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boredout305 · 3 years

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Kid Congo Powers Interview

Kid Congo Powers was a founding member of the Gun Club. He also played with The Cramps and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Powers currently fronts Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds and recently completed a memoir, Some New Kind of Kick.

The following interview focuses on Some New Kind of Kick. In the book Powers recounts growing up in La Puente—a working-class, largely Latino city in Los Angeles County—in the 1960s, as well as his familial, professional and personal relationships. He describes the LA glam-rock scene (Powers was a frequenter of Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco), the interim period between glam and punk embodied by the Capitol Records swap meet, as well as LA’s first-wave, late-1970s punk scene.

Well written, edited and awash with amazing photos, Some New Kind of Kick will appeal to fans of underground music as well as those interested in 1960-1980s Los Angeles (think Claude Bessy and Mike Davis). The book will be available from In the Red Records, their first venture into book publishing, soon.

Interview by Ryan Leach

Kid Congo with the Pink Monkey Birds.

Ryan: Some New Kind of Kick reminded me of the New York Night Train oral histories you had compiled about 15 years ago. Was that the genesis of your book?

Kid: That was the genesis. You pinpointed it. Those pieces were done with Jonathan Toubin. It was a very early podcast. Jonathan wanted to do an audio version of my story for his website, New York Night Train. We did that back in the early 2000s. After we had completed those I left New York and moved to Washington D.C. I thought, “I have the outline for a book here.” Jonathan had created a discography and a timeline. I figured, “It’ll be great and really easy. We’ll just fill in some of the blanks and it’ll be done.” Here we are 15 years later.

Ryan: It was well worth it. It reads well. And I love the photographs. The photo of you as a kid with Frankenstein is amazing.

Kid: I’m glad you liked it. You’re the first person not involved in it that I’ve spoken with.

Ryan: As someone from Los Angeles I enjoyed reading about your father’s life and work as a union welder in the 1960s. My grandfather was a union truck driver and my father is a cabinetmaker. My dad’s cousins worked at the General Motors Van Nuys Assembly plant. In a way you captured an old industrial blue-collar working class that’s nowhere near as robust as it once was in Los Angeles. It reminded of Mike Davis’ writings on the subject.

Kid: I haven’t lived in LA for so long that I didn’t realize it doesn’t exist anymore. I felt the times. It was a reflection on my experiences and my family’s experiences. It was very working class. My dad was proud to be a union member. It served him very well. He and my mother were set up for the rest of their lives. I grew up with a sense that he earned an honest living. My parents always told me not to be embarrassed by what you did for work. People would ask me, “What’s your book about? What’s the thrust of it?” As I was writing it, I was like, “I don’t know. I’ll find out when it’s done.” What you mentioned was an aspect of that.

When I started the book and all throughout the writing I had gone to different writers’ workshops. We’d review each other’s work. It was a bunch of people who didn’t know me, didn’t know about music—at least the music I make. I just wanted to see if there was a story there. People were relating to what I was writing, which gave me the confidence to keep going.

Ryan: Some New Kind of Kick is different from Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s autobiography, Go Tell the Mountain. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but think of Pierce’s work as I read yours. Was Go Tell the Mountain on your mind as you were writing?

Kid: When I was writing about Jeffrey—it was my version of the story. It was about my relationship with him. I wasn’t thinking about his autobiography much at all. His autobiography is very different than mine. Nevertheless, there are some similarities. But his book flew off into flights of prose and fantasy. I tried to stay away from the stories that were already out there. The thing that’s interesting about Jeffrey is that everyone has a completely different story to tell about him. Everyone’s relationship with him was different.

Ryan: It’s a spectrum that’s completely filled in.

Kid: Exactly. One of the most significant relationships I’ve had in my life was with Jeffrey. Meeting him changed my life. It was an enduring relationship. It was important for me to tell my story of Jeffrey.

Ryan: The early part of your book covers growing up in La Puente and having older sisters who caught the El Monte Legion Stadium scene—groups like Thee Midniters. You told me years ago that you and Jeffrey were thinking about those days during the writing and recording of Mother Juno (1987).

Kid: That’s definitely true. Growing up in that area is another thing Jeffrey and I bonded over. We were music hounds at a young age. We talked a lot about La Puente, El Monte and San Gabriel Valley’s culture. We were able to pinpoint sounds we heard growing up there—music playing out of cars and oldies mixed in with Jimi Hendrix and Santana. That was the sound of San Gabriel Valley. It wasn’t all lowrider music. We were drawn to that mix of things. I remember “Yellow Eyes” off Mother Juno was our tribute to the San Gabriel Valley sound.

Ryan: You describe the Capitol Records Swap Meet in Some New Kind of Kick. In the pre-punk/Back Door Man days that was an important meet-up spot whose significance remains underappreciated.

Kid: The Capitol Records Swap Meet was a once-a-month event and hangout. It was a congregation of record collectors and music fans. You’d see the same people there over and over again. It was a community. Somehow everyone who was a diehard music fan knew about it. You could find bootlegs there. It went from glam to more of a Back Door Man-influenced vibe which was the harder-edged Detroit stuff—The Stooges and the MC5. You went there looking for oddities and rare records. I was barely a record collector back then. It’s where I discovered a lot of music. You had to be a pretty dedicated music fan to get up at 6 AM to go there, especially if you were a teenager.

Ryan: I enjoyed reading about your experiences as a young gay man in the 1970s. You’d frequent Rodney’s English Disco; I didn’t know you were so close to The Screamers. While not downplaying the prejudices gay men faced in the 1970s, it seemed fortuitous that these places and people existed for you in that post-Stonewall period.

Kid: Yeah. I was obviously drawn to The Screamers for a variety of reasons. It was a funny time. People didn’t really discuss being gay. People knew we were gay. I knew you were gay; you knew I was gay. But the fact that we never openly discussed it was very strange. Part of that was protection. It also had to do with the punk ethos of labels being taboo. I don’t think that The Screamers were very politicized back then and neither was I. We were just going wild. I was super young and still discovering things. I had that glam-rock door to go through. It was much more of a fantasy world than anything based in reality. But it allowed queerness. It struck a chord with me and it was a tribe. However, I did discover later on that glam rock was more of a pose than a sexual revolution.

With some people in the punk scene like The Screamers and Gorilla Rose—they came from a background in drag and cabaret. I didn’t even know that when I met them. I found it out later on. They were already very experienced. They had an amazing camp aesthetic. I learned a lot about films and music through them. They were so advanced. It was all very serendipitous. I think my whole life has been serendipitous, floating from one thing to another.

Ryan: You were in West Berlin when the Berlin Wall was breached in November 1989. “Here’s another historical event. I’m sure Kid Congo is on the scene.”

Kid: I know! The FBI must have a dossier on me. I was in New York on 9/11 too.

Ryan: A person who appears frequently in your book is your cousin Theresa who was tragically murdered. I take it her death remains a cold case.

Kid: Cold case. Her death changed my entire life. It was all very innocent before she died. That stopped everything. It was a real source of trauma. All progress up until that point went on hold until I got jolted out of it. I eventually decided to experience everything I could because life is short. That trauma fueled a lot of bad things, a lot of self-destructive impulses. It was my main demon that chased me throughout my early adult life. It was good to write about it. It’s still there and that’s probably because her murder remains unsolved. I have no resolution with it. I was hoping the book would give me some closure. We’ll see if it does.

Ryan: Theresa was an important person in your life that you wanted people to know about. You champion her.

Kid: I wanted to pay tribute to her. She changed my life. I had her confidence. I was at a crossroads at that point in my life, dealing with my sexuality. I wanted people to know about Theresa beyond my family. My editor Chris Campion really pulled that one out of me. It was a story that I told, but he said, “There’s so much more to this.” I replied, “No! Don’t make me do it.” I had a lot of stories, but it was great having Chris there to pull them together to create one big story. My original concept for the book was a coming-of-age story. Although it still is, I was originally going to stop before I even joined the Gun Club (in 1979). It was probably because I didn’t want to look at some of the things that happened afterwards. It was very good for my music. Every time I got uncomfortable, I’d go, “Oh, I’ve got to make a record and go on tour for a year and not think about this.” A lot of it was too scary to even think about. But the more I did it, the less scary it became and the more a story emerged. I had a very different book in mind than the one I completed. I’m glad I was pushed in that direction and that I was willing to be pushed. I wanted to tell these stories, but it was difficult.

Ryan: Of course, there are lighter parts in your book. There are wonderful, infamous characters like Bradly Field who make appearances.

Kid: Bradly Field was also a queer punker. He was the partner of Kristian Hoffman of The Mumps. I met Kristian in Los Angeles. We all knew Lance Loud of The Mumps because he had starred in An American Life (1973) which was the first reality TV show. It aired on PBS. I was a fan of The Mumps. Bradly came out to LA with Kristian for an elongated stay during a Mumps recording session. Of course, Bradly and I hit it off when we met. Bradly was a drummer—he played a single drum and a cracked symbol—in Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Bradly was a real character. He was kind of a Peter Lorre, misanthropic miscreant. Bradly was charming while abrasively horrible at the same time. We were friends and I always remained on Bradly’s good side so there was never a problem.

Bradly had invited me and some punkers to New York. He said that if we ever made it out there that we could stay with him. He probably had no idea we’d show up a month later. Bradly Field was an important person for me to know—an unashamedly gay, crazy person. He was a madman. I had very little interest in living a typical life. That includes a typical gay life. Bradly was just a great gay artist I met in New York when I was super young. He was also the tour manager of The Cramps at one point. You can imagine what that was like. Out of Lux and Ivy’s perverse nature they unleashed him on people.

Ryan: He was the right guy to have in your corner if the club didn’t pay you.

Kid: Exactly. Who was going to say “no” to Bradly?

Ryan: You mention an early Gun Club track called “Body and Soul” that I’m unfamiliar with. I know you have a rehearsal tape of the original Creeping Ritual/Gun Club lineup (Kid Congo Powers, Don Snowden, Brad Dunning and Jeffrey Lee Pierce). Are any of these unreleased tracks on that tape?

Kid: No. Although I do have tapes, there’s no Creeping Ritual material on them. I spoke with Brad (Dunning) and he has tapes too. We both agreed that they’re unlistenable. They’re so terrible. Nevertheless, I’m going to have them digitized and I’ll take another listen to them. “Body and Soul” is an early Creeping Ritual song. At the time we thought, “Oh, this sounds like a Mink DeVille song.” At least in our minds it did. To the best of my ability I did record an approximation of “Body and Soul” on the Congo Norvell record Abnormals Anonymous (1997). I sort of reimagined it. That song was the beginning of things for me with Jeffrey. It wasn’t a clear path when we started The Gun Club. We didn’t say, “Oh, we’re going to be a blues-mixed-with-punk band.” It was a lot of toying around. It had to do with finding a style. Jeffrey had a lot of ideas. We also had musical limitations to consider. We were trying to turn it into something cohesive. There was a lot of reggae influence at the beginning. Jeffrey was a visionary who wanted to make the Gun Club work. Of course, to us he was a really advanced musician. We thought (bassist) Don Snowden was the greatest too. What’s funny is that I saw Don in Valencia, Spain, where he lives now. He came to one of our (Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds) shows a few years ago. He said, “Oh, I didn’t know how to play!”

Ryan: “I knew scales.”

Kid: Exactly. It was all perception. But we were ambitious and tenacious. We were certain we could make something really good out of what we had. That was it. We knew we had good taste in music. That was enough for us to continue on.

Ryan: I knew about The Cramps’ struggles with IRS Records and Miles Copeland. However, it took on a new meaning reading your book. Joining The Cramps started with a real high for you, recording Psychedelic Jungle (1981), and then stagnation occurred due to contractual conflicts.

Kid: There was excitement, success and activity for about a year or two. And then absolutely nothing. As I discuss in my book—and you can ask anyone who was in The Cramps—communication was not a big priority for Lux and Ivy. I was left to my own devices for a while. We were building, building, building and then it stopped. I wasn’t privy to what was going on. I knew they were depressed about it. The mood shifted. It was great recording Psychedelic Jungle and touring the world. The crowds were great everywhere we went. It was at that point that I started getting heavy into drugs. The time off left me with a lot of time to get into trouble. It was my first taste of any kind of success or notoriety. I’m not embarrassed to say that I fell into that trip: “Oh, you know who I am and I have all these musician friends now.” It was the gilded ‘80s. Things were quite decadent then. There was a lot of hard drug use. It wasn’t highly frowned upon to abuse those types of drugs in our circle. What was the reputation of The Gun Club? The drunkest, drug-addled band around. So there was a lot of support to go in that direction. Who knew it was going to go so downhill? We weren’t paying attention to consequences. Consequences be damned. So the drugs sapped a lot of energy out of it too.

I recorded the one studio album (Psychedelic Jungle) with The Cramps and a live album (Smell of Female). The live record was good and fun, but it was a means to an end. It was recorded to get out of a contract. The Cramps were always going to do it their way. Lux and Ivy weren’t going to follow anyone’s rules. I don’t know why people expected them to. To this day, I wonder why people want more. I mean, they gave you everything. People ask me, “When is Ivy going to play again?” I tell them, “She’s done enough. She paid her dues. The music was great.”

Ryan: I think after 30-something years of touring, she’s earned her union card.

Kid: Exactly. She’s done her union work.

Ryan: In your book you discuss West Berlin in the late 1980s. That was a strange period of extreme highs and lows. During that time you were playing with the Bad Seeds, working with people like Wim Wenders (in Wings of Desire) and witnessed the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the GDR. Nevertheless, it was a very dark period marred by substance abuse. Luckily, you came out of it unscathed. As you recount, some people didn’t.

Kid: It was a period of extremes. In my mind, for years, I rewrote that scene. I would say, “Berlin was great”—and it was, that part was true—and then I’d read interviews with Nick Cave and Mick Harvey and they’d say, “Oh, the Tender Prey (1988) period was just the worst. It’s hard to even talk about it.” And I was like, “It was great! What are you talking about?” Then when I started writing about it, I was like, “Oh, fuck! It really wasn’t the best time.” I had been so focused on the good things and not the bad things. Prior to writing my book, I really hadn’t thought about how incredibly dark it was. That was a good thing for me to work out. Some very bad things happened to people around me. But while that was happening, it was a real peak for me as a musician. Some of the greatest work I was involved with was being done then. And yet I still chose to self-destruct. It was a case of right place, right time. But it was not necessarily what I thought it was.

Ryan: Digressing back a bit, when we would chat years back I would ask you where you were at with this project. You seemed to be warming up to it as time went on. And I finally found a copy of the group’s album in Sydney, Australia, a year ago. I’m talking about Fur Bible (1985).

Kid: Oh, you got it?

Ryan: I did.

Kid: In Australia?

Ryan: Yes. It was part of my carry-on luggage.

Kid: I’m sure I can pinpoint the person who sold it to you.

Ryan: Are you coming around to that material now? I like the record.

