Guava

Entrepreneur Kelly Ifill presents banking opportunity

by ARIAMA C. LONG Report for America Corps Member / Amsterdam News StaffMay 9, 2024

Guava, a banking hub for Black entrepreneurs and small business owners founded by entrepreneur Kelly Ifill, is as unique as its name suggests. 

Ifill launched Guava in 2021 with a vision of putting small Black businesses on a pathway that would lead to generational wealth and economic change. The company takes inspiration from her family’s entrepreneurial experiences with racial disparities and unequal access to capital in the U.S. 

Ifill, 37, grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with her grandmother and mother, who would later become deeply instrumental in pushing her toward a better education and opportunities. Like many in the neighborhood, her people originally hail from Trinidad. Her grandmother was a proud entrepreneur who owned a cleaning business. Ifill said she and her relatives all took cues from her grandmother, seeing her as a role model who normalized the idea of working for oneself early on in their development.

“My mom created a space for me to explore as a child,” said Ifill about her mother’s influence. “Especially as first-generation Americans, a lot of us don’t necessarily have [that] right. We have to be a doctor or lawyer. She obviously had high expectations for me, but I was definitely able to explore different things and try things that sparked the foundation of the creative, allowing me to be an entrepreneur.” 

Ifill joked that as a child, even though she had many positive role models who were business owners in her family, she was wary of dealing with the difficulties that came with running a business as a Black woman. “I was like, ‘That looks hard, I want a job,’” she said with a laugh. “But here I am.”

Ifill initially became an educator in the city’s public and charter schools, taking an interest in technology along the way. She went on to earn an MBA at Columbia University. After business school, she worked in the venture capital sector  for a few years, in educational tech, helping connect startups and emerging companies with funds. 

“Again, it came back to my grandmother, my cousins, my uncles, and knowing that more entrepreneurs looked like them than the folks that were getting millions of dollars,” Ifill said about the disparities she witnessed. She began working on laying the groundwork for Guava as a result. Her ultimate goal was to use her bank and networking system to connect local Black businesses to critical resources that they need to survive and thrive.

The company name reflects her cultural origins. “I love guava specifically, and when we were doing the naming exercise, it started off as a little bit of an inside joke,” she said, explaining how her company came to be named after a tangy tropical fruit. “And the more that we stuck with the name, it really fit what we do and how we do it. I built Guava to serve Black and Brown entrepreneurs and as a fruit, it signified the process of growing together and that sense of community.”

Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member who writes about politics for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting .

URL

https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2024/05/09/entrepreneur-kelly-ifill-presents-banking-opprotunity/

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The truth of law enforcement groups in the usa, is all have a history of severe abuses which when you parallel them to the crimes they prevent, i argue far outweighs what they prevent, sequentially making them dysfunctional. The tragedy is the populace in the usa who actually need aid by law enforcement is a fraction of a percentage of the whole but their mouthpiece is amplified by the communication channels of the wealthy in the usa who know false problems make great news. 

A police officer took a teen for a rape kit.

Then he assaulted her, too.

Hundreds of law enforcement officers have been accused of sexually abusing children over the past two decades, a Post investigation found

A teen who was sexually abused by a New Orleans police officer.

Story by Jessica Contrera, 

Jenn Abelson and 

John D. Harden

Updated March 14, 2024 at 5:54 p.m.Originally published March 14, 2024

The 14-year-old did not want to go to the emergency room. Her mother had begged her. Her therapist had gently prodded. And now there was a police officer in her living room.

“You really should think about it,” he said.

He introduced himself as Officer Rodney Vicknair. His New Orleans Police Department cruiser was waiting outside, ready to take her to the hospital for a rape kit. Early that morning, the girl said, a 17-year-old friend had forced himself on her.

Under the police department’s rules, a case like this was supposed to be handled from the start by a detective trained in sex crimes or child abuse. But on this afternoon in May of 2020, it was Vicknair, a patrol officer with a troubled past, who knocked on the girl’s door.

He tried to coax her into changing her mind. “If I’m a young man that has done something wrong to a young lady and she doesn’t follow up and press the issue,” Vicknair said as his body camera recorded the conversation, “then I’m gonna go out and do it to another young lady.”

“And it’s gonna be worse, maybe, the next time,” Vicknair said, “because I’m gonna think in my head, ‘Oh, I got the power. I can go further this time.’ ”

The girl didn’t want that. She just wanted this to be over.

