View allAll Photos Tagged enmesh
Approaching Barcelona on LH 1812 from München - From high up in the sky Catalonya looks beautiful,peaceful and quiet… Wondering what Thursday’s elections will bring. The path to the election has been enmeshed in bitter recriminations, outbreaks of violence, the fleeing of the Catalan President to Belgium and the jailing of other separatist leaders. The result of tomorrow’s election is expected to be very close but the people I’m talking to are confident that Spain will remain united. Let’s hope that common sense will prevail!
Nome: Nebulosa da Águia, NGC 6611, Messier 16
Tipo: Aglomerado aberto estelar com nebulosidade
Distância: aprox. 7.000 anos-luz
Magnitude Aparente: 6,4
Constelação: Serpente (Cauda) [1]
A Nebulosa da Águia é uma notável região ativa de formação estelar localizada na constelação da Serpente (cauda). A nebulosa, uma nuvem gigante de gás interestelar e poeira, já criou um considerável aglomerado de estrelas jovens. O aglomerado é também chamado de NGC 6611 e a nebulosa como IC 4703. O aglomerado foi descoberto em 1745 por Philippe Loys de Chéseaux. Em 1764, Charles Messier catalogou novamente o aglomerado como M16 mas descreveu a presença de uma tênue névoa, provavelmente indicações da nebulosa. [1]
Este enxame estelar tem somente 5,5 milhôes de anos (de acordo com Sky Catalog 2000 e Gotz) com uma formação estelar ainda ativa na nebulosa; isto resulta na presença de muitas estrelas quentes do tipo espectral O6. Estima-se que o aglomerado tenha uma extensão de 15 anos-luz e a nebulosa tenha uma extensão aproximada de 70 x 55 anos-luz. [1]
Os destaques desta nebulosa não param por aí. Ainda temos nesta nebulosa os famosos "Pilares da Criação", estruturas com formato similar à estalagmites localizadas no centro da imagem. Essa região já foi alvo do telescópio espacial Hubble em 1995 criando imagens que encantaram o mundo. As colunas dos pilares são compostas de hidrogênio e poeira, que agem como incubadoras de novas estrelas. Dentro das colunas e na superfície, os astrônomos encontraram nós, ou glóbulos, de gás mais denso, chamados EGG (Evaporating Gaseous Globules - Glóbulos Gasosos em Evaporação). Várias estrelas estão sendo formadas no interior destes glóbulos. [2]
Fonte:
[1] messier.seds.org/m/m016.html
[2] wikipedia
Registrei esta imagem em duas sessões: 15 de agosto de 2015 em Brotas - São Paulo - Brasil e outra em 03 de julho de 2016 na zona rural de Campo Belo - Minas Gerais - Brasil.
Dados técnicos:
ISO 800, exposição total de 5h30m (66 subs), darks (200), flats (~250) e bias (200).
Equipamento:
- Montagem Equatorial Orion Atlas EQ-G
- Telescópio Ritchey-Chretien 8" F8 Fibra de Carbono GSO
- Câmera Canon DSLR 500D modificada com filtro Astrodon
- Redutor focal Astro-Physics 67 CCDT
- Auto guiagem com câmera ASI120MM ZWO em OAG
- Filtro Clip Astronomik CLS (na sessão de Brotas)
Software
- Captura: BackyardEOS
- Processamento: PixInsight 1.8, eXcalibrator e Adobe Photoshop CS5
- Guiagem: PHD2
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Name: Eagle Nebula, NGC 6611, Messier 16
Type: Open cluster with nebulosity
Distance: near 7,000 light-years
Apparent magnitude: 6.4
Constellation: Serpens Cauda [1]
The Eagle Nebula Messier 16 (M16) is a conspicuous region of active star formation, situated in Serpens Cauda. The starforming nebula, a giant cloud of interstellar gas and dust, has already created a considerable cluster of young stars. The cluster is also referred to as NGC 6611, the nebula as IC 4703. The discoverer, Philippe Loys de Chéseaux, describes only the cluster when recording his 1745-1746 discovery. Charles Messier, on his independent rediscovery of June 3, 1764, mentions that these stars appeared "enmeshed in a faint glow", probably suggestions of the nebula.[1]
This stellar swarm is only about 5.5 million years old (according to the Sky Catalog 2000 and Götz) with star formation still active in the Eagle Nebula; this results in the presence of very hot young stars of spectral type O6. The cluster has a linear extension of about 15 light years. The nebula extends much farther out, to a diameter of over 30', corresponding to a linear size of about 70x55 light years. [1]
The highlights of this nebula don't stop here. We found in this nebula the famous "Pillars of Creation", structures similar to stalagmites situated in center of image. This region was target of Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 that made incredible images. The columns of pillars are composed of hidrogen and dust, that act like incubator of new stars. Inside of columns and surface of this structures, the astronomers found nodes, or globules, of dense gas, known as EGG (Evaporating Gaseous Globules). Various stars are being formed inside this globules.[2]
Sources:
[1] messier.seds.org/m/m016.html
[2] wikipedia
I registered this picture in two sessions: August, 15th 2015 in Brotas - São Paulo - Brazil and other session at July, 3rd 2016 in rural zone of Campo Belo - Minas Gerais - Brazil.
Technical data:
ISO 800, 5h30m of exposition (66 subs), darks (200), flats (~250) e bias (200).
Equipment:
- Equatorial Mount Orion Atlas EQ-G
- GSO Ritchey-Chretien Telescope 8" F8
- Canon DSLR 500D modded with Astrodon filter
- Focal reducer Astro-Physics 67 CCDT
- Guided with ASI120MM ZWO using OAG
- Astronomik CLS clip filter (in 1st session)
Software
- Capture: BackyardEOS
- Processing: PixInsight 1.8, eXcalibrator and Adobe Photoshop CS5
- Guiding: PHD2
New art exhibition and LGBT information event by Joss Floss. Launch party at 12 PM SLT on Friday 12th April with music from DJ Flossy. Here's the taxi:
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On 23rd June 2016, just over half the UK voted in the Brexit Referendum to leave the EU after 43 years of membership.
The result was geographically split. Some parts of the UK (Scotland and N. Ireland) voted strongly to remain in the EU.
The result was an extraordinarily divisive moment in the history of the UK.
Immediately after the result, financial markets reacted negatively worldwide, and David Cameron announced that he would resign as Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party.
In the months and years that followed, the Conservative government decided that it would not consult with other parties and drove its own Brexit ideology.
In doing so, it forgot about the other half of Britain that did not want this change to occur.
As a result, when the EU departure deal was put before parliament, it was voted down 3 times in early 2019 just before the intended departure from the EU on 29th March 2019.
The government then, belatedly and at the eleventh hour, began to consult with opposition parties.
Today, 12th April 2019, the UK has passed another line in the sand and failed to leave the EU for the 2nd time. The deadline is now extended by the EU to the 31st October 2019.
The UK is suffering from a problem of identity. Half of the population identify as European while the other half identify as British. Some identify purely as Scottish. Many British people can no longer identify with their former political parties as those parties, falling in line with the majority vote, no longer reflect their views.
Some members of ethnic and LGBT+ minorities in the UK are fearful about what Brexit might mean for them as some of their rights are upheld in European law.
The UK government has done little to address those fears and the increase in hate crime over recent years has done little to allay the doubts of minority groups.
This has led to increasing resistance to Brexit and the People’s Vote March on 23rd March 2019 in which more than a million people took to the streets of London.
What does it mean to be born into a certain identity? And can we change or claim a new identity in the middle of our lives?
It is time that governments, intent on respecting democracy, paid attention to and cared for the concerns of all members of their society.
To use a metaphor, Britain is pulling back from the European “melting pot” and trying reassert its influence on its own citizens. But is this really possible?
Identity is a choice, political affiliation is a choice and, for some, gender identity and sexual preference is also a choice.
Today, for many, those choices are bitterly enmeshed with the concepts of sovereignty and nationhood.
The Empire Trilogy
Heather Bennett
November 14th – December 23rd
Opening Reception
Friday November 14th 2008 7-9pm
Luxe Gallery
53 Stanton St.
New York, NY
Luxegallery.net
For immediate release, New York, NY
Luxe Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of The Empire Trilogy featuring artist Heather Bennett's latest body of work. Bennett who is known for her cinematic large-scale photographs has taken her aesthetic to time based media.
With a nod to Warhol's, 1964 opus, "Empire", this trilogy of videos resists any typical temporal, action-based narrative, and yet simultaneously suggests it. Each piece centers around a lone woman, all of whom almost slyly encompass a panoply of reflecting fictions. The amalgamated 'characters' take substance from childhood fairytales, contemporary fashion, female genre roles and a healthy dose of nostalgia and somehow coalesce into a peaceful, almost quieting image. The enmeshing of an anti-narrative and obvious reference to the bold fiction of children's fairytales complicate the calm hold of these images with humor; slithering alloys placing ironies. While we can see no real action over the duration of these works, at the intersection of cliché, there is a poignancy, a piquancy. Slight movements are not deliberations but more akin to a misty dream, an action of the unconscious; slow, flowing, even meandering and pointless but undeniably pertinent as iconic and soulful. These are portraits of control, of mastery. Almost in subterfuge, there is a complexity, a riot, a life replete with pressure, valuation, desire, memory, association, limitation and possibility, bubbling under the surface of a lullaby. Original soundtracks of tonal washes and subtle, circular, harmonies paint clues to the welled chaos of our valiant mistresses. Impregnated with emotion, these imperial sometimes haunting tracks illuminate and obfuscate their tenants, giving rise to their essential contradiction. We see traps of assumption escaped with grace. The prisons laying in wait within contemporary society, especially in a female body, are refracted through distorted prisms of past and present associations which affect our reality sometimes with serendipity, as well as, inappropriateness.
"Holly Holy" is a collision of Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and a bit of Eve, bathed in red velvet and monastically reading Faulkner. "Locks and Hocks" conflates Goldilocks and a restrained 50's housewife, entombed in a sun-drenched, yellow kitchen listlessly stirring a pot of beans and hammocks. And "Babe" collapses male and female with a school girl, Paul Bunyan combo of metamorphosed blue plaid where our heroine dully wields a two-sides axe, knocking dirt from her boots, while swathed in one of the most sexualized articles of clothing in recent history. The resulting unions blend our knowns, alarm us with their misplaced intimacies and create an inextricably raveled whole which humbly asks us to believe in something we are not quite sure we understand.
Music by Joe Raglani
Image: Heather Bennett, Locks & Hocks, 2008, production still
Symbols usually represent objects and give clues to abstract or supernatural events and the opinions or concepts of historical cultures. They are products of collective thinking and are the shortest way to describe something.
In the opinion of Carl Gustav Jung, symbols are not a sign of the ordinary; they are images of an invisible spirit and have a meaning far beyond themselves. When words are inadequate symbols provide there own language of communication.
Although symbols are perceivable, sometimes there true meaning is not visible.
The best way to express the intangible, invisible, fantastic, imaginative and emotional elements is by using symbols. For thousands of years it was believed, that symbols were sacred and pointed to specific situations and specific energies.
Christ taught by symbols and parables. The mysterious knowledge of the Druids was embodied in signs and symbols. The Mysteries were a series of symbols.
By developing symbolic languages, information was protected and not disclosed, thus preventing the misuse or degeneration of the information. For example, Archaic schools saw secrets and mysteries in symbols and used them, as a language of communication and these symbols remain unchanged today.
The compass describes circles, and deals with spherical trigonometry, the science of the spheres and heavens. The square therefore is a symbol of what concerns the earth and the body; the compass of what concerns the heavens and the soul.
The Cross has been a sacred symbol from earliest antiquity.. It is found upon all the enduring monuments of the world; in Egypt, Assyria, India, Persia and on the Buddhist Towers of Ireland. Pointing to the four quarters of the world it was the symbol of universal Nature.
The Temple of Solomon presented a symbolic image of the Universe; and resembled in its arrangements and furniture, all the temples of the ancient nations that practiced the Mysteries.
In our thinking we make use of a great variety of symbol-systems: linguistic, mathematical, pictorial, musical, ritualistic.
Symbols can bring people together and unite them for a cause. Nevertheless, symbols can divide and hurt. When complex conflicts escalate to the point of organized violence, the “us versus them” dynamic of confrontation can easily develop an autonomous dynamism.
What may well have begun as a simple dispute over resources or governance becomes a clash of identities; symbols of collective identity and belonging become banners of war.
We transform symbols and images projected by others into reservoirs for our own fear, loathing, and insecurity; we transform our own group’s symbols into instruments of self-justification, through which we bless our own sense of righteous indignation and grievance. Thus do we become enmeshed in a clash of symbols.
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I have a new one. It is for Halloween and u can choose between 13 horror pictures of pictures I made last year for my blog and my photoshop.
U can buy it at the Halloween Kikai Market.
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Kikai/191/193/602
or at my mainstore
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Wood%20Island/161/132/4001
poses
left IE Sheer Class 10
right IE Sheer Class 2
The calm before the strom. Wondering what Thursday’s elections will bring. The path to the election has been enmeshed in bitter recriminations, outbreaks of violence, the fleeing of the Catalan President to Belgium and the jailing of other separatist leaders. The result of tomorrow’s election is expected to be very close but the people I’m talking to are confident that Spain will remain united. Let’s hope that common sense will prevail! - Port Vell, Barcelona, Spain.
I have always been a fan of the Lord of the Rings, long before Peter Jackson undertook the books as a film series. At a young age I became engrossed with the story, the thrill of a journey out into the unknown, ready (or not) to face what dangers or wonders lie out there for you.
Later in my adult years, I have become too enmeshed in my career. I love what I do and the people I work with- I absolutely love the company I work for, but all the while I find myself missing out on the adventurous trails and missions I once found myself embarking upon.
I’ve always seen life as a journey, and I have JRR Tolkien to thank for that. And if it is a journey, I guess it’s time I start on my way again…
Theme: Life’s A Journey
Year Seven Of My 365 Project
The enMESHed into Fall Hunt is open from Oct 15- Nov 15. Come on down to ::cute as f*ck:: to snag this cute Happy Halloween sign for FREE! It's 100% original mesh and features ::cute as f*ck:: hand-drawn art. It's a great way to decorate for Halloween.
HINT: Candy corn is oh so sweet. It makes a yummy fall time treat.
Murbach Abbey (French: Abbaye de Murbach) was a famous Benedictine monastery in Murbach, southern Alsace, in a valley at the foot of the Grand Ballon in the Vosges.
The monastery was founded in 727 by Eberhard, Count of Alsace, and established as a Benedictine house by Saint Pirmin. Its territory once comprised three towns and thirty villages. The buildings, including the abbey church, one of the earliest vaulted Romanesque structures, were laid waste in 1789 during the Revolution by the peasantry and the abbey was dissolved shortly afterwards.
Of the Romanesque abbey church, dedicated to Saint Leger, only the transept remains with its two towers, and the east end with the quire. The site of the nave now serves as a burial ground. The building is located on the Route Romane d'Alsace.