Kid: Oh, yeah. I hated it for so long. People would say to me, “Oh, the Fur Bible record is great.” I’d respond, “No. It can’t possibly be great. I’m not going to listen to it again, so don’t even try me.” Eventually, I did listen to it and I thought, “Oh, this is pretty good.” I came around to it. I like it.

Ryan: You’ve made the transition!

Kid: I feel warmly about it. I like all of the people involved with it. That was kind of a bad time too. It was that post-Gun Club period. I felt like I had tried something unsuccessful with Fur Bible. I had a little bit of shame about that. Everything else I had been involved with had been successful, in my eyes. People liked everything else and people didn’t really like Fur Bible. It was a sleeper.

Ryan: It is.

Kid: There’s nothing wrong with it. It was the first time I had put my voice on a record and it just irritated the hell out of me. It was a first step for me.

Ryan: You close your book with a heartfelt tribute to Jeffrey Lee Pierce. You wonder how your life would’ve turned out had you not met Jeffrey outside of that Pere Ubu show in 1979. Excluding family, I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who’s had that sort of impact on my life.

Kid: As I was getting near the end of the book I was trying to figure out what it was about. A lot of it was about Jeffrey. Everything that moved me into becoming a musician and the life I lived after that was because of him. It was all because he said, “Here’s a guitar. You’re going to learn how to play it.” He had that confidence that I could do it. It was a mentorship. He would say, “You’re going to do this and you’re going to be great at it.” I was like, “Okay.” Jeffrey was the closest thing I had to a brother. We could have our arguments and disagreements, but in the end it didn’t matter. What mattered was our bond. Writing it down made it all clearer to me. His death sent me into a tailspin. I was entering the unknown. Jeffrey was like a cord that I had been hanging onto for so long and it was gone. I was more interested in writing about my relationship with him than about the music of the Gun Club. A lot of people loved Jeffrey. But there were others who said they loved him with disclaimers. I wanted to write something about Jeffrey without the disclaimers. That seemed like an important task—to honor him in a truthful manner.

Ryan: I’m glad that you did that. Jeffrey has his detractors, but they all seem to say something along the lines of “the guy still had the most indefatigable spirit and drive of any person I’ve ever known.”

Kid: That’s what drove everyone crazy!

Ryan: This book took you 15 years to finish. Completing it has to feel cathartic.

Kid: I don’t know. Maybe it will when I see the printed book. When I was living in New York there was no time for reflection. I started it after I left New York, but it was at such a slow pace. It was done piecemeal. I wanted to give up at times. I had a lot of self-doubt. And like I said, I’d just go on tour for a year and take a long break. The pandemic made me finally put it to bed. I couldn’t jump up and go away on tour anymore. It feels great to have it done. When I read it through after the final edit I was actually shocked. I was moved by it. It was a feeling of accomplishment. It’s a different feeling than what you get with music. Looking at it as one story has been an eye-opener for me. I thought to myself, “How did I do all of that?”

I see the book as the story of a music fan. I think most musicians start out as fans. Why would you do it otherwise? I never stopped being a fan. All of the opportunities that came my way were because I was a fan.

#kidcongopowers #interviews #gunclub #jeffreyleepierce #cramps #Badseeds

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itmighthavebeenintentional · 3 years

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I’m Ready

Summary: “I can’t...I can’t take my forever if you’re not in it.”

Picks up right where the show left off. Not technically a fix-it, as I didn’t change anything, but I promise it gets better.

Rating: Teen

Warnings: Cursing, mentions of (canon) child abuse and neglect, mentions of past trauma, working through trauma, denial, bit of pining (but, like, in a denial sort of way), some fluff, some angst (but not as much as there is fluff)

Author’s Note: So many thanks to @there-must-be-a-lock for endless suggestions, fixes, and beautiful images (header AND dividers!!!). Thanks to all my friends for cheering me on, especially @thoughtslikeaminefield ; I probably wouldn’t have kept going with the story without you.

This is my first Destiel story and my first time posting in a while. Please be kind.

Word Count: 7704

In case you missed it: ItMightHaveBeenintentional’s Masterlist

Dean isn’t sure how long he’s been in heaven, at least not by heaven’s timeframe. Probably years, maybe even a couple of decades. He doesn’t age in heaven, and time works differently, running fast and stretching slow.

For Dean, heaven is a chance to rest, catch up with his massive found family, and just breathe for the first time since he was a kid. No worrying about Sam, no waiting for the next monster to pop out, no prepping for the next apocalypse.

Nothing like heaven to give a guy time to kick his boots off and just relax.

Unfortunately, relaxing has never come easy to Dean. Sure, he can go through the motions (binge watching horror movies, binge drinking, hell, just bingeing in general), but relaxing is an entirely different matter.

Relaxing means letting his guard down. It means giving up his hypervigilance. It means sleeping hard and staying asleep until he wakes naturally and unassisted by attackers. It means spending long moments reminding himself the monster at the end of the book is really gone.

Sam is safe. Everyone he’s ever loved is safe and close, where he can reach them.

Almost everyone.

...

Jake Walker is born on the ninth of July at twenty-one seconds past 9:14 AM. His mother Samantha is exhausted after a two-weeks-early delivery, but both she and the baby are strong and steady. Her wife didn’t faint, none of the medical team ever sounded the least worried, and she heard her son’s first shocked wail as he came into the world. Exhausted, but definitely good.

His mom Betty, on the other hand, is an absolute wreck. She’s been anxious the entire pregnancy, despite good news from the doctor at every visit, and she is terrified that the unexpected early arrival of their son means her worst fears are just beginning.

Betty takes slow, calming breaths, focusing on not clamping down too hard on Sam’s hand. She has to stay strong, calm, for her new family. She has to keep her head on straight, in case—in case —

“Your son is absolutely fine, seems he just had a real particular time he wanted to arrive. Here he is.”

Betty opens her eyes to find a delivery nurse beaming at her, proffering a small, swaddled bundle.

“Never seen such a calm baby. Here, he’s been waiting for you.”

Betty looks down into the startlingly clear, mossy green eyes gazing up at her from the squashed, serene little face, and she feels something click into place in the middle of her chest. Samantha leans her head back against her pillow, letting out a long slow breath as she smiles, and Betty’s pulse slowly finds its way back to something like normal.

“We’ve been waiting for you, too, big guy.”

...

Trauma doesn’t heal in a day, not even in heaven. All the shit Dean remembers — all the shit he tried to forget — everything he ever managed to suppress — drives him from his bed at night, leaving him sleepless on his front porch, staring blankly into the night, or tinkering on Baby in the garage, digging into the perfect engine, determined to distract himself from his spiraling thoughts.

Dean has never been an idiot, no matter how many times he played the fool in life. The people he and Sam couldn’t save, the people he let down, none of those deaths are on him. Dean isn’t responsible for the pain and suffering, but he’s haunted by it all the same.

The problem is, haunts don’t go away on their own. Every hunter knows that.

It’s not that he wants forgiveness; how can he be forgiven for something he isn’t responsible for? He needs to see those people, though, see that they’re okay and at peace. He has to make sure everyone is where they should be, safe and at least content. And even if he ultimately isn’t their killer, didn’t want their deaths, would have done anything to prevent them, he still needs them to know...to know everything.

He needs absolution.

And if the person who needs to hear those things the most is MIA, well, they’ve got a history of not saying a lot of things face to face. There’s always prayer, right?

Dean starts by visiting a couple of people he hadn’t been able to save along the way, feeling strangely like someone following a twelve step program. Objectively, (ie, according to the people he talks to), he’s got nothing to apologize for. He did his best; he made tough decisions in situations forced upon him. They don’t blame him in the least, and most are truly and obviously thankful for his intervention.

Their words don’t make much of a dent in the mountain of guilt Dean carries on his shoulders, but it’s a start.

Once or twice, Dean finds himself looking up at the sky, so far from empty, opening his mouth to call out — an action so common on earth it nearly became reflex —but he stops himself both times. He’s not ready for that conversation.

But he needs to talk to someone closer to him, a deeper connection than the monster victims he’s been visiting.

He’s restless, needs to move a little, needs to talk to…

Someone. He needs to talk to someone. But he can’t. Hell, he can’t even say the name.

Pacing the garage turns to a wandering ramble down the road, past Sam and his family’s house, past Mom and Dad’s house (there’s a conversation or fifty that he’s not ready for), until he finds himself in front of what can only be described as a hobbit hole. He shakes his head, not for the first time, the corner of his mouth tilted up as he knocks on the circular front door.

He’s greeted by bright red hair, a surprisingly crushing hug, and one of the brightest smiles Dean has ever seen.

“Hey, Charlie. Can we, uh...You up for a walk? I was hopin we could talk for a while.”

...

Jake grows quickly and steadily, always near the top of all his growth charts but never alarmingly so. He’s bright, quick to anger and quick to laugh, and fiercely loving. He is both his mothers’ boy, always up for a cuddle or a wrestle, and he loves to build block towers and demolish them with equal abandon.

He makes his displeasure with vegetables known early on. On this particular morning, he introduces his strained peas to the kitchen wall with surprising velocity. Betty knows better than to encourage this attitude, so she hides her smile behind calm, controlled admonition as she offers another spoonful.

Jake looks her straight in the eyes, his smile dazzling and laughter bright, and she knows she hasn’t fooled him one bit. She sighs and lets her own smile match his. He won her over the day he was born; there’s not much point trying to fight it now.

“Come on, babe, eat your peas and we’ll see about some of those stewed apples left over from Mommy’s pie filling. Deal?”

She scrunches her nose and wiggles her eyebrows. Jake’s little eyes widen at her expression, and he tries to imitate it before dissolving into giggles. Betty takes the opportunity to poke a spoonful of peas into his open mouth.

She’s not spent much time around kids before this, but Betty swears she’s never seen a baby look so resigned and exasperated in real life. But she’s played her trump card. He’s too young for the crust, but a couple of spoonfuls of smashed up fruit (apple is his favorite), and Jake is guaranteed to eat just about anything she presents.

“Pie?” she asks.

Jake smiles and opens his mouth wider.

...

“SURPRISE!!!”

The last time he was shocked this badly, Sam didn’t let him forget that fucking cat for years. Or ever, really. Seems like everyone he ever knew is stuffed into his living room, barely leaving room for the balloon bouquets and a massive… That’s not a cake, it’s…

That’s the most beautiful apple pie Dean has ever seen in his entire life.

Dean is engulfed by arms, hugging and patting and slapping his back (was that a pinch on his ass?), everyone eager to get their turn with him, wishing him a happy birthday, saying they can’t wait until he opens his presents, it’s so good to see him, he’s looking so rested!

He manages to extract himself from the wellwishers, citing parental obligations, and finally makes his way over to Mary, smiling warmly and offering him a knife and a plate. His eyes flick anxious from his mom to the golden brown circle of perfection before him, but he can’t bring himself to ask. Mary’s smile widens.

“I didn’t lay a hand on it except to take it out of the box. Happy Birthday, Dean.”

Six plates of pie later, Dean reclines on his couch, letting the relaxed atmosphere of the party sink into his bones. The excitement and crowd of early have begun to wind down, leaving a double handful of family, both blood and found, all telling the most embarrassing, terrible Dean stories they can think of.

It’s possible Dean’s never laughed this hard in his entire life.

He heaves a deep sigh of contentment and props his feet ponderously on the coffee table, draping an arm across the back of the couch and surveying the room.

Donna, one of the apparent party conspirators, tosses him a sparkling grin over her shoulder before turning back to a rather animated conversation with Charlie about the length of Dean’s wig at the LARPing battle. Sam and Kevin are recounting Dean’s worst cooking disasters to Garth’s wife, and Bobby is entertaining Mary with Dean’s disastrous attempt to flirt with the pizza delivery girl who delivered to Bobby’s house most weekends when Sam and Dean would stay with him.

If Dean had to describe one perfect day, this would be just about it, down to the flakiness of the pie crust and the amazing collection of horror movies and original vinyls he’s been gifted. Almost every single person he could possibly want present is there, and since he isn’t dwelling on absence today, Dean decides to push his wandering thoughts out of his head and just soak it all in.

Every muscle in his body hums contentedly, and Dean feels strangely warm and peaceful, but excited, all at once. It’s weird, just sitting here and enjoying the moment, not worrying about the next minute or hour or day or even year. He’s full of pie, he’s got great tunes to look forward to, and there’s nothing to worry about.

He’s happy.

Naturally, that’s when the panic sets in. This won’t last; it never does. Happiness can’t last. He learned that a long time ago.

Sure, it’s heaven, but he doesn’t deserve to be here, so something is going to spoil it for him, for everyone. Probably Dean himself, he thinks as his eyes dart from his mom to his dad. Dean always seems to find a way to fuck things up, couldn’t take care of Sam, couldn’t keep himself alive, couldn’t even keep the Empty from—

“Hey, birthday boy.” Jody’s voice somehow reaches Dean through his darkening thoughts, and he comes back to himself in stages, focusing on the warmth of her hands on his shoulders. She stands behind the couch, leaning down to squeeze his shoulders. “Wanna get some air?”

He nods blindly and climbs numbly to his feet. Jody guides him efficiently out the door and points Dean in an arbitrary direction. They walk for what could be moments or hours as Dean plows through the morass in his mind.

“I get it,” Jody finally says.

Dean glances sharply at her.

“I still have random panic attacks sometimes, wondering if Alex is safe at the hospital, if this is going to be the hunt that gets Claire.” Her eyes are fixed on some point in the distance, and he gets the feeling she’s deliberately not meeting his eyes. “I check on Owen every thirty minutes on my bad nights, and I have to lay hands and eyes on Sean to convince myself he’s really there before I can calm down. It always takes me a minute or sixty to make myself remember where we are, where everyone is, and that there isn’t some big or even small bad waiting around the corner or under the bed.”

Dean stuffs his hands in his pockets, stuffing down his automatic reassurances. The first half of his life was spent avoiding conversations like this, and it took him a long time to unlearn the knee-jerk reaction to brush off people’s concerns with some variation of “Everything’s fine.”

Jody, with an awareness born of decades of hunting and parenthood, senses his discomfort. She slows her steps and catches Dean’s elbow, turning him gently to face her.

“That feeling in your gut when the happiness comes, the panic, that knowledge deep, deep down that everything good is bound to turn to shit.” Jody reaches out and wipes a trickle of moisture from Dean’s face.

It’s not raining, he thinks, frowning. Where the hell did that come from?

“You're going to unlearn it. You’re the toughest bastard I’ve ever met, Dean, and you've been through literal hell. If anyone has earned their happiness up here, it’s you. You’re allowed to be happy, and someday you’ll know it.”

Dean would love to reply right now, to contradict Jody. He’d love to remind her of all the bad calls he made, of all the torturing he did in hell, of all the lies he told...

But this knot in his throat is choking him. And still Jody persists.

“I know how goddamned stubborn you are, but you’re not stupid either. We have nothing to forgive you for. Maybe once you’ve talked to everyone on your list, you’ll see that, too. But in the meantime, take a deep breath, give me a hug, and at least say in your head that you’re allowed to enjoy yourself at your own damned birthday party, even if you can’t admit it out loud.”