She didn’t know it was only the beginning. Four months later, police would arrest a man for sexually assaulting the girl. But it wouldn’t be her teenage friend. It would be Officer Rodney Vicknair.

The day the 14-year-old met 53-year-old Vicknair was the day the officer began a months-long grooming process, prosecutors would allege. Within hours of meeting the girl, Vicknair wrapped his arm around her while they took a selfie. He let her play with his police baton. He joked with her about “whipping your behind.” He showed her multiple photos of a young woman dressed only in lingerie.

Officer Vicknair talks to teen at the hospital

0:23

The Washington Post blurred the teen’s face to protect her identity. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

Americans have been forced to reckon with sexual misconduct committed by teachers, clergy, coaches and others with access to and authority over children. But there is little awareness of child sex crimes perpetrated by members of another profession that many children are taught to revere and obey: law enforcement.

A Washington Post investigation has found that over the past two decades, hundreds of police officers have preyed on children, while agencies across the country have failed to take steps to prevent these crimes.

At least 1,800 state and local police officers were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022, The Post found.

Abusive officers were rarely related to the children they were accused of raping, fondling and exploiting. They most frequently targeted girls who were 13 to 15 years old — and regularly met their victims through their jobs.

The Post identified these officers through an exclusive analysis of the nation’s most comprehensive database of police arrests at Bowling Green State University, as well as a review of thousands of court documents, police decertification records and news reports.

In case after case, officers intentionally earned the trust of parents and guardians, created opportunities to get kids alone and threatened repercussions for broken silence. Unlike teachers and priests, they did it all while wielding the power of their badges and guns.

Chuck Wexler, who leads the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy and training organization, said the number of officers charged with these crimes is “very troubling.”

“Whatever we can do to prevent this and hold those accountable will help restore the trust in the police,” Wexler said.

But while many school systems and churches have created practices and policies to root out predators, law enforcement agencies have largely treated child sexual abuse as an isolated problem that goes away when an officer is fired or prosecuted — rather than an always-present risk that requires systemic change.

There is no national tracking system for officers accused of child sexual abuse. At a time when police departments across the country face staffing shortages and are desperate to hire, there are no universal requirements to screen for potential perpetrators. When abuse is suspected, officers are sometimes allowed to remain on the job while investigations of their behavior are left in the hands of their colleagues.

In the New Orleans Police Department, child sexual abuse has been a problem before. The city recently paid $300,000 to settle a lawsuit over its 1980s Police Explorers program led by a lieutenant who was accused of sexually exploiting 10 boys. The case was investigated by the head of NOPD’s juvenile sex crimes unit — who in 1987 was convicted of child sex crimes, too.

In more recent years, two officers remained on the force after they were accused of abusing young girls. Then they sexually assaulted other children. They are among six NOPD officers who have been convicted of crimes involving child sexual abuse since 2011.

Vicknair is the latest. His case reflects larger problems that police departments confront in conducting background checks, identifying red flags and responding to complaints of inappropriate behavior. To reconstruct what happened in New Orleans, The Post obtained hundreds of internal law enforcement records, hours of video footage and dozens of text messages.

Vicknair was hired in 2007 despite a record that included multiple arrests and a conviction for battery on a juvenile. His sexually charged interactions with the girl he drove to the hospital, though witnessed by another officer, went unreported to superiors. He frequently visited the girl’s home in the summer of 2020, telling new cops he was training that they should stay in the car while he went inside alone. And when concerns about Vicknair’s behavior were reported to the department, police officials allowed him to remain on duty for a week. During that week, the girl said, Vicknair sexually assaulted her.

Reached by phone last year, Vicknair declined to comment for this story. In November of 2022, he pleaded guilty to violating the girl’s civil rights, admitting that he locked her in his truck and touched her under her clothing.

The city of New Orleans and its police department also declined to discuss the case with The Post, citing pending litigation. The victim and her mother filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city and its superintendent of police in 2021.

In court filings, the city has repeatedly denied that the police department is responsible for the girl’s abuse, arguing that Vicknair was not on duty at the time of the assault he pleaded guilty to and was not acting on behalf of NOPD “while performing any of the inappropriate actions alleged against him.”

Soon, the case will go before a jury. A trial over what, if anything, the girl is owed by NOPD was scheduled to begin March 18. But hours after The Post published this story online, a judge ordered that the trial be delayed.

