. It has already put in place the puppet Trudeau Government that has done more damage to our security than any external enemy has ever managed. William Ray

Cruisin’ with Jaguar Design Chief Ian Callum in a ’32 Ford on Woodward

If anyone else wore a grin anywhere near the size of the one on the face of Jaguar design chief Ian Callum at this year’s Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise, we didn’t see them.

“Fun!” he exclaims. “It’s fantastic to drive a ’32 Ford, which is a car after my own heart,” he says of the 1932 Highboy borrowed from Carl and Jeanne Booth. Callum has pulled off of Woodward Avenue to wait for his younger brother, Moray, Ford’s design vice president, to meet up with Ian’s makeshift entourage.

“First thing he did was try to catch up to the Jaguar I-Pace by laying down a good patch of rubber,” Carl Booth says of Callum and his Ford’s V-8 engine and its sensitive throttle. “He said, ‘Wow! That pedal is quick to respond.’”

Ian Callum drives his perfect Dream Cruise car: Carl and Jeanne Booth’s LS3-powered ’32 Ford, built by Brothers Custom Automotive.

Callum has attended the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, an event usually held the same weekend as the Dream Cruise, for decades. But Pebble moved back a week for 2018 to accommodate a golf tournament, so we conjured up this fish-out-of-water meeting by arranging Booth’s hot rod for Callum, who has a 351 Windsor-powered ’32 Ford coupe of his own back home in England. Woodward, however, turns out to be Callum’s natural habitat.

The makeshift entourage includes Bill Jagenow, driving his Flathead Ford Model T roadster; Autumn Riggle, driving Jeanne Booth in a lowered, custom 1956 Lincoln Premier—Jagenow and Riggle are partners in Brothers Custom Automotive, which built the Booths’ and Moray’s hot rods—and Bill’s 12-year-old son, Louis “Liam” Jagenow VII, riding shotgun in our Jaguar I-Pace photo car. I briefly imagine Liam participating in the Dream Cruise silently in such an EV in a quarter century or so.

Ian catches up with his brother, Moray.

Moray Callum arrives in a Lincoln Navigator, and we take a couple more laps of Woodward before gathering in front of Pasteiner’s Auto Zone Hobbies (car models and books).

“He’s got a goatee beard,” Ian says of Moray. “It’s most peculiar.”

The two brothers don’t see each other often enough. That may change.

I’ve retired from being a judge at Pebble Beach,” Ian says. “I’ve done it for 18 years. So I’ll probably be here next year,” when the events are again on the same weekend. “I’ll probably go to Pebble on Thursday and come back here Friday and Saturday.”

As Ian and I go to leave Pasteiner’s classics-jammed parking lot, a woman steps forward.

“Excuse me? Hi, my name is Catherine Johnston. I was told that you designed my car, the Jag F-Type.”

“Yeah, I did!” Ian allows, adding that he did it with a team.

“I have it here.”

“And you’re in tears!”

“I love that car. It is my most favorite car in the world, and I wanted to thank you.”

So far, the Dream Cruise isn’t that different for Callum than meeting prominent Jaguar owners at Pebble. And there are other designers to catch up with: Peter Davis, who worked for Fiat in Italy in the ’90s when Ian Callum was there for Ford; Wayne Cherry, General Motors’ sixth design chief; and Howard “Buck” Mook, a colleague during Ian’s 12 years at Ford. When the designers split up, Ian finds a 1941 Willys Gasser a block away.

“A friend of mine in England has got a Willys like that,” he says. “He actually drives it on the road. He’s got a cage in it; it’s a complete drag racer. It’s quite interesting because it makes a lot of noise. … Wow. Look at that! That’s a blower and a half.”

“I used to work on Corvettes,” says Bob Kinzer, owner of the Willys. “That’s an ‘outlaw’ fiberglass body.”

“The engine’s remarkable,” Callum tells Kinzer. “Do you know how much horsepower?”

Although he’s not one for green cars, Ian Callum is drawn to Keith Collins’ personally restored ’65 Ford Mustang 2+2.

“At least 750,” Kinzer replies. Like the cars on the Pebble grass, Kinzer trailered his car from Utica, Michigan, to 14 Mile Road, a couple of blocks away, then drove it the rest of the distance to his parking slot just off the curb.

Next, Callum studies a dark green ’65 Ford Mustang 2+2 fastback with a 289 V-8 and “Special Edition” painted on the rear quarter-panels. It’s not the sort of paint job that would earn it a space on the 18th fairway, but it’s the kind of homespun work that speaks to the spirit of the Dream Cruise.

“When it came out, I was struck by this very strong, powerful face,” Callum says. “That lovely shaped grille. It was very purposeful. And I really fell for that, it is really in some sort of way a kind of European car, which is a nice balance.”

Owner Keith Collins reveals it was white with blue stripes—the classic “A Man and a Woman” paint combo—when he bought it in Florida. “I’m still working on it,” Collins says. “Actually, it took a year to do all the major stuff on it.”

Callum is impressed with all these do-it-yourselfers and shade-tree mechanics on Woodward.

“I do appreciate a lot of the owners of the cars at Pebble Beach who do it because they love the cars, but it’s as much about the investment as it is about building them, which is fine,” he says. “I’ve got a few such investments myself. But everybody here is here because they love the car. They’re not interested in what it costs, what it’s worth. It’s worth more to the soul than to the wallet.”

Callum spots a ’56 Chevy with a crate motor, not unlike a car he sold recently. He did much of the work on his ’56 Chevy, including modern mechanical upgrades. Aesthetically, he’s fine with retro rods, not so much rat rods.

“I like honest cars,” he says. “But cars that have been patinaed and scratched intentionally, I don’t have a lot of time for that.”

As we continue walking, Callum says he’d like to have a 1963-65 Buick Riviera and considers the Bill Mitchell design era, at least up to the early ’70s, the pinnacle of American design. He likes post-Virgil Exner Mopars as well, pointing to a ’69 Dodge Dart GT convertible.

Let’s make a deal: Ian Callum tries to buy Carolyn Peters’ Super Bee at the Halls’ Dream Cruise Party.

“See, I like that. The simplicity of them. After the failings of the ’50s, they discovered this thing called ‘elegance.’”

Callum also points out a passing Meyers Manx and a 1969 Pontiac Firebird.

“The ’68, ’69 Firebird is one of Mr. Tata’s favorite cars,” he says, referring to Ratan Tata, who as then-chairman of Tata Group bought Jaguar Land Rover for Tata Motors from Ford in 2010.