History
The founder of the abbey, Count Eberhard, brother of Luitfrid of the Etichonids, brought Bishop Pirmin from Reichenau Abbey on Lake Constance to build up the religious community, which had previously used the Rule of St. Columbanus and become ill-disciplined. Pirmin solved the difficulty by introducing the Rule of St. Benedict.
Count Eberhard gave the abbey a rich endowment and extensive privileges, including the right of free election of the abbot. The monastery was obliged to have its privileges regularly confirmed and was thus closely dependent on the Pope and the Emperor (after 1680 the King of France). Murbach was placed under the patronage of Saint Leger, who had introduced the Benedictine Rule into Burgundy in the 7th century.
The abbey was important politically, and Charlemagne himself took the title "Abbot of Murbach" (Latin: Pastor Murbacencis; in a secular sense) in 792–93.
By about 850 Murbach had become one of the intellectual centres of the Upper Rhine; the library contained about 340 works of theology, grammar and history. In its decline, the library at Murbach still provided a possible source (aside from Fulda Abbey) for Poggio Bracciolini's recovery in 1417 of Lucretius' lost didactic poem De rerum natura.[1] At the same time the worldly possessions of the abbey were increasing, thanks to large numbers of gifts. Murbach owned properties and rights in about 350 localities. Most of them were in Alsace, in the Bishoprics of Basle and Strasbourg. In addition there were properties on the right bank of the Rhine and even in the Black Forest. For example, in 805 the Alemannic nobles Egilmar, Focholt, Wanbrecht and Nothicho gave to the abbey their land and a church in the present Grissheim (Latin: villa Cressheim in pago Brisachgaginse). Further, the abbey acquired the territory of Lucerne in Switzerland and owned besides a whole series of estates in the Palatinate, near Worms and Mainz.
This first period of prosperity ended in 936 with the invasion of Alsace by Hungarians. By the 13th century the abbey had recovered and was able once again to play an important role in Alsace and the region of the Rhine.
Murbach Abbey played an important role in the creation of Switzerland. On April 16, 1291 Rudolf I bought all the rights over the town of Lucerne and the abbey estates in Unterwalden from Murbach Abbey. The Waldstätte or Forest Communities (Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden) saw their trade route over Lake Lucerne cut off and feared losing their independence. When Rudolph died on July 15, 1291 the Communities prepared to defend themselves. On August 1, 1291 an Everlasting League was made between the Forest Communities for mutual defense against a common enemy.[2] This league formed the nucleus around which the modern country of Switzerland grew.
From the 14th century the abbey began gradually to decline in influence. In the 15th and 16th centuries Murbach was a principality, and between 1680 and 1789 was enmeshed in the tensions between the King of France and the Empire. In 1764 the monks gave up the Benedictine Rule, and the monastery became a collegiate foundation for members of the nobility (French: insigne chapitre collégial-équestral de Murbach, German: Adeliges Ritterstift Murbach). In 1789 the French Revolution and the rioting peasants gave the abbey its death blow.
The cover from a publicity brochure, dated 1935, and in French entitled "coup d œil d'ensemble sur l'entreprise" and that describes the massive, vertical integrated company of Fried.Krupp Aktiengesellschaft, Essen. Krupp's have a long history, dating back to 1811 in Essen where they were foremost in the industrial development of the Ruhr and indeed, now merged with Thyssen, their HQ is still in Essen, a city once regarded as a company town.
By 1935 this vast company, manufacturing iron and steel as well as armaments, machinery, locomotives, shipbuilding and vehicles, was already thoroughly enmeshed in the economy of the National Socialist state and they, along with the family members who ran the concern, would be active participants in Germany's rearmament and complicit the country's conduct of the Second World War.
The brochure was gifted to a visiting French businessman ; the cover shows a forging press of 15,000t capacity at the main Essen works. The design is clearly contemporary in its style and layout.
Hair is Little Bones, top and jacket is Villena, and leather skirt is from Rowne!
Visit this location at Virtual Attitude Wrestling and enMESHed HQ in Second Life
Fletcher Bennett - Triangle of Lust
Playtime Books 616, 1962
Cover Artist: Robert Bonfils
"A masochistic husband, a frustrated wife, a greedy sex-peddler find themselves hopelessly enmeshed in a triangle of passion."
Concept: Power works on minor scales, it is intertwined and enmeshed meticulously in every civil, social and inter(and intra)-personal level of humanity. It is always active (unless mistaken for subjugation (the later still empowered)), seldom revealed by looking at it directly (cause it frequently stares back). And it produces knowledge, produces ethics (its work), keeps us at the level of "what we are". Power breathes us and makes us breathe (unconsciously and not).
Background: I happened to create this image and I found interesting to stick to it a concept that's under heavy duty lately (in my mind). It has much of the elements that denote relations of power (the other, the self, the scale surrealism, the act of staring and breathing (speaking)...). It might seem somehow flat, but "our secondary blood" is far from it (as a sidenote: I did not add the idea of power-through-discourse (a central one, but not sole) to the image for a simple: the "French" would kill me);)
Manipulation info: The image is an old one (a similar version of this shot was already uploaded some weeks ago). I swept away the mouth, drew a new one, multiplied the ants, liquified some portions that needed retouching and finally added textures. The lighting setup was two umbrelled Speedlites on both sides, E-TTL +FEC. Ratio privileged the left side;) Hope you like it.
I again apologize for my evident absentism on Flickr, but times have been really busy lately. To all my great friends here: take care, folks;)
Oooh, I love me a mech.
Here's a quick-n-dirty Proof-of-Concept construction showing my initial ideas to drive remotely the turntable (WiP from a few days ago). That in itself is easy enough, but I figured there might be 'emergency' conditions when one would prefer to spin the turntable by hand quickly, in which case the worm drive would prevent that. So the other part of this mech disconnects the worm drive enmeshment with the 40T cog.
Operation:
• In Position A, the black handle at the back turns the worm gear and thus the 40T cog turns (upon which would be mounted the turntable).
• In Position B, the red-handled shaft is pulled out thus pulling the blue beam, rotating the grey crank and pulling on the lime-green bush. This will pull the worm gear off the 40T cog (possible on account of the uni joint), enabling the turntable to be spun round relatively quickly using 'The Hand of God' (cue trumpets and angelic choir music).
The two uni joints further north enable the axle drive to come up a plate's thickness, since otherwise the worm gear would rub on the studs.
['Prize' for the most innuendos spotted.]
tops: Holli pocket FabFree Headquarters gift (free)
sandal: pure poison group gacha gift
short pants: MoDANNA [enMESHed Hunt] 53 (free hunt)
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Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
Perennial Books, 1990
Cover Illustration © Mark Penberthy
"Oedipa Maas is made the executor of the estate of her late boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. As she diligently carries out her duties, Oedipa is enmeshed in what would appear to be a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not-inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge."
Marina Bay Sands from the Helix Bridge, Singapore.
It's New Year's Eve today and as always, the end of the year is a good time to reflect. Like I always say, every year is a good year, because you're one year further down the road.. A little wiser.. A little older.. A little more jaded at times, and a little more hopeful as well. Technically speaking all of us, young or old, should have grown a little more in this year, and that's reason enough to celebrate the end of the year. I hope to do so later watching the sunset.. But that's up to the rain that's pouring now.
Happy New Year to y'all. :)
Powerlessness
Alienation in the sense of a lack of power has been technically defined by Seeman as “the expectancy or probability held by the individual that his own behaviour cannot determine the occurrence of the outcomes, or reinforcements, he seeks." Seeman argues that this is “the notion of alienation as it originated in the Marxian view of the worker’s condition in capitalist society: the worker is alienated to the extent that the prerogative and means of decision are expropriated by the ruling entrepreneurs".[20] Put more succinctly, Kalekin-Fishman (1996: 97) says, “A person suffers from alienation in the form of 'powerlessness' when she is conscious of the gap between what she would like to do and what she feels capable of doing”.
In discussing powerlessness, Seeman also incorporated the insights of the psychologist Julian Rotter. Rotter distinguishes between internal control and external locus of control, which means "differences (among persons or situations) in the degree to which success or failure is attributable to external factors (e.g. luck, chance, or powerful others), as against success or failure that is seen as the outcome of one’s personal skills or characteristics".[21] Powerlessness, therefore, is the perception that the individual does not have the means to achieve his goals.
More recently, Geyer remarks that “a new type of powerlessness has emerged, where the core problem is no longer being unfree but rather being unable to select from among an overchoice of alternatives for action, whose consequences one often cannot even fathom”. Geyer adapts cybernetics to alienation theory, and writes (1996: xxiv) that powerlessness is the result of delayed feedback: “The more complex one’s environment, the later one is confronted with the latent, and often unintended, consequences of one’s actions. Consequently, in view of this causality-obscuring time lag, both the ‘rewards’ and ‘punishments’ for one’s actions increasingly tend to be viewed as random, often with apathy and alienation as a result”.
Meaninglessness
A sense of meaning has been defined by Seeman as “the individual’s sense of understanding events in which he is engaged”.[23] Seeman (1959: 786) writes that meaninglessness “is characterized by a low expectancy that satisfactory predictions about the future outcomes of behaviour can be made." Where as powerlessness refers to the sensed ability to control outcomes, this refers to the sensed ability to predict outcomes. In this respect, meaninglessness is closely tied to powerlessness; Seeman (Ibid.) argues, “the view that one lives in an intelligible world might be a prerequisite to expectancies for control; and the unintelligibility of complex affairs is presumably conducive to the development of high expectancies for external control (that is, high powerlessness)”.
Geyer (1996: xxiii) believes meaninglessness should be reinterpreted for postmodern times: "With the accelerating throughput of information [...] meaningless is not a matter anymore of whether one can assign meaning to incoming information, but of whether one can develop adequate new scanning mechanisms to gather the goal-relevant information one needs, as well as more efficient selection procedures to prevent being overburdened by the information one does not need, but is bombarded with on a regular basis." "Information overload" or the so-called "data tsunami" are well-known information problems confronting contemporary man, and Geyer thus argues that meaninglessness is turned on its head.
Normlessness[edit]
Normlessness (or what Durkheim referred to as anomie) “denotes the situation in which the social norms regulating individual conduct have broken down or are no longer effective as rules for behaviour”.This aspect refers to the inability to identify with the dominant values of society or rather, with what are perceived to be the dominant values of society. Seeman (1959: 788) adds that this aspect can manifest in a particularly negative manner, “The anomic situation [...] may be defined as one in which there is a high expectancy that socially unapproved behaviours are required to achieve given goals”. This negative manifestation is dealt with in detail by Catherine Ross and John Mirowski in a series of publications on mistrust, powerlessness, normlessness and crime.
Neal & Collas (2000: 122) write, “Normlessness derives partly from conditions of complexity and conflict in which individuals become unclear about the composition and enforcement of social norms. Sudden and abrupt changes occur in life conditions, and the norms that usually operate may no longer seem adequate as guidelines for conduct”. This is a particular issue after the fall of the Soviet Union, mass migrations from developing to developed countries, and the general sense of disillusionment that characterized the 1990s (Senekal, 2011). Traditional values that had already been questioned (especially during the 1960s) were met with further scepticism in the 1990s, resulting in a situation where individuals rely more often on their own judgement than on institutions of authority: "The individual not only has become more independent of the churches, but from other social institutions as well. The individual can make more personal choices in far more life situations than before” (Halman, 1998: 100). These choices are not necessarily "negative": Halman's study found that Europeans remain relatively conservative morally, even though the authority of the Church and other institutions has eroded.
Political alienation
One manifestation of the above dimensions of alienation can be a feeling of estrangement from, and a lack of engagement in, the political system. Such political alienation could result from not identifying with any particular political party or message, and could result in revolution, reforming behavior, or abstention from the political process, possibly due to voter apathy.
A similar concept is policy alienation, where workers experience a state of psychological disconnection from a policy programme being implemented.
Social isolation
Social isolation refers to “The feeling of being segregated from one’s community”. Neal and Collas (2000: 114) emphasize the centrality of social isolation in the modern world: “While social isolation is typically experienced as a form of personal stress, its sources are deeply embedded in the social organization of the modern world. With increased isolation and atomization, much of our daily interactions are with those who are strangers to us and with whom we lack any ongoing social relationships.”
Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, migrants from Eastern Europe and the developing countries have flocked to developed countries in search of a better living standard. This has led to entire communities becoming uprooted: no longer fully part of their homelands, but neither integrated into their adopted communities. Diaspora literature depicts the plights of these migrants, such as Hafid Bouazza in Paravion. Senekal (2010b: 41) argues, "Low-income communities or religious minorities may feel separated from mainstream society, leading to backlashes such as the civil unrest that occurred in French cities in October 2005. The fact that the riots subsequently spread to Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, and Switzerland, illustrates that not only did these communities feel segregated from mainstream society, but also that they found a community in their isolation; they regarded themselves as kindred spirits".
Relationships
One concept used in regard to specific relationships is that of parental alienation, where a child is distanced from and expresses a general dislike for one of their parents (who may have divorced or separated). The term is not applied where there is child abuse. The parental alienation might be due to specific influences from either parent or could result from the social dynamics of the family as a whole. It can also be understood in terms of attachment, the social and emotional process of bonding between child and caregiver. Adoptees can feel alienated from both adoptive parents and birth parents.
Attachment relationships in adults can also involve feelings of alienation. Indeed, emotional alienation is said to be a common way of life for many, whether it is experienced as overwhelming, or is not admitted to in the midst of a socioeconomic race, or contributes to seemingly unrelated problems.
Self-estrangement
Self-estrangement is an elusive concept in sociology, as recognized by Seeman (1959), although he included it as an aspect in his model of alienation. Some, with Marx, consider self-estrangement to be the end result and thus the heart of social alienation. Self-estrangement can be defined as “the psychological state of denying one’s own interests – of seeking out extrinsically satisfying, rather than intrinsically satisfying, activities...”. It could be characterized as a feeling of having become a stranger to oneself, or to some parts of oneself, or alternatively as a problem of self-knowledge, or authenticity.
Seeman (1959) recognized the problems inherent in defining the "self", while post-modernism in particular has questioned the very possibility of pin-pointing what precisely "self" constitutes. Gergen (1996: 125) argues that: “the traditional view of self versus society is deeply problematic and should be replaced by a conception of the self as always already immersed in relatedness. On this account, the individual’s lament of ‘not belonging’ is partially a by-product of traditional discourses themselves”. If the self is relationally constituted, does it make sense to speak of "self-estrangement" rather than "social isolation"? Costas and Fleming (2009: 354) suggest that although the concept of self-estrangement “has not weathered postmodern criticisms of essentialism and economic determinism well”, the concept still has value if a Lacanian reading of the self is adopted. This can be seen as part of a wider debate on the concept of self between humanism and antihumanism, structuralism and post-structuralism, or nature and nurture.