And if the damp patch on Jody’s shoulder bothers her as they stroll back to Dean’s house to grab a couple of beers, at least she’s tactful enough to not mention it.

...

Jake takes care of his family. He’s a fairly serious, empathetic toddler, quick to kiss other’s ouchies. After receiving his first Elmo bandage, Jake insists on bandaging his stuffed puppy’s tail, his tyrannosaurus rex’s left eye (“He fight with stegosaurus,” Jake solemnly informs Samantha as he presses the adhesive strip in place), and then an old, almost-healed shaving cut on Betty’s left knee.

“Mama better now?” Jake asks, somehow managing to sound strictly professional and absurdly adorable at the same time. He looks up to Betty for approval, and she wonders how she manages to let him touch the ground at all with how much she just wants to hold him all day long.

“Mama so much better now,” she informs him, careful to stay serious. He rewards her with the golden smile that is the highlight of her days before rushing off to find someone else he can fix up.

Both Betty and Samantha marvel in his quickness to share his snacks. They never refuse an offered Cheerio from him, no matter how damp or sticky (though a few of those disappear quickly when Jake’s attention wanders).

The discussion over a first pet is fairly quick and decisive. Everyone agrees the pet must be something fluffy that can be cuddled. Betty vetoes anything smaller than a cantaloupe, citing her clumsiness and tendency to step on things that should never be trod upon. Jake vetoes cats, saying he just doesn’t trust them, and Mommy and Mama share one of their silent conversations before Samantha speaks up.

“A puppy it is, then, Jakey. Let’s go look up some good breeds.”

Their first pet is a rescue named Garth, at Jake’s adamant insistence, though they're still not sure where he learned that name in the first place. Garth is clumsy, awkward, easy-going, and the most spoiled and cared for pet in the neighborhood.

Jake’s little sister Tabitha comes along shortly before his fourth birthday, and he takes to big brotherhood with an authority and self-assurance that delights every stranger the family meets. When she eventually starts walking, Jake is right by her side, guiding each one of her toddling little steps while a beaming Mommy and Mama follow close behind.

No one is even a little surprised when Tabby’s first whole word is “Hake.” She masters the letter j eventually, but continues to refer to his big brother by the name she gave him for most of the rest of their lives. Jake doesn’t even pretend to be annoyed.

“It was just a matter of time,” Samantha says one night, as she and Betty are getting ready for bed one night not long after Tabby has given Jake his new moniker. “You know what I mean?”

Betty, who has known exactly what Sam means since the day she literally tripped over her future wife at university, smiles and turns down the covers on her side of the bed.

“That’s Jake,” she says. They’ve spent hours, discussing their son’s odd, charming quirks long into the night, offering up phrases like “old soul” and “wise,” and eventually realized nothing they said could ever completely encompass the loving little person they somehow managed to bring into the world.

“That’s Jake,” Sam agrees, and turns her version of Jake’s golden smile on her wife. Mischief sparkles in her eyes, and Betty wonders how she ended up with three people in her life that she absolutely cannot win against.

“Ready to get sweaty, Betty?”

Betty groans but can’t hold back her grin. “You are the absolute worst, and that is exactly why I love you.”

…

Sam manages to shock Dean when he insists on a big family Christmas. His extra years on earth apparently helped the younger Winchester warm to the idea of holidays, finally getting to enjoy them with his son as he never did during his own childhood.

Sam doesn’t have to try very hard to talk everyone into celebrating. Things have been calm and serene, more than a little on the uneventful side, and Dean figures it will add some variety to his afterlife. Something to plan, something to look forward to that won’t be crashed by murderous Elder Gods or various other supernatural entities.

Probably.

Dean secretly loves that feeling of finding the perfect present for someone, something he was never really in a position to do back on earth. He takes a deep breath, proactively reminding himself that this is okay, this is allowed, this is good, that everything is not only okay but actually kind of great, really.

He can be happy. He can. He can do this.

The shade of red Sam’s face turns before he finally dissolves into laughter is a thousand percent worth the degradation of actually gifting someone a signed vinyl copy of Celine Dion’s first solo album.

“It’s perfect, Dean. Thanks, man.” Sam pulls his brother into a hug, and his giant paw slapping Dean in the middle of the back literally knocks the panic right out of him. Deans huffs, at a loss for words, and hugs Sam back perhaps just a smidge too forcefully before letting him go.

“You’ll never top Sapphire Barbie for best Christmas present, but this runs a close second.” Sam shakes his head, still grinning as he reads over the back cover of the album while Mary and John look on, varying levels of confusion and amusement on their faces.

“What’s he talking about, Dean?” John asks. He takes a long drink of his whiskey. “Sapphire Barbie? Some kinda code word or something?”

Sam and Dean glance at each other, their shoulders tensing automatically. For a moment, Dean can actually feel the phantom hunger pains transposed over the current fullness of his belly, and he can see a tiny Sam (still way more hair than necessary), huddled despondent and hungry under a shitty, moth-eaten motel blanket, convinced there would be no Christmas.

“Dean, uh...accidentally got me a Barbie for Christmas one year, it was — a, uh — yeah, he wanted to make sure I got a present, so he grabbed it, and…” Sam trails off.

John huffs a confused laugh, and Dean’s hackles rise at the scoff, so like Sam’s and yet so much more...condescending. John rises from the couch and goes to refill his glass. Sam seems content to let the moment pass, but something in Dean’s gut, something latent and ignored since his heavenly ascension, sparks and smolders bitterly.

“How the hell do you ‘accidentally’ get somebody a Barbie?” John asks, still chuckling, and Dean suddenly realizes he’s real fucking tired of biting his tongue.

“I stole the Barbie. Stole a couple of other things, too. A Christmas tree, some decorations, a baton.”

Mary glances between her sons, confused, before turning to John. “Where were you while this happened?”

A parade of emotions march over John’s face: confusion is followed by slow recognition. Guilt makes a quick appearance only to be chased away by dull, ashamed anger.

Dean can practically see John’s mind flashing through the scenario, recalling more about the hunt than his own sons on that cold, nasty Christmas Eve. He knows the instant his dad reverts to default setting of laying the blame on his eldest son. Dean braces himself automatically, his body viscerally reacting to the familiar storm on his father’s face.

Dean has the fleeting thought that at least his dad is drinking from a glass now; ought to hurt a lot less than being hit with a whole bottle.

“You left your brother to go steal from somebody else’s home on Christmas? After what happened with the shtriga?”

Dean knows true anger, near rage, for the first time in heaven, and the bitter wash of it through him is cutting and all too familiar.

“Pretty stupid thing to do, I know, but I wasn’t even twelve yet, so I wasn’t making the wisest of decisions.”

“Not even twelve?” Mary cuts in. “Sam? Does anybody feel like explaining this to me?”

“What the hell were you thinking, Dean, anything could have—”

But Dean had a lifetime of being plowed under by his dad’s inability to take responsibility, has had way more than enough of shouldering the blame for shit he should never have been left with in the first place.

“I was thinking that somebody should get a seven-year-old something for Christmas, should make sure he has enough to eat. Where were you, Dad? What were you thinking? Because you sure as hell weren’t thinking about us.”

That knot starts up in Dean’s throat again, the muscles tightening against the fear that blossoms in his chest, echoed from decades of training. Sam’s hand finds Dean’s arm, and Dean looks to him. Instead of the caution or reproach he’s expecting, though, all Sam simply nods.

“Say it, Dean.”

Dean stands slowly, facing John Winchester with every bit of strength he’s built, every bit of courage he’s earned from a lifetime of terror, and realizes that the angry, bitter man before him is no more a threat to him anymore than Chuck is. And without looking, he knows Sam stands behind him, solid and resolute.

“I wasn’t even twelve. It was Christmas, and you abandoned us. Yeah, I stole Sam a Barbie doll. You know what I got for Christmas that year? The year before? Every fucking year before that for almost as long as I can remember?”

John opens his mouth, even now unable to admit his faults, but Dean barrels on before his dad can get a word out.

“Not a damn thing from you. Not one damn thing. Not presents, not food, not a warm place to sleep or a word of thanks or approval. Not even a fucking phone call to say Merry Goddamn Christmas.” Dean pauses one last time, and it suddenly feels like he’s towering over the man whose shadow always felt too dark, too large, too suffocating; the man whose respect he used to crave more than food and water.

“What about me, Dad? Huh? What about me?”

Dean doesn’t recall leaving his parents’ house, doesn’t remember driving home, but he finds himself on his own front porch, leaning forward in his rocking chair. He takes in a long, deep breath before scrubbing his hands through hair and leaning against the back of the chair.

A breeze rifles the leaves of a nearby tree, ruffling Dean’s hair. He taps his thumb against the arm of the chair and takes a long moment to breathe in the night air.

Dean lets his thoughts roll around for a while. The stars creep slowly across the black, the crickets chirp, and the breeze continues to tickle through Dean’s mussed hair.

“You and I could write the book on shitty dads, am I right, kid?”

He’s not sure why he decides to talk to Jack. Just nice to have someone to talk to, knowing they’re not going to talk right back.

“Could just cut him out. Dunno how that’d work in heaven.” He thinks a moment, then grins to himself. “Not sure Mom’d let me get away with that. Sam would back me up, though.” Dean grins into the somehow not-empty night. “I would be the guy that brings a family feud into paradise, huh?”

Dean takes in the wilderness around him, the empty house at his back, the extra rocking chair for...a visitor, he supposes. He has learned today that heaven, as perfect as it is, still holds anger and bitterness and loneliness, and he figures that’s to be expected.

“You still did good, kid. You and me, we did good even with our shitty old men in and outta our lives. Glad we cut yours out for good. Guess I’ll figure out how to deal with mine eventually. All I’ve got now is time, anyway.”

Dean pushes up slowly, still surprised at the lack of cricks, pops, and aches that accompanied the action his last couple of years on earth.

“Night, Jack,” he says into the wind. He glances over at the empty rocking chair one last time. “If you see him, tell him —just tell him—”

Dean frowns, shakes his head, and turns his back on the night.

…

Jake’s not a crier, not really. There are inevitable tears that come with bad falls, but Jake sheds tears like it’s a physical reaction that he’s getting out of the way so he can move on.

So when Betty goes to change the sheets in her son’s room, only to find him silently crying on the floor, she panics. Sheets flop forgotten to the side as she drops next to his, reaching instinctively for his still-plump cheeks.

“Baby, what’s wrong? Are you hurt? What happened?”

“Nothing happened, Mama, I’m sorry I scared you,” he sniffles, his eyebrows down low on his small forehead.

Jake has never lied in his entire young life, and Betty is torn because he is obviously upset about something, but his face is full of nothing but truth and confusion.

“You have nothing to apologize for, Jakey,” she says, settling on the floor next to him and opening her arms. He instantly climbs into her lap, hooking his own arms around her neck and nuzzling under her chin. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Can you tell me what made you cry?”

“I...I don’t know,” he says, his little voice quiet and heavily confused. “I was playing with Tabby, she was helping me build a tower with my blocks, and then Mommy came to get Tabby for her snack.”

Betty is stumped. Jake has never had any kind of separation anxiety, as far as she can tell. He’s spent nights with both sets of grandparents, even a couple of weekends with aunts, uncles, and cousins, and never shed so much as a single tear.

“You...are you crying because you miss Tabby? She’s right in the next room, baby, you can go with her for snack time, you know that.”

“No, Mama, I —I don’t know why I’m crying. Tabby hugged me, she said she loved me, then she went with Mommy, and I felt...really happy. Like —the happiest ever, and...it was too much happy?”

The last part comes out as a question, and honestly Betty isn’t sure how to answer it.

“Well, baby,” she starts hesitantly, not sure where to lead this particular discussion. “Can you explain what you mean when you say ‘too much happy’?”

He snuggles closer against her chest, his forehead pressing along her jaw. “I dunno. I think...maybe I’m not supposed to be that happy? Is that why the tears came out? Because I got more happy than I’m supposed to get? Was I wrong, Mama?”

Betty breathes slowly, tightening her hold on the little boy in her arms. “You weren’t wrong, Jake. You can be as happy as you want. There’s never too much happy, I promise.”

She feels him shift, and she looks down to meet his clear, green gaze. He studies her carefully, scrutinizing her expression, and she’s reminded why she’s always been so very careful to tell her children the truth, albeit on levels they can understand.

“You pinky promise?”

The proffered pinky is smudged, pudgy, and absolutely perfect. Betty hooks her pinky finger with her son’s, bumping his nose gently with her own.

“Jakey, you have my eternal permission to be as happy as you are capable of feeling. And no one is ever allowed to take that from you. Good?” He nods, and she carefully brushes the tear tracks from his cheeks. “Sometimes feelings are really big, and they’re just a little too big for your body. They have to find a way out, and that’s why the tears come out.”

“Is that why you cry when you watch the kissy movies?” he asks, suddenly smiling. “Your feelings are too big, too?”

“Yup. We’ve got big feelings in this family, Jakey. Better get used to it, kiddo.”

...

More time passes. Dean walks, he talks, he goes through the motions. He heals a little with every conversation, every time he reaches out, and even though some of the wounds feel as fresh as the day he got them, eventually all that’s left are faint scars. He’d never willingly erase the scars, anyway. He earned them, and he’ll be damned if something like a little death and talk therapy could just wipe them away.

Gradually — so gradually Dean doesn’t realize it until Donna makes a comment one night after their regular poker game — Dean learns to not only let his guard down but drop it entirely. He’s shocked to realize the loss of his emotional armor doesn’t even bother him.

Dean works on Baby, drinks with Bobby, teaches Mary how to make an apple pie from scratch, and even manages to have a couple of honest, semi-civil conversations with his father. They don’t exactly reach Andy and Opie levels of father-son bonding, but John does eventually manage to grudgingly admit he fucked up some (a lot). Dean supposes anyone can make progress in heaven if they try hard enough.

He’s talked to everyone he can think of, settled scores, smoothed ruffles, filled himself to bursting with absolution. Dean is so absolved he thinks he might punch the next person who pats him on the back and tells him how much good he’s done for the world.

And still, he comes home every night to that extra rocking chair.

He waits now, waits while he talks with Sam, waits while he walks through the woods, waits while he changes Baby’s oil. He can’t shake the feeling that something is coming. He can feel it around himself, like a suit of armor or a second skin. Nothing terrible, nothing ominous, but something. Which is weird because nothing ever seems to happen in heaven, not really.

Could be he’s just bored, but Dean doesn’t think that’s it. Not entirely.

He talks to Jack nightly now. It’s a habit, something to help Dean talk through and untangle his thoughts into something he can understand. He looks forward to their talks, being able to get his feelings out without being either validated or rebuffed. Just letting some steam off.