Speaking of Ford, we encounter Mook again, who leads us to a wild yellow Mustang II, a V-8 with chrome SVT valve covers under the hood, owned by Greg Sauve. Mook is also responsible for the ’66 Pontiac GTO-based “Monkeemobile.” As for the Mustang II, Callum isn’t enamored with his friend’s most notorious design.

Ian with Jaguar PR’s Stuart Schorr and the author.

“[Lee] Iacocca said nobody over 30 was allowed to work on the new Mustang,” Mook explains. “We had a contest for two weeks. We had to do sketches, full-sized tape and everything, and Iacocca chose my design.”

“I remember your sketches,” Callum says.

“They were very exaggerated,” Mook admits. “We always used to do that here in America.”

Soon, Callum is off to a local Jaguar dealer’s party at the M1 Concourse in Pontiac, 8 miles to the north. That’s too much like a Pebble Beach event, so instead we meet up with him later at the party of GM executive Jim Hall and his wife, Pam. Jaguar’s design director eyes the Halls’ ’63 Corvette and designer Dave Rand’s ’66 Jaguar E-type Series 1. Woodward has a reputation as an all-American muscle car and hot rod festival, but Callum understands Jaguar’s place among the Fords, Chevys, and Dodges.

“Jaguar’s the affordable exotic,” he says. “That was the mission. For a lot of people, these classics and these hot rods are affordable classics. They’re affordable exotics to them. It touches their heart the way that a normal car will not touch.”

He fawns over a 1969 Dodge Super Bee parked behind Rand’s E-type and tells me, “I want you to say in your story that this is the car I’d go home with.”

IFTTT

Cruisin’ with Jaguar Design Chief Ian Callum in a ’32 Ford on Woodward

If anyone else wore a grin anywhere near the size of the one on the face of Jaguar design chief Ian Callum at this year’s Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise, we didn’t see them.

“Fun!” he exclaims. “It’s fantastic to drive a ’32 Ford, which is a car after my own heart,” he says of the 1932 Highboy borrowed from Carl and Jeanne Booth. Callum has pulled off of Woodward Avenue to wait for his younger brother, Moray, Ford’s design vice president, to meet up with Ian’s makeshift entourage.

“First thing he did was try to catch up to the Jaguar I-Pace by laying down a good patch of rubber,” Carl Booth says of Callum and his Ford’s V-8 engine and its sensitive throttle. “He said, ‘Wow! That pedal is quick to respond.’”

Ian Callum drives his perfect Dream Cruise car: Carl and Jeanne Booth’s LS3-powered ’32 Ford, built by Brothers Custom Automotive.

Callum has attended the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, an event usually held the same weekend as the Dream Cruise, for decades. But Pebble moved back a week for 2018 to accommodate a golf tournament, so we conjured up this fish-out-of-water meeting by arranging Booth’s hot rod for Callum, who has a 351 Windsor-powered ’32 Ford coupe of his own back home in England. Woodward, however, turns out to be Callum’s natural habitat.

The makeshift entourage includes Bill Jagenow, driving his Flathead Ford Model T roadster; Autumn Riggle, driving Jeanne Booth in a lowered, custom 1956 Lincoln Premier—Jagenow and Riggle are partners in Brothers Custom Automotive, which built the Booths’ and Moray’s hot rods—and Bill’s 12-year-old son, Louis “Liam” Jagenow VII, riding shotgun in our Jaguar I-Pace photo car. I briefly imagine Liam participating in the Dream Cruise silently in such an EV in a quarter century or so.

Ian catches up with his brother, Moray.

Moray Callum arrives in a Lincoln Navigator, and we take a couple more laps of Woodward before gathering in front of Pasteiner’s Auto Zone Hobbies (car models and books).

“He’s got a goatee beard,” Ian says of Moray. “It’s most peculiar.”

The two brothers don’t see each other often enough. That may change.

I’ve retired from being a judge at Pebble Beach,” Ian says. “I’ve done it for 18 years. So I’ll probably be here next year,” when the events are again on the same weekend. “I’ll probably go to Pebble on Thursday and come back here Friday and Saturday.”

As Ian and I go to leave Pasteiner’s classics-jammed parking lot, a woman steps forward.

“Excuse me? Hi, my name is Catherine Johnston. I was told that you designed my car, the Jag F-Type.”

“Yeah, I did!” Ian allows, adding that he did it with a team.

“I have it here.”

“And you’re in tears!”

“I love that car. It is my most favorite car in the world, and I wanted to thank you.”

So far, the Dream Cruise isn’t that different for Callum than meeting prominent Jaguar owners at Pebble. And there are other designers to catch up with: Peter Davis, who worked for Fiat in Italy in the ’90s when Ian Callum was there for Ford; Wayne Cherry, General Motors’ sixth design chief; and Howard “Buck” Mook, a colleague during Ian’s 12 years at Ford. When the designers split up, Ian finds a 1941 Willys Gasser a block away.

“A friend of mine in England has got a Willys like that,” he says. “He actually drives it on the road. He’s got a cage in it; it’s a complete drag racer. It’s quite interesting because it makes a lot of noise. … Wow. Look at that! That’s a blower and a half.”

“I used to work on Corvettes,” says Bob Kinzer, owner of the Willys. “That’s an ‘outlaw’ fiberglass body.”

“The engine’s remarkable,” Callum tells Kinzer. “Do you know how much horsepower?”

Although he’s not one for green cars, Ian Callum is drawn to Keith Collins’ personally restored ’65 Ford Mustang 2+2.

“At least 750,” Kinzer replies. Like the cars on the Pebble grass, Kinzer trailered his car from Utica, Michigan, to 14 Mile Road, a couple of blocks away, then drove it the rest of the distance to his parking slot just off the curb.

Next, Callum studies a dark green ’65 Ford Mustang 2+2 fastback with a 289 V-8 and “Special Edition” painted on the rear quarter-panels. It’s not the sort of paint job that would earn it a space on the 18th fairway, but it’s the kind of homespun work that speaks to the spirit of the Dream Cruise.

“When it came out, I was struck by this very strong, powerful face,” Callum says. “That lovely shaped grille. It was very purposeful. And I really fell for that, it is really in some sort of way a kind of European car, which is a nice balance.”

Owner Keith Collins reveals it was white with blue stripes—the classic “A Man and a Woman” paint combo—when he bought it in Florida. “I’m still working on it,” Collins says. “Actually, it took a year to do all the major stuff on it.”