Mental disturbance
Until early in the 20th century, psychological problems were referred to in psychiatry as states of mental alienation, implying that a person had become separated from themselves, their reason or the world. From the 1960s alienation was again considered in regard to clinical states of disturbance, typically using a broad concept of a 'schizoid' ('splitting') process taken from psychoanalytic theory. The splitting was said to occur within regular child development and in everyday life, as well as in more extreme or dysfunctional form in conditions such as schizoid personality and schizophrenia. Varied concepts of alienation and self-estrangement were used to link internal schizoid states with observable symptoms and with external socioeconomic divisions, without necessarily explaining or evidencing underlying causation. R.D. Laing was particularly influential in arguing that dysfunctional families and socioeconomic oppression caused states of alienation and ontological insecurity in people, which could be considered adaptations but which were diagnosed as disorders by mainstream psychiatry and society.(Laing,[1967] 1959). The specific theories associated with Laing and others at that time are not widely accepted, but work from other theoretical perspectives sometimes addresses the same theme.
In a related vein, for Ian Parker, psychology normalizes conditions of social alienation. While it could help groups of individuals emancipate themselves, it serves the role of reproducing existing conditions.(Parker,2007). This view can be see as part of a broader tradition sometimes referred to as Critical psychology or Liberation psychology, which emphasizes that an individual is enmeshed within a social-political framework, and so therefore are psychological problems. Similarly, some psychoanalysts suggest that while psychoanalysis emphasizes environmental causes and reactions, it also attributes the problems of individuals to internal conflicts stemming from early psychosocial development, effectively divorcing them from the wider ongoing context. Slavoj Zizek (drawing on Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis) argues that in today's capitalist society, the individual is estranged from their self through the repressive injunction to "enjoy!" Such an injunction does not allow room for the recognition of alienation and, indeed, could itself be seen as an expression of alienation.(Zizek, 1994).
Frantz Fanon, an early writer on postcolonialism, studied the conditions of objectification and violent oppression (lack of autonomy) believed to have led to mental disorders among the colonized in the Third World (in particular Africans) (Fanon, ([2004] 1961).
A process of 'malignant alienation' has been observed in regard to some psychiatric patients, especially in forensic units and for individuals labeled 'difficult' or who aren't liked by at least some staff, which involves a breakdown of the therapeutic relationship between staff and patients, and which may end in the suicide of the patient. Individuals with long-term mental disorders, which may have originally stemmed from social alienation, can experience particular social and existential alienation within their communities due to other people's and potentially their own negative attitudes towards themselves and 'odd' behavior.
Disability
Differences between persons with disabilities and individuals in relative abilities, or perceived abilities, can be a cause of alienation. One study, "Social Alienation and Peer Identification: A Study of the Social Construction of Deafness",found that among deaf adults one theme emerged consistently across all categories of life experience: social rejection by, and alienation from, the larger hearing community. Only when the respondents described interactions with deaf people did the theme of isolation give way to comments about participation and meaningful interaction. This appeared to be related to specific needs, for example for "real" conversation, for information, the opportunity to develop close friendships and a sense of "family". It was suggested that the social meaning of deafness is established by interaction between deaf and hearing people, sometimes resulting in marginalization of the deaf, which is sometimes challenged. It has also led to the creation of alternatives and the deaf community is described as one such alternative.
Physicians and nurses often deal with people who are temporarily or permanently alienated from communities, which could be a result or a cause of medical conditions and suffering, and it has been suggested that therefore attention should be paid to learning from experiences of the special pain that alienation can bring.
Eastham, MA
Coast Guard Beach - Cape Cod
December, 10th, 2011
"On November 9, 1620, a ship named the Mayflower, 65 days out from Plymouth, England, made her landfall in the New World at what is now Coast Guard Beach. Captain Jones, knowing that his Pilgrim passengers were supposed to settle in northern Virginia, headed southeastward. Although he stood well offshore to avoid shoal waters, his ship soon became enmeshed in the worst shoals in the area, Pollock Rip. A miraculous change of wind enabled Jones to sail his ship free of the shoals, and he then turned northward to anchor in Provincetown Harbor, November 11, 1620.
The outer beach, or 'backside,' of Cape Cod has been the notorious graveyard for more than 3,000 ships since the wreck of the Sparrowhawk in 1626. The high cost in lives and property demanded by the sands of Cape Cod, led to the establishment of the Massachusetts Humane Society in 1786, the first organization in the nation devoted to the rescue and assistance of shipwrecked mariners. The Humane Society established shelter huts along the coast; later, it built lifeboat stations where surfboats, line-throwing guns, and other lifesaving gear were stored for the use of volunteer crews in times of emergency.
In 1848, the Congress appropriated funds for the first time to construct, equip and maintain similar stations in New Jersey. From 1848 until 1872, Congress provided the money to build more stations along the eastern seaboard and the Great Lakes. The stations in Massachusetts continued to be administered by the Massachusetts Humane Society, but the federal government subsidized its operation. The continued frequent loss of life along the nation's shores led Congress, in 1871-1872, to reorganize the Life Saving Service, a place it on a full-time professional basis. The construction and manning of nine stations on the "backside" of Cape Cod was provided for in the Federal budget of 1871.
One of the original nine stations was constructed at Nauset. It was located about 350 yards southeast of the present building. Shoreline erosion compelled the construction of a new station. The old station remained in service until 1937, when it was replaced by the present structure. The present building was in service as a Coast Guard Station until 1958.
The first headquarters of the Cape Cod National Seashore opened in this building in 1961. Currently, the building houses the Cape Cod National Seashore overnight NEED (National Environmental Educational Development) program for school groups."
SOURCE: www.nps.gov/caco/planyourvisit/coast-guard-beach-eastham.htm
During the period between 1949 and 1959, Harlequin published about 500 books, none of which were romance novels. Romance didn't come to Harlequin until the early 1960s. Before then they were a general fiction publisher covering every genre from westerns to science fiction.
From the back cover:
Drums of DAMBALA By H. BEDFORD JONES
As Paul O'Donnell stood by the rail of the ship that had brought him to Haiti, the tiny rowboat putting out from the shore was already carrying the first hints of the danger and tragedy lying in wait for him. Five minutes after landing he was enmeshed in a frightful web of political intrigue, fomented by voodoo fanaticism and unscrupulous ambition led by the hatred and ferocity of a beautiful and diabolical woman, and roused to bloody action by the throbbing, jungle rhythm of the drums of Dambala, the voodoo Snake-God. He, the white man, seeking a brother lost years ago in the revolution that had freed the Negroes, and Toussaint L'Ouverture, the black Napolean struggling to maintain his precarious hold on power, fight side by side against treachery, revolt, and massacre, in a story whose breathless action is set against a savage and enthralling background.
Mary's foot among Christians, can at any time by the false light (the temptations of this world) bite it "mortally" to keep it in the entropic cyclicity of the times. He is mortal, literally and figuratively, by an Achilles' heel that expresses his fatal weakness despite a great general strength, which can lead him to his loss. This is what the creeping serpent - the Luciferic energy - reminds us, which in the absence of being firmly contained by the sacred feminine. Transmutation is about making the form disappear or changing its nature. Alchemy is not a science, it is a Great Art, its phenomena are inexplicable for our intellect.
"If we turn to the light, there is no more shadow." All initiatory quests consist in letting the light in, not seeking it. While the chemist works on shadows (matter), the alchemist works on the obstacles that prevent light from passing through and create shadows. The alchemist's goal is therefore to transmute matter into light by removing its shadows (and if a body is able to no longer resist true light, then it no longer has any weight...!)
The alchemist who only polishes his mirror to become transparent to himself. It will thus avoid the weight of light that
would prevent out of body experience, very useful to its transcendence. It is this alignment (the inner straightness) that is symbolized by this image of the half-disappeared virgin. A process of individuation will free the individuality of the collective psyche through a deliberate act of no longer stopping the light, thus the absence of shadow allows this transmutation into the fifth dimension.. Brandemarked as the irrefutable sacred text by its more or less faithful followers, Biblical Genesis (1:3) says: "Let there be Light! And the Light was...". We can logically deduce from this that if the Light was, it is not eternal, and if it is not eternal, it was created... Also, if it was created, it was not created by the Light! By who, then? This Luciferic lesson tells us that we cannot understand Genesis, because human beings think with thoughts that come from elsewhere, instead of creating thoughts that come from the energy of Intelligence, the One who gives Light, and the devotees assimilate to God, the Creator Father, who detached a small part of His Holy Light from His divine Sphere! Only the clarity of our mind adjusted to the universal Spirit indicates the path of our evolution.
The word Light is a danger, because it forces us to have a certain notion of luminosity. And as soon as we have any notion of luminosity, we tend to be attracted by our ego-mental source of emotions, the manifestation of the soul aspiring to be liberated, to be attracted by this luminosity! That is why when we die, we are drawn to luminosity, that is, the Astral vitiated by our unclarified civilizational memories... A human being who dies must never go to the Light, source of illusions revealing his inflammatory neuroses and psychoses!
The word Light "simply" makes the human being understand that there is an Absolute Energy in the Cosmos. By radiation, It creates the atomic burst, which is the Light. In other words, Light is always an illusion projected into the Cosmos by the radiation of the Original Absolute Energy. Light is a creation, not an absolute, never to be conceived or considered as the Absolute, Which Is. In What Is, there is no Light, only clarity, Clarity. And as we know it in our transitional state, it is not very luminous... If the clarity is too luminous to our limited mystical mind, we must be careful, because we can very easily be attracted by it. And that's what happens in the Death World *!
The immortals, when they change the Plan for having successfully transmuted the material body, when they leave their material body, they do not go into the Light. They are themselves Light! Being themselves Light, they approach the more perfected Lights with which they have a vibratory relationship, and it is They who lead them to be on the planes that suit them. It is necessary to be unconscious, human and spiritual to be limited to it, to be attracted by the Light! It is one of the greatest dangers of esotericism, that of religious groups or sects, New Age, and secret societies, Freemasonry in the first place. Because in esotericism, we talk about the Light all the time, to be attracted by the Light for its wonderful promises. The day when human beings understand that Light is a creation of Universal Energy, they no longer have to go to the Light. He is the bearer of Light! Lumen Dei, the light proceeding from the unmanifest Godhead, the other is Lumen Naturae, the light hidden in matter and the forces of nature. While the Divine Light may be discerned and appreciated in revelation and in the mystery of the Incarnation, the Light of Nature needs to be released through alchemy before it can become fully operative. God redeems humanity, but nature needs to be redeemed by human alchemists, who are able to induce the process of transformation which alone is capable of liberating the light imprisoned in physical creation.The cosmos, according to Paracelsus, contains the divine light or life, but this holy essence is enmeshed in a mechanical trap, presided over by a kind of demiurge, named by Paracelsus Hylaster (from hyle, "matter," and astrum, "star"). The cosmic spider-god has spun a web within which the light, like an insect, is caught, until the alchemical process bursts the web. The web is none other than the consensus reality composed of the four elements of earth, water, fire and air, within which all creatures exist. The first operation of alchemy therefore addresses itself to the breaking up (torturing, bleeding, dismembering) of this confining structure and reducing it to a condition of creative chaos (massa confusa, prima materia). From this, in the process of transformation, the true, creative binaries emerge and begin their interaction designed to bring about the coniunctio or alchemical union. In this ultimate union, says Jung, the previously confined light is redeemed and brought to the point of its ultimate and redemptive fulfillment.
Through this work of manipulating energies by aiming to repair his inner structure, the alchemist is placed before the symbols and dreamlike processes of his inner world, this archetypal reality of the dream mixing the unconscious with the conscious. By proceeding in this way, it operates in 4th reality density, where the physical laws specific to 3-D no longer apply. It is the key to opening the doors of space-time for the purpose of exiting the Entropic Matrix, the opening of the third eye - that of the heart
Soul have both descended independently of one another into the depths of man's collective psyche and have there come upon realities which look so alike because thy are equally anchored in truth. Time and again he pointed out the affinities and contrasts between alchemical figures and those of Christianity, demonstrating a sort of mirror-like analogy not only between the stone of the philosophers and the image of Christ, but between alchemy and Christianity themselves.Alchemy, stands in a compensatory relationship to mainstream Christianity, rather like a dream does to the conscious attitudes of the dreamer. The Stone of alchemy is in many respects the stone rejected by the builders of Christian culture, demanding recognition and reincorporation into the building itself. . While these statements ostensibly refer to the material universe and to nature, those glassed Virgin perceives in them a model or paradigm for the material and natural aspect of human nature as well. Under the guise of liberating the light confined in matter, the alchemists were endeavoring to redeem the spirit or psychic energy locked up in the body and psyche (the "natural man" of St. Paul) and thus make this energy available for the greater tasks of the spirit or spiritual man. To better understand the Mysteries, it is necessary to consider the High as the nests of this fact represent the Forces and the old Races that are and have been more powerful in Us. Our Body is also a micro-universe. The planets are gaseous and chtonians, and are to be connected with the Earth and with the various forms of terrestrial humanities that we have known and our different cerebral, anatomical and physiological abilities past and present. As with the ones represent the Matter spirit, their composition and the speed of the electrons around it. is far from the nucleus and emits photon light, accelerates its speed and changes its orbit as the sapphire of a reading head jumps from one furrow to another. every other cell of the Spirit. The quantum leap occurs when an electron, which is an electron, would cross USA in one second twice and could therefore do so much faster; which would change our reality and our physical appearance. Virgin Saturne? Look at his right Index, his way of standing and his belly.
Pose: Something New Summer Lovin in the June enMeshed Box. You can subscribe at the enMeshed Mainstore by May 31st.
On Demi:
Bikinis: Ravnous Ibiza Baby + HUD. Located at the mainstore.
Hair: Doe Nova in Pastels. A Gacha located at SaNaRae.
Head: Catwa Catya. Located at the mainstore.
Body: Slink Hourglass. Located at the mainstore.
Hands: Slink Dynamic. Located at the mainstore.
Feet: Slink Deluxe. Located at the mainstore.
On Dae:
Shorts: ID Leather Short 001. Located at the marketplace store.
Hair: EMO-tions Tyler in B+W pack. Located at the mainstore.
Head: GA.EG Damon Bento Mesh Head. Located at the mainstore.
Body: Niramyth Aesthetic. Located at the mainstore.
**any other items you can inquire about**
Red Mangrove propagule, the sprout that hangs down comes from the Mangrove pod as it floats along the water's surface is literally what created Florida. The roots touch bottom and grow in all directions, catching sand and debris, and single-rootedly forming the very landmass we know of as Florida!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_Creek
Without this seed, none of what we know as our coastline... and many other coastlines... would be there. Thank you, Mangrove Seed, for all your environmental work!
From "The Forgotten Pioneer", Arva Moore Parks
"Much of the coast was a "mangrove coast"; here a great mangrove tree marks the transiton from bay to land. It's curved and twisted prop roots enmeshed all sorts of natural rubbish-- its own leaves, sand, grasses, the gifts from the sea-- until slowly, slowly through the years the "squish" became the solid earth." p36
Mangroves are trees and shrubs that grow in saline coastal habitats in the tropics and subtropics – mainly between latitudes 25° N and 25° S. The saline conditions tolerated by various species range from brackish water, through pure seawater (30 to 40 ppt), to water of over twice the salinity of ocean seawater, where the salt becomes concentrated by evaporation (up to 90 ppt).
There are many species of trees and shrubs adapted to saline conditions. Not all are closely related, and the term "mangrove" may be used for all of them, or more narrowly only for the mangrove family of plants, the Rhizophoraceae, or even more specifically just for mangrove trees of the genus Rhizophora.