He’s done it for so long that he can barely remember the night he started. Dean knows Jack can hear him, but the kid’s been true to his word, stayed hands off and radio silent. He lets mortals deal with their own issues, keeping himself and the supernatural world well away. Even the angels leave people alone in heaven.

Especially the angels, Dean grudgingly admits to himself, late one night after leaving Sam’s house. Instead of going home to that extra rocking chair, he drives Baby slowly, aimlessly, yet somehow ends up back on that same bridge where he met up Sam all those years ago.

He parks right at the end (no traffic in heaven) and strolls out to the middle, scuffing his boots and sending little puffs of dust in the air. His hands are stuffed deep in his pockets, out of habit more than anything else, and he lifts his gaze from the ground up to the full moon in the sky.

“Hey, kid,” he says softly. “Hope it’s goin good for you.Things are pretty good here. I know you know, you’re everywhere and all that,” Dean waves his hand vaguely, then continues, “Just wanted to let you know, I guess. I didn’t tell you enough, but we—I —really appreciated you. Appreciate you. You, uh...you did real good, kid. Then and now.” He pauses, then takes a breath, standing straight and letting all pretense go.“Please tell Cas...he did good, and...I miss him. And I know you’re all taking the hands-off approach, but —I dunno, maybe...he could —stop by? Or…”

The silence around Dean is heavy, comforting like a thick blanket.

Or a tan trenchcoat, he thinks.

“Jack —“

He cuts himself off, though. He spent all this time in heaven working through rivers of bullshit, wearing down mountains of lies and self-loathing until he can finally be honest and open with everyone. And if he’s going to be honest with himself tonight, Jack isn’t who he needs to talk to.

“Sorry kid, I gotta put you on hold.”

Purgatory flashes before his eyes, that sense of loss and being lost, the desperation and certainty that he’d never see his best friend again.

I can’t do this anymore, he thinks. I can’t pretend anymore. And I’m done lying to myself.

“Cas. Castiel. I hope you can hear me. I miss you. I don’t know where you are. Bobby said you were here, that you helped remake this place into something pretty damned awesome, but I never see you. I can feel you sometimes, can tell some things are up here just because you put ‘em there. Someone will tell a story, and I swear I can feel you standing right beside me, can almost hear you frowning and not understanding the joke. I…”

He knows there’s something left —knows he hasn’t found the right words yet. He has no idea what that right thing is, or even what he’s still waiting for, but he figures if he just barrels on, it’ll come to him.

“There was too much in the way, back on earth, in Purgatory. Too much always coming after us, trying to kill us or worse. I got in my own damned way, never knew what to say or how to say it. Didn’t think I deserved...I should’ve…”

He’s not sure what’s more bizarre, that he’s praying to someone who probably won’t respond — probably can’t even hear him — or that he’s doing so in a place wildly opposite from that last time he prayed like this.

Dean isn’t sure how he keeps ending up in this situation, but here he is, gasping out his feelings to the night air, barely able to squeeze the words past that perpetual knot in his throat.

“It’s a lot clearer up here, more room to breathe and think. This heaven you and Jack made...it’s great. Hell, it’s damn near perfect. But there’s no you. And I just can’t see my heaven as right without you. I can’t...I can’t take my forever if you’re not in it.”

A wispy cloud, silver in the moonlight, drifts across an otherwise flawless sky. Dean stares upwards for several minutes, wondering if Cas can see the same stars tonight, wherever he is.

“Maybe...I don’t know if you can come back. Or if you even left. I don’t know how any of it works.”

He’s on the cusp. He can almost taste the next step.

Dean’s at a loss, though. He could be brave: he could say everything he should’ve said in that last moment, everything he should have told Cas.

Or he could take the comfortable path, revert to being a dick and tell Cas exactly how he feels about all this silent treatment, about the no-show in heaven or not telling him about his deal with the Empty until it was too late, about waiting until the last second so Dean would have no time—

Or he could do both.

Both is good.

Metal railings squeak under Dean’s punishing grip. He’s not sure when he grabbed hold of the bridge itself, but right now he needs all the support he can get.

“You left me! You should have told me, given me a chance. Another chance, just one more. I’m sorry, Cas, I knew but I didn’t. I— I should’ve told you, should’ve held you, I could have—“

The tears flow unimpeded, the air squeezed from his lungs in convulsive gasps, but Dean can’t stop now.

“I should have told you everything I felt, every day. I should have trusted you more, and I’m so sorry. You were always family, you were always there for me when I needed you. We both fucked up so many times, lost so much time together. I was so angry at you, at me, at everyone and everything, and I let it get in the way.”

The silence around him is maddening. Here he is, ripping his guts out in the middle of the bridge, and all he gets back is crickets and evening breezes. Dean shoves off the railing, too frantic to stay still.

“Gimme something, Cas, anything! I’m pouring my heart out! I fucked up, and I’m sorry, and I swear I’m gonna do better, but you’ve gotta give me the chance! Just...just give me some sort of answer, please? Let me know you’re there!”

The silence persists.

Just as quickly as Dean’s rage crescendos, it fizzles suddenly. He drops to the ground, back and head slamming hard against the side of the bridge as he lets out a roar of helpless rage. His fists grip his hair, teeth grinding against the wave of helplessness that threatens to overwhelm him.

“I missed my chance, I waited too long, I should’ve said— I should have—“

And then it comes to him.

His hands draw down from his hair, scrubbing his face before steepling his fingers in front of his mouth. He can’t believe it’s taken him this long to realize.

“I’m an idiot.” His voice is barely audible, even to his own ears, but he has no doubt his words will reach their intended destination. “This place you built, you and Jack, it’s as good as it gets. I deserve it, I earned it. I got my family, I got the easy life for a while. I got my family. I had my rest. There’s only one thing left in the universe I need, only one person I want.”

Dean stands, dusting himself off and turning his face back up to the stars.

“I’m ready, Cas. I— I love you. And I’m ready for the next thing. Whatever that is. However that is. As long as—”

One last pause.

“As long as you’re there, that’s all I need.”

...

The inevitable day of separation comes: Jake’s first day of kindergarten. Samantha is proud of her guardian warrior, knows he’s going to succeed at everything he puts his little bullheaded mind to. Betty hopes very hard that he won’t be too lonely without Tabitha there with him. Tabitha only knows that Jake’s finger tastes good and makes her gums feel better when she chews on it.

Jake, as always, approaches this monumental step with aplomb and logic.

“I’ll give it a shot,” he says casually as his little sister gnaws on his thumb. “An’ if I don’t like it, I’ll just stay here and take care of Tabby. You an’ Mommy can go to work, then, ‘kay, Mama? I can make nut butter n’ jelly sammiches. But I’ll try it out.”

...

School isn’t so bad, Jake decides on his second day. His teacher Mrs. Harris seems to know what she’s doing (she already knows who she can trust with scissors and glue), and the other kids are nice enough. There’s different toys (“learning tools”, Mrs. Harris calls them), so that’s interesting enough, but—

Something is missing.

“Can you tell me what you mean, Jakey?” Betty asks at dinner that night. “Are there supplies you need? We got everything on the list.” She wipes a smear of sweet potato off Tabitha’s face before looking back to her son. His mouth is turned down in a frown of concentration, like he’s trying to remember something.

“I don’t need anything, Mama, just...someone. I need someone. My friend hasn’t come to school yet.”

“It takes time to make friends, baby,” Samantha says. “It’s only the second day of school. Have you tried asking anyone to play yet?”

“Yeah, and they’re fun and all, but they aren’t my friend. My friend isn’t here yet,” Jake says. Then his frown vanishes with the sudden mood change of a five-year-old, and he turns beseeching eyes on Betty, aiming unerringly at the softer target. “I finished my green beans. That means dessert now, right, Mama?”

Jake decides on the third day that the best place to wait for his friend (he just knows he’s going to show up any day now) is the playground.

“My friend likes the playground,” he murmurs. “That’s good, I like the playground, too.” He eats his lunch slowly, watching the other kids wolf down their food so they can have extra playtime. He’s barely finished his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, though, when he’s distracted by movement on the other side of the play yard. The door to the school opens and the school secretary steps out. Then she turns and gently pulls someone out from behind her.

A small boy stands in the doorway, white shirt tucked neatly into black slacks. His blue tie is a little loose, as if he’s been tugging on it, and his tan jacket is a little too big, hanging loosely around his small frame. His hair looks like someone was in too much of a rush to comb it properly. He clutches a pink piece of paper in one hand and, in the other, a backpack inexplicably decorated with flying, winged slices of pizza.

“Late drop-off, parent had to run,” the secretary tells Mrs. Harris before tiptoeing out of the room.

With an anxious glance at the other children, the boy scuttles forward and immediately trips over his own untied shoelaces.

Jake is at the little boy’s side before anyone else can react, kneeling down to check on him. The prone child is too shocked to cry, both by the fall and by the sudden appearance of this unknown factor. Jake checks him over, then nudges him until he sits up.

“You gotta keep ‘em double tied,” Jake says seriously. “Or else that’ll happen all the time.” Without waiting for an answer, Jake sets about the laborious task of looping each set of laces in turn, rabbits chasing each other around trees and down holes until the shoes are secure.

Jake climbs to his feet and reaches down, gripping the other boy’s shoulders and helping him stand. A dark smear of jelly stains the shoulder of the coat in the shape of a smudged purple handprint.

“Thank...thank you,” the smaller boys whispers. He lifts his eyes hesitantly, and clear blue meets olive green for the first time. “I’m Chris.”

“I’m Jake.” He thinks for a long moment, frowning. Something is settling in his chest, something big and permanent and scary; at first he thinks it’s too much.

Then he thinks back to what Mama told him: you can be as happy as you want.

He smiles at Chris. “You’re with me. You’re the one I was waiting for.”

Hope and just a bit of delight flicker across Chris’s eager face.

“I am? You mean it?”

Jake nods and grabs his new friend’s hand. “Yep. Now you’re here, that’s all I need. And nobody's allowed to take you from me, Mama said so. C’mon, let’s play cars.”

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phandombigotryarchive · 3 years

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Trigger warning:

Discussions of sexual assault, transphobia, transmisogyny, chattel slavery and violent antiblackness.

Good afternoon,

It may come to many people's great happiness in this community that I am no longer interested in muling for a fandom that wants my community dead and excuses our deaths.

I am not here to hold your hand on why you should see Black people as human beings if you are unable to do so.

I'm not here to sit around here to convince you that the Black trauma that you are excusing is of real live human beings. That enslaved Black people were mothers, fathers, cousins, siblings, aunts, nephews, loved ones and by brushing off the pain that they went through, you are dehumanizing literal human beings.

This is a fandom that excuses white supremacy, discrimination of people with facial differences, transmisogyny, orientalism, the objectification of m/m ships (often involving a party of color), ableism, transmisogyny/transphobia, general anti-Blackness, colorism and we can go on for just about forever.

It protects those and their enablers and in addition to this, excuses and normalizes the use of chattel slavery as a fanfiction trope.

Think about this before you consider aligning yourself with the people in this fandom or joining it at all.

Therefore, this archive serves a reminder of what the true nature of the Phantom of Opera fandom holds and no matter how many times you block me, you cannot erase this. It serves as a resource for current marginalized fans and future fans to heed warning of the false respectable aura these bigots parade.

I would like to thank our allies for doing as much as they can for the sake of protecting themselves from this fandom. Don't worry. I saw your posts. I thank you.

To all non-Black people of color that stood by and watch this happen without a care, I'm not surprised that you would have such lack of feeling for Black fans. I would implore you to do better but that would imply that any of you actually had spines.

Anyways. Keep the Black names of actors under Phantom of the Opera out of your mouths and gifsets. I know who you are and that you're seeing this. No, posting pictures of Norm Lewis and Derrick Davis along with others will not solve anti-Blackness in a fandom that excuses chattel slavery.

Non-Blacks cannot accept "apologies" for anti-Blackness and slavery apologists.

Take your performatism somewhere else.

Blackness, being Irani and the beauty of being trans is something to be celebrated. Do not forget this even in such a bigoted, white supremacist fandom.

To all those who are affected by the phandoms bigotry, let me say this. You are not alone.

Now, I will recount these past months events of transphobia and antiblackness. for anyone who was lost within the narrative.

We begin with @transphantomweek. @cefantomeenhabitnoir noticed that i-penna and filthybonnet, both big names in the fandom were perpetrators of transmisogyny. When he called this out, they were instantly shut down, blocked and isolated from the fandom.

@cefantomeenhabitnoir has an entire Google doc dedicated to the harassment they faced and the transmisogyny perpetuated in this fandom and you can find it on his page and in my phandom bigotry callouts tag.

Kept Below is the fic that @cefantomeenhabitnoir is referring to.

See my phandom bigotry callouts tag and @cefantomeenhabitnoir 's transmisogyny/transphobia call out for more details, which is also in that tag.

Now we bring ourselves to our current situation. Madamefaust.

On February 25th, 2021, I called out madamefaust for using the tragic mulatto trope, exploiting the usage of the Dumas Family (real life victims of the Haitian-French slave trade) to racebend Raoul De Chagny as a biracial. Black-French Man in her since deleted fic, "Strange Sweet Sound".

I will explain to you why this is bad.

"Do you even know the implications of naming a Black/White biracial child a bastard and flat out stating that their white side was involved in the slave trade? It means that child’s mother was possibly raped. You are implying that Raoul’s mother was a victim of slavery and sexual trauma. You are playing into the tragic mulatto trope. You are anti-Black."

- Me in my original call-out post (which you can find on my pinned.)

The tragic mulatto trope is trope born from slavery times involving a Black/White biracial child who was the product of rape between a white and enslaved Black party (typically female). They are pitied for their Blackness.

"Lydia Maria Child introduced the literary character that we call the tragic mulatto in two short stories: "The Quadroons" (1842) and "Slavery's Pleasant Homes" (1843). She portrayed this light skinned woman as the offspring of a white slaveholder and his black female slave. This mulatto's life was indeed tragic. She was ignorant of both her mother's race and her own. She believed herself to be white and free. Her heart was pure, her manners impeccable, her language polished, and her face beautiful. Her father died; her "negro blood" discovered, she was remanded to slavery, deserted by her white lover, and died a victim of slavery and white male violence."

After I called this out, many people in the fandom blocked me and began to post very cryptic things regarding cancel culture.

Madamefaust is not exempt from participating in my harassment. Madamefaust is a pharoga writer and a large number of the people harassing me were pharoga shippers. You can find the list of names in @cefantomeenhabitnoir 's bigot call out list.

Even her literal friends and mutuals were posting things regarding the words, "you don't have to care about anything" about a Black woman calling out the literal fetishization of slavery.

Madamefaust did nothing to stop my harassment. Only posting a cryptic post "to stop" while these people still kept indirecting me.

Why didn't you tell them to disengage until the damage was already done? Why didn't you confront them personally and not in some text post? You knew what you were doing. You were watching. This fandom is small.

I hope you feel ashamed and that the shame follows you forever. You were playing with literal Black lives and the deaths of many people who were murdered. Slavery wasn't a fun game. It was endless brutalization and loss of self. Black people's lives were treated as products. Me and many people's ancestors literally had nothing.