Callum is impressed with all these do-it-yourselfers and shade-tree mechanics on Woodward.

“I do appreciate a lot of the owners of the cars at Pebble Beach who do it because they love the cars, but it’s as much about the investment as it is about building them, which is fine,” he says. “I’ve got a few such investments myself. But everybody here is here because they love the car. They’re not interested in what it costs, what it’s worth. It’s worth more to the soul than to the wallet.”

Callum spots a ’56 Chevy with a crate motor, not unlike a car he sold recently. He did much of the work on his ’56 Chevy, including modern mechanical upgrades. Aesthetically, he’s fine with retro rods, not so much rat rods.

“I like honest cars,” he says. “But cars that have been patinaed and scratched intentionally, I don’t have a lot of time for that.”

As we continue walking, Callum says he’d like to have a 1963-65 Buick Riviera and considers the Bill Mitchell design era, at least up to the early ’70s, the pinnacle of American design. He likes post-Virgil Exner Mopars as well, pointing to a ’69 Dodge Dart GT convertible.

Let’s make a deal: Ian Callum tries to buy Carolyn Peters’ Super Bee at the Halls’ Dream Cruise Party.

“See, I like that. The simplicity of them. After the failings of the ’50s, they discovered this thing called ‘elegance.’”

Callum also points out a passing Meyers Manx and a 1969 Pontiac Firebird.

“The ’68, ’69 Firebird is one of Mr. Tata’s favorite cars,” he says, referring to Ratan Tata, who as then-chairman of Tata Group bought Jaguar Land Rover for Tata Motors from Ford in 2010.

Speaking of Ford, we encounter Mook again, who leads us to a wild yellow Mustang II, a V-8 with chrome SVT valve covers under the hood, owned by Greg Sauve. Mook is also responsible for the ’66 Pontiac GTO-based “Monkeemobile.” As for the Mustang II, Callum isn’t enamored with his friend’s most notorious design.

Ian with Jaguar PR’s Stuart Schorr and the author.

“[Lee] Iacocca said nobody over 30 was allowed to work on the new Mustang,” Mook explains. “We had a contest for two weeks. We had to do sketches, full-sized tape and everything, and Iacocca chose my design.”

“I remember your sketches,” Callum says.

“They were very exaggerated,” Mook admits. “We always used to do that here in America.”

Soon, Callum is off to a local Jaguar dealer’s party at the M1 Concourse in Pontiac, 8 miles to the north. That’s too much like a Pebble Beach event, so instead we meet up with him later at the party of GM executive Jim Hall and his wife, Pam. Jaguar’s design director eyes the Halls’ ’63 Corvette and designer Dave Rand’s ’66 Jaguar E-type Series 1. Woodward has a reputation as an all-American muscle car and hot rod festival, but Callum understands Jaguar’s place among the Fords, Chevys, and Dodges.

“Jaguar’s the affordable exotic,” he says. “That was the mission. For a lot of people, these classics and these hot rods are affordable classics. They’re affordable exotics to them. It touches their heart the way that a normal car will not touch.”

He fawns over a 1969 Dodge Super Bee parked behind Rand’s E-type and tells me, “I want you to say in your story that this is the car I’d go home with.”

IFTTT

Cruisin’ with Jaguar Design Chief Ian Callum in a ’32 Ford on Woodward

If anyone else wore a grin anywhere near the size of the one on the face of Jaguar design chief Ian Callum at this year’s Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise, we didn’t see them.

“Fun!” he exclaims. “It’s fantastic to drive a ’32 Ford, which is a car after my own heart,” he says of the 1932 Highboy borrowed from Carl and Jeanne Booth. Callum has pulled off of Woodward Avenue to wait for his younger brother, Moray, Ford’s design vice president, to meet up with Ian’s makeshift entourage.

“First thing he did was try to catch up to the Jaguar I-Pace by laying down a good patch of rubber,” Carl Booth says of Callum and his Ford’s V-8 engine and its sensitive throttle. “He said, ‘Wow! That pedal is quick to respond.’”

Ian Callum drives his perfect Dream Cruise car: Carl and Jeanne Booth’s LS3-powered ’32 Ford, built by Brothers Custom Automotive.

Callum has attended the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, an event usually held the same weekend as the Dream Cruise, for decades. But Pebble moved back a week for 2018 to accommodate a golf tournament, so we conjured up this fish-out-of-water meeting by arranging Booth’s hot rod for Callum, who has a 351 Windsor-powered ’32 Ford coupe of his own back home in England. Woodward, however, turns out to be Callum’s natural habitat.

The makeshift entourage includes Bill Jagenow, driving his Flathead Ford Model T roadster; Autumn Riggle, driving Jeanne Booth in a lowered, custom 1956 Lincoln Premier—Jagenow and Riggle are partners in Brothers Custom Automotive, which built the Booths’ and Moray’s hot rods—and Bill’s 12-year-old son, Louis “Liam” Jagenow VII, riding shotgun in our Jaguar I-Pace photo car. I briefly imagine Liam participating in the Dream Cruise silently in such an EV in a quarter century or so.

Ian catches up with his brother, Moray.

Moray Callum arrives in a Lincoln Navigator, and we take a couple more laps of Woodward before gathering in front of Pasteiner’s Auto Zone Hobbies (car models and books).

“He’s got a goatee beard,” Ian says of Moray. “It’s most peculiar.”

The two brothers don’t see each other often enough. That may change.

I’ve retired from being a judge at Pebble Beach,” Ian says. “I’ve done it for 18 years. So I’ll probably be here next year,” when the events are again on the same weekend. “I’ll probably go to Pebble on Thursday and come back here Friday and Saturday.”

As Ian and I go to leave Pasteiner’s classics-jammed parking lot, a woman steps forward.

“Excuse me? Hi, my name is Catherine Johnston. I was told that you designed my car, the Jag F-Type.”

“Yeah, I did!” Ian allows, adding that he did it with a team.

“I have it here.”

“And you’re in tears!”

“I love that car. It is my most favorite car in the world, and I wanted to thank you.”

So far, the Dream Cruise isn’t that different for Callum than meeting prominent Jaguar owners at Pebble. And there are other designers to catch up with: Peter Davis, who worked for Fiat in Italy in the ’90s when Ian Callum was there for Ford; Wayne Cherry, General Motors’ sixth design chief; and Howard “Buck” Mook, a colleague during Ian’s 12 years at Ford. When the designers split up, Ian finds a 1941 Willys Gasser a block away.