Mangroves form a characteristic saline woodland or shrubland habitat, called mangrove swamp, mangrove forest, mangrove or mangal. Mangals are found in depositional coastal environments where fine sediments (often with high organic content) collect in areas protected from high energy wave action. They occur both in estuaries and along open coastlines. Mangroves dominate three quarters of tropical coastlines.
Arch Creek East Environmental Preserve, North Miami, FL.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_Creek
See my set, Woods, weeds and streams.
Webb Bridge, Melbourne, Australia. This is an interesting bridge for pedestrians and cyclists across the Yarra River. It was said to be inspired by fishermen's nets. Makes for some interesting images.
Our Daily Challenge ...invisible.
You can't see it but it's there and it's very easy to bring it to mind when you look at a picture of coffee ... it's wonderful aroma! The part of the brain responsible for our sense of smell—the limbic system—is related to feelings and memory.The emotional connections and the memories attached to a smell are very personal and seem to be intrinsically enmeshed with the individual experience. For many years, a coffee after work in a quiet little coffee shop was a time to unwind and chat. These days the smell of coffee just makes me want to sit, relax and enjoy time with a friend.
"7 Days of Shooting" "Week #44 - Light Moments " "Shoot Anything Saturday"
Quoting from the back cover:
"Are You a Failure? If success has passed you by there may still be time. Sri Ahandi has helped many to undreamed-of heights in achievement and personal satisfaction. Swami Ahandi will give a lecture on 'The Human Potential' Tuesday evening at eight o'clock. 802 W. 10th St.
"That was the entire ad, an obvious come-on for some con game. But somehow it pulled Dane Morrow like a magnet, almost beckoning with an invisible finger to come and be fleeced. Since Dane didn't have a nickel to his name, what could he lose?
"It turned out that the swami guaranteed to make you rich -- for a fee of $1,000 and a share of the wealth you would acquire through his astounding powers . . .
"It was a hoax -- except that Dane did immediatley start making money, and found himself enmeshed in a miasmic complex of dangerous secrets, evil influences, and a sinister society of self-styled super-men known as The Enlighened Ones!
"A Dramatic, Suspenseful Novel Inspired By The Popular TV Program: ONE STEP BEYOND."
The Big City
(1928) American
B&W : Seven reels / 6838 feet
Directed by Tod Browning
Drama: Crime.
Survival status: The film is presumed lost; a trailer for the film does survive [16mm reduction positive].
Directed by Tod Browning
Written by Tod Browning, Waldemar Young
Starring Lon Chaney, Marceline Day
Cinematography Henry Sharp
Editing by Harry Reynolds, Irving Thalberg (uncredited)
Distributed by MGM
Release date March 24, 1928
Country United States
Language Silent
"The Big City" is a classic crime drama. .
The last known copy of the film "The Big City" perished in 1967 in the MGM vaults fire that also destroyed "London after Midnight". Silent Era lists this film as "survival status: unknown". It is not available for viewing, so we have to rely on newspaper articles from the 1920ies. If you have any information about a surviving copy of the film please let us know.
Here are just a few of the reviews for this film:
No one in the world can look so 'hard boiled' and menacing as this Lon Chaney and few can look so sympathetic in the very same role. In his latest starring vehicle, "The Big City", Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's gripping romance of New York's underworld, Chaney plays the role of a hardened detective. And no character could demand more of an actor's histrionic talents. He has to be the very embodiment of the law - and still be as human as anyone else. Few beside Lon Chaney could play this complex role adequately, and of it Chaney has made a masterpiece of motion picture acting.
"The Big City" is a delicate romance told in a setting of NIGHT CLUBS AND BRIGHT LIGHTS, holdups and police and gangster battles woven into an amazing blend of thrills and surprises. Marceline Day in the role of a little shop girl, innocently caught in the underworld, is appealing. (Mirror)
Chaney plays the role of a police sleuth, and Betty Compson is seen as a member of the underworld. Marceline Day, however, has the big female lead as a shop girl who is enmeshed in an plot engineered by a detective. A very ingenious plot and well acted by a very fine cast. (Portland Guardian)
Chaney and his associates come in conflict with a gang of jewel thieves: a sensational hold-up of a popular night club, gun battles and duels of wits between the detectives and gangsters; these are all breathlessly exciting backgrounds for a charming love idyll of a boy and a girl. Miss Day, a shop girl innocently enmeshed in the underworld, has some remarkable scenes. (Recorder)
Marceline Day in the role of a little shop girl, innocently caught in the underworld, is appealingly sweet. (Sunday Times)
"The Big City" is a delicate romance, told in a setting of night clubs and bright lights, police raids in the underworld and battles of "crooks," woven into an astonishing blend of thrills, surprises, and romance. In this colorful, swift-moving picture of New York night life, Lon Chaney plays the role of a detective, and, avoiding the use of elaborate disguises which characterized many of his previous appearances, he gives a truly marvelous performance. Briefly, the story is that Chuck Collins, a New York detective, is detailed to circumnavigate the machinations of a gang of cabaret thieves. Assuming the role of proprietor of a dance hall, he is accepted by the underworld as a fellow-gangster. Move and counter-move follow in rapid succession, and finally Chuck captures the entire gang. The leading feminine role, taken by Marceline Day, is that of a shop girl enmeshed in the underworld plot engineered by Chuck, and an admirable study she makes of it, too. (The Brisbane Courier)
A vivid story of the underworld of New York, it shows just how far the influence of a young girl of strong character and high ideals can affect the lives of people born and bred to crime. Marceline Day lives up to her name as 'Sunshine', the sweetness of her smile capturing all hearts. (The Register)
Marceline Day does splendidly with her role. (Motion Picture News)
A travesty of Justice
We are looking for the name (Melody?) and hopefully a photo of a somewhat obscure actress of the early silent film era. She apparently was the victim of a jewel robbery that occurred in her suite in New York City. Her story may have been used to inspire the cover from the Snappy Detective Stories July 1934 issue. We have not been able to find a copy and were wondering if any of the stories matched the cover illustration, and if any actual names were given.
She may have been the Lover (Wife?) of a wealthy, influential New York City Business man. One weekend, while he was out of town, she left his South Hampton mansion and went out partying to New York City for the weekend. During that time, she reported to police that she had been robbed in her penthouse suite by a masked burglar to the tune of 75,000 worth of jewelry... In what may have been a rather cruel twist of injustice, an elevator valet with a Juvenile criminal background was arrested for the crime, tried without any real evidence, convicted and put in prison. Years later He died under mysterious circumstances while still incarcerated in a New York Prison. The Ladies jewelry was never reported recovered.
The above info was, told to us by an old vaudeville magician who had performed with a young lady whose stage name of Melody was all he could remember. She eventually became a silent era ‘B’ actress under a name he could not recall. He thought she may have had a minor role as an actress appearing in the 1911 silent film version of the Poseidon Adventure.
Rumor had it that her apartment was never “burglarized” and that she made up the story to prevent the insanely jealous influential Businessman she was involved with from finding out the truth.
But then we came across another story gathered from article that appears to have been derived from some surviving pages (with no cover) out of an old pulp detective magazine of the prohibition era, Real Detective Tales. The ladies name was given as Melinda Victoria Scott se Hamot, but it may not have been her real name. If anyone knows what issue and year the below story derived from that article may have been published we would greatly appreciate it.
According to this article, Melinda was a silent film actress who had married a well to do gentleman and was known for the lavish jewelry she would show off. This lady had had been wearing some of her expensive jewelry while out on the town in N.Y.C. On this particular evening (sometime during the 1920’s) Melinda was being chaperoned for the evening by a male with a rather dubious background. This man was said to be a well-known City “raker”, a handsomely roguish man with a well-known reputation for escorting wealthy married ladies, as well as a reputation with the police as having connections with the underworld orchestrating burglaries. His given name was not mentioned. After attending a show and a couple of nightclubs, he insisted that Ms. Hamot go with him to a local underground gambling joint for a few (then illegal) drinks.
Late that evening (or early morning), a group of masked hoodlums held up the speakeasys’ patrons. It was believed that they were mainly after the money being gambled. But not only did they take all the money, but they also made the richly attired ladies present hand over all their jewels. Including those being worn by, we believe, our mystery women who supposedly was being robbed in her apartment at the same time.
Two weeks later the Actress’s male escort, throat slit, was found floating in the Hudson River.
Since some of the male patrons in attendance were in the governments’ employ, Tammany Hall took over the investigation and apparently hushed up the whole incident. The full story never made it to the local newspapers, although supposedly the New Yorker Magazine had some questions (could not find any reference) No crime was reported, no one was arrested, nor any of the property ever “reportedly” recovered. This was the gist of the article that we were able to read in the surviving pages of the old magazine.
We have been searching in the New York Times, but have failed to turn up any related story to the speakeasy hold up. Although we did find a few similar stories about women being bound and robbed of their jewels, but no exact matches to the penthouse robbery so far.
We strongly believe, based on the vaudevillian’s description of the lady and her mannerisms, that the Penthouse robbery victim, and the speakeasy robbery victim was one and the same Lady. We also think that there never was a penthouse robbery, and the jewels that the elevator valet was accused of stealing were actually relinquished to one of the thugs that held up the gambling joint. The main clue we don’t have is a name for the Lady. This would at least give us a starting point to investigate our theory.
If anyone out could shed some lights on this little mystery, especially the pulp detective magazines listed above, we would greatly appreciate it.
enMESHed Into Summer 2015 0L Hunt
June 15th - July 15th
Lots of goodies from over 50 creators waiting for you - I made 3 of them, each on a different floor, so happy hunting everyone!!! :)
Starting location: maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Seduced/185/96/21
Slurl: maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Behringa/232/33/22
Hints:
- for the 1st prize: What's going on?
- for the 2nd prize: Time to look for the wild and fairy stuff
- for the 3rd prize: Field flowers and chocolate eggs anyone?
Hunt info: enmeshedhunts.wordpress.com/
GUIDE AND SUPERVISION... Holistic Way, Super Vision, Eye Nutrition...pineal gland create inner light and super vision of your dreams...Lighting is a standout amongst the most imperative components in home stylistic layout. A decent lighting makes a feeling of warmth and inviting interest in the house. It likewise empowers you to perform every day errands well, makes you agreeable and above all outwardly upgrades the room.
Abstract: Sustainability has the potential to provide a holistic framework that can bridge the gap that is often found between socio-economic justice and environmental discourses. However, sustainability and sustainability education have typically accepted the prevailing socio-economic and cultural paradigm. It is my aim in this paper to demonstrate that a truly holistic and visionary sustainability (education) framework ought to demand radical and critical theories and solutions- based approaches to politicize and interrogate the premises, assumptions, and biases linked to the dominant notion of sustainability. If we are to envision and construe actual sustainable futures, we must first understand what brought us here, where the roots of the problems lie, and how the sustainability discourse and framework tackle—or fail to tackle—them. To do this is to politicize sustainability, to build a critical perspective of and about sustainability. It is an act of conscientização (or conscientization), to borrow Paulo Freire’s seminal term, of cultivating critical consciousness and conscience. In lieu of the standard articulation of politics as centralized state administration, ‘critical sustainability studies’ is based on a framing that gives prominence to a more organic, decentralized engagement of conscientious subjects in the creation of just, regenerative eco-social relations. It illuminates the ideological and material links between society, culture, and ecology by devoting particular attention to how knowledge and discourse around and across those realms are generated and articulated. I believe that future scholarship and activism in sustainability and sustainability-related fields would benefit immensely from dialoguing with this framework.
The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
– Murray Bookchin, The Meaning of Confederalism, 1990
Introduction: Why Sustainability (and Sustainability Education)?
Despite conflicting opinions over what the terms ‘sustainability’ and its variant ‘sustainable development’ actually mean, the framework of sustainability has gained a lot of traction in the last two decades. Its Western origins can be traced back to the writings of Western philosophers and seminal environmentalists like John Locke and Aldo Leopold (Spoon, 2013). Redclift (2005) asserts that sustainability as an idea was first used during the ‘limits to growth’ debates in the 1970s and the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference. Perhaps the most commonly quoted definition of sustainable development is that of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) who states that “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987, p. 43).
Sustainability has the potential to provide a holistic framework that can bridge the gap that is often found between socio-economic justice and environmental discourses. After all, recent scholarship indicates that the issue of environmental quality is inevitably linked to that of human equity (Morello-Frosch, 1997; Torras & Boyce, 1998; see Agyeman, Bullard, & Evans, 2002), and thus they need to be thought about together. I hold that an actual sustainable society is one where wider matters of social and economic needs are intrinsically connected to the dynamic limits set by supporting ecosystems and environments.
Sustainability education has emerged as an effort to acknowledge and reinforce these interrelationships and to reorient and transform education along the lines of social and ecological well-being (Sterling, 2001). By being rooted in whole systems thinking, i.e. “the ability to collectively analyze complex systems across different domains (society, environment, and economy) and across different scales (local to global)” (Wiek, Withycombe, & Redman, 2011, p. 207), sustainability education strives to illuminate the complexities associated with the broad, problem-oriented, solution-driven nature of sustainability (Warren, Archambault, & Foley, 2014). If we are to devise cultural systems that are truly regenerative, this “novel” brand of education urges the teaching of the fundamental facts of life by stewarding learning communities that comprehend the adaptive qualities of ecological patterns and principles (Stone, 2012). Sustainability education highlights the centrality of ‘place’ as a unit of inquiry to devise reciprocal—and thus sustainable—relationships where one nourishes and is nourished by their surrounding social and ecological milieus (Williams & Brown, 2012).
Additionally, sustainability and, as a consequence, sustainability education are future- oriented and therefore demand ‘futures thinking’: the ability to assess and formulate nuanced pictures of the future vis-à-vis sustainability predicaments and sustainability problem-solving schemes (Wiek, et al., 2011). In a nutshell, futures thinking suggests that we need to imagine the potential ramifications of past and current human activities by critically analyzing them today if we are to conceive of new, more sustainable futures (Warren et al., 2014). Future studies can therefore help people to pursue their “ontological vocation” as history makers (Freire, 1993, p. 66) and to (re)claim their agency as a means of creating the world in which they wish to live (Inayatullah, 2007).
However, sustainability and sustainability education have typically accepted the prevailing socio-economic and cultural paradigm despite their apparent holistic intent and(theoretical) efforts to reconcile the three pillars of sustainability—equity, environment, and economy. Whether intentionally or not, they have promoted curative solutions instead of reflecting new, critical mindsets that can actually generate meaningful socio-cultural innovation by naming and discursively dismantling the systems and processes that are the root causes of the complex problems we face. And, as Albert Einstein once put it, “no problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.”
It is my aim in this paper to demonstrate that a truly holistic and visionary sustainability (education) framework ought to demand radical (of, relating to, or proceeding from a root) and critical (of, relating to, or being a turning point) theories and solutions-based approaches to politicize and interrogate the premises, assumptions, and biases linked to the dominant notion of sustainability.