Life as an enslaved person was either get raped by the slave master or labor until you die.

And this fandom has the nerve to excuse using that as a fanfic trope?

Now, we move on to @strength-to-try

@strength-to-try dubs themselves an "anti racism" page yet allows antiblack slave trade apologists and their defenders to interact with their posts.

When a Black woman criticizes them (me), they refer to me as a "Black Individual" and flat out state that they aren't going to block out literal

SLAVE TRADE APOLOGISTS, ANTIBLACK PEOPLE AND BLACK FETISHIZERS.

YOU ARE NOT BLACK. I CAN TELL.

You cannot "forgive" or accept apologies antiblackness if you aren't Black.

The entire reason that page exists is because I was calling out ANTIBLACKNESS AND SLAVE TRADE APOLOGISM IN PHANDOM.

FUCK YOU AND FUCK EVERYONE WHO SUPPORTS @strength-to-try and their anti-Blackness, slave trade apologism and willingness to stand with white supremacists all whilst throwing me, a Black woman under a bus.

IF YOU SUPPORT THEM, YOU ARE ANTIBLACK. YOU ARE STANDING IN LINE WITH SOMEONE WHO LETS WHITE SUPREMACIST SLAVE TRADE APOLOGIST ANTIBLACK RACISTS INTERACT WITH THEM.

TAKE IT FROM AN ACTUAL BLACK PERSON (ME!)

FUCKING LISTEN TO BLACK PEOPLE WHEN WE SAY THE SHIT YOU'RE DOING IS RACIST.

The Phantom of the Opera fandom is especially not safe for Black People and Trans Women. It houses, protects and defends WHITE SUPREMACY.

But it is also not safe for darkskinned people, Muslims and Iranis.

It is reeking with people who fetishize the Daroga, a darkskinned Irani Muslim man. They lighten his skin, barely even mention his religion unless they're trying to strip it away or demonize his home country. They write him hyperaggressive and hypersexual towards Erik. They call him a monkey. This is not love. This is racism.

They also hyper-sexualize Irani women and refuse to think critically about why Gaston Leroux describes the Little Sultana, an Irani woman as so blood thirsty and Erik (a white man's) main abuser.

You can find examples in my phandom bigotry callouts tag. Or just read any pharoga fic. It's filled with this prejudiced shit.

Also I encourage you all to stop demonizing Erik's facial difference and to educate yourself on the history of ableism regarding the discrimination of people with facial differences. You can find some of these resources under my ableism tag.

So, in all, go run your money to @cefantomeenhabitnoir for the transphobic trauma you've put him through if you have a single bit of sympathy for them. You know who you are.

I don't expect much from a fandom who condones literal anti-Blackness and slavery apologism. But if any of you do feel remorse, I encourage you to run your money to Black people. Especially darkskinned, disabled and LGBT Black people whenever you see a donation post as reparations.

Silence is violence.

Also, I have put together an artist blacklist of people who supported madamefaust's use of slavery in her fanfic, defended it or flat out refused to stop interacting with said defenders of it.

In addition to this, I have added said artists who have contributed to the racist orientalist sentiment against the Daroga and, of course transphobes/transmisogynist defenders.

You can contact @queerangelic or @cefantomeenhabitnoir for the list to know which in the fandom to avoid.

More than many of you are guilty.

For new Phantom of the Opera fans considering joining the fandom? Read my pinned and check out my phandom bigotry callouts tag.

I suggest that you do not join this hellscape fandom or get out of here while you can.

Avoid this fandom as much as possible.

And Phandom? I'll see you all in hell.

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mallowstep · 3 years

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the nature of folklore

today, i want to talk about the nature of folklore.

we're not divorced from it in the modern day by any means: the nature of folklore is that it is always there.

after all, how many times have you heard that if your roommate dies, you get an a? or listened eagerly to someone's tale of an impossible encounter with an impossible stranger?

folklore is omnipresent. it is woven into us.

that said, we don't have a ton of folklore via stories, oral history, and songs anymore. if i could singlehandedly change that, i would. i grew up telling stories, keeping the history of my family in vignettes i taught to my brother, making up comforting fables for my younger cousins when they couldn't sleep.

my mother sang me lullabies, amazing grace, you are my sunshine, tula tula, melodies i can no longer name but would recognize in a heartbeat.

i went to a summer camp where you were never too old for a bedtime story, where the greatest reward, even for a pack of sixteen year olds, desperately vieing for independence, was to hear another story. i can still tell you the story of the invisible prince, of how such and such and so and so met and married, recount the little prince or hatchet or my side of the mountain in impeccable detail.

unfortunately, i am but one voice, and i don't think i really want to change us back. let culture progress, it is the way of the world.

but i have so many stories for cats. trust me, i have about 20 drafts sitting of stories for these murder cats. but i want to take a moment to talk about how folklore works, what it does, and why it's important.

[3.7k words. 20 minute read. section headers, minimal formatting changes.]

oral history: a written explanation

i'm feeling a bit punny.

anyway, i'm not qualified to talk about oral history. what i am qualfied to do is talk about the broadest sense of it.

oral history is not an accurate way of keeping records. stories change, people forget things, the tales become exaggerated and tweaked.

but...it's not the worst way. it's a real, sincere, history.

for example, in my full moon, it's unlikely that one individual really mastermined this plan. especially not the same individual who sorted out some other important part of skyclan business, which in it of itself is a tall-tale.

realistically, the clans realized they had an error, decided on when they would meet, and just went with it.

but briarleap is one of skyclan's heroes. she's not the only one: rushfoot and dovestar are also important heroes. she fills a particular type of archetype: she's the young hero, who sees the world more clearly than those around her and comes up with a solution.

so it makes sense to assign her to the problems which are clever and had no obvious solution. she's not really a trickster archetype, but she is clever, young, and has no real power within the clan.

in other words, she's a ya novel protagonist.

likewise, the yet-unwritten story of briarleap and swallowpaw definitely didn't happen as it's told. that's just a nice box to put it in, a nice cover for an important lesson: mark unstable branches.

all the clans probably have a similar version of briarleap's story. i can't tell you for sure who the equivalent is, because i don't know, but it's worth remembering that almost none of these cats existed.

i think riverclan's will be a cat named briarstream.

you see what i mean, they're both named briar- because briarleap belongs to no cat. they just have a suffix that corresponds with common clan names.

now, i can't speak for anyone else, but in come back to you one by one, by solacefruit, there's a cautionary tale about catching koi. we get this line:

The koi were left alone because the tall folk loved them. That was the truth of the story. The real truth, not Linnetleaf’s version.

that confirms it, the story is a warning that's been polished into something kinder and more forgiving. (i highly recommend come back to you one by one btw.)

that's how oral history works.

it's not good for having a factual understanding of historical events, but...that's not really the point.

shared stories

another thing is, a lot of clans share the same stories.

i already talked about briarleap/stream/??? for the other clans, but it's more than just that.

every clan is going to claim that they have the right, correct story, that the other clans don't tell it well, etc., but with the exception of clan specific stories, that's not generally true.

okay this is hard to explain bc i'm still drafting/editing a lot of what i'm talking about right now and full moon is kind of a boring story for this. so i'm going to use the story of the long night, because that's the closest to finished and most likely to have been published by the time i finish this.

cw: the long night is a story that involves infanticide and cannibalism. i'm not graphic about it, but it's featured very heavily. we move into discussion at "STORY COMPLETE," and i move on entirely at "SAFE"

okay, so to summarize very briefly, the long night is a story about the seasons and about queen madness. it's one piece of clan creation mythos.

basically, before there were seasons, the night and day just took turns. during the night, everyone slept, but during the day, everything woke. one night, the night doesn't end. i'm telling the thunderclan version, because that's the version i'm working on, but this is a tale from before there were clans, so while every clan says their version is universal, it's definitely not.

there's a queen, slateflower, who has six kits (pigeonkit, harekit, fallowkit, dewkit, ripplekit, and muddykit), who are very young. her mate, silvershadow, has been hunting for her, because there was no clan to provide.

he's able to catch a small amount of prey, but as the night goes on, slateflower just doesn't have enough milk. she knows her kits are going to starve, so she picks the weakest one, kills it, and eats it. when silvershadow returns and asks what happens, she says that muddykit died and she buried her. this repeats itself until only pigeonkit and harekit are left.

silvershadow fails to catch anything, so he comes back, and sees slateflower try to decide who's weaker. he realizes what's happening, takes harekit from slateflower so she doesn't have to decide, and brings the kit into a clearing. he begs the moon to end the night so he can feed his family again.

it takes him a couple times, and he also is searching for another nursing queen. he finds a queen named flamepuddle, who also had a litter of six kits (silentkit, webkit, wildkit, dustykit, beetlekit, and talonkit), as well as taking in the kits of her sister, echofur, (heatherkit, redkit, goldkit, leafkit, cricketkit, and graykit), and right now, only redkit, leafkit, talonkit, goldkit, and cricketkit had survived. (the rest, and her sister, died of starvation.)

flamepuddle agrees to take in harekit, and the night eventually ends.

silvershadow decides that he, flamepuddle, and slateflower will live together. this isn't a thunderclan origin story, mind, just the beginning of collective cat behavior. but one of the reasons it is a distinctly thunderclan edition is because the implication is that later on, the other clans are all splinter groups.

there's also an implication that such large litters used to be more common, à la how in the bible, people used to be more fertile.

so anyway, because all cats are said to be descendents of these nine cats (silvershadow, flamepuddle, slateflower, redkit, talonkit, goldkit, cricketkit, harekit, and pigeonkit — leafkit dies later on), it's said they all carry the trauma of the long night and queens, feeling unsafe, will choose the strongest of their litter.

STORY COMPLETE

so.

in thunderclan's telling, flamepuddle and silvershadow are made to be the heroes, and slateflower is the villain. notice that slate is a windclan name, and the kits who die don't have very thunderclan prefixes. the implication is that this is because the other clans are weaker.

in a riverclan telling, instead of flamepuddle and slateflower, we might have puddlefeather and tallsong, and the kits who survive might be fallowkit and dewkit.

in skyclan, we might have mothpetal and nightstep, with surviving kits echokit and maplekit.

and so on. silvershadow usually keeps his name, tho. or at least half of it.

the 10th cat who dies is also variable. in thunderclan, it's another kit. slateflower is understood to not have intended her actions. in shadowclan, it's the slateflower analogy who dies. in riverclan, silvershadow dies and puddlefeather and tallsong have to work together.

so we always have the same story, but the details of it change, and there's a lot about the clan in that.

it might even be that the reason puddlefeather is able to keep five out of twelve kits alive is because she can fish for herself. tallsong can't.

and this is a story that's supposed to be universal, before the time of clans.

imagine how differnt briarleap and briarstream are. no, seriously, i don't have it in me to do five versions of every folk tale i write, so y'all have to live with one.

anyway, i could go on here, but wow, this section is...much longer than i meant as it is whoops.

SAFE

morals, protagonists, and antagonists

i'm not going to lie, i'm somewhat exhausted from the last section.

basically, the "protagonists" are often the ones who make mistakes. this is because that's a common theme for parables. you want the protagonist, who listeners relate to, to understand the mistakes and learn from them.

there's almost always a moral in these stories. they're not told just to entertain. they're ritualistic, nigh religious, tied in deeply with their culture.

finally, when an opposing clan is needed, (a) the clan telling the story is nearly always in the right, and (b) it tends to shift to whoever the clan is most antagonistic with.

a lot of my stories are shadowclan v skyclan because they have the strongest story-telling development and i don't have any aus planned for shadowclan and (old) skyclan, but i really like what i've developed for them.

in the case a friendly clan is needed, that also tends to shift, but it's less likely to change. it's significantly more likely to change if they're fighting with the clan in the tale.

for this reason, clans tend to be allies with cross territory clans in stories. you're just less likely to fight with someone who's territory you're across from, and you get fun flanking if you gang up on someone in the middle.

characters and archetypes

so i mentioned how briarleap is a certain kind of archetype, and that's pretty common in folklore. you've got your tricksters, witches, wise elders, w/e. i could do a bunch of research into folklore and find a canonized list but i'm approximately 90% sure it's going to tell me it varies by culture so. instead of doing that, i'm going to talk through some of the character archetypes i've been using.

please keep in mind that this is highly suspect to change. also, i'm referring to a lot of cats in my lore posts, so i'm sorry, because if you don't keep up with that, you might be a little bit lost. if you want to check out my folklore, it's here. maybe one day i'll make a kit simulation list that gives them to you in the order a kit would be told them.

the young warrior — characters like briarleap. smart, creative, and willing to speak up when something is wrong. they're who young kits should aspire to be. they're the most common protagonist in stories for young kits, and they're one of the only protagonists for stories with a "good" lead.

cassandra — prophetic characters who struggle to act on their prophecies. goosefeather types. they're cautionary tales, warnings about who not to be, because these are true seers who failed. sometimes, it is framed as the clan being wrong (e.g., berrymoon's main story is about this), but usually it's because the character said too much/too little, at the wrong time, etc.

impulsive apprentice — another warning. characters like swallowpaw. their actions are usually not actually wrong, but they end up being wrong with hindsight. they're tragic characters, and their warnings are usually about the rules established because of them, rather than not being like them.

wise leader/deputy — it's exactly what it sounds like lmao. usually, this is going to be the deputy more than the leader, because the deputy is a far more relatable position than the leader. these are your rushfoots and lilytails, deputies who make quick decisions on the behalf of their clan.

foolish/selfish warrior — warriors who take actions selfishly, which wrap back around to hurt themselves. these are the "protagonists" of the tales about feeding elders and kits first, and so on. they're actually the most common protagonist in stories over all. it's kind of a wide category, including everything from slateflower from "the long night" to lightningcall from "full moon." you know, a queen who only escaped the dark forest because it didn't exist, and a tom whose "mistake" was not showing up to a deputy meeting he was physically unable to attend.

there are, naturally, many more archetypes. there are archetypes for every role in the clan, often many. there's probably some amount of symbolism in the names — perhaps "-leap" is a skyclan indicator of a young warrior, etc., but at least right now, i'm not interested in that. i have more fun naming characters than worrying about the symbolism behind it, because i'm trying to also provide an understanding of clanlife, and that requires bending the rules.