“A friend of mine in England has got a Willys like that,” he says. “He actually drives it on the road. He’s got a cage in it; it’s a complete drag racer. It’s quite interesting because it makes a lot of noise. … Wow. Look at that! That’s a blower and a half.”

“I used to work on Corvettes,” says Bob Kinzer, owner of the Willys. “That’s an ‘outlaw’ fiberglass body.”

“The engine’s remarkable,” Callum tells Kinzer. “Do you know how much horsepower?”

Although he’s not one for green cars, Ian Callum is drawn to Keith Collins’ personally restored ’65 Ford Mustang 2+2.

“At least 750,” Kinzer replies. Like the cars on the Pebble grass, Kinzer trailered his car from Utica, Michigan, to 14 Mile Road, a couple of blocks away, then drove it the rest of the distance to his parking slot just off the curb.

Next, Callum studies a dark green ’65 Ford Mustang 2+2 fastback with a 289 V-8 and “Special Edition” painted on the rear quarter-panels. It’s not the sort of paint job that would earn it a space on the 18th fairway, but it’s the kind of homespun work that speaks to the spirit of the Dream Cruise.

“When it came out, I was struck by this very strong, powerful face,” Callum says. “That lovely shaped grille. It was very purposeful. And I really fell for that, it is really in some sort of way a kind of European car, which is a nice balance.”

Owner Keith Collins reveals it was white with blue stripes—the classic “A Man and a Woman” paint combo—when he bought it in Florida. “I’m still working on it,” Collins says. “Actually, it took a year to do all the major stuff on it.”

Callum is impressed with all these do-it-yourselfers and shade-tree mechanics on Woodward.

“I do appreciate a lot of the owners of the cars at Pebble Beach who do it because they love the cars, but it’s as much about the investment as it is about building them, which is fine,” he says. “I’ve got a few such investments myself. But everybody here is here because they love the car. They’re not interested in what it costs, what it’s worth. It’s worth more to the soul than to the wallet.”

Callum spots a ’56 Chevy with a crate motor, not unlike a car he sold recently. He did much of the work on his ’56 Chevy, including modern mechanical upgrades. Aesthetically, he’s fine with retro rods, not so much rat rods.

“I like honest cars,” he says. “But cars that have been patinaed and scratched intentionally, I don’t have a lot of time for that.”

As we continue walking, Callum says he’d like to have a 1963-65 Buick Riviera and considers the Bill Mitchell design era, at least up to the early ’70s, the pinnacle of American design. He likes post-Virgil Exner Mopars as well, pointing to a ’69 Dodge Dart GT convertible.

Let’s make a deal: Ian Callum tries to buy Carolyn Peters’ Super Bee at the Halls’ Dream Cruise Party.

“See, I like that. The simplicity of them. After the failings of the ’50s, they discovered this thing called ‘elegance.’”

Callum also points out a passing Meyers Manx and a 1969 Pontiac Firebird.

“The ’68, ’69 Firebird is one of Mr. Tata’s favorite cars,” he says, referring to Ratan Tata, who as then-chairman of Tata Group bought Jaguar Land Rover for Tata Motors from Ford in 2010.

Speaking of Ford, we encounter Mook again, who leads us to a wild yellow Mustang II, a V-8 with chrome SVT valve covers under the hood, owned by Greg Sauve. Mook is also responsible for the ’66 Pontiac GTO-based “Monkeemobile.” As for the Mustang II, Callum isn’t enamored with his friend’s most notorious design.

Ian with Jaguar PR’s Stuart Schorr and the author.

“[Lee] Iacocca said nobody over 30 was allowed to work on the new Mustang,” Mook explains. “We had a contest for two weeks. We had to do sketches, full-sized tape and everything, and Iacocca chose my design.”

“I remember your sketches,” Callum says.

“They were very exaggerated,” Mook admits. “We always used to do that here in America.”

Soon, Callum is off to a local Jaguar dealer’s party at the M1 Concourse in Pontiac, 8 miles to the north. That’s too much like a Pebble Beach event, so instead we meet up with him later at the party of GM executive Jim Hall and his wife, Pam. Jaguar’s design director eyes the Halls’ ’63 Corvette and designer Dave Rand’s ’66 Jaguar E-type Series 1. Woodward has a reputation as an all-American muscle car and hot rod festival, but Callum understands Jaguar’s place among the Fords, Chevys, and Dodges.

“Jaguar’s the affordable exotic,” he says. “That was the mission. For a lot of people, these classics and these hot rods are affordable classics. They’re affordable exotics to them. It touches their heart the way that a normal car will not touch.”

He fawns over a 1969 Dodge Super Bee parked behind Rand’s E-type and tells me, “I want you to say in your story that this is the car I’d go home with.”

IFTTT

Entertainment: It was an ad? so what! It's still art

In the hills high above Los Angeles, within the white-columned serenity of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the bastard stepchild of the fine art world is finally getting its birthright.

“Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, 1911-2011,” which opened June 26, may be the most sweeping such survey in decades, featuring 198 works (pictures, magazine covers, ad campaigns, garments) throughout eight galleries and spanning images both obvious and unknown.

Richard Avedon’s “Dovima With Elephants,” the 1955 print of a Dior evening gown amid the pachyderms, which the show’s curator said became the most expensive fashion photograph sold at auction when it went for more than $1 million at Christie’s in 2010? It’s in there. Erwin Blumenfeld’s photo of Lisa Fonssagrives in a Lucien Lelong dress hanging off the side of the Eiffel Tower, the poster on many a dorm room wall? That, too. Ditto for Bruce Weber’s 1982 Calvin Klein underwear ad featuring a briefs-clad Tom Hintnaus silhouetted against a white adobe structure in the shape of a phallus. Once upon a time, it stopped traffic in Times Square.

But so are images from Willy Maywald, Neal Barr and Kourken Pakchanain, photographers whose names are not broadly known. And works from artists not normally considered fashion photographers (Man Ray, Dora Maar), but whose experimentation with the form helped advance the art.

The result is not entirely comprehensive: It is focused on work made in the four traditional fashion capitals — New York, Paris, London and Milan. And it ends in 2011, when the advent of Instagram and Snapchat changed photographers into “image-makers,” according to Paul Martineau, associate curator of photographs at the Getty Museum, who organized the exhibition. But with 89 photographers represented — 15 are women, and two are African-American — this show is more wide-ranging than even New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s 2004 exhibition “Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990,” which covered only a decade or so and included 13 photographers.

“I think the last time there was really a survey show like this was in 1977, when Nancy Hall-Duncan organized one for the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester,” New York, Martineau said.