Troubling (Monolithic) Sustainability
In order to be able to unveil and critically analyze the propositions and suppositions of what I call ‘the monolithic sustainability discourse,’ it is fundamental to start with the etymology of the word ‘sustainability’ itself. The operationalization of the term can be problematic for it implies prior judgments about what is deemed important or necessary to sustain. While some of these judgements might resonate with an array of environmentalists who perceive that the health of the planet and the well-being of our descendants are being—or are already—compromised by certain human activities, various other perilous premises and assumptions are generally left unacknowledged as a result of the depoliticized character of the dominant discourse of sustainability. Lele and Norgaard (1996) have put forward three questions that can help us to uncover and think more critically about these presuppositions in and across various contexts and scales: (a) what is to be sustained, at what scale, and in what form?; (b) over what time period, with what level of certainty?; (c) through what social process(es), and with what trade-offs against other social goals? (p. 355).
By building on these critical questions and clarifications, we can better understand the nuances of how the destructive and thus unsustainable ethos of dehumanization and socio- ecological exploitation may inform and permeate normative notions and articulations of sustainability. Yet, this is only plausible if sustainability is politicized. To politicize is to engage the existing state of socio-political affairs, to problematize that which is taken for granted, to make explicit the power relations that are an innate part of everyday life and experience (Bailey & Gayle, 2003). In an attempt to comprehend why sustainability is typically depoliticized we ought to examine briefly its discursive history.
The term ‘sustainable development’ became a part of the policy discourse and almost every day language following the release of the Brundtland Commission’s report on the global environment and development in 1987 (Redclift, 2005). While their definition included a very clear social directive, its human and political dimensions have been largely overlooked amongst references to sustainability, which, due to its environmental origins (Lele & Norgaard, 1996) and neoliberal focus on rights rather than needs (Redclift, 2005), have typically focused on bio- physical, ecological issues (Vallance, Perkins, & Dixon, 2011). Social sustainability, which has been conceptualized in response to the failure of the sustainability approach to engender substantial change (Vallance et al., 2011), is the least developed of the three realms and is frequently framed in relation to ecological and/or economic sustainability (Magis & Shinn, 2013). I assert that the reason for this is twofold: first and foremost, the sustainability agenda was conceived by international committees and NGO networks, think tanks, and governmental structures (Agyeman et al., 2002), which makes it a top-down approach and, consequently, less likely to recognize and address themes such as structural poverty, equity, and justice (Colantonio, 2009); and second, because social sustainability is made subservient to economics and the environment, it fails to examine the socio-political circumstances and elements that are needed to sustain a community of people (Magis & Shinn, 2013).
Sustainability, since its inception as a Western construct, has been progressively viewed as a crucial driver in economic development and environmental management worldwide. Nevertheless, as delineated above, its almost universal focus on reconciling the growth model of economics and the environment has served to covertly depoliticize the dominant discourse and therefore render it uncontentious if not intrinsically benign. It is worth further exploring the dynamics of depoliticization for I believe they are at the radicle of the issues sustainability attempts to address in the first place.
Bailey and Gayle (2003) identify a series of acts that can be associated with the dynamics of depoliticization, three of which can be observed when examining the monolithic sustainability discourse: (a) eschewing political discourse; (b) removing from the discourse the recognition that social advantages are given to certain constituent groups; (c) not disclosing underlying viewpoints or values. These processes are enmeshed with intricate ideological instances that help to mask the systemic and/or structural nature of a social or cultural matter (Bailey & Gayle, 2003). Further, as Foucault (1984) has stated, “power is everywhere” (p. 93) and it is embodied and enacted in discourse and knowledge. Hence, possessing the analytical tools to name and unpack these discursive ideological formations and power dynamics ought to be a prerequisite to the development of more holistic and critically conscious understandings and applications of sustainability.
Politicizing Sustainability
If we are to envision and construe actual sustainable futures, we must first understand what brought us here, where the roots of the problems lie, and how the sustainability discourse and framework tackle—or fail to tackle—them. To do this is to politicize sustainability, to build a critical perspective of and about sustainability. It is an act of conscientização (or conscientization), to borrow Paulo Freire’s seminal term, of cultivating critical consciousness and conscience (Freire, 1993). It is a call for the necessity to highlight, problematize, and disrupt what I have termed ‘the ethos of unsustainability’ and its interrelated ideologies of dehumanization and exploitation. Ultimately, to embrace a stance that fails to scrutinize the sources of degradation and exploitation is to uphold the power relations that sustain oppressive structures (Freire, 1993; Perry, 2001). I assert that only by delving into the origins of the ‘ethos of unsustainability’ can we really devise sustainability paradigms that are capable of promoting significant socio-cultural transformation.
To comprehend the contours of the predicaments that loom on our horizon as well as their premises and logics, we must go back over 500 years in history to 1492, the year that marks the beginning of the current colonial era and the globalization of the European colonial imaginary (Tuck and Yang, 2012). It is important to note that my intention in doing so is not to provide a sweeping, all-encompassing description of this genealogy/historical process, but rather, to simply name, connect, and emphasize the ideological systems and patterns that have been conceptualized and reconceptualized so as to sustain the ethos of unsustainability and its exploitative power structures. After all, as Freire (1993) has indicated, “to name the world is to change it” (p. 88).
(World) Capitalism: A Technology of European Colonialism
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word ‘colonialism’ stems from the Roman word ‘colonia,’ which meant ‘settlement’ or ‘farm.’ The OED describes it as:
… a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state; the community so formed, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and successors, as long as the connection with the parent state is kept up.
In Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Ania Loomba (2001) points out that this definition fails to link the word ‘colonialism’ to its ideologies of conquest and domination as it eschews any testimonial about those peoples who were already living in the places where the colonies were formalized. She offers another, more nuanced definition that hints to the processes of conquest and control of other peoples’ land and resources (Loomba, 2001, p. 2):
The process of ‘forming a community’ in the new land necessarily meant unforming or re-forming the communities that existed there already, and involved a wide range of practices including trade, plunder, negotiation, warfare, genocide, slavement and rebellions.
Loomba (2001) illuminates that while European colonialisms from the late fifteenth century onwards included a miscellany of patterns of domination and exploitation, it was a combination of these patterns that generated the economic disparity required for the maturation and expansion of European capitalism and industrial civilization; thus, capitalism demands the maintenance of colonial expansion in order to flourish. In spite of colonialism not being a monopoly of capitalism because it could be—and has been—utilized by so-called ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ states as well (Dirlik, 2002), capitalism is a technology of colonialism that has been developed and re-structured over time as a means of advancing European colonial projects (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Colonialism was the instrument through which capitalism was able to reach its status as a global, master frame (Loomba, 2001).
A distinction between the three historical modes of colonialism might help to further elucidate the interrelationships between capitalism and colonialism.
Theories of coloniality as well as postcolonial theories typically acknowledge two brands of colonialism: external colonialism, which involves the appropriation of elements of Indigenous worlds in order to build the wealth and the power of the colonizers—the first world—, and internal colonialism, the bio- and geo-political management of people and land within the borders of a particular nation-state (Tuck and Yang, 2012). A third form, settler colonialism, is more suitable to describe the operationalization of colonialisms in which the colonizers arrive and make a new home on the land (Tuck and Yang, 2012). The settler objective of gaining control over land and resources by removing the local, Indigenous communities is an ongoing structure that relies on private property schemes and coercive systems of labor (Glenn, 2015).
In these processes of colonialism, land is conceived primarily if not exclusively as commodity and property, and human relationships to the land are only legitimized in terms of economic ownership (Tuck and Yang, 2012). These combined colonialist ideologies of commodification and private property are at the core of the various political economies of capitalism that are found in today’s globalized world (O’Sullivan, 2005). By relying on the appropriation of land and commodities through the “elimination of the Native” (Wolfe, 2006, p. 387), European colonialisms wind up restructuring non-capitalist economies so as to fuel European capitalism (Loomba, 2001). The globalization of the world is thereby the pinnacle of a process that started with the formation of the United States of America as the epitome of a Euro- centered, settler colonialist world power (Quijano, 2000).
Inspired by the European colonial imaginary, which transforms differences and diversity into a hierarchy of values (Mignolo, 2000) as well as by economic liberalism, which erases the production and labor contexts from the economy (Straume, 2011), the capitalist imaginary constitutes a broad depoliticization that disconnects its ‘social imaginary significations’ from the political sphere (Straume, 2011). Given that capitalism is imbued with European diffusionist constructs (Blaut, 1989), namely ‘progress,’ ‘development,’ and ‘modernity,’ the depoliticization of this now globalized imaginary is required not only to maintain the resilience of capitalism as a master frame (Straume, 2011), but also to camouflage its interconnectedness to European colonial systems.
Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) study and articulation of the conceptualization and operation of ideologies proves fruitful in terms of understanding how the capitalist imaginary has been used to facilitate processes of globalization that benefit European colonialisms. He argued that ideologies are invaluable when manufacturing consent as they are the means through which certain ideas and meanings are not only transmitted, but held to be true (Gramsci, 1971). Hence, hegemony, the power garnered through a combination of ideologies and coercion, is attained by playing with people’s common sense (Gramsci, 1971) and their lived system of meanings and values (Williams, 1976; see Loomba, 2001). Since subjectivity and ideology are key to the expansionist capitalist endeavor and its interrelated logics of commodification and domination (Gramsci, 1971), it becomes necessary to summon and dissect the colonial ideas and belief systems that have served and continue to serve as its conduits. This can in turn help us to interrogate the value systems and mental models that directly and/or indirectly inform the dominant notion of sustainability (education).
White Supremacist, Heteropatriarchal State Capitalism
As devised and practiced by Europeans and, later, by other Euro-centered powers such as the United States, colonial ideologies of race and racial structures smooth the way for capitalist production (Wolfe, 2006). The Eurocentric construct of race as “a system of discrimination, hierarchy and power” (Olson, 2004, xvii, p. 127-128) conveys colonial experience and infuses the most essential realms of world power and its hierarchies (Quijano, 2000). The state and its many institutions are particularly pivotal in sustaining these racialized ideologies that are obligatory for the development and continuance of capitalism (Loomba, 2001).
Slavery, as the foundation of notions of race and capitalist empire and one of the pillars of white supremacy, marks the concepts of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ as white (Painter, 2010) and renders black people as innately enslaveable, as nothing more than private property (Smith, 2010a). Within the context of the United States, the forms of slavery can and, indeed, have changed—from chattel slavery, to sharecropping, and more recently, to the prison industrial complex, which is still grounded in the premise that black bodies are an indefinite property of the state (Smith, 2010a)—yet, slavery as a logic of white supremacy has persisted (Smith, 2010a). The other two pillars of white supremacy are genocide, which expresses the need for Indigenous Peoples to always be disappearing, and orientalism, which builds on Edward Said’s influential term to explain how certain peoples and/or nations are coded as inferior and, therefore, a constant threat to the security and longevity of imperial states (Smith, 2010a).
The pillars of white supremacy may vary according to historical and geographical contexts (Smith, 2010a). Nonetheless, the centering of whiteness is generally what defines a colonial project. The formation of whiteness, or white identity, as a racialized class orientation stems from political efforts by capitalist elites and lawmakers to divide and conquer large masses of workers (Battalora, 2013). White identity is perhaps one of the most successful colonial and capitalist inventions since it “operates as a kind of property … with effects on social confidence and performance that can be empirically documented” (Alcoff, 2015, p. 23). It is a very dynamic category that can be enlarged to extend its privileges to others when white supremacist social and economic relations are jeopardized (Painter, 2010). It sustains itself, at least partially, by evading scrutiny and shifting the discursive focus to ‘non-whites’ (Silva, 2007). Whiteness is to be made invisible by remaining the norm, the standard, that which ought not to be questioned.
Capitalism therefore depends on and magnifies these racial hierarchies centered on whiteness. And, since race is imbricated and constructed simultaneously with gender, sexuality, ability, and other colonial categories—a conceptualization that serves to obscure white supremacy in state discourses and interventions (Kandaswamy, 2012)—, it is crucial to investigate the other ideologies that also shape class formation processes.
Heteropatriarchy, the combination of patriarchal and heterosexual control based on rigid and dichotomous gender identities—man and woman—and sexual orientations—heterosexual and homosexual—where one identity or orientation dominates the other, is another building block of colonialism. Patriarchy is employed to naturalize hierarchical relations within families and at a larger, societal level (Smith, 2010b). Similarly, heteronormativity paints heterosexual nuclear-domestic arrangements as normative (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill, 2013) and is thus the bedrock of the colonial nation-state (Smith, 2010b). These social and cultural systems that configure heteropatriarchy are then apprehended as normal and natural whereas other arrangements or proclivities are demonized and perceived as repulsive and abnormal (Arvin et al., 2013). Heteropatriarchy is directly linked to colonial racial relations as it portrays white manhood as supreme and entitled to control over private property and to political sovereignty (Glenn, 2015). This indicates that the process of producing and managing gender frequently functions as a racial project that normalizes whiteness (Kandaswamy, 2012).
The laws and policies that were designed to institutionalize the formation of whiteness and white supremacy demonstrate that race, class, and gender are intertwined systems that uphold, constitute, and reconstitute each other (Battalora, 2013). The state and its ideological institutions are therefore major sites of racial struggle (Kandaswamy, 2012); they are responsible for devising and constantly revising the rationale that guides a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal settler colonialism grounded in the need to manufacture collective consent. These discourses are rooted in a pervasive state process that combines coercive state arbitration with societal consent by articulating the ideologies that link racial structure and representation as an effort to reorganize and distribute resources according to specific racial lines (Ferguson, 2012).
Despite increasing globalizing neoliberal urges toward deregulation and privatization, capitalism is still enabled and supported by the state. Its ‘ideological apparatuses,’ the state institutions and ideologies that enable and support the classist structure of capitalist societies (Althusser, 1989), is still fundamental to the expansion of capitalist enterprises; the nation-state is capitalism’s atomic component. The neoliberal state has utilized innovations in methods of social discipline and control along with legal practices to facilitate the process of economic globalization (Gill, 1995). Yet, all these schemes that involve retention of power through dominance and manufactured consent are rooted in divide and conquer strategies that cause those in subservient positions in society to engage in conflicts with one another (Hagopian, 2015). The interlinked logics and ideologies of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy conceived by state capitalism serve to spur dissent between potential opponents and thereby further stratify socio-economic classes. This prevents them from building a unified basis that can present a tangible threat to the status quo (Hagopian, 2015). Colonial and neocolonial powers have repeatedly deployed this stratagem to not only increase their geographical reach, but also to normalize and standardize the economic growth model of capitalism.
Colonialism is hence not just an ancient, bygone incident. The ideologies and processes delineated above demonstrate that it has remained very much in effect within contemporary capitalist and neoliberal frameworks (Preston, 2013). It then becomes critical to investigate how the dominant sustainability discourse may or may not collude in these schemes so that we may conceive of holistic blueprints that beget positive socio-ecological transformation.
Sustainability and Colonialism: Contradiction or Conscious Ideological Maneuver?