With the permission of the victim and her mother, The Post is identifying the girl only by her middle name, Nicole.

At 14, Nicole was barely 100 pounds. She hadn’t yet gotten braces. A large stuffed giraffe still watched over her bedroom.

She’d spent her preteen years in custody battles between divorced parents, in a domestic violence shelter with her mom and in a hospital for self-harm. She believed all adults just wanted to tell her what to do. But on the day Vicknair persuaded her to go to the emergency room and then sat with her and her mother for hours, Nicole felt like he actually wanted to listen.

“If you ever just want to shoot, talk, text me,” he told her as his body camera continued recording. “You having problems, just need somebody to talk to, if I’m working I’ll come swing by and talk to ya, okay? ... We’ll go get some ice cream in McDonald’s or something.”

Nicole saved Vicknair’s number in her phone as “Officer Rodney.”

“Now hit call so I know it’s you and I can save you as a contact,” Vicknair said before leaving. He lifted his phone and aimed his camera down at her. Her bare legs were dangling off the hospital bed.

“No,” Nicole objected, raising her hand to block his view.

Vicknair took the picture anyway. “There we go,” he said. “Perfect.”

icole was just a year old when Vicknair applied for the job that would make it possible for him to meet her and other children.

“I always wanted to be a police officer in New Orleans,” Vicknair wrote on his NOPD application in 2006. “I truly love helping + serving my community.”

He was far from the typical police recruit. He’d worked as an EMT and a hospital security guard, but he was about to turn 40 — an age that would have disqualified him from joining some departments at the time. At 5-foot-11, he weighed 237 pounds. He had lifelong tremors that regularly made his hands shake.

A department spokesperson told The Post that, today, NOPD has some of the most stringent hiring requirements in the state of Louisiana. Since entering into a consent decree with the Justice Department in 2012, NOPD has been working to reform its policies and practices.

But at the time Vicknair applied, NOPD was in disarray following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Public outcry over officers’ actions had resulted in intense scrutiny from the outside and low morale on the inside. Recruiters needed to find people willing to wear the badge. According to the Justice Department, NOPD began lowering hiring standards and performing less rigorous background checks.

In his application, Vicknair disclosed to the department that he’d previously been charged with disturbing the peace and aggravated assault. Just the year before he applied, deputies from the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office were called when Vicknair reportedly brandished a knife at his ex-girlfriend and beat a man she was dating.

Citing the “potential for future violence, as well as threats made by Mr. Vicknair in the presence of deputies,” law enforcement seized Vicknair’s knife and his gun before taking him to jail, according to a police report included in his background check.

The charges were eventually dropped. Vicknair’s ex-girlfriend, Denise Trower, told The

that she asked authorities to stop pursuing the case because she was afraid of what Vicknair might do if she didn’t. During their relationship, she said, Vicknair choked her and held a loaded gun to her head.

“He had threatened that he would make sure somebody did something to my son,” Trower said.

Without calling Trower to learn more about what happened, the NOPD background investigator wrote that the arrest “should not reflect poorly” on Vicknair’s application.

The incident was not the only time Vicknair had been charged with a serious crime. In 1987, he was convicted in Ascension Parish of simple battery on a juvenile — a part of his past he did not disclose to NOPD. He was sentenced to $50 in fines or 10 days in jail.

Three of Vicknair’s family members told The Post that he was charged after he had what they described as a sexual relationship with a minor. Vicknair was 20 years old. The girl, whom The Post is not identifying, was a preteen at the time. She did not respond to interview requests.

There is no indication that the background investigator looked into the simple battery conviction; he didn’t appear to know it existed. Though The Post obtained a record of Vicknair’s conviction from the court, the background investigator reported in his notes that Vicknair had no criminal record in Ascension Parish.

Records show the NOPD background investigator also did not contact anyone in Vicknair’s family.

Vicknair’s sister, Kim Vogel, said that if she had been contacted, she would have told the department not to hire her brother. She described him as loyal, generous and eager to help other people. But she also said his history of anger and violence still gives her nightmares.

“I don’t think he should have been a police officer, and I hate even bringing that out there,” Vicknair’s sister said. “But I also blame that on the police department, because I know they do background checks, they do psychological tests and all that. And they missed all of it.”

Vicknair did undergo a computerized voice-stress analysis, a type of lie detector test.

“Did you intentionally withhold any information from your employment application?” the examiner asked.

Vicknair answered no. The NOPD investigator rated his application as “acceptable.” He was hired onto the force in March 2007.