In that gap, a tale lies. It is a reminder that despite the growing prominence of both photography and fashion in the cultural conversation, when it comes to the hallowed halls of a museum, there’s still a palpable tension around both disciplines, and the question of whether or not they belong.

“Photography had to fight to get taken seriously, and fashion photography had to fight even harder,” said Nick Knight, the contemporary photographer based in London and founder of the fashion film website SHOWStudio, who has three works at the Getty.

Martineau wanted to explore “the intersection of these two marginalized mediums,” fashion and photography,he said. The result forces viewers as well as the institution to grapple with lingering prejudices against both forms, though not everyone is convinced that they still exist.

Jeff Rosenheim, the curator in charge of the department of photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said the issue is “cultural, not institutional,” arguing that while the Met treats all types of photography equally (scientific, architectural, documentary or fashion), sometimes the bias is with the beholder.

Wherever the source of the discomfort resides, it harks back to the myth of the pure creative genius making art in service to the muse, as opposed to the service of filthy lucre, or, even worse, quotidian demand. Though it has long been discredited, this idea has forever tainted fashion and photography, which suffer the multiple stains of frivolity, facility and — don’t dare utter it aloud — marketing.

“Fashion photography was long looked down on as a commercial branch of photography,” said Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “So even after museums accepted that photography could be art, they still resisted collecting or exhibiting fashion photography.”

After all, these were pictures that most often first appeared in magazines — disposable monthly publications. They represented the opposite of the eternal, a value theoretically at the heart of the art world. Indeed, of the numerous institutions Martineau researched while creating the “Icons” show, he said, he found a dearth of fashion photographs in all but a handful of museum collections.

“There is a hierarchy in art forms that has come down over the ages, and museums are very slow to change,” Martineau said. “Most photography departments are housed in the basement, and the gallery spaces are on the lower levels. Painting is on the upper level.”

And as with museums, so with the mental landscape. According to Rosenheim of the Met, after Walker Evans, the celebrated photographer of the Great Depression, became a member of the Century Club in New York, he was invited to show his work at the club’s gallery. And he did: He showed his paintings.

“Which were modest at best,” Rosenheim said. “He was the most anointed photographer of his generation, and he was embarrassed to show his photographs at the Century! There’s been a dramatic change in how most of the world sees photography since then, but still: Some photographers don’t even want to be described as photographers — it’s like the most insulting thing you could say to them. They want to be called artists.”

Combine that with an even broader unease around fashion, with its whiff of indulgence and the superficial, and the insecurity and fear of not being seen as “serious” grows. “Fashion photographers and their attitude toward their work is its own area of psychological study,” said Rosenheim, who co-curated the 2017 show “Irving Penn: Centennial.” Indeed, in Norma Stevens’s biography of Richard Avedon, “Avedon: Something Personal,” the author claims that during a 1970 retrospective at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Avedon initially insisted there be no fashion pictures included, saying, “Fashion is the f word, the dirtiest word in the eyes of the art world.”

As Steele explained, “Fashion has long been dismissed as superficial and vain, in large part because of its association with the body, especially the female body, and with change, rather than permanence, truth and beauty.”

Knight, the photographer, goes even further. “In England and North America, where we are heirs to a Protestant value system, vanity is seen as a sin, and fashion is vanity. As a result, it has been marginalized, trivialized and often dismissed, though it is a universal and hugely important means of self-expression.”

There is a reason that when the Costume Institute became a part of the Metropolitan Museum, an element of the deal was that it pay for its own operating budget; it remains the only curatorial department at the Met to do so. The strategy it developed to meet that end — its annual blitzkrieg of a celebrity-and-fashion Gala — is still a touchy subject, discussed sotto voce by others within the museum, who feel its glitz and cost is somehow unbecoming to the institution.

At the same time, because of their popular appeal, shows of fashion and fashion photography are among the largest drivers of traffic in any museum.

Martineau conceived of the “Icons” show while working on the Getty’s Herb Ritts exhibition, which took place in 2012 and became its most visited photography exhibition (later surpassed by the Robert Mapplethorpe show in 2016). It also awakened the museum to the potential of the art form, and persuaded its leaders to allot “considerable resources”— he would not say how much — to building a fashion photography collection.

Since 2010, Martineau has acquired 70 new pictures by 25 photographers, aiming to make the Getty a dominant institution in the field, with the exhibition — and an accompanying coffee-table book — being his opening bid.

So though there is little doubt in the public mind and artistic sphere that names like Avedon, Penn and Newton have transcended their roots, what this exhibition posits is that in these and many other cases, there were no roots needed to transcend. By taking the pictures off the page and hanging them on the wall, Martineau recontextualizes them and frees them from subconscious associations most of us have with the idea of fashion magazines and ad campaigns (and our own secret interest, which we too often disavow by dismissing our knowledge as something gleaned by reading fashion magazines at the hairdressers).

He allows us to experience the power in placing a woman in a suit and heels amid the rubble of the London bombing, the way Cecil Beaton did in 1941; or the way the distortion in a picture shot from below, by Neal Barr, reflects the revolution in mores during the 1960s; and how reducing an image to a saturated silhouette, as Knight did with Naomi Campbell in a Yohji Yamamoto coat in 1987, allows it to move beyond model and garment to become an idea of itself.

Indeed, it is the less recognizable photographs that are often the most compelling, that make you think twice about the many ways visual artists were pushing the boundaries of their form while straddling the limitations of their job, and that demonstrate the preconceptions that come reflexively with the eye and memory of the viewer.

Witness a Bonwit Teller ad by Anton Bruehl from 1932 made to display “knitted-to-order sport clothes:” It depicts a female form in what looks like a body stocking, her head shadowed in an upraised arm, her silhouette resembling Greek statuary, strings from spools creating the geometric tracings of bondage over her skin. “I had seen that a long time ago, and it just embedded itself in my consciousness,” said Martineau, who tracked it to the New York Public Library and arranged a loan. “It was just so daring and inventive.”

“The composition just calls out to you,” Martineau said. “It says: ‘Come near me. Examine me.'” And, he might have added: Give me the respect I deserve.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Vanessa Friedman © 2018 The New York Times

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/07/entertainment-it-was-ad-so-what-its_3.html

‘Play It Again, Issam’: In Casablanca, a Cafe Is Still a Cafe

CASABLANCA, Morocco — Some things get better as time goes by. Rick’s Café may be one of them.