By unearthing what I believe are the roots of the predicament that sustainability attempts to heal, namely the ethos of dehumanization and exploitation rooted in divide and conquer systems, it becomes easier to analyze how the colonial political economy of capitalism may conserve hegemonic ideologies that pervade social relations and knowledge generating processes.
Yet, these ideologies and knowledge schemes have been given minimal attention in sustainability (education) scholarship. Even though some academics have contributed to the generation of a more critical comprehension of the interrelationships between capitalism, environmental degradation, and socio-economic justice (see Cachelin, Rose, & Paisley, 2015; Martusewicz, Edmundson, & Lupinacci, 2011; Pellow & Brulle, 2005), this major blindspot in linking sustainability to the colonial imaginary and its legacies prompts the following questions:(awhy are critiques of colonialism and capitalism so infrequent in the sustainability literature?: (a) why are critiques of colonialism and capitalism so infrequent in the sustainability literature?; and (b) how does that impact the discourse of sustainability?
I assert that, in spite of calls for paradigm shifts, the dominant disancourse of sustainability in the West embodies a transnational, globalized standard of economic growth. The promise that economic development can eradicate or at least alleviate poverty and hunger in a sustainable way reflects some of the same goals and values of the optimistic ‘ecological modernization’ concept and perspective, which suggest that the development and modernization of liberal capitalism result in improvements in ecological outcomes (Buttel, 2000). The neoliberal, capitalist overtones of sustainable development not only expose the contradiction inherent in the term, but they also serve to further commodify nature (Cock, 2011). This neoliberalization of nature, which has recently gained a lot of attention in the corporate world and academia under the lexicon of ‘ecosystem services,’ alienates people from their physical surroundings and therefore reinforces the society-nature divide. In short, the sustainability discourse has been appropriated by the capitalist master frame and has transformed most if not all social and ecological relations into financial ones. In lieu of addressing social and environmental justice issues, this form of “green” or “natural” capitalism is responsible for deepening both social and environmental inequalities (Cock, 2011).
Since sustainability (education) is (supposed to be) a praxis-oriented framework that symbiotically combines thought and action for transformative, liberatory ends, it ought to embrace this critique of colonial capitalism and the subsequent neoliberalization of the political economy if it is to oppose and resist hegemonic ideologies in its multiple and diverse manifestations. After all, whether intentionally or not, what matters in the end is that those discourses of sustainability that do not take a stance against colonialism and capitalism only serve to preserve them and the status quo. An understanding of these interdependent systems allows for the development of critical sustainability dialogues and actions that can actually promote the paradigmatic shifts required to redress the socio-cultural problems that are at the heart of the environmental crises. Thus, sustainability can and should be reframed to suggest a process of personal, social, and cultural conscientization that is environmentally sound, i.e. one that follows ecological principles and patterns, instead of upholding the dehumanizing, exploitative, and paradoxical ‘development as growth’ standard of global capitalism.
The following section combines the analyses and critiques presented in the preceding (sub)sections into a single, cohesive, and holistic framework, and further elucidates the distinctions between monolithic sustainability and critical sustainabilities.
The Framework of Critical Sustainability Studies
[T]he political cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisioned as constituting a specific sphere or level of society. It must be conceived as a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition.
- Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 2005
‘Critical sustainability studies,’ while not exactly novel in the sense that it draws on principles, concepts, and positions that are foundational to other frameworks and fields—more specifically, critical Indigenous and ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, queer theory, feminist theory, crip theory, social ecology, political ecology, and cultural studies—, presents itself as an alternative to the sustainability theories and conceptualizations that have failed to engage a truly intersectional analysis of dominant sustainability and environmental discourses, policies, and practices. Its primary objective is to rearticulate sustainability as it has the potential to provide a more holistic conception of conscientization that can bridge the gap between social and economic justice and environmental sustainability.
The framework indicates a crucial double political intervention: to put sustainability and critical theory in conversation; to embed sustainability and ecology into critical theory and vice- versa. As I discussed in the previous section, sustainability has, for the most part, become a hegemonic and, therefore, highly problematic discourse that refuses to transform the complex ideologies and systems that undergird the ethos of unsustainability and the current socio- ecological crises. On the other hand, critical theory, which seeks to extend the consciousness of the human self as a social being within the context of dominant power structures and their knowledge management operations (Kincheloe, 2005), could benefit from incorporating ecological principles and the sustainability notion of ‘place’ into its analytical toolbox. After all, I am as interested in localizing critical knowledge—without disconnecting it from global matters and realities—as I am in putting forth more critical and radical views of sustainability. Hence, this framework brings together what I believe are some of the most robust and cutting edge theories and methodologies to facilitate the deconstruction of the questionable ideologies that guide Western epistemologies like (hegemonic) sustainability.
Critical sustainability studies encourages sustainability scholars and/or educators to move from a defined methodology of problem-solving to the more critical moment of calling something into question (Freire, 1993). By rooting it in conscientization, I propose an orientation to sustainability and sustainable development that politicizes and reveals it as an agenda, discourse, and knowledge system that ought to be contested and rearticulated so that it can incorporate and critically engage with emancipatory understandings of power and power relations. Furthermore, by problematizing and closing the culture-nature divide, it can lay down the groundwork for the paradigmatic changes necessary to heal widespread colonialist alienation from the wider ecological community and to create visions of deep sustainabilities that can engender ecologically sound socio-cultural transformation.
I stress that the notion of sustainabilities is necessary if we have the intention of opposing and displacing the monolithic, top-down and now universalized sustainability agenda, which I refer to as ‘big S Sustainability.’ After all, much like science (Parry, 2006), sustainability is not the property of any one culture or language. There are different ways of seeing and knowing sustainability, so it is time to pluralize it in the literature and discourse. This simple act is an extraordinary intervention in itself because within the colonial imaginary “sustainability” means “Western sustainability.” By centering “novel” understandings of sustainability that are concerned with the specificities of geo-political, cultural, and historical contexts and power relations, sustainability scholars and educators can create theories and visions of sustainability that can lead to the development of more just, place-based cultures and social ecologies.
Critical sustainability studies as I envision it is a consciousness-raising exercise that is particularly useful in educational settings. It indicates methodology as much as content. This praxis-oriented framework can help teachers and students alike to develop consciousness of freedom and to acknowledge authoritarian socio-cultural tendencies that have toxic environmental ramifications. The next section provides an overview of its tenets, the educational philosophy that underpins it, as well as the four preliminary methodological principles and examples of related pedagogical interventions that directly inform the framework and its liberatory, decolonizing ambitions.
Epistemological Position, Preliminary Methodological Principles, and Pedagogical Interventions for Conscientization
The epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical implications of critical sustainability studies are rooted in an ethical and political vision, one that is found in the vast majority of social ecology and political ecology projects: that “the domination of nature by man [sic] stems from the very real domination of human by human” (Bookchin, 2005, p. 1). In other words, we cannot overcome the ecological crisis unless we rid ourselves of the colonial ideologies of domination and hierarchy that permeate all forms of systemic and systematic exploitation and dehumanization. While much easier said than done, critical sustainability studies seeks to conceptualize this vision by building on the following tenets:
That sustainability and sustainability education are not neutral, they either advance or regress justice and Critical sustainability studies strives to promote justice and ecological regeneration.
That an analysis of power is central to understanding and engendering positive socio-cultural Critical sustainability studies strives to be conscious of power relations and to identify power inequalities and their implications.
That it is crucial to foreground the sociocultural identities and experiences of those who have been (most) oppressed – people of color, people with disabilities, queer and transgender people, the working class and the economically poor, undocumented immigrants, Critical sustainability studies acknowledges that just, healthy cultures and societies can only be cultivated if we examine the circumstances that cause and maintain socio-economic marginalization.
That positive socio-cultural transformation comes from the bottom up. Critical sustainability studies emphasizes and advocates a collective and decentralized approach to sustainable change.
And, finally, that the human community is inherently a part of rather than apart from the wider ecological world. Critical sustainability studies affirms that this relational ethos serves as the epistemological foundation of novel, dynamic worlds where healing and justice are at the front and center of our cultural and ecological identities.
In addition to delineating critical sustainability studies as a praxis that is founded on the above tenets, the framework is guided by a critical constructivist epistemological position. Strongly influenced by Freirean pedagogies and the Frankfurt school of thought, critical constructivism endeavors to dissect the processes by which knowledge is socially constructed; in other words, what we know about the worlds we live in always demands a knower and that which is to be known, a contextual and dialectical process that informs what we conceive of as reality (Kincheloe, 2005). This epistemological position problematizes and extends constructivism by illuminating the need for both teachers and students to develop a critical awareness of self, their perspectives, and ways their consciousness have been shaped and/or reshaped by society (Watts, Jofili, & Bezerra, 1997). Critical constructivists attempt to comprehend the forces that construe consciousness and the ways of seeing and being of the subjects who inhabit it (Kincheloe, 1993, as cited in Watts et al., 1997). This political, counter- Cartesianism, and anti-objectivist philosophy (Kincheloe, 2005) is central to an emancipatory approach to sustainability and sustainability education, and is, therefore, at the root of the critical sustainability studies conception of holistic conscientization.
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BOSCASTLE
Three Inns, three Rivers, three Churches, and a most popular harbour. Boscastle is a great day out in Cornwall, with excellent facilities, historic harbour, parking, public toilets, shops, cafes, pubs, restaurants, stunning scenery and breathtaking views.
Boscastle is a medieval harbour and village hidden in a steep sided valley. This natural harbour on the North Cornwall coastline was created by the confluence of three rivers. Boscastle is an excellent base for touring the area, all of Cornwall or North Devon, including moorlands, sheltered wooden valleys and coastal footpaths offering magnificent views.
From the harbour the visitor can explore the beautiful surrounding area with its ancient woods, the old village of Boscastle with cottages dating back to the 15 th Century, the site of the Norman Castle and the medieval strip farming system which is still in operation on the cliff top. And there is much, much more, not least the stunning coastal views.
Boscastle's small harbour now provides shelter to a number of little fishing boats. It was once a hive of activity with trade taking place between Wales, Bristol and the south of England.
From the harbour a lovely valley heads inland; a path follows a fast flowing burbling stream which leads to several hidden churches allowing you to discover the little known connection between North Cornwall and Thomas Hardy.
The Elizabethan Harbour, built in 1584 by Sir Richard Grenville of 'Revenge' fame, has been the scene of many acts of heroism and treachery over the years with privateers and volunteers, smugglers and wreckers.
An hour before low water, with a rough sea that is, you can see and bear a splendid blow hole rendering water and spray across the harbour mouth.
Along this stretch coastline lives the legend of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, the Quest for the Holy Grail. The Chapel of St. James is believed to have been built on the ancient pilgrim route to Compostella in Spain.
The Rivers Jordan, Valency and Paradise flow through the village. The Valency Valley is a fine walk around to the dark and intriguing Minster Church, almost enmeshed by rare trees and shrubs looking for light. Jordan Vale is the steep hill running from the Bottreaux House Hotel to the Wellington. A walk up or down takes one "back in time".
Forrabury Church stands high up to the south of Boscastle and not too far off the coastal path. The site of "Botreaux Castle" is at the top end of the village dating back to 1100 AD, and the views over Boscastle are quite magnificent when approaching from this direction. It' s worth turning around and going back again should you be travelling upwards.
The castle of Bottreaux, from which Boscastle gained its name, has, alas, vanished but it is said that much of the village was built from its stone. Indeed there are stone windows in the Wellington that are reputed to have come from the Castle. A tiny opening and a road near here takes you down past Minster church through a valley to Lesnewth and St. Juliots Church.
Thomas Hardy fell in love with Boscastle when working as an architect on the renovation of St. Juliots Church. He also fell in love in Boscastle, to Emma Gifford, whom he married after a four year courtship—it was not a successful relationship and ended in tragedy after 30 years. Hardy was not daunted but returned to the land he loved and wrote some of his most moving poetry. A copy of "A Pair of Blue Eyes" will describe all the valleys and cliffs up to High Cliff (731 ft), the highest in Cornwall.
The Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall, houses the world's largest collection of witchcraft related artefacts and regalia. The museum has been located in Boscastle for over forty years and is amongst Cornwall's most popular museums.
Boscastle flood of 2004
A flash flood on 16 August 2004 caused extensive damage to the village. Residents were trapped in houses as the roads turned into rivers: people were trapped on roofs, in cars, in buildings and on the river's banks. and the village's visitor centre was washed away.
Two Royal Air Force Westland Sea King rescue helicopters from Chivenor, three Royal Navy Sea Kings from Culdrose, one RAF Sea King from St Mawgan and one Coastguard S61 helicopter from Portland searched for and assisted casualties in and around the village.
The operation was coordinated by the Aeronautical Rescue Coordination Centre (ARCC) based at RAF Kinloss in Scotland in the largest peacetime rescue operation ever launched in the UK. A total of 91 people were rescued and there were no fatalities, only one broken thumb. Around 50 cars were swept into the harbour and the bridge was washed away, roads were submerged under 2.75 m of water, making communication effectively impossible until flood-waters subsided. The sewerage system burst, and for this range of health and safety reasons Boscastle was declared temporarily inaccessible.
Boscastle was flooded again on 21 June 2007 although the scale of destruction was not nearly as serious as in 2004.
False Choices.
Niesamowite aparatura oburzony posłańcy palming żonglerzy uzdrowicieli marzenia,
intimations bréagacha toisí inmheánacha urranna ríthábhachtach enmesh léanta,
suprimindo intenções mancando fraqueza, no entanto, respostas morfina da sociedade congênita predestinada,
orgyilkos belső diminutions sokasága kínzó elmék spurting kiszámíthatatlan gondolatok megdöbbenéssel univerzumában,
urddo arswydus batrymau sylfaenol wersi anhrefnus dagrau bodolaeth anturus dallineb ystyr arwr,
Aranjamente fragmentare repudiere dezbateri convenționale evolutiv neștiințifice nervos examinările hipnoza temerile,
unbewussten Entwicklungen Widersprüche explizite unterschwellige Schwerpunkt Verstärkungen Automatismus Befugnisse ausgeübt,
expanding singularitates vel condiciones oppositiones IGNOBILITAS intellectus theoremata describing quantum theory s praedicit,
ατρόμητος καταρρέει βαρυτικά κρίσιμη τρύπες περιστρεφόμενο αξιοθέατα καύσης μετατρέπει θερμοκρασία επεκτάσεις ηλεκτρόνια του,
動的時間量の力の絶対位置航行高周波数エネルギーを光偏向.
Steve.D.Hammond.
The cover from a publicity brochure, dated 1935, and in French entitled "coup d œil d'ensemble sur l'entreprise" and that describes the massive, vertical integrated company of Fried.Krupp Aktiengesellschaft, Essen. Krupp's have a long history, dating back to 1811 in Essen where they were foremost in the industrial development of the Ruhr and indeed, now merged with Thyssen, their HQ is still in Essen, a city once regarded as a company town.
By 1935 this vast company, manufacturing iron and steel as well as armaments, machinery, locomotives, shipbuilding and vehicles, was already thoroughly enmeshed in the economy of the National Socialist state and they, along with the family members who ran the concern, would be active participants in Germany's rearmament and complicit the country's conduct of the Second World War.