(i mean, for what it's worth, this is true of many things. "the long night" as thrushpelt tells it is not the full version. usually, you wouldn't separate it from "the four seasons," but also, he glazes over the infanticide and cannibalism because he's talking to, like, four-year-olds, explaining how their mother had inherited a trait from slateflower.)

overall, though, i think these five are enough to give you an idea of what the archetypes look like.

interestingly, i also want to call attention to the fact that there's no specific trickster archetype. i mean, there is, because it's (a) one of the most common, and (b) it needs to exist for what i'm about to say, but it doesn't properly count.

see, cats are good at being sneaky and smart and clever. you know this if you have a cat.

clan cats also have to be good at following rules.

so basically every protagonist and antagonist in a story is some permutation of the trickster. the young warrior is the trickster but with less pointless trickery. the impulsive apprentice is probably the closest to straight-up trickster, but there's usually no associated deception. etc.

but in general, all cats should be clever and smart and finding new solutions, so there isn't a specific trickster.

names and times

on a related note, one that's significantly harder to demonstrate, the names of cats get repeated a lot.

in the real world, this is because the names are approximately 75% generated and 25% tweaked, and i have a bias towards certain names.

in the context of lore and worldbuilding, and why i'm not doublechecking against my database of every cat i've ever mentioned, this is because, well, it should make sense for certain elders to tell multiple stories, or, logically, for a kit to grow into a warrior grow into an elder and tell a story.

i mean, dovestar's nine lives are a huge part of skyclan, because each life is supposed to demonstrate some fundamental principle, and they're told over the nine moons of a kit's life (again, cats count kits' lives from the season before they're born for the purpose of holy nine, and from their actual birth for every other purpose, which is how brokenstar got around the warrior code fun fact), so yeah, i'll probably have some repetition in there.

likewise, there's no timeline for these. we don't know what happens when at all, except that the cats telling a story are younger than the cats in the story, and any "book cats" are younger than any other mentioned cat.

(that last point is because exactly one story is told by thrushpelt.)

so anyway, really hazy times and names because...that's how things go m8.

impact of the great journey

so as you can imagine, the great journey is a pretty big deal.

first of all, we're running out of cats who can remember the forest. in thunderclan, according to moonkitti, who i trust in this, birchfall is the youngest cat who can remember it. so considering birchfall could have great grandchildren in the next book or two, i'd say that we're pretty much done with cats who lived there.

even among the other cats, squirrelflight was an apprentice, and she went on the first journey, so there's that. cloudtail and brightheart won't be around for much longer, and graystripe might be immortal, but if he isn't, he'll be gone soon too.

i mean, i know there are non-thunderclan cats, but do you know their names? do you?

yeah. that's what i thought.

anyway, my point is, right now, in canon time, all of the stories are set in the forest. but like, that's kind of not helpful.

who knows, there's probably a story about sunningrocks that just doesn't make sense anymore.

i don't know for sure how the great journey impacts the folklore. this is because there's not an easy way for me to write it. my elders' den stuff is specifically set before tbp, so i don't have to think about adding in the villains of tbp.

why only tbp? because we have 3 wonderful, fantastic, folklore worthy villains. in tnp, we have the journey, in po3, we have interpersonal drama, in oots, we have rehashings of old villains, in dotc nothing matters, in avos, we have weird fuzziness i don't really remember what happened after darktail tbh, and tbc is ongoing. but wait! i hear you saying, what about hawkfrost? and darktail himself? and... no. shut up. they don't matter. just. they're not. they don't. they're not lore villains is what i'm saying very poorly. they're not the kind of villains who inspire lore. maaaaybe darktail? but he was far too recent for folklore.

anyway.

i'm sure in all of the po3 stuff i have on the horizon, i'll explore this more. dovefeather lore is in the awkward middle ground — everything is from the perspective of cats who never knew the old forest, but pretty much everyone older than them does, so it's unlikely anything substantive has changed.

but i have a lot of po3 extended universe plans that might dip in to this?

but for spitballing purposes, what probably happens is that most stories are just reskinned.

things like stories about sunningrocks are going to be repurposed. maybe about that weird strip of territory that they fought over? i'm not sure.

some stories will get to stay in the old forest, like the battle with bloodclan. and some stories will fade out, just as they always do. but for the most part, once the elders didn't live in the forest, they're just going to start plopping stories in the lake.

also, the great journey itself is 100% already folklore. i don't have to do that part, canon actually does it for me. kits are constantly being told about the great journey, or apprentices are telling us they were told about it, or someone is having a weird dream sequence that involves it.

the great journey is a major part of folklore, and that's cool. maybe if i run out of old stories, i'll do some post-canon elders' den stuff. we'll see, i'm definitely not feeling it right now, but that could change.

speaking of great...

this is a minor thing, but like, what's up with all the greats?

the great journey, okay, yeah, sure, makes sense.

and then we have the great battle.

also legit. it had been a while.

and then...the great storm?

look, i understand the storm in bramblestar's storm was a big deal. i have a lot of thoughts about bramblestar's storm as a book and this isn't that. but...

can we compare how many cats died in the great journey and the great battle? and we lost, like, three cats in the great storm

don't get me wrong, i sobbed like a baby when briarlight died.

oh hold on i lied that wasn't this book. never mind never mind.

i just, like, it's very strange IMO to have this great being a thing. or at least, i don't now, i guess it's evolution of culutre?

bluh okay i'm hungry and i do not focus well so i'm going to finish up but just. great. interesting.

conclusion

folklore is a topic i'm really interested in, and i try really hard to think through the consequences of, well, everything i can.

i'm definitely missing a lot of details — specifically, i scratched out my plans for a specific creation myth — but i like the general shape of the lore i'm building up.

#warriors au #warriors culture #warrior cats #warriors worldbuilding #warriors #q #mine #txt #26th #March #2021 #March 26th 2021 #cloudtail's daughter #jaywing #dovefeather #essay #long

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svartalfhild · 4 years

Text

I have been thinking a lot lately about the sort of person I am, the sort of person I would like to be, and why I’ve turned out the way that I have. Long post incoming. (Sorry, mobile folks.)

I’ve recently had a lot of old memories from when I was growing up resurface and give new context to the things I do now. I tend to think of myself as being a very timid and self-critical person, and that’s often the case, but I have these moments where I’m not. Those moments can manifest in all kinds of wild ways. Most often, they are born from anger. Moments when I get mouthy or lash out because I’ve been pushed over the edge. Moments when I become stone cold because my sympathy has run out. I don’t like being that way. I’m scared to let my anger out ever because I’ve done so many awful things with it in the past, and I don’t want to become my father.

But at the same time, those moments are among the rare occasions when my anxiety shuts down, and briefly, I get to feel something like confidence. I stop analyzing and take action for once. I realize there are appropriate times to be angry and appropriate ways to express anger, but I’m always afraid that if I let myself be angry at the right times, my anger will also come out at the wrong times. There’s a time and a place to be a stone cold bitch, and I don’t trust myself to know when that is.

So I prefer to always be kind. I prefer to win people’s respect by being soft rather than assertive, because trying to be excessively nice has always come with a much, much lower risk of hurting people. It’s more important to me that I should do no harm than it is to avoid getting stepped on. I don’t always succeed at being sufficiently nice, but I try so hard.

Looking back on my childhood, I think that has a lot to do with my trauma and with the big mistakes that I’ve made in my life.

When I was a child...I wasn’t very good at being soft. I was not a sweet child. I was isolated and lived in a strict “intellectual” household under the thumb of my father’s constant rage, which made me selfish, cold, deceitful, and arrogant in ways children usually aren’t. Sure, I generally absorbed all the moral ideas of my supposedly progressive-minded parents about basic decency, but that wasn’t nearly enough. They taught me nothing about how to actually interact with people, and as an undiagnosed autistic girl, it was extremely difficult to learn on my own. Hell, I didn’t even really know that it was worth trying to learn. I wasn’t a complete gremlin; I was quiet, so the adults generally thought of me as nice and well-mannered, but my peers saw the stone cold bitch.

There were times, albeit rare ones, when I did pick the right moment to be That Bitch. At the age of like 7, I kicked an older boy really hard in the shin and yelled at him for bullying another girl because he wouldn’t stop and the teachers weren’t doing anything about it. When I was 10, I sat on the bus near a bunch of rowdy boys so they’d make the mistake of trying to harass me instead of creeping on a girl who lived two doors down from me. They were not prepared for my willingness to be extremely mean to them. When I was 12, I got a double feature of people touching my ponytail and them not being prepared for Real Bitch Hours. The girls who sat behind me in history got a blunt ass “don’t touch me”, and I did not back down when they got offended. The boys who sat behind me in math got rather graphic descriptions of the damage I would do to their balls if they didn’t leave me alone, and they reacted with a surprising amount of horror (which was rather satisfying to me), especially if I fixed them long enough with what they coined my “murder stare”. Unfortunately, the latter experience later became a spectacle as they asked me to recount my graphic description to their friends and earned me a rep as a misandrist, but it had at least persuaded them not to touch me.

Sadly, these occasions are the only ones I can recall of having spoken up in anger as a child and having been entirely justified in doing so. Most of the time, my assholery wasn’t righteous, it was just callous. I quite frankly deserved much of my bad reputation and subsequent lack of friends. I often wonder at what point I made the decision to start caring. I think perhaps I started to realize how bad I was at the onset of my teens, because that’s when I had to start atoning for some seriously messed up shit and I’d lost the few friends that I’d had. But I don’t think I truly began to grasp the importance of kindness until my late teens, when I learned that I wasn’t just a “sheltered” kid; I was an abuse victim, and that came with all kinds of realizations about my own behaviour. I didn’t want to be an abuser. I didn’t want to inflict what I’d been through on others. So I started to try to do better.

The thing is, I was not at all equipped for that. I had a rough couple of years trying to reconcile my desire to be a different person with accepting the way my brain is wired. I’d just learned that I’m asexual and autistic and all these other terms I could finally use to describe who I am. I had trouble figuring out what parts I should be proud of, what parts I shouldn’t, and how to appropriately express all of that.

I still don’t know when exactly my empathy switch flipped, but at some point, as I was transitioning from high school to college, all that empathy I’d repressed since forever came flooding out in excess, and I’ve struggled with regulating it from then on. I went from wondering if there was something wrong with me because the best I could manage was general compassion to just not being able to stop the empathy train.

Anyway, it seems like all that led me to being afraid of myself and to trying to accomplish things by being as soft as I can, as a way to atone for my mistakes, as a way to avoid becoming my father, and as a recognition of the importance of being kind. That’s helped me in a lot of ways, and I hope that it’s made life better for the people I interact with, but the thing is, it’s not always what’s needed. Being deferent and accommodating has its drawbacks. I have trouble getting people to take me seriously, and I often find myself stuck in awful situations because I couldn’t bring myself to assert my boundaries or rock the boat in any way.

I need to find a balance between the stone cold bitch and the Giving Tree. Once again, I find myself lacking the necessary tools to achieve that. I think I’d need to be in therapy and living away from my family to get there. The best I can do right now is aim for “looks like she’ll kill you, but is actually a cinnamon roll”. That won’t make me more confident or assertive when I need to be, but at least people might take me a little more seriously.

Anyway, thanks for slogging through my little personal essay. I just needed to organize some thoughts I’ve been having for a while.

#personal

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lady-gwenna · 4 years

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There is a letter to my mother written in an old notebook of mine. It’s pages are falling out, the cover peeling apart, purple duct tape along it’s spine. The paper isn’t quite yellowed, not yet. It has been well preserved despite of it’s condition. Because of it’s condition. It’s home is now a drawer of other notebooks and books on writing and drawing and general creativity. In some ways, it feels like I locked those parts of me away when I stopped carrying that old notebook like other people carry the bible.

6-7-8 years of on again off again writing hidden behind scratched out words and neat but tiny cursive written in pens that do not accommodate it well enough to be legible to anyone but me. And my father. So much about us is identical, down to the way we form our letters on paper. Made forging signatures easy, made believing my thoughts were safe impossible.

There is a letter to my mother written in an old notebook of mine, back from when words were easy. The handwriting is mine, the turn of phrase is mine. There are spelling mistakes on all the words that I never bother to write out completely, trusting that I’ll be able to figure it out again if I need to. It is undeniably a letter to MY mother, but it wasn’t my idea.

I wrote it at the request of the in-school therapist I used my mother’s guilt to help set up before she left. She was kind to me, even if it felt like she wasn’t sure why I wanted to talk. Why I went through the effort to say seemingly nothing at all. How I could lay the trauma of my childhood on a silver platter to the too cheery liaison between the school and her, recount the story yet again with a smile a shrug, and then not say another word about it for the next year and a half.

I didn’t mention it because there were other things that I wanted to talk about. Like the fact that I was a white girl raised in Hispanic and black communities, suddenly surrounded by white people and privileged ambition and stereotypical nuclear families that I honestly thought were a lie to make telling stories easier. I wanted to talk about how I couldn’t sit still unless my mind was elsewhere, and even then my hands or feet had to move. How it felt like a river of fire in my veins instead of blood and I needed to get it out before it burned away everything, and how I literally did not feel it when I dragged a tiny blade across my skin to watch it separate. How when the numbness in my head wore off for the night, it scared the shit out of me, the way my passion has always scared others. I wanted to talk about how freedom was a pretty girl’s smile and acceptance when she realized that I had no idea how to survive in the real world despite the way nothing seemed to faze me. I wanted to talk about how my awkward attempts at femininity made me feel out of place, despite being painfully aware that yes, I am female. I wanted to talk about how anything less than perfect felt like failure, even if I was at the top of the class, how it never felt like enough, advanced classes, school clubs, art lessons, library poetry meetings, when was the last time you slept?

So it wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk, and she wasn’t wrong in her assumption that I was lost. But I’ve always been clever and quiet and secretive, and I didn’t know how to explain that I can tell the story of how I saw my sister’s father strangle our mother, and throw a landline phone at my baby sister in a casual voice because I was 3 or 4 years old at the time and the nightmares that I’ve lived with ever since have warped my memory of that night so much that I can’t tell fact from fiction, so I know that it happened, but I don’t really remember it, I didn’t know how to explain that I didn’t care about my history, as messy as it is, I cared about how my future felt like it was slipping out from under me because I could not make sense of the present, I didn’t know how to explain, so I didn’t. Instead I told the story that I knew would get me enough sympathy to get access to someone who was getting paid to help me figure it out.

So I wrote a letter to my mother that I mostly meant because a kind women told me to, even though it didn’t make a difference to any of the things I actually wanted to talk about. I never did trust easy, and it really does tend to bite me in the ass.

#way too honest #talking about feelings #my writing #not edited #need to edit

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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‘It Was a Losing Fight to Write Anything That Wasn’t “Ethnic”’

White food writers are often allowed to be generalists, while BIPOC creators are limited to their personal histories, their cultures, and the foods their grandmothers made

In this age of the cook-turned-influencer, Bon Appétit’s video content found astonishing success by capitalizing on the colorful world of the quirky characters featured in its test kitchen. In many cases, the employees’ personalities were turned into their personal brands. This strategy, actively pursued by now-former editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport, piggybacked off an evolving relationship between audiences and celebrity chefs like Alison Roman, whose “authentic” lazy-girl cooking hacks jolted her into almost instant fame. Branding oneself as the creator of a viral dish (“the stew,” “the pasta”) or crafting an identity around a quirk or personality trait, all but eliminates the need for bona fide experts, allowing the internet-friendly celebrity chef to take their place.