Chris Kelley of Bath, England, stopped there one recent day for lunch on his way to a kite-surfing vacation in southern Morocco, and said he was impressed at how lovingly restored the old place was. It was just like the one in the movie “Casablanca.”

Like many visitors here, Mr. Kelley was surprised to learn that Rick’s Café Américain never existed, except on a Hollywood movie lot, where the classic film starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman was made.

It was 1942, the world was at war, and the eponymous city was occupied by the Axis powers. Rick’s was just the figment of a writer’s imagination.

The owner and founder of the real Rick’s Café in Casablanca is a former American diplomat, Kathy Kriger.

“We wanted to make it everything it was in the movie, and then some,” she said.

A dozen white arches supported by columns frame the main dining room, under a three-story, octagonal cupola, and green leather bumpers grace the curved bar top. Palms in the corners, hanging brass chandeliers, beaded table lamps and a baby grand piano tucked into an archway lend to the period-authentic mise-en-scène.

Not coincidentally, Ms. Kriger on most nights can be found standing at the corner of the bar, the waiters under instructions to refill her wine glass with water until 11 p.m., when a Moroccan Val d’Argan Blanc is allowed. A lot of the regulars call her “Madame Rick.”

The incarnation of Rick’s Café has nothing to do with World War II, but a lot to do with the modern-day war on terrorism, and Ms. Kriger’s own small role in it. It also has much to say about the enduring power of a great work of art to affect destinies in real life.

Like a lot of Americans, Ms. Kriger was long a fan of “Casablanca,” which often makes critics’ lists of the 10 greatest movies of all time. She first saw it in 1974 at a movie festival in her hometown, Portland, Ore.

“At the end, everyone stood up and applauded,” she said.

Ms. Kriger later joined the State Department, which posted her as a commercial attaché to this Atlantic coastal port, Morocco’s business center and biggest city.

She was stunned to discover there was no Rick’s Café here, which seemed to her a missed marketing opportunity.

Then came the Sept. 11 attacks, and what she considered a backlash in America against Muslims. She wanted to fight that backlash, she said.

She decided that a good way would be to show that an American woman, operating alone in a Muslim society, could start a business like Rick’s Café, to act as an exemplar of tolerance, a refuge in a troubled world.

Ms. Kriger cashed in her 401(k) plan and found a wreck of an old stately home in the Ancienne Medina, the old city of Casablanca, which was then and is still a shabby, litter-strewn place.

The house did not look like much, but it faced the port, had two royal palm trees flanking its front door, and inside was an architectural gem in the rough. She enlisted the noted interior designer Bill Willis to help restore it, and went to a Moroccan bank for a loan.

The loan wasn’t enough, so Ms. Kriger began emailing friends in the States with a pitch that began something like: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, this is the one.”

Many of them responded to the idea of starting a real Rick’s Café. She referred to her fund-raising effort as “rounding up the usual suspects,” which inspired the name of the corporate entity that would own the club.

It was 2002 when she was fund-raising, amid much suspicion in America about the finances of Islamic extremists, so she proactively went to the Treasury Department to explain why people were wiring money to the Usual Suspects Société Anonyme in Casablanca.

Even so, one of her investors, in Lincoln, Neb., received a visit from the local F.B.I. office to question his investment, she said.

Ms. Kriger was interviewing Moroccan candidates for a manager when she met Issam Chabaa. He mentioned he could play the piano. “I asked him to show me, and he sat down and played ‘As Time Goes By,’” Ms. Kriger said. “He was hired.”

He has been with her since the opening 14 years ago.

Mr. Chabaa still plays jazz piano several nights a week, as well as managing the club’s 60 employees. Hardly a week goes by without some diner asking him to “Play it again, Issam.”

Mr. Chabaa does play “that song” a lot, but he’s a proud man. When customers say, “Play it again, Sam,” he corrects them: “My name is Issam.”

(Historical note: “Play it again, Sam,” is never actually uttered in the movie; Ingrid Bergman’s character, Ilsa, says, “Play it once, Sam, for old time’s sake.”)

What Ms. Kriger feels she has created, she said, is a place that can showcase what is great about America and Americans, when the country is once again on a protectionist, isolationist bent.

“Casablanca” was, first of all, a propaganda movie, at a time when Americans were debating whether to send troops to North Africa and later to Europe. Ms. Kriger’s own politics are hinted at in the restaurant’s menu, which includes dishes like “Obama Family Chili con Carne.” It is surprisingly spicy.

Her Rick’s Café seems a success, filling its tables in five dining rooms over two floors for lunch and dinner on most days. At any given sitting there are guests from such a variety of places they would rival the movie’s own very international set of characters, and cast.

One recent Friday, the clientele included Italians, British, Americans, Chinese, Colombians, Chileans, French — plus a table where they declined to say where they were from (clue: at least one spoke Russian).

The Serbian ambassador to Morocco was down from Rabat, sitting in her customary place next to the roulette table, which is only for show, since gambling is illegal in Morocco. “I know the history,” said Sladjana Prica, “but still I prefer to believe this is the real place.”

On a screen nearby, the movie “Casablanca” played on a continuous loop.

Many of the cafe’s modern-day clients come because of an abiding affection for the film.

“Our parents practically raised us on ‘Casablanca,’ ” said Bridget Donvin, 21, from New Zealand, who was visiting with her 24-year-old sister, Mary. “I don’t think a year went by that we didn’t watch it.”

Over lunch, they sent their parents scores of cellphone pictures of the cafe.

Lakeitha Anderson, 49, is more of an exile than a tourist, an American who decided after President Trump’s election that she was leaving the country and taking her employment recruiting business on the road.

“I love the oasis feeling of it here,” she said, over dinner. “Especially for people of color, we need a break from it all.”

Wasn’t the point of the movie, though, that the oasis that was Rick’s Café Américain could not long evade what was happening in the wider world?

“That may be,” Ms. Anderson said, “but I’m going to stay away for as long as I can.”

Ms. Kriger, 72 and divorced, said she planned to spend the rest of her days in Rick’s Café, holding up her corner of the bar when she is not mingling with customers. “This is my assisted living center,” she quipped. Or as Humphrey Bogart’s character, Rick Blaine, put it in the movie: “I’m going to die in Casablanca. It’s a good place for it.”

The post ‘Play It Again, Issam’: In Casablanca, a Cafe Is Still a Cafe appeared first on World The News.

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‘Play It Again, Issam’: In Casablanca, a Cafe Is Still a Cafe

CASABLANCA, Morocco — Some things get better as time goes by. Rick’s Café may be one of them.