The brochure was gifted to a visiting French businessman ; the rear cover shows one of the company's collieries, one of the shafts and pitheads of the large Zeche Hannibal in neighbouring Bochum. Krupp was a vertically integrated company in that it owned collieries to ensure its own supplies of coal and coke for its iron and steel works. Hannibal dated from the period 1848/54 and the complex closed in 1973. These are the headstocks of Hannibal 1.
Items from the enMeshed and Free Dove hunts
Skin/Shape - [HUSH] Aprile Group Gift in Store
Hair - CATWA Hair Zoey [A] - Biker Fair Gift
Eyes - IKON Soverign Eyes Field - Group Gift In store
Romper - 20.Five Mesh Rompers (Fat Pack) - enMeshed Hunt Gift
Glasses/ring - Little Spring Blossoms - enMeshed Hunt Gift
Earrings - M.Mayako Desigual Groovy Earrings dourado (tinted) - Free Dove Mini Hunt #8
Bag - M.Mayako Spiked Clutch Bag Color Change - Free Dove Mini Hunt #6
Boots - Annie Fringed Boot Carnation - Free Dove Mini Hunt #7 Prism
ASW Blooming Bench - enMeshed Hunt Gift
TDF's Birch Gazebo - enMeshed Hunt Gift
The Artist Shed - Shabby Spring Birdhouse - enMeshed Hunt Gift
By Peddie and Kinnear of Edinburgh, 1868-74. It incorporates the remaining part of the Tolbooth of 1615-29 by Thomas Watson of Old Rayne at the east, and also the City Chambers to Broad Street, added in 1975 by the Aberdeen City Architect's Department. The 1868-74 Town House is a 4-storey and attic, 16-bay, Scots Baronial turreted municipal building with an advanced 6-stage corbelled and bartizaned square-plan, 5-stage clock tower with a spire to the west. The building is situated on a prominent corner site in the city centre and is of grey granite ashlar. It has a base course, string courses, cill courses and a parapet. The ground floor has segmental-arched arcading and there are smaller, round-arched openings at the first floor. There are small gabled roof dormers with finials.
The 17th century Tolbooth is a rubble, square-plan castellated tower with corbelled balustraded parapet and clock faces on 3 sides and which is partly enmeshed in later buildings. Its polygonal steeple has blind round-arched openings and a decorative lead spire. It is internally connected to the 19th century Town House to the west.
Aberdeen Town House, including municipal offices, court house, Tolbooth and city chambers, is a significant example of civic architecture and is of outstanding importance because of its fine and influential Scots baronial design with exceptional interior scheme, conceived by the highly respected architects Peddie and Kinnear. The imposing scale of the building with its landmark tower dominates the east end of Union Street in Aberdeen city centre. It incorporates an early 17th century Tolbooth, one of the oldest buildings in Aberdeen and its integration with the newer buildings provides a connection between the old burgh of Aberdeen and the new-found wealth of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The partnership of Edinburgh architects of John Dick Peddie and Charles George Hood Kinnear existed between 1856 and 1878 and it continued as a leading practice in Scotland up to the Second World War. Kinnear's earlier association with David Bryce was a significant influence on the practice. The partnership was very successful from the beginning and there were numerous commissions for high status public and commercial buildings, schools and churches across Scotland. Aberdeen Town House is considered to be one Peddie and Kinnear's best buildings.
Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.
Today however we are not at Cavendish Mews. Instead, we have travelled east across London, through Bloomsbury, past the Smithfield Meat Markets, beyond the Petticoat Lane Markets* frequented by Lettice’s maid, Edith, through the East End boroughs of Bethnal Green and Bow, and through the 1880s housing development of Upton Park, to East Ham. It is here that we have followed Edith and her beau, grocery delivery boy Frank Leadbetter, to the Premier Super Cinema**, where the pair are treating themselves to one of their favourite Sunday pleasures: a feature film with a newsreel and cartoon before the main event.
Even though spring is finally in the air, it is cold out on the streets of London today, with a biting cold wind, so the warmth of the cinema’s foyer is a welcome respite from the weather outside after the journey up the High Street from the East Ham railway station. The foyer is brightly lit and cheerful. The cinema, renovated in 1922, isn’t called a picture palace for nothing, and no expense was spared with thick red wall-to-wall carpets covering the floors and brightly coloured up-to-date Art Deco wallpaper covering the walls, upon which the latest films are advertised in glamourous and colourful posters. Throughout the space, button backed*** armchairs and settees are arranged in intimate clutches around small tables, allowing patrons like Edith and Frank to await the commencement of their session in comfort. It is at one of these clusters that Edith sits patiently in her black three-quarter length coat and black dyed straw cloche decorated with lilac satin roses and black feathers, with her green leather handbag at her feet as she awaits her beau.
“Here we are then,” Frank says cheerfully. “Tea for my best girl.” He places two utilitarian white cups in saucers from the nearby cinema kiosk on the table that he and Edith are occupying in front of a vase of fresh, fragrant flowers. He takes his seat opposite her, enjoying the luxury of his plush seat as he does. “And,” He fishes into his coat pocket withdrawing a purple box and presents it to his sweetheart with a flourish. “A box of Gainsborough Dubarry Milk Chocolates****!”
“Oh Frank!” Edith exclaims in delight, her cheeks flushing red as she speaks. “You are good to me.”
“Nothing too good for my best girl!” Frank assures her.
Edith smiles as she looks at the beautifully decorated box featuring a lady with cascading auburn hair highlighted with gold ribbons, a creamy face and décollétage sporting a frothy white gown and gold necklace. She traces the embossed gold lettering on the box’s lid with reverence.
“You’re being very solicitous today, Frank.” Edith remarks as she picks up her teacup, staring at Frank as she takes a sip of hot, milky tea from her cup.
“Am I?” Frank replies in a question, his voice full of nonchalance as he picks up his own cup.
“You are, Frank.” Edith opines. “You know you are.”
“How so, Edith?”
“Well for a start, you agreed to come and see ‘Peter Pan’*****.” Edith replies, placing her cup back into her saucer.
“I like ‘Peter Pan’, Edith!” Frank retorts. “I have read the book, I’ll have you know.”
“Yes, but when you may have one of your last chances to see the ‘Thief of Bagdad’****** with swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks, and you demur to my choice...” Edith does not complete her sentence, but stares across at her sweetheart.
“Oh fie the ‘Thief of Bagdad’!” Frank scoffs. “It will still be running here for a week or two yet. We can see it next Sunday.” He waves Edith’s repark away with a dismissive hand. “Anyway, I chose the last film we saw, ‘Chu-Chin-Chow’*******, and that had enough swashbuckling with villain Abou Hassan being stabbed by Zharat and his forty thieves done away with.”
Edith looks sceptically at Frank. “And this box of chocolates on top of our slap-up tea at Lyon’s Corner House******** in Tottenham Court Road?”
“What?” Frank retorts with incredulity. “Can’t a chap spoil his girl once in a while?”
“Oh, please don’t misunderstand me, Frank!” Edith quickly pipes up with a smile. “I’m not complaining!”
“I should hope you wouldn’t be.”
“But I can’t help being a little bit suspicious.” Edith arches her eyebrow over her right eye and purses her pretty pale lips.
“Well I like that!” Frank answers back, folding his arms akimbo across his chest in defence.
“This wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that I went to see a clairvoyant the week before last, would it, Frank?” Edith fishes. “And that I didn’t see you last Sunday, because you had to take care of your granny?”
“Clairvoyant? What clairvoyant, Edith?” Frank asks, pleading innocence.
“Oh come on Frank!” Edith laughs. “You know Mrs. Boothby loves a gossip!” she goes on, mentioning Lettice’s charwoman********* who comes to help Edith with all the hard graft around Cavendish Mews a few days a week. “You can’t imagine us not talking, Frank.”
Ignoring her gentle chuckle, Frank continues to decry his irreproachability. “I don’t know what you and Mrs. Boothby talked about.”
“She told me that she saw you Tuesday week ago, the same day I went to see Madame Fortuna the clairvoyant in Swiss Cottage**********, and she told you that I was going to see her. There’s no use trying to say she didn’t, because I know that for all her tall tales and gilding of the lily***********, Mrs. Boothby wouldn’t do that with a story about you.”
Frank unfolds his arms and picks up his teacup, taking a sip of tea. “Alright, so I did meet her that day, Edith, and yes, she told me that you were going to see a clairvoyant, although her description of her was perhaps a little bit less kind than that.”
“Oh yes.” Edith chuckles. “She told me that it was a lot of mumbo-jumbo too, Frank.”
“Well, I don’t know if I’d disagree with her, Edith.” Frank says in concern, cocking an eyebrow. “You know I am a believer in facts, not fiction.”
“Well, I happen to be a believer in Madame Fortuna, and what she had to say.” Edith replies defiantly. “Which I don’t believe to be fiction.”
“And what else did Mrs. Boothby disclose about our meeting in Binney Street, Edith?” Frank asks.
“Oh, not so very much, Frank.” Edith replies with a smirk. “Just that you were out delivering groceries when she saw you.”
“And?” Frank queries.
Edith sighs. “And that she told you how distracted I’ve been about not having a commitment from you about getting married.”
“Which is utter pish-posh************, Edith, and well you know it.” Frank says seriously. “You know I’m committed to marrying you. You’re the only girl for me.”
“I know that, Frank. But Mrs. Boothby also said that you should be a bit more demonstrative with your dedication.”
“I doubt Mrs. Boothby would have used either the word ‘demonstrative’ or ‘dedication’.” Frank laughs.
“Maybe not, Frank.” Edith concurs, chuckling as well. “But she made the point clear, as I’m sure she did with you, Frank.”
“Indeed, she did.”
“So, this is you being more demonstrative of your dedication to me.” Edith says with a smile, toying with the box of chocolates, turning the pretty packaging over in her careworn hands.
Frank thinks for a moment ruminating over in his mind as to whether to tell his sweetheart about Mrs. Boothby’s suggestion that he get on with asking Edith’s parents for their daughter’s hand in marriage, which he did do last Sunday on his afternoon off: a visit which resulted in both George and Ada Watsford readily agreeing to the match. Then he thinks otherwise. Frank may not yet be able to afford a gold wedding band like those which he and Edith saw in the window of Schwar and Company************* along Walworth Road in the South London suburb of Elephant and Castle************** a bit over a month ago, but he has almost finished paying off a silver ring intended for Edith at a smart jewellers shop along Lavender Hill***************, not far from his boarding house in Clapham Junction. Although simple, Frank is having his and Edith’s names engraved on the inside of the band, along with the year 1925. He still wants to surprise Edith with his proposal and the ring, so he decides not to say anything about visiting her parents, knowing that after his conversation with them, that they will not steal Frank’s thunder and give the game away, although it will be far harder for Ada, who is very close to her daughter.
Frank raises his hands. “Guilty as charged, Edith.”
“Oh Frank!” Edith exclaims, a smile of delight breaking out across her lips. “You really are sweet!”
Edith reaches out her hand to him across the polished wooden surface of the pedestal table. Frank stretches out his own hand and allows her to enmesh her fingers with his and squeeze them. The action is only small, but so intimate and full of emotion that Frank takes great comfort from it. Even though Edith does not know his grand plans yet, he knows that everything is alright between the two of them now, and any doubts Edith may have had about his commitment to her have been dispelled by his actions, Mrs. Boothby’s consoling words with Edith at cavendish Mews, whatever prediction Madame Fortuna the clairvoyant made, or most likely a mixture of all of these things. Frank smiles reassuringly across at his sweetheart, who returns his smile wholeheartedly.
“I keep telling you, Edith.” Frank murmurs as his cheeks colour. “You’re not only my best girl, you’re my only girl.” He returns her gentle squeeze with one of his own.
“Well, just you keep telling me that, Frank.” Edith replies softly, looking across at Frank with loving eyes a-glitter with emotion. “I may know it, but I’ll never tire of hearing it.”
“With pleasure, Edith, my best and only girl.” Frank answers.
Just then, the double doors near to them open and with the voluble burble of cheerful chatter, people begin to file out the door in pairs or small groups. Edith and Frank watch the passing parade of mostly women and a smattering of men in their Sunday best as they exit the cinema auditorium, all murmuring about the film they have just seen. As the crowd thins to a trickle with the stragglers leaving the theatre and the vociferous burble of voices dissipates, Frank turns to Edith.
“By the by, what did the clairvoyant, madame whatshername tell you, anyway?”
“Never you mind, Frank Leadbetter!” Edith replies with an air of mystery as she stands up, snatching up the box of chocolates as she does. “She told me the truth. That’s all you have to worry about.”
Frank gets up and follows Edith as they join the crowd of chattering cinema goers as they go into the brightly lit auditorium, and make their way to their plush red velvet seats.
Inside the theatre a fug of cigarette smoke fills the auditorium, a mixture of that created by the previous audience and a few new patrons who just start to light up before the house lights go down. The space is filled with the faint traces of various perfumes, which mix with the stronger traces of cigarettes, fried food, and body odour. Around them quiet chatter and the occasional burst of a cough or a laugh resound. It feels cosy and safe. At the front of the theatre, in a pit below the screen, a middle aged woman whom they have come to recognise by sight from their many trips to the Premier Super Cinema, appears dressed in an old fashioned Edwardian gown with an equally outmoded upswept hairdo that went out of fashion before the war. She starts to play the upright piano with enthusiasm, dramatically banging out palm court music for the audience before the beginning of the newsreel.
Settling in their plush red velvet seats in the middle of the auditorium, Frank winds his arm around Edith’s shoulder. “I love you, my best girl.”
Behind them the projector whirrs to life as the lights dim. Suddenly the screen is illuminated in blinding, brilliant white as the pianist in the pit below the screen starts to play the playful opening bars to the music to accompany Peter Pan.
“I love you too, Frank Leadbetter.” Edith replies as she opens her box of Gainsborough Dubarry Milk Chocolates and proffers the open end to Frank so that he may help himself to one of the delicious, foil wrapped chocolates inside.
*Petticoat Lane Market is a fashion and clothing market in Spitalfields, London. It consists of two adjacent street markets. Wentworth Street Market and Middlesex Street Market. Originally populated by Huguenots fleeing persecution in France, Spitalfields became a center for weaving, embroidery and dying. From 1882, a wave of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in eastern Europe settled in the area and Spitalfields then became the true heart of the clothing manufacturing district of London. 'The Lane' was always renowned for the 'patter' and showmanship of the market traders. It was also known for being a haven for the unsavoury characters of London’s underworld and was rife with prostitutes during the late Victorian era. Unpopular with the authorities, as it was largely unregulated and in some sense illegal, as recently as the 1930s, police cars and fire engines were driven down ‘The Lane’, with alarm bells ringing, to disrupt the market.
**The Premier Super Cinema in East Ham was opened on the 12th of March, 1921, replacing the 800 seat capacity 1912 Premier Electric Theatre. The new cinema could seat 2,408 patrons. The Premier Super Cinema was taken over by Provincial Cinematograph Theatres who were taken over by Gaumont British in February 1929. It was renamed the Gaumont from 21st April 1952. The Gaumont was closed by the Rank Organisation on 6th April 1963. After that it became a bingo hall and remained so until 2005. Despite attempts to have it listed as a historic building due to its relatively intact 1921 interior, the Gaumont was demolished in 2009.