During the next 12 years, he was internally investigated for allegations of misconduct a dozen times, according to NOPD records.

In eight of the cases, which included accusations of unauthorized force, theft of $1,000 and drug possession, the department found no evidence of misconduct, could not determine whether the wrongdoing occurred or deemed his actions justified. Vicknair was not disciplined.

Records show he was formally punished twice for reckless driving and twice for acting inappropriately toward women who claimed he had mocked or harassed them while on duty. The most severe consequence he received was a five-day suspension.

In 2016, he was promoted to become a mentor to new officers while he patrolled the neighborhood where he would meet Nicole.

After the swabbing was over, after she stopped hyperventilating, after she stayed at the hospital to ensure she didn’t hurt herself, Nicole was discharged. Then she called Officer Vicknair.

“Let me know when back home and I’ll come check on you,” Vicknair texted the 14-year-old on May 26, 2020. He’d started messaging her the night he met her, by sending a GIF of a waving puppy.

In the weeks that followed, he began showing up at her house in uniform. He’d sip a Dr Pepper while talking about the headlines on Fox News. He’d lecture Nicole about staying out of trouble.

Nicole’s mother, Rayne, witnessed it all. Rayne — The Post is identifying her by her first name to protect Nicole’s privacy — had grown up with a sheriff’s deputy for a grandfather. She trusted law enforcement and raised her daughter to feel the same way.

So Rayne encouraged Vicknair to follow up on his idea to take Nicole out for ice cream. She called him when Nicole was having a breakdown. She invited him to visit Nicole on her 15th birthday.

Rayne didn’t worry when she discovered that the 53-year-old officer was talking to her daughter on the phone late at night that summer. She was grateful that Nicole, who had become silent and surly in the weeks following her sexual assault report, was finally opening up to someone. Someone who could be a role model.

“She would be like, ‘Oh, I had the best talk with Rodney last night, Mom. He’s so nice,’” Rayne remembered.

The interest Vicknair was taking in her daughter was so different from how NOPD first responded. On the morning in May when Rayne discovered her daughter on the couch with her 17-year-old friend, two other patrol officers were the first to be dispatched to a report of attempted rape at her house.

It was 5:21 a.m. The teenage boy had already fled. Records show the officers spent 11 minutes at the house before leaving. They appeared to take no further action.

Their response was exactly what the federal government had spent years trying to fix at NOPD. As a part of the 2012 consent decree, the Justice Department’s investigators found that officers were repeatedly mishandling reports of sexual assault. NOPD’s investigations were “seriously deficient, marked by poor victim interviewing skills, missing or inadequate documentation, and minimal efforts to contact witnesses or interrogate suspects.”

Years later, NOPD’s special victims unit continued to be understaffed and overwhelmed. According to a recent Justice Department report, the unit closed out 3 percent of cases in 2022.

Several hours after the first officers left Nicole’s house, her therapist called to report the assault a second time. NOPD sent Vicknair and two other patrol officers to her house. Then a special victims detective, Kimberly Wilson, arrived. Body-camera footage shows she spent a total of four minutes with Nicole before saying she had somewhere else to be.

She left Vicknair and another officer to drive and sit with the teen at the hospital. Wilson stopped by later that afternoon, but didn’t interview Nicole until two days later.

“I told him to stop,” Nicole said about the 17-year-old. “He said ... ‘No, let me get it over with.’ ”

Wilson declined to comment on her investigation. There is no record that Wilson ever interviewed the 17-year-old, and it is unclear from the case file whether Nicole’s rape kit DNA was tested by the crime lab.

Instead of progress in her case, Nicole got visits from Vicknair.

The first time Vicknair came over when her mother wasn’t home, Nicole remembered, he asked if she owned any booty shorts.

“What was running through my mind at that time was ‘Oh, he’s just a guy,’ ” Nicole said. “You know, that’s how guys think.”

The more he came over and called, the more he learned about what Nicole had been through in her life. Rayne told the officer that her daughter was the “textbook poster child for daddy issues.” Nicole told him about sneaking into bars on Bourbon Street while her mom worked nights — and about the older men who bought her drinks there.

Vicknair began warning her, Nicole said later, that he could report her mom for child endangerment and get her thrown in jail. He told Nicole he could arrest anyone. He whacked her with his baton.

She’d been taught to be afraid of strangers who might want to kidnap her, not adults in positions of authority who increasingly tested her boundaries.