But as the casual viewer noticed — and as stories about Bon Appétit’s corporate culture have revealed in recent weeks — it is almost always only white food writers, chefs, and recipe developers who get to adopt personas that go beyond their ethnicity. For every Brad Leone, who gets to be goofy and charming, for every Claire Saffitz, who becomes a sensation for being hyper-competitive and neurotically orderly, you have a Priya Krishna or a Rick Martinez, whose ethnicity, and the “expertise” in a certain cuisine that comes with it, is often framed as their most useful contribution to the team.

Martinez, former senior food editor and current BA contributor, was branded the “resident taco maestro” in the pages of the magazine, yet, as he recounted to Business Insider, then-deputy editor Andrew Knowlton asked if he was “a one-trick pony” for focusing on Mexican cuisine. Argentinian test kitchen manager Gaby Melian’s only solo video on YouTube is of her making her family’s empanada recipe. Fan favorite Sohla El-Waylly, who managed to veer out into more generalist territory with beloved recipes for dumplings, cinnamon buns, and even a carbonara dessert, started her career at BA talking about her riff on a family biryani recipe on the Bon Appétit Foodcast podcast and made an “updated” version of a Bengali snack, piyaju, for her first solo video. Even after expanding out of her “niche” and producing some of the channel’s most creative recipes, El-Waylly’s expertise was considered external to her identity, and — as she revealed in an Instagram story on June 8 — she was compensated as such. Other BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) at BA, including contributing editor Priya Krishna and research director Joseph Hernandez, also spoke out against BA’s pay disparities and its pervasive racist culture that, as Business Insider wrote, “does not provide nonwhite employees the same opportunities on the brand’s video side that white employees enjoy.”

The feeling of being slotted into a niche is all too familiar for Martinez. “There’s this idea in food media that it’s somehow easier to cook the food of your culture because you grew up with it or that it’s a part of you,” Martinez tells me. “It completely discounts the skills that it takes to build a recipe for an American audience. To recreate or even create an homage to the original dish requires a lot of creativity, skill, and work.”

The recent changes at BA — Rapoport’s resignation, white BA staffers’ refusal to put out content until their BIPOC colleagues are paid fairly — are a start. Yet the simultaneous compartmentalizing and marginalization of BIPOC in food media goes far beyond one organization or one editor-in-chief. Allowing BIPOC to have more agency within the food media system will require reimagining the relationship white America has both to “other cuisines” and to the people who grew up on them.

There’s this perception in food media, which publications like Bon Appétit subscribe to and perpetuate, that all that nonwhite writers really want is to have their cultures represented “authentically.” But the premise of authenticity is rooted in a white gaze that selectively acquires aspects of nonwhite cultures to package as just exotic enough to remain accessible. In late June, the New York Times published a story about “Thai fruit” that frames common fruit in Thailand as foreign and difficult to understand. The week before, tofu was labeled “white, chewy, and bland” in a since-deleted tweet by Bloomberg Asia. And who can forget the infamous Bon Appétit pho fiasco, which called the Vietnamese dish “the new ramen” and enlisted a white chef to give a “PSA: This Is How You Should Be Eating Pho”? Stories like these serve as reminders that foods outside of whiteness are at odds with an imagined “American” readership, for whom these foods remain distant and other.

“Our white colleagues think that we are speaking out about representation or appropriation because we want to be seen as experts on the subject,” says travel and food writer Dan Q. Dao. “[But] what we are [really] fighting is a long battle for inclusivity and equity in our workplaces.”

“I’m often asked to add a cultural slant even when one does not exist.”

Those workplaces, it should be noted, are overwhelmingly white. In June, Leah Bhabha noted in a Grubstreet piece, citing a 2019 Diversity Baseline study, that 76 percent of all publishing industry professionals are white. “In my own experience, as a biracial Indian writer, I’ve never had more than one coworker of color on my team,” she wrote, “and frequently it’s just been me.” The social media age — and the branding pressures inherent within — exacerbates that experience. Social media allows for real-time feedback that makes creators accountable to an audience that often acts as ad hoc sensitivity readers for people writing about their own cultural backgrounds. Writer and chef Samin Nosrat recently tweeted her frustrations with that pressure: “Instead of criticizing the systems that refuse to allow for greater diversity and inclusion, desis, Iranians, whoever, just pile on individual cooks for our perceived failure to represent their ideal versions of their entire cuisines. (Or even more frustratingly, for failing to cook something *exactly* like maman did it back home. I am not your maman!)”

But as media writer Allegra Hobbs pointed out in October 2019, “in the age of Twitter and Instagram, an online presence, which is necessarily public and necessarily consumable, seems all but mandatory for a writer who reaches (or hopes to reach) a certain level of renown.” In curating this online presence, writers and other creators are often pushed to flatten themselves into an easily legible extension of their identity.

Like many, food writer and chef Lesley Téllez has struggled with the expectations that come with being Mexican in food media. “There’s more pressure on BIPOC to find a niche that makes us stand out,” she says. “Over and over, the faces who look like us are people who specialize in food from their particular countries or backgrounds. It sends an overt message that stepping out as a generalist is hard, and that you will not be hired as such. I have definitely felt pressure to keep non-Mexican-cooking stuff off of my social media, and my old blog.”

For all the claims organizations in food media have made of diversifying their rosters and cleaning up the more egregious offenses in their treatment of nonwhite writers, there is still an association between nonwhite writers and their ethnicity, which is treated as tantamount to other aspects of their identities. BIPOC in food media are routinely not considered for assignments about things that don’t directly relate to their ethnicity or race. “I became a food writer 20 years ago when it was not really a profession,” says Ramin Ganeshram. “Yet, despite my qualifications as a reporter, editor, and chef, it was a losing fight to write anything that wasn’t ‘ethnic.’... I was discouraged and prevented from writing about generalized food technique or profiles, despite French culinary training.”

These assignments are often handed off to white writers, who are seen as “generalists” with the ability to stick their hands into any cuisine and turn it into something palatable (or, more importantly, into pageviews). Ganeshram says, “I was directly told regarding a job I didn’t receive at a New England-based national cooking magazine that they thought of me as more of an ‘ethnic’ writer.”

Instead, BIPOC get stuck with work directly related to their ethnicities. “I’m often asked to add a cultural slant even when one does not exist,” says food writer Su-Jit Lin, “or frame things from a point of greater expertise than I actually have. It’s assumed I’m fully indoctrinated into the culture and more Chinese than American (not true — my lane is actually Southern, Italian, and kind of Irish food).” Even when chefs push back against this compartmentalization, they are turned into caricatured ambassadors for their backgrounds. Chef (and Eater contributor) Jenny Dorsey wrote on Twitter that even though she demonstrated a dish on video that had nothing to do with her heritage, the result was ultimately titled “Jenny Dorsey talks about how her Chinese-American heritage influences her cooking.”

Often, the addition of a “cultural slant” to stories leads to one of the more egregious ways that nonwhite food is pigeonholed and othered — through what writer Isabel Quintero calls a lust for “Abuelita longing.” The term speaks to the way immigrant and diasporic writers (both within and outside food media) are frequently expected to add a dash of trauma or ancestral belonging to anything they write. As a Trinidadian-Iranian chef, Ganeshram finds this association particularly limiting. “When I’ve tried to write stories about my Iranian heritage, not being a recent Iranian immigrant or the child of a post-revolution immigrant has been an issue,” she says. “The editors I dealt with only wanted a refugee/escaping the Islamic Republic story. They decided what constituted an ‘authentic’ Iranian story, and that story was based in strife and hardship only.” These markers of authenticity can only come from the wholesome domesticity presumed of the ethnic other.

The extreme whiteness of the food industry, and of food media, places undue pressure on nonwhite writers and chefs. As food writer and founder of Whetstone Magazine, Stephen Satterfield wrote for Chefsfeed in 2017: “In mostly-white communities, you become an ambassador for your race. The stakes are high, and you try hard not to screw it up for the ones behind you…. Black chefs know this well: we must validate our presence, where others exist unquestioned. And what does it mean to be a black food writer? It means that you’ll never just be a food writer, you’ll be a black food writer.”

In other words, being designated as “ethnic” chefs put far too many BIPOC working in food media in a bind. Either they work against being pigeonholed by pitching stories that mark them as generalists, but lose out on assignments as a consequence, or they double down and tell stories of their culture and cuisine, but risk being limited both career- and compensation-wise.

Martinez was aware of this predicament while signing on to write a regional Mexican cookbook. “Writing a love letter to Mexico is so important in these times, but I had to seriously consider whether it would be a career-limiting move,” he says. He chose to write the book, but others, like Caroline Shin, food journalist and founder of the Cooking with Granny video and workshop series, have had to push against the expectation that anything they publish will be about their ethnic cuisine. “Last year, literary agents told me that I couldn’t sell diversity,” she says. “[I]f I wanted a cookbook, I should focus on my Korean culture.” While Shin chose to start her own program as what she calls an “‘I’ll show you’ to white-dominated institutions,” it raises the question of whether BIPOC in food media can taste mainstream success without operating as spokespeople for their ethnic cuisines.

But if you continue to pigeonhole and tokenize your BIPOC employees, seeing them primarily as products of trauma or perpetuating their marginalization by refusing them fair pay and workplace equity, then your calls to diversify the workplace mean very little, if anything at all.

Mallika Khanna is a graduate student in media who writes about film and digital culture, diaspora and immigrant experiences and the environment through a feminist, anti-capitalist lens. Nicole Medina is a Philly based illustrator who loves capturing adventure through her art using bold colors and patterns.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/39Jaxcc https://ift.tt/3ffOn2G

White food writers are often allowed to be generalists, while BIPOC creators are limited to their personal histories, their cultures, and the foods their grandmothers made

“I’m often asked to add a cultural slant even when one does not exist.”

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/39Jaxcc via Blogger https://ift.tt/3jV5hXH

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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alexisdsunkenplace · 4 years

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Slavery and Generational Trauma

In class yesterday, we discussed how slavery is not as distant as it seems. People who are alive today can recount stories about their relatives who knew enslaved people. And yet, the media shys away from exploring the true horror of slavery. Our lecture on Beloved made a lasting impact on me, because I realized that I belong to the group of people who are uncomfortable with movies that deal with slavery. I actively dismissed stories like Roots and 12 Years A Slave, recognizing their importance to a degree while previously agreeing to the misconception that there are too many slavery movies. Whether it deals with the actual period of slavery or the aftermath, I steer clear from those type of films. I think that’s why I avoided watching Beloved until later in life. To me, the scariest things aren’t zombies, monsters, and aliens. I can handle the supernatural. It’s the reality that our nation is built on the oppression of my community that sparks my fear. Slavery is not something that we can ever truly move past from in this lifetime, which is why Beloved is horrific. The intergenerational trauma and familial secrets that stem from a history of oppression remain the most chilling.

When we as viewers first learn that Sethe kills her “Beloved,” her older daughter, I am terrified. Stories of mother’s harming their daughter always shakes me to my core. Unlike zombies and monsters, who have no obligation to humans, the general consensus is that mothers should protect their children from harm. Sadly, characters like Sethe, people who put their children in danger, exist in real life. Nonetheless, Sethe’s actions occur out of the fact that she wants to protect Beloved and her other children from slavery. It’s an unimaginable dilemma that truly assists Toni Morrison in her goal of expressing the magnitude and depth of slavery and its devastating reality.

What becomes even more horrifying is the fact that Beloved’s reincarnated self still does not save her. Rather than return to Earth healed, Beloved returns enraged and rightfully so. She acts violently towards others, raping Paul D. (a violent act that Beloved’s mother, Sethe, suffered from). She destroys the house out of anger and continues to rebel. Clearly Sethe didn’t spare her daughter from hardship and pain. Granted, Beloved didn’t have to experience slavery. However, she is haunted by familial pain and anger. That’s one of the frightening consequences of slavery, the idea that regardless of whether or not you were enslaved you can’t escape it.

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hist2000indigenousresistance · 4 years

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Our History is the Future

Prior to reading this book, I hadn’t really approached Standing Rock from a historical perspective, and certainly not one that centered the sovereignty of the Oceti Sakowin before. It centered indigenous sovereignty from an indigenous perspective (being written, of course, by a native, sioux, person).

But I think that Nick Estes did a very good job recontextualizing historic events that I had heard about from settler perspectives and relating them to the continued fight for indigenous sovereignty that brought us to the events of the #NoDAPL movement.

Old Wars

It recontextualized things like the “American Indian Wars.” According to Wikipedia’s “list of wars involving the United States” there were 4 wars between the various Oceti Sakowin tribes and the United States; The Dakota War of 1862, the Colorado War (1863-65), the Powder River War (1965) and Red Cloud’s War (1866-68) which led to the creation of the Treaty of Fort Laramine, which much of the book is based around. There were also 2 other wars after the treaty was signed: the Great Sioux War of 1876 (which seized the black hills that were given in the treaty), the Pine Ridge Campaign (which led to the massacre at Wounded Knee). In reading Estes's account of these events, I realized that the way that these wars are taught in my childhood history classes, was as if there weren’t real wars. They were not portrayed as sovereign nations resisting encroachment onto their territories by the United States. I mean, they were barely taught at all, because history class preferred to focus on the Civil War that was happening at the same time.

When I was in Chicago at the cultural center, there was a sign that said: “The Civil War was also a settler colonial war.” This made sense to me in some way, because it was a war over land that belonged to neither group that was trying to claim it. The Indian Wars and the Civil War were both, as the sign said: “each part of the westward advance of the United States empire and the colonization of the west. The Civil War...was also a conflict over the way the United States empire would develop.” That sign, plus the realization that the dates of the American Indian Wars overlap almost completely with the Civil War made me realize just how wrong the United State’s history is taught.

The history of the Oceti Sakowin - their origins to now - isn’t included in the curriculum. The United States gets to act like their expansion was inevitable, and ignore the historic wars that were waged against sovereign nations in a conquest for more land and resources. And ignore the modern war with the continued occupation of lands, breaking of treaties, and denial of modern sovereignty. By simply thinking of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate/Great Sioux Nation as a nation it directly challenges the notion that it was inevitable. It recontextualizes the history and the supposed ‘greatness’ of the United States by proving that it is a nation built upon the destruction of other nations.

Ghost Dancers

Another thing that stuck with me from the book was the Ghost Dance. Settler history doesn’t portray it in the same way as Estes does. Its generally refered to as some kind of ‘crazy indian thing’ on par with the Dancing Plague of 1518 because of its mischaracterization by anthropologists. What isn’t mentioned is how much it makes sense in the true context of its time period. Estes calls it “an accumulation of prior anti-colonial experiences, sentiments, and struggles” and recontextualizes it as a true anti-colonial resistance movement, one that went against the US ‘concentration camp’ reservations, boarding schools, and the movement towards assimilation. A movement that posed a threat to US imposition of their sovereignty over the Oceti Sakowin, and was met with military force and violence.