***Button back upholstered furniture contains buttons embedded in the back of the sofa or chair, which are pulled tightly against the leather creating a shallow dimple effect. This is sometimes known as button tufting.
****Starting in the Edwardian era, confectioners began to design attractive looking boxes for their chocolate selections so that they could sell confectionary at a premium, as the boxes were often beautifully designed and well made so that they might be kept as a keepsake. A war erupted in Britain between the major confectioners to try and dominate what was already a competitive market. You might recognise the shade of purple of the box as being Cadbury purple, and if you did, you would be correct, although this range was not marketed as Cadbury’s, but rather Gainsborough’s, paying tribute to the market town of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, where Rose Bothers manufactured and supplied machines that wrapped chocolates. The Rose Brothers are the people for whom Cadbury’s Roses chocolates are named.
*****Peter Pan is a 1924 American silent fantasy adventure film released by Paramount Pictures, the first film adaptation of the 1904 play by J. M. Barrie. It was directed by Herbert Brenon and starred Betty Bronson as Peter Pan, Ernest Torrence as Captain Hook, Mary Brian as Wendy, Virginia Browne Faire as Tinker Bell, Esther Ralston as Mrs. Darling, and Anna May Wong as the Indian princess Tiger Lily. The film was seen by Walt Disney and inspired him to create his company's 1953 animated adaptation. The film was celebrated at the time for its innovative use of special effects (mainly to show Tinker Bell) according to Disney's 45th anniversary video of their adaptation of Peter Pan. In 2000, this film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
******The Thief of Bagdad is a 1924 American silent adventure film directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Douglas Fairbanks, and written by Achmed Abdullah and Lotta Woods. Freely adapted from One Thousand and One Nights, it tells the story of a thief who falls in love with the daughter of the Caliph of Baghdad. In 1996, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"
*******Chu-Chin-Chow is a 1923 British-German silent adventure film directed by Herbert Wilcox and starring Betty Blythe, Herbert Langley, and Randle Ayrton. Abou Hassan and his forty thieves descend on a small Arabian town on the wedding day of Omar and the beautiful Zharat and kidnap them. Abou sells Zahrat to Kasim Baba, the miser and money lender of Bagdad, while posing as Prince Constantine. Later, Abou poses as the wealthy Chinese prince Chu-Chin-Chow, and bids on Zahrat when she is placed at auction. She pierces his disguise and exposes him. He robs the other bidders of their wealth and escapes with Zahrat. Promising that she will live among untold wealth, he sets her free. After she finds Omar, Abou takes them to his treasure cave, making good on his promise. Ali Baba, brother of Kasim, accidentally discovers the cave and helps himself to the treasure. He then goes for aid to free Zahrat. Kasim, led by his greed, also comes to the cave but is captured and killed by Abou. Zahrat, now free, returns to Bagdad. Ali Baba gives a great feast. Abou appears as a merchant with forty jugs of oil, in which are hidden his forty thieves. Zahrat discovers the deception and, assisted by a powerful slave, they get rid of the hidden thieves. Left alone, Abou is denounced and the multitude turn on him. Cornered, he is stabbed by Zahrat who then returns to her village and finds happiness with Omar.
********J. Lyons and Co. was a British restaurant chain, food manufacturing, and hotel conglomerate founded in 1884 by Joseph Lyons and his brothers in law, Isidore and Montague Gluckstein. Lyons’ first teashop opened in Piccadilly in 1894, and from 1909 they developed into a chain of teashops, with the firm becoming a staple of the High Street in the United Kingdom. At its peak the chain numbered around two hundred cafes. The teashops provided for tea and coffee, with food choices consisting of hot dishes and sweets, cold dishes and sweets, and buns, cakes and rolls. Lyons' Corner Houses, which first appeared in 1909 and remained until 1977, were noted for their Art Deco style. Situated on or near the corners of Coventry Street, Strand and Tottenham Court Road, they and the Maison Lyonses at Marble Arch and in Shaftesbury Avenue were large buildings on four or five floors, the ground floor of which was a food hall with counters for delicatessen, sweets and chocolates, cakes, fruit, flowers and other products. In addition, they possessed hairdressing salons, telephone booths, theatre booking agencies and at one period a twice-a-day food delivery service. On the other floors were several restaurants, each with a different theme and all with their own musicians. For a time, the Corner Houses were open twenty-four hours a day, and at their peak each branch employed around four hundred staff including their famous waitresses, commonly known as Nippies for the way they nipped in and out between the tables taking orders and serving meals. The tea houses featured window displays, and, in the post-war period, the Corner Houses were smarter and grander than the local tea shops. Between 1896 and 1965 Lyons owned the Trocadero, which was similar in size and style to the Corner Houses.
*********A charwoman, chargirl, or char, jokingly charlady, is an old-fashioned occupational term, referring to a paid part-time worker who comes into a house or other building to clean it for a few hours of a day or week, as opposed to a maid, who usually lives as part of the household within the structure of domestic service. In the 1920s, chars usually did all the hard graft work that paid live-in domestics would no longer do as they looked for excuses to leave domestic service for better paying work in offices and factories.
**********Swiss Cottage is an area in the London Borough of Camden. It is centred on the junction of Avenue Road and Finchley Road and includes Swiss Cottage tube station. Swiss Cottage lies north-northwest of Charing Cross. The area was named after a public house in the centre of it, known as "Ye Olde Swiss Cottage".
***********The term “gilding the lily” came about as a mistaken version of a line from King John, which was “to gild refined gold, to paint the lily.”, and means to adorn unnecessarily something that is already beautiful or perfect.
************Pish-posh is a phrase used in British slang to express disagreement or to say that something is nonsense. The exact origin of this phrase is not precisely documented, but it is considered a colloquial and informal expression that has been in use for many years. It is often used to express scepticism or disagreement in a light hearted manner.
*************Established in 1838 by Andreas Schwar who was a clock and watch maker from Baden in Germany, Schwar and Company on Walworth Road in Elephant and Castle was a watchmaker and jewellers that is still a stalwart of the area today. The shop still retains its original Victorian shopfront with its rounded plate glass windows.
**************The London suburb of Elephant and Castle, south of the Thames, past Lambeth was known as "the Piccadilly Circus of South London" because it was such a busy shopping precinct. When you went shopping there, it was commonly referred to by Londoners, but South Londoners in particular, as “going up the Elephant”.
***************Lavender Hill is a bustling high street serving residents of Clapham Junction, Battersea and beyond. Until the mid Nineteenth Century, Battersea was predominantly a rural area with lavender and asparagus crops cultivated in local market gardens. Hence, it’s widely thought that Lavender Hill was named after Lavender Hall, built in the late Eighteenth Century, where lavender grew on the north side of the hill.
This beautiful Art Deco cinema interior is not all it appears to be, for it is made up entirely with pieces from my miniatures collection.
Fun things to look for in this tableau include:
Edith’s green leather handbag I acquired as part of a larger collection of 1:12 artisan miniature hats, bags and accessories I bought from an American miniature collector Marilyn Bickel. The umbrella comes from Melody Jane’s Doll House Suppliers in the United Kingdom.
The pedestal table , vase of flowers, white teacups and saucers and two flounced red velvet chairs all come from Kathleen Knight’s Doll’s House in the United Kingdom, whilst the dainty box of Gainsborough Dubarry Milk Chocolates, which has been beautifully printed, on the table’s surface, comes from Shepherd’s Miniatures in the United Kingdom.
The chrome Art Deco smoker’s stand in the foreground is a Shackman miniature from the 1970s and is quite rare. I bought it from a dealer in America via E-Bay. The black ashtray inside it is an artisan piece, the bowl of which is filled with “ash”. The tray as well as having grey ash in it, also has a 1:12 cigarette which rests on its lip (it is affixed there). The match box in the stand was made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire.
The Art Deco pedestal stand in the foreground has been made by the high end miniature furniture maker, Bespaq, whilst the vase of flowers on it comes from Falcon Miniatures in the United States, who are well known for their realistic and high quality miniatures.
The posters around the cinema walls were all sourced by me and reproduced in high quality colour and print.
The geometric Art Deco wallpaper is beautiful hand impressed paper given to me by a friend, who did so in the hope that I would find a use for it in the “Cavendish Mews – Lettice Chetwynd” series.
The thick and bright red carpet is in fact a placemat which I appropriated in the late 1970s to use as a carpet for my growing miniatures collection. Luckily, I was never asked to return it, and the rest of the set is long gone!
HAEGUE YANG
IN THE CONE OF UNCERTAINTY
NOV 2,2019-APR 5,2020
In the Cone of Uncertainty foregrounds Haegue Yang’s (b. 1971, Seoul) consistent curiosity about the world and tireless experimentation with materializing the complexity of identities in flux. Living between Seoul and Berlin, Yang employs industrially produced quotidian items, digital processes, and labor-intensive craft techniques. She mobilizes and enmeshes complex, often personal, histories and realities vis-à-vis sensual and immersive works by interweaving narrative with form. Often evoking performative, sonic and atmospheric perceptions with heat, wind and chiming bells, Yang’s environments appear familiar, yet engender bewildering experiences of time and place.
The exhibition presents a selection of Yang’s oeuvre spanning the last decade – including window blind installations, anthropomorphic sculptures, light sculptures, and mural-like graphic wallpaper – taking its title from an expression of the South Florida vernacular, that describes the predicted path of hurricanes. Alluding to our eagerness and desperation to track the unstable and ever-evolving future, this exhibition addresses current anxieties about climate change, overpopulation and resource scarcity. Framing this discourse within a broader consideration of movement, displacement and migration, the exhibition contextualizes contemporary concerns through a trans-historical and philosophical meditation of the self.
Given its location in Miami Beach, The Bass is a particularly resonant site to present Yang’s work, considering that over fifty percent[1] of the population in Miami-Dade County is born outside of the United States, and it is a geographical and metaphorical gateway to Latin America. Yang has been commissioned by the museum to conceive a site-specific wallpaper in the staircase that connects the exhibition spaces across The Bass’ two floors. This wallpaper will be applied to both transparent and opaque surfaces to accompany the ascending and descending path of visitors within the exhibition. Informed by research about Miami Beach’s climatically-precarious setting, the wallpaper, titled Coordinates of Speculative Solidarity (2019), will play with meteorological infographics and diagrams as vehicles for abstraction. Interested in how severe weather creates unusual access to negotiations of belonging and community, as well as the human urge to predict catastrophic circumstances, the work reflects a geographic commonality that unconsciously binds people together through a shared determination to face a challenge and react in solidarity.
Yang’s exhibition encompasses galleries on both the first and second floors of the museum and exemplifies an array of Yang’s formally, conceptually ambitious and rigorous body of work. Considered an important ‘Light Sculpture’ work and one of the last made in the series, Strange Fruit (2012-13) occupies one of the first spaces in the exhibition. The group of anthropomorphic sculptures take their title from Jewish-American Abel Meeropol’s poem famously vocalized by Billie Holiday in 1939. Hanging string lights dangling from metal clothing racks intertwined with colorfully painted papier-mâché bowls and hands that hold plants resonate with the poem’s subject matter. The work reflects a recurring interest within Yang’s practice, illuminating unlikely, less-known connections throughout history and elucidating asymmetrical relationships among figures of the past. In the story of Strange Fruit, the point of interest is in a poem about the horrors and tragedy of lynching of African-Americans in the American South born from the empathies of a Jewish man and member of the Communist party. Yang’s interests are filtered through different geopolitical spheres with a keen concentration in collapsing time and place, unlike today’s compartmentalized diasporic studies.
Central to In the Cone of Uncertainty is the daring juxtaposition of two major large-scale installations made of venetian blinds. Yearning Melancholy Red and Red Broken Mountainous Labyrinth are similar in that they are both from 2008, a year of significant development for Yang, and their use of the color red: one consists of red blinds, while the other features white blinds colored by red light. With its labyrinthine structure, Red Broken Mountainous Labyrinth bears a story of the chance encounter between Korean revolutionary Kim San (1905-1938) and American journalist Nym Wales (1907-1997), without which a chapter of Korean history would not survive to this day. Yearning Melancholy Red references the seemingly apolitical childhood of French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras (1914-1996). While living in French Indochina (present-day Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos), Duras and her family experienced a type of double isolation in material and moral poverty, by neither belonging to the native communities nor to the French colonizers, embodying the potentiality for her later political engagement. Despite their divergent subject matter, both works continue to envelop an interest in viewing histories from different perspectives and the unexpected connections that arise. By staging the two works together, what remains is Yang’s compelling constellation of blinds, choreographed moving lights, paradoxical pairings of sensorial devices – fans and infrared heaters – and our physical presence in an intensely charged field of unspoken narratives.
A third space of the exhibition will feature work from Yang’s signature ‘Sonic Sculpture’ series titled, Boxing Ballet (2013/2015). The work offers Yang’s translation of Oskar Schlemmmer’s Triadic Ballet (1922), transforming the historical lineage of time-based performance into spatial, sculptural and sensorial abstraction. Through elements of movement and sound, Yang develops an installation with a relationship to the Western Avant-Garde, investigating their understanding in the human body, movement and figuration.
Observing hidden structures to reimagine a possible community, Yang addresses themes that recur in her works such as migration, diasporas and history writing. Works presented in In the Cone of Uncertainty offer a substantial view into Yang’s rich artistic language, including her use of bodily experience as a means of evoking history and memory.
Haegue Yang lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Seoul, South Korea. She is a Professor at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Yang has participated in major international exhibitions including the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018), La Biennale de Montréal (2016), the 12th Sharjah Biennial (2015), the 9th Taipei Biennial (2014), dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012) and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) as the South Korean representative.
Recipient of the 2018 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, she held a survey exhibition titled ETA at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in the same year, which displayed over 120 works of Yang from 1994-2018. Her recent solo exhibitions include Tracing Movement, South London Gallery (2019); Chronotopic Traverses, La Panacée-MoCo, Montpellier (2018); Tightrope Walking and Its Wordless Shadow, La Triennale di Milano (2018); Triple Vita Nestings, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, which travelled from the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2018); VIP’s Union, Kunsthaus Graz (2017); Silo of Silence – Clicked Core, KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017); Lingering Nous, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); Quasi-Pagan Serial, Hamburger Kunsthalle (2016); Come Shower or Shine, It Is Equally Blissful, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2015); and Shooting the Elephant 象 Thinking the Elephant, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015). Forthcoming projects include the Museum of Modern Art (October 2019), Tate St. Ives (May 2020) and Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (2020).
Yang’s work is included in permanent collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; M+, Hong Kong, China; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, South Korea; Tate Modern, London, UK; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA. Her work has been the subject of numerous monographs, such as Haegue Yang: Anthology 2006–2018: Tightrope Walking and Its Wordless Shadow (2019); Haegue Yang: ETA 1994–2018 (2018); Haegue Yang – VIP’s Union (2017); and Haegue Yang: Family of Equivocations (2013).