So she told no one when Vicknair’s texts shifted from “Lion King” GIFs to tongue emojis. Or when he confided in her about his own childhood trauma, then asked her to send nudes. Or when he went from telling her he wanted to touch her to actually doing it.

“I passed your house earlier,” Vicknair texted Nicole on Sept. 7, three and a half months after he met her.

“Stalker,” she replied.

“You like it,” he texted back.

Later, she would wish she had told him to leave her alone. “I just kept going along with shit,” Nicole remembered. “He knew where we lived, you know?”

Vicknair would admit to investigators after he was arrested that he visited Nicole at her house at least a dozen times.

But it wasn’t anyone within NOPD who raised concerns about Vicknair’s behavior. It was Nicole’s mother, who in September found a photo on her daughter’s phone. In it, Vicknair’s tattooed arms were wrapped around Nicole, pressing the back of her body into the front of his.

Nicole told her mom only that Vicknair once followed her in his police cruiser while she was on a run, yelling “Nice ass!” out the window. Rayne consulted with Nicole’s therapist. They both worried there was more going on.

How, Nicole’s mother began to wonder, do you report the police to the police?

On Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, nearly four months after Vicknair met Nicole, the head of the New Orleans Police Department received a text.

“It’s about potential sexual abuse of a minor by an officer,” read the message to then-Superintendent Shaun Ferguson.

The text was sent by Susan Hutson, then the city’s independent police monitor, a civilian oversight agency created after Hurricane Katrina. Hutson’s job included listening to citizens’ complaints about police and trying

When the interview was over, investigators did not immediately seek a warrant for Vicknair’s arrest. Instead, they asked Nicole to call the officer who she had just said assaulted her — and ask him if he would do it again.

She was deeply uncomfortable. But she did as she was told. She pulled up “Officer Rodney” on her phone.

[Excerpt from call]

Nicole:

Can we do what we did in your truck again?

Vicknair:

Um.

In the background, a girl’s voice can be heard saying, ‘Love you, Dad!’

Nicole:

Can we?

Vicknair:

I don’t know if it’s your phone or my phone, it’s breaking up.

[Vicknair ended the call.]

Vicknair already knew that Nicole was going to the child advocacy center for a forensic interview that day. Nicole told him the interview was about another man, one she’d met on Bourbon Street.

Now, Nicole feared, Vicknair knew what was going on.

Less than an hour after Vicknair hung up on Nicole, he got into his Toyota Tundra, the same vehicle Nicole said she’d been assaulted in two nights earlier. He was followed by an officer who’d been sitting outside his house, conducting surveillance.

The officer quickly lost sight of Vicknair’s truck.

When the truck returned, it was gleaming, with fresh gloss on the tires and exterior. The officer wrote in his surveillance report that it appeared Vicknair had gone to get his vehicle detailed.

If there was any evidence — or underwear — remaining in the truck, it had just been washed away.

to get something done about them.

Often, that meant contacting NOPD’s version of internal affairs, known as the Public Integrity Bureau. While some police departments turn to outside agencies to conduct investigations when one of their officers is suspected of committing a serious crime, NOPD investigates its own.

Hutson notified Ferguson and then-integrity bureau leader Arlinda Westbrook that same Friday evening. Sgt. Lawrence Jones, a criminal investigator with the public integrity bureau, did not begin looking into Vicknair until the following Monday, Sept. 21. (Jones and Westbrook did not respond to interview requests from The Post. Ferguson, who retired in 2022, declined to comment.)

Jones first spoke with Nicole and her mother that Monday. Sitting in on the call was Stella Cziment, the deputy police monitor at the time.

Listening to Nicole talk, Cziment later told The Post, she could tell the girl was afraid to speak honestly about Vicknair. She called him her friend, and was clearly trying to protect him. They weren’t certain that sexual abuse had already occurred. But the red flags about the officer’s behavior were obvious, Cziment said. She assumed that NOPD would act to remove Vicknair from duty as quickly as possible.

“What we were scared of was the amount of access he had to the child,” Cziment said.

But Vicknair was not removed from active duty that day, even after Jones, the investigator, visited Nicole’s house and saw the photo of Vicknair, in uniform, pressing Nicole into his body and texts in which the officer called her sweetie, honey, buttercup, baby girl and boo.

Vicknair remained on patrol the next day, even after Jones reviewed the body-camera footage from when Vicknair took Nicole to the hospital and showed her photos of a nearly naked woman.