Chris Kelley of Bath, England, stopped there one recent day for lunch on his way to a kite-surfing vacation in southern Morocco, and said he was impressed at how lovingly restored the old place was. It was just like the one in the movie “Casablanca.”

Like many visitors here, Mr. Kelley was surprised to learn that Rick’s Café Américain never existed, except on a Hollywood movie lot, where the classic film starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman was made.

It was 1942, the world was at war, and the eponymous city was occupied by the Axis powers. Rick’s was just the figment of a writer’s imagination.

The owner and founder of the real Rick’s Café in Casablanca is a former American diplomat, Kathy Kriger.

“We wanted to make it everything it was in the movie, and then some,” she said.

A dozen white arches supported by columns frame the main dining room, under a three-story, octagonal cupola, and green leather bumpers grace the curved bar top. Palms in the corners, hanging brass chandeliers, beaded table lamps and a baby grand piano tucked into an archway lend to the period-authentic mise-en-scène.

Not coincidentally, Ms. Kriger on most nights can be found standing at the corner of the bar, the waiters under instructions to refill her wine glass with water until 11 p.m., when a Moroccan Val d’Argan Blanc is allowed. A lot of the regulars call her “Madame Rick.”

The incarnation of Rick’s Café has nothing to do with World War II, but a lot to do with the modern-day war on terrorism, and Ms. Kriger’s own small role in it. It also has much to say about the enduring power of a great work of art to affect destinies in real life.

Like a lot of Americans, Ms. Kriger was long a fan of “Casablanca,” which often makes critics’ lists of the 10 greatest movies of all time. She first saw it in 1974 at a movie festival in her hometown, Portland, Ore.

“At the end, everyone stood up and applauded,” she said.

Ms. Kriger later joined the State Department, which posted her as a commercial attaché to this Atlantic coastal port, Morocco’s business center and biggest city.

She was stunned to discover there was no Rick’s Café here, which seemed to her a missed marketing opportunity.

Then came the Sept. 11 attacks, and what she considered a backlash in America against Muslims. She wanted to fight that backlash, she said.

She decided that a good way would be to show that an American woman, operating alone in a Muslim society, could start a business like Rick’s Café, to act as an exemplar of tolerance, a refuge in a troubled world.

Ms. Kriger cashed in her 401(k) plan and found a wreck of an old stately home in the Ancienne Medina, the old city of Casablanca, which was then and is still a shabby, litter-strewn place.

The house did not look like much, but it faced the port, had two royal palm trees flanking its front door, and inside was an architectural gem in the rough. She enlisted the noted interior designer Bill Willis to help restore it, and went to a Moroccan bank for a loan.

The loan wasn’t enough, so Ms. Kriger began emailing friends in the States with a pitch that began something like: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, this is the one.”

Many of them responded to the idea of starting a real Rick’s Café. She referred to her fund-raising effort as “rounding up the usual suspects,” which inspired the name of the corporate entity that would own the club.

It was 2002 when she was fund-raising, amid much suspicion in America about the finances of Islamic extremists, so she proactively went to the Treasury Department to explain why people were wiring money to the Usual Suspects Société Anonyme in Casablanca.

Even so, one of her investors, in Lincoln, Neb., received a visit from the local F.B.I. office to question his investment, she said.

Ms. Kriger was interviewing Moroccan candidates for a manager when she met Issam Chabaa. He mentioned he could play the piano. “I asked him to show me, and he sat down and played ‘As Time Goes By,’” Ms. Kriger said. “He was hired.”

He has been with her since the opening 14 years ago.

Mr. Chabaa still plays jazz piano several nights a week, as well as managing the club’s 60 employees. Hardly a week goes by without some diner asking him to “Play it again, Issam.”

Mr. Chabaa does play “that song” a lot, but he’s a proud man. When customers say, “Play it again, Sam,” he corrects them: “My name is Issam.”

(Historical note: “Play it again, Sam,” is never actually uttered in the movie; Ingrid Bergman’s character, Ilsa, says, “Play it once, Sam, for old time’s sake.”)

What Ms. Kriger feels she has created, she said, is a place that can showcase what is great about America and Americans, when the country is once again on a protectionist, isolationist bent.

“Casablanca” was, first of all, a propaganda movie, at a time when Americans were debating whether to send troops to North Africa and later to Europe. Ms. Kriger’s own politics are hinted at in the restaurant’s menu, which includes dishes like “Obama Family Chili con Carne.” It is surprisingly spicy.

Her Rick’s Café seems a success, filling its tables in five dining rooms over two floors for lunch and dinner on most days. At any given sitting there are guests from such a variety of places they would rival the movie’s own very international set of characters, and cast.

One recent Friday, the clientele included Italians, British, Americans, Chinese, Colombians, Chileans, French — plus a table where they declined to say where they were from (clue: at least one spoke Russian).

The Serbian ambassador to Morocco was down from Rabat, sitting in her customary place next to the roulette table, which is only for show, since gambling is illegal in Morocco. “I know the history,” said Sladjana Prica, “but still I prefer to believe this is the real place.”

On a screen nearby, the movie “Casablanca” played on a continuous loop.

Many of the cafe’s modern-day clients come because of an abiding affection for the film.

“Our parents practically raised us on ‘Casablanca,’ ” said Bridget Donvin, 21, from New Zealand, who was visiting with her 24-year-old sister, Mary. “I don’t think a year went by that we didn’t watch it.”

Over lunch, they sent their parents scores of cellphone pictures of the cafe.

Lakeitha Anderson, 49, is more of an exile than a tourist, an American who decided after President Trump’s election that she was leaving the country and taking her employment recruiting business on the road.

“I love the oasis feeling of it here,” she said, over dinner. “Especially for people of color, we need a break from it all.”

Wasn’t the point of the movie, though, that the oasis that was Rick’s Café Américain could not long evade what was happening in the wider world?

“That may be,” Ms. Anderson said, “but I’m going to stay away for as long as I can.”

Ms. Kriger, 72 and divorced, said she planned to spend the rest of her days in Rick’s Café, holding up her corner of the bar when she is not mingling with customers. “This is my assisted living center,” she quipped. Or as Humphrey Bogart’s character, Rick Blaine, put it in the movie: “I’m going to die in Casablanca. It’s a good place for it.”

The post ‘Play It Again, Issam’: In Casablanca, a Cafe Is Still a Cafe appeared first on World The News.