The title of the book, our history is the future was confusing to me at first, but the explanation of the ghost dance actually helped me to understand it. Estes description of the ghost dance as being “transported to a forthcoming world where the old ways and dead relatives lived” in contrast to the “horrors of their current reality” and that it offered “a reminder that life need not always be this way” to its participants, I was able to better understand (Estes 124). The idea of looking to our past in order to envision a future that is better than our current present makes sense. I think it’s a bit like envisioning the future that you want as the first step to making it a reality, like in Decolonization is not a metaphor, decolonization must first stop being a metaphor in order for “the very possibility of decolonization” to be real (Tuck & Yang 4).

And similarly, I think, Standing Rock offered a similar window into the past and the future. Estes recounts Ladonna BraveBull Allard’s story from the Sacred Stone camp, seeing everyone working, roasting deer meat, kids playing, and people telling stories. “They were all speaking Dakota. I looked at them and I thought, ‘this is how we are supposed to live. This makes sense to me.’ Every day...I saw our culture and our way of life come alive.” (BraveBull Allard, via Estes pg 51-52)

Continued Resistance

There are so many “Standing Rocks” that have happened over and over again throughout Octei Sakowin history as their land has been taken, and dams have flooded their towns, their land, as police killed their people, and there has been resistance to all of these. Yet from my perspective, settlers see Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline as different from all these other events that the tribes didn’t want.

But what really makes it different? Is it because there were other people involved? Because there were non-Sioux and non-native people who stood with them? What makes one act of resistance more important than another? Because all these acts of resistance are important to be recognized. “This Battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue.” (From inside cover, Our History is the Future)

When I was considering those questions, a quote came to mind from Pualani Case, a Native Hawaiian who is a leader of the Protect Mauna Kea movement to stop TMT.

“When the Native people of a place say, ‘not this time’ ‘no more’ ‘you have taken almost everything we have, and if we allow you to build on the most sacred’ without attempting to stop that, we may as just lay down, as a native people and say ‘take everything’ if you take the most sacred what will we have left.”

-Pualani Case, Source

When I first heard this quote, it made me uncomfortable, because I thought, ‘just because someone takes one thing doesn’t mean they should take all of it, but when I rewatched the video for the third-ish time, and after I read Estes’ book, I think I understand it better. That quote isn’t about the settlers taking the land, it's about the importance for the native people to defend the land, to try to stop settler imposition and construction on the land. Some of what makes them still have a right to the land are because they have never stopped fighting for it in one way or another.

Chicago Cultural Center is built on land that “consists of both territory ceded through treaties that the U.S. government coerced Indigenous people to sign and unceded territory created by landfill after those coerced treaties were signed.” (Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center, pg 20 ) Many other places in the united states are built like that, Boston is like that. But coerced treaties and made land doesn’t separate Native people from the land, it’s still theirs and they are still of the land.

And therefore, every act of resistance, every existence as resistance, is important, even if some are more important because they deal with the most sacred, and the most important things, like the water, and the right to live.

Modern Sovereignty

“Internationalism” was another concept from Our History is the Future that I thought was super interesting and recontextualizing. Because if you consider all the tribes to be their own nations that retain their sovereignty, then gatherings like the sacred stone camps at standing rock, organizations like the American Indian Movement, are international movements. And interactions between the United States and native nations are nation-to-nation, they are international relations, or at least, maybe they should be considered international relations.

A lot of my thoughts on this book are still scattered, even after the weeks that I’ve spent processing and connecting it to my interactions in my daily life. But there’s one paragraph that I really like that I think does a good job, a better job, of relating all these things I talked about down.

“The Ghost Dance was not a monolithic movement, but an accumulation of prior anti-colonial experiences, sentiments, and struggles that informed #NoDAPL. Each struggle had adopted essential features of previous traditions of Indigenous resistance, while creating new tactics and visions to address the present reality, and, consequentially, projected Indigenous liberation into the future. Trauma played a major role. But if we oversimplify Indigenous peoples as perpetually wounded, we cannot understand how they formed kinship bonds and constantly recreated and kept intact families, communities, and governance structures while surviving as fugitives and prisoners of a settler state and as conspirators against empire; how they loved, cried, laughed, imagined, dreamed, and defended themselves; or how they remain, to this day, the first sovereigns of this land and the oldest political authority.”

-Nick Estes pg. 131

#bookreflection #our history is the future #readingreflection

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instantdeerlover · 4 years

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‘It Was a Losing Fight to Write Anything That Wasn’t “Ethnic”’ added to Google Docs

‘It Was a Losing Fight to Write Anything That Wasn’t “Ethnic”’

White food writers are often allowed to be generalists, while BIPOC creators are limited to their personal histories, their cultures, and the foods their grandmothers made

“I’m often asked to add a cultural slant even when one does not exist.”

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/21347367/food-media-flattens-ethnicity-into-identity-bipoc-creators-bon-appetit-rick-martinez-alison-roman

Created July 31, 2020 at 01:26AM /huong sen View Google Doc Nhà hàng Hương Sen chuyên buffet hải sản cao cấp✅ Tổ chức tiệc cưới✅ Hội nghị, hội thảo✅ Tiệc lưu động✅ Sự kiện mang tầm cỡ quốc gia 52 Phố Miếu Đầm, Mễ Trì, Nam Từ Liêm, Hà Nội http://huongsen.vn/ 0904988999 http://huongsen.vn/to-chuc-tiec-hoi-nghi/ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xa6sRugRZk4MDSyctcqusGYBv1lXYkrF

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newyorktheater · 4 years

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Angela Lansbury, who is appearing tonight as Lady Bracknell in a one-night benefit staging of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest at Roundabout’s American Airlines theater, was interviewed at Lincoln Center library over the weekend by Irish Rep’s Charlotte Moore as part of the 37th season of The League of Professional Theatre Women’s Oral History Project. Lansbury, 94, recounted her first role in the movies, as the saucy maid in Gaslight at the age of 17. From then on, “I was a utility actress, as far as MGM was concerned. They could put me into almost any role, and I would act it.” Two decades after that first Oscar-nominated screen role, she won her first of five Tony Awards. Three quarters of a century after she began, she’s still preparing for roles. “It’s terribly important to get out of yourself and into that character. Leave yourself at home.”

So many people (and journalists!) complained that the public impeachment hearings made for dull theater that others angrily denounced the “theater critic school of journalism” and Saturday Night Life responded with a soap opera called “Days of Our Impeachment.”

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Her dignity in responding to Trump speaks volumes. I wonder if this is riveting enough for the “theater critic” school of journalism. Schiff uses the opportunity t make clear Trump is engaged in witness intimidation. This is a moment. A real moment.

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) November 15, 2019

Covering the news like a fucking theater critic. This is why Donald Trump is president. This is why our missiles are shinier than our schools. This is why the Climate Crisis will destroy us all. https://t.co/ukmWBv99EA

— Bradley Whitford (@BradleyWhitford) November 14, 2019

But then others, such as Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks, rightly denounced the denouncers for besmirching theater critics.

The dismissive use of theater criticism is misapplied, anyway. By people who should know better. If you are not observing a performance in the room, you aren’t a theater critic. You are a TV critic.

— Peter Marks (@petermarksdrama) November 14, 2019

A lot of denouncing in America these days — and more to come:

Schedule of impeachment hearings in the coming week

Week in NY Theater Previews & Reviews

Rick Borutta, personal assistant to Elaine Stritch

Preview: “Nobody’s Bitch”: Elaine Stritch as Boss

Elaine Stritch kicked Rick Borutta in the stomach every day. That, anyway, is how he says it felt at the beginning. “Other than that, she was rather likable,” says Borutta, who worked as her personal assistant for four years, an experience that he has turned into a solo show, entitled “Nobody’s Bitch,” which he is bringing to New York for the first time for one night only at The Duplex on November 26th.

Michael Benjamin Washington

Fires in the Mirror

It would be hard to overstate the city-wide trauma that occurred in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in August, 1991, nor the power of “Fires in the Mirror,” the groundbreaking documentary play about it nine months later at the Public, which introduced New York theatergoers to the astonishing theater artist Anna Deavere Smith. That power comes roaring back in a revival at Signature that, for the first time, features an actor other than Smith…“Fires in the Mirror” offers, without judgment and with implicit compassion, a breadth of personalities — rabbis and reverends, activists and everyday residents — with views that conflict, contradict, supplement or concur. But how they present themselves and what they say also often resonate way beyond what happened in Crown Heights.

Tina The Tina Turner Musical

The thrilling final minutes of “Tina” are all that a rock concert should be, and the main reason to see this jukebox biomusical about one of the world’s most electric performers, portrayed by Adrienne Warren in a star-making role. It may not be reason enough, though, especially for those of us who recall the 1993 movie, “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” which covers the same remarkable life of the outsized talent born Annie Mae Bullock to a sharecropping family in Nutbush, Tennessee.

Slava’s Snowshow

In the 26 years since the Russian clown Slava Polunin began touring, “Slava’s Snowshow” has been performed “thousands of times to millions of people in hundreds of cities,” according to the playbill. It doesn’t mention how much confetti, water and fusillades of giant beach balls have been dumped on, squirted, and shot at audiences. I’d say tons just in the performance I saw at Broadway’s Stephen Sondheim Theater, where the silly, wordless, plotless, pointless and popular 90- minute show (plus intermission) is running through January 5. Much of the show is a series of moments too sketchy to be called scenes and too scenic to be called sketches

User Not Found

Keep those cell phones on; that’s where “User Not Found” largely unfolds. Yes, this terrific site-specific play takes place in a café near BAM in Fort Greene, where Terry O’Donovan portrays a fellow café dweller also named Terry grieving the death of his ex-lover Luka. But this inventive, pointed work of theater asks us to consider how the current public immersion in the digital world affects both life and death. And so, to that end, the theatergoers are each given a headphone and a smart phone in order to follow Terry’s story, though he’s standing (and moving around, and eating) right in front of us, and speaking directly to us. But he’s also answering his text messages, and looking at his dead lover’s social media accounts – and we’re looking right along with him. “User Not Found” is an unusual show that requires some initial adjustment, dips into what feels like sci-fi, but ultimately, and surprisingly, becomes quite touching…in more ways than one.

BrandoCapote

“BrandoCapote” is a play with a script by Sara Farrington inspired by a fascinating interview Truman Capote conducted with Marlon Brando at the peak of his popularity in 1957, while the movie star was filming “Sayonara” in Japan. It is also a dance theater piece choreographed by Laura K. Nicoll that mixes modern American with traditional Japanese movement, enhanced by vivid Japanese costumes. And it is the latest showcase for director Reid Farrington’s inventive technical experiments in integrating filmed images into live theatrical performance: Very brief clips from more than a dozen of Brando’s film performances (from Oscar-winners “On The Waterfront” and “The Godfather” to such oddities as “The Island of Doctor Moreau”) are projected crisply onto Japanese umbrellas of varying sizes that the cast members suddenly unfold.

Each of these elements of “BrandoCapote” intrigued me and impressed me. But all three put together lost me.

The Week in New York Theater News

Santino Fontana in Tootsie

Tootsie will close on Sunday, January 5, 2020, having played 293 regular and 25 preview performances at the Marquis Theatre.

Forbidden Broadway The Next Generation will close December 1st.

The Drama Bookshop has found a new home a block south of the old store and will reopen in March, 2020.

wow. the new @dramabookshop animated by architect @DavidKorins https://t.co/ukykIRLoFs

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) November 12, 2019

Accessibility Corner

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/theater/tiny-tim-a-christmas-carol-disabled-actors.html

Tiny Tim is being portrayed by a disabled actor (actually two.)

In Mockingbird, Russell Harvard, a deaf actor, finally gets his wish not to be defined solely by his deafness: Harvard assumes two supporting parts (both of them hearing characters): Boo Radley, the mysterious, rarely seen neighbor of the intimidated youngsters, Scout and Jem Finch, and more prominently Link Deas, the inscrutable local dismissed as a drunk.

A celebration of the life and legacy of Broadway legend Harold Prince will take place on Monday, December 16, at The Majestic Theatre (247 West 44th Street). Beginning at 1:30 PM, the tribute is open to friends, family and the theater community, and will feature tributes and performances from colleagues and loved ones. Doors will open at 1PM. The Majestic is the 31-year home of Mr. Prince’s record-breaking production of The Phantom of the Opera, the longest-running show in Broadway history.

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MasterVoices will begin its 2019-20 season on Thursday, November 21 at Carnegie Hall with the concert staging of George and Ira Gershwins’ 1933 musical Let ‘Em Eat Cake, with a book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, a comic satire about a populist U.S. President who is voted out of office and stages a coup to regain power.

Theater has a problem with people of color by Jose Solis: I’ve been working professionally as a theater critic since 2013; I’m a board member of the Drama Desk (where I also serve as part of the nominating committee), and I’ve written for every reputable publication in town. For as long as I’ve been attending theater in the city, my name and brown skin have made me the target of bullies and racists. I’ve been asked if I’m with the catering staff at theater critics events, been chastised by angry ushers to turn my cell phone off, even if I have never taken my device out of my pocket during a performance, and often been asked if I’m sure I belong in the orchestra, as ushers point me to the mezzanine. My skin has become so thickened by the mistreatment and rudeness of theater employees that I might as well be a walking callus. I experience this, in part, because I’m a rarity on Broadway. In the 2017-2018 season, 75% of Broadway audiences were Caucasian, according to statistics compiled by the Broadway League. Theater clearly has a people of color problem: It’s not only that many people of color have no interest in revivals of revered but irrelevant plays featuring beige ensembles, it’s also that when we do come to the theater, we are told that we’re invading white spaces. When I see a show with a white friend, people often ask the friend if they brought me to the show and ask me if it’s my first time at the theater.

“Time 100 Next” list honors Broadway veterans @ALISTROKER, @BeanieFeldstein and @jeremyoharris https://t.co/lUgGDwG2Gb pic.twitter.com/XFRyJ88hUQ

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) November 13, 2019

Have a play in mind you think we should have in our circulating collection? There’s a form for that! https://t.co/UooR75cEFu

— NYPL Theatre (@NYPL_Theatre) November 14, 2019

How Theater Directors Use Fragrances to Create “Poetry for the Nose”

From at least the late 19th century, when David Belasco had actors cook and brew coffee on stage to heighten the realism of domestic scenes, to recent efforts to evoke a piney forest or the tang of gunpowder, directors have tried to involve an audience’s olfactory sense to intensify their experience. …“The difficulties of controlling an odor once released into a large room like a theater are very complicated,” said Stuart Firestein, a neuroscientist at Columbia University and former theatrical actor and director.

(I don’t think you need a neuroscientist with a back to point this out.)

Celebrating 25 Years of Disney on Broadway raised $570,426 for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

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#Stageworthy News of the Week: Angela Lansbury 77 years later. Impeachment as Theater? Stritch The Bitch? Drama Bookshop Finds a Home! So many people (and journalists!) complained that the public impeachment hearings made for dull theater that others angrily denounced the "theater critic school of journalism" and Saturday Night Life responded with a soap opera called "Days of Our Impeachment."

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