The entire week, Vicknair kept his job, his badge, his gun. Not until Friday, Sept. 25, seven days after the text to the head of police, was Nicole interviewed by someone specially trained in child abuse at the New Orleans Child Advocacy Center.

“I try to keep him happy,” Nicole told the forensic interviewer, according to a videotaped recording obtained by The Post. “He’s a cop, so it’s not like he’s going to get in trouble for any of this.”

The last time she’d seen Vicknair, she said, was just two days earlier. He’d come to her house while on duty, then returned after his shift. She went out to his truck and got inside.

“Did something happen?” the interviewer asked.

Nicole squirmed in her chair, her Converse high-tops shaking.

“I just can’t say it,” she said.

“I’m not gonna put words in your mouth,” the interviewer said.

“Fine,” Nicole said. “He stuck his finger in my, in my — ”

She pointed downward. At 15, she was too embarrassed to name her own body parts. The interviewer asked her one more time, and then her story came rushing out. How weird it felt. How scared she was.

She tried to hug him goodbye, she said, but then, “He stuck his finger in one more time and was like, ‘Just one more taste.’ ”

That night in Vicknair’s truck, Nicole said, he asked her for a favor. He wanted to keep her underwear.

He still had them, she said.

By 2 a.m. the next day, Vicknair was inside an interview room, handcuffed to a table.

“Rodney, first of all, I want to thank you for sitting down and talking with us,” said Jones, seated across from his colleague.

“I didn’t have much choice,” Vicknair balked.

Sheriff’s deputies had knocked on the door of Vicknair’s home just before 1:30 a.m. on Sept. 26.

Vicknair came out in only his boxer briefs and lit a cigarette. He kept smoking as they cinched cuffs behind his back.

When he learned during his recorded interview that his arrest was related to Nicole, he laughed.

“On her?” he said. “Okay.”

Over the next hour and a half, Vicknair switched between denials and explanations for what he couldn’t deny. Yes, he’d gone to Nicole’s house just before midnight two nights earlier — but only because she’d asked him to sniff her to see if she smelled like weed, he said. Yes, he had sexual photos of her on his phone — but he’d only taken screenshots of her Snapchats “in case something ever did happen,” he said. Yes, he told her which of her thongs were his favorite and that she had “a nice ass for your age.”

“If that was inappropriate, then so be it. It was inappropriate,” he said. “But there was never nothing sexual.”

Vicknair was adamant that he did not penetrate her or take her underwear.

“I care about her the same way I cared about several other girls and boys that I’ve given my business cards to and talked to them,” Vicknair said.

He accused Jones of trying to “make a case or something of a disturbed child.”

“The issue is that we have a 52-year-old, 15-year, veteran police officer who’s seeing … this 15-year-old girl regularly,” Jones said.

“That ain’t nothing,” Vicknair said. “I talk to a lot of younger people four or five times a week.”

At no point during the interview did Jones ask for the names of the other young people Vicknair claimed to be talking to, including a runaway girl he mentioned specifically. There is no indication in the internal case records that NOPD ever conducted a review of other children Vicknair had interacted with.

“We just hope,” Jones told Vicknair, “none of them come calling here.”

Charged with sexual battery, indecent behavior with a juvenile and malfeasance in office, Vicknair spent a week in jail before posting a $55,000 bond.

He submitted a letter of resignation to the police department in January 2021.

His wife of five years filed for divorce. He suffered three heart attacks and a stroke.

The Justice Department, which took over his prosecution from Orleans Parish, charged him with deprivation of rights under the color of law, the same federal charge often filed against officers who use excessive force. In November 2022, Vicknair agreed to plead guilty.

In his plea, he signed a statement admitting that he made sexual comments, requested and received sexually explicit photos and touched Nicole’s genitals under her clothing without her consent inside his locked vehicle.

In exchange, prosecutors asked the judge to send him to prison for seven years.

On March 8, 2023, Vicknair shuffled into a federal courthouse for his sentencing hearing using a cane. For the first time since the night in his truck, he was in the same room as Nicole.

She was 17 years old. She wouldn’t stick with therapy. She and her mother fought so often that she’d moved with a boyfriend to California. There, she reasoned, she would never have to see an NOPD cruiser again.

She spent her days sleeping and watching documentaries about sex crimes and murders, telling herself that what happened to her wasn’t as bad as what happens to other girls. She spent her nights playing “Call of Duty” online with strangers, nearly all of them boys and men. She shot and swore and screamed at them, and reminded herself that none of them knew where she lived.

“Is there something you would like to say to the court?” the judge, Lance Africk, asked her.

She stood at a microphone in a stiff white button-down shirt she’d purchased just hours before. She hoped it would make the judge take her seriously.

All day, people had been telling her how “strong” she was. She thanked them, saying nothing about her recurring nightmare in which uniformed, tattooed arms were wrapping around her again. Or the knife she kept in her closet in case they ever did.

“To her, he appears as a helping hand, but little does she know he had other plans,” Nicole said, reading a poem she’d written as her victim impact statement.

Vicknair, coughing behind a mask, was watching her.

“He tears her down and makes her suffer, yet she comes out 10 times tougher. Now every night the light stays on, scared he will return. She hopes he has had a change in heart and that he has learned.”

The judge told her she was strong. He told her mother not to feel guilty. Then he began to narrate, in graphic detail, everything Vicknair had done to Nicole.

“I guess he was thinking: Who is going to believe a 14- or 15-year-old over me, a New Orleans police officer?” the judge said. “He served himself, not this young, trusting child.”

But the child he was talking about was no longer there. The moment the judge began describing it all again, Nicole ran out of the courtroom in tears.

While she hovered over a bathroom sink, trying not to vomit, the judge announced that he was refusing to accept the plea. He believed seven years was not enough time. He told both sides to come back the next week.

When they did, Africk agreed to a new deal. He sentenced Vicknair to prison for 14 years, Nicole’s age when he met her.

Two months later, Nicole was scrolling on her phone when she started to shake. She rubbed her eyes, thinking she must be imagining the notification that had just appeared on her screen.

A Snapchat account with a familiar name was trying to contact her.

A bitmoji of a dark-haired man was waving at her, surrounded in confetti.

“Officer Rodney,” the notification said, “added you as a friend.”

Vicknair was not yet in prison. The judge had granted him time to seek medical care before he turned himself in.

Vicknair’s heart problems had become something more. After he was sentenced, doctors had discovered a fast-growing tumor in his brain. It appeared that Vicknair was trying to contact Nicole from his hospital bed. She did not reply.

Vicknair had two brain surgeries before his brother and ex-wife drove him to Massachusetts to report to federal prison. He continued to deny to his family members that he had sexually abused Nicole. He continued to be paid police retirement benefits of more than $2,700 per month, records show. Louisiana has no law that automatically disqualifies police officers convicted of serious crimes from receiving their pensions.

Days after Nicole’s 18th birthday, Vicknair was rolled into prison in a wheelchair.

Most of his sentence was spent at a federal prison medical facility in North Carolina, where he received chemotherapy and radiation.

He served less than six months. Vicknair died on Jan. 1, 2024.

Nicole was at a restaurant in California when she heard the news from an attorney in her civil rights lawsuit. She wanted to feel relieved. Instead, she kept thinking about how little time Vicknair served. And how, before he died, he’d given a deposition in her civil case. Under oath, he returned to denying that he’d ever assaulted her.

Now, it felt like not a single adult was taking responsibility for what happened to her. If she gave up her lawsuit against the city, no one ever would.

She’d already endured a day-long deposition in December, when an attorney representing New Orleans asked her questions such as, “Was there any sexual meaning to him hitting you with the baton?” In January at a settlement conference, she listened to the lawyers debate just how much her trauma was worth.

The same city that had once charged Vicknair with sexual battery and malfeasance in office was now claiming his assault was “wholly unrelated” to his job.

But a judge disagreed, ruling in February that the city was, in fact, liable for Vicknair’s actions. It would still be up to a jury to decide how much New Orleans owed Nicole — and whether NOPD was at fault for hiring Vicknair in the first place.

As the March trial date crept closer, Nicole’s stomach started to ache. The pain kept getting worse, until it was so agonizing that she couldn’t sleep. But for days, she refused to go to the emergency room.

When she finally gave in, she reminded herself that this ER was different. That she was no longer 14. That Vicknair was not beside her. She still hyperventilated through every exam.

She learned that what could have been a relatively minor issue had become a serious kidney infection. It would take weeks for her to recover.

While she waited for the pain to ebb, her attorneys in New Orleans prepared for her trial by deposing the city’s police officials. Why, they asked, had the city hired someone with a