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‘Play It Again, Issam’: In Casablanca, a Cafe Is Still a Cafe

CASABLANCA, Morocco — Some things get better as time goes by. Rick’s Café may be one of them.

Chris Kelley of Bath, England, stopped there one recent day for lunch on his way to a kite-surfing vacation in southern Morocco, and said he was impressed at how lovingly restored the old place was. It was just like the one in the movie “Casablanca.”

Like many visitors here, Mr. Kelley was surprised to learn that Rick’s Café Américain never existed, except on a Hollywood movie lot, where the classic film starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman was made.

It was 1942, the world was at war, and the eponymous city was occupied by the Axis powers. Rick’s was just the figment of a writer’s imagination.

The owner and founder of the real Rick’s Café in Casablanca is a former American diplomat, Kathy Kriger.

“We wanted to make it everything it was in the movie, and then some,” she said.

A dozen white arches supported by columns frame the main dining room, under a three-story, octagonal cupola, and green leather bumpers grace the curved bar top. Palms in the corners, hanging brass chandeliers, beaded table lamps and a baby grand piano tucked into an archway lend to the period-authentic mise-en-scène.

Not coincidentally, Ms. Kriger on most nights can be found standing at the corner of the bar, the waiters under instructions to refill her wine glass with water until 11 p.m., when a Moroccan Val d’Argan Blanc is allowed. A lot of the regulars call her “Madame Rick.”

The incarnation of Rick’s Café has nothing to do with World War II, but a lot to do with the modern-day war on terrorism, and Ms. Kriger’s own small role in it. It also has much to say about the enduring power of a great work of art to affect destinies in real life.

Like a lot of Americans, Ms. Kriger was long a fan of “Casablanca,” which often makes critics’ lists of the 10 greatest movies of all time. She first saw it in 1974 at a movie festival in her hometown, Portland, Ore.

“At the end, everyone stood up and applauded,” she said.

Ms. Kriger later joined the State Department, which posted her as a commercial attaché to this Atlantic coastal port, Morocco’s business center and biggest city.

She was stunned to discover there was no Rick’s Café here, which seemed to her a missed marketing opportunity.

Then came the Sept. 11 attacks, and what she considered a backlash in America against Muslims. She wanted to fight that backlash, she said.

She decided that a good way would be to show that an American woman, operating alone in a Muslim society, could start a business like Rick’s Café, to act as an exemplar of tolerance, a refuge in a troubled world.

Ms. Kriger cashed in her 401(k) plan and found a wreck of an old stately home in the Ancienne Medina, the old city of Casablanca, which was then and is still a shabby, litter-strewn place.

The house did not look like much, but it faced the port, had two royal palm trees flanking its front door, and inside was an architectural gem in the rough. She enlisted the noted interior designer Bill Willis to help restore it, and went to a Moroccan bank for a loan.

The loan wasn’t enough, so Ms. Kriger began emailing friends in the States with a pitch that began something like: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, this is the one.”

Many of them responded to the idea of starting a real Rick’s Café. She referred to her fund-raising effort as “rounding up the usual suspects,” which inspired the name of the corporate entity that would own the club.

It was 2002 when she was fund-raising, amid much suspicion in America about the finances of Islamic extremists, so she proactively went to the Treasury Department to explain why people were wiring money to the Usual Suspects Société Anonyme in Casablanca.

Even so, one of her investors, in Lincoln, Neb., received a visit from the local F.B.I. office to question his investment, she said.

Ms. Kriger was interviewing Moroccan candidates for a manager when she met Issam Chabaa. He mentioned he could play the piano. “I asked him to show me, and he sat down and played ‘As Time Goes By,’” Ms. Kriger said. “He was hired.”

He has been with her since the opening 14 years ago.

Mr. Chabaa still plays jazz piano several nights a week, as well as managing the club’s 60 employees. Hardly a week goes by without some diner asking him to “Play it again, Issam.”

Mr. Chabaa does play “that song” a lot, but he’s a proud man. When customers say, “Play it again, Sam,” he corrects them: “My name is Issam.”

(Historical note: “Play it again, Sam,” is never actually uttered in the movie; Ingrid Bergman’s character, Ilsa, says, “Play it once, Sam, for old time’s sake.”)

What Ms. Kriger feels she has created, she said, is a place that can showcase what is great about America and Americans, when the country is once again on a protectionist, isolationist bent.

“Casablanca” was, first of all, a propaganda movie, at a time when Americans were debating whether to send troops to North Africa and later to Europe. Ms. Kriger’s own politics are hinted at in the restaurant’s menu, which includes dishes like “Obama Family Chili con Carne.” It is surprisingly spicy.

Her Rick’s Café seems a success, filling its tables in five dining rooms over two floors for lunch and dinner on most days. At any given sitting there are guests from such a variety of places they would rival the movie’s own very international set of characters, and cast.

One recent Friday, the clientele included Italians, British, Americans, Chinese, Colombians, Chileans, French — plus a table where they declined to say where they were from (clue: at least one spoke Russian).

The Serbian ambassador to Morocco was down from Rabat, sitting in her customary place next to the roulette table, which is only for show, since gambling is illegal in Morocco. “I know the history,” said Sladjana Prica, “but still I prefer to believe this is the real place.”

On a screen nearby, the movie “Casablanca” played on a continuous loop.

Many of the cafe’s modern-day clients come because of an abiding affection for the film.

“Our parents practically raised us on ‘Casablanca,’ ” said Bridget Donvin, 21, from New Zealand, who was visiting with her 24-year-old sister, Mary. “I don’t think a year went by that we didn’t watch it.”

Over lunch, they sent their parents scores of cellphone pictures of the cafe.

Lakeitha Anderson, 49, is more of an exile than a tourist, an American who decided after President Trump’s election that she was leaving the country and taking her employment recruiting business on the road.

“I love the oasis feeling of it here,” she said, over dinner. “Especially for people of color, we need a break from it all.”

Wasn’t the point of the movie, though, that the oasis that was Rick’s Café Américain could not long evade what was happening in the wider world?

“That may be,” Ms. Anderson said, “but I’m going to stay away for as long as I can.”

Ms. Kriger, 72 and divorced, said she planned to spend the rest of her days in Rick’s Café, holding up her corner of the bar when she is not mingling with customers. “This is my assisted living center,” she quipped. Or as Humphrey Bogart’s character, Rick Blaine, put it in the movie: “I’m going to die in Casablanca. It’s a good place for it.”

The post ‘Play It Again, Issam’: In Casablanca, a Cafe Is Still a Cafe appeared first on World The News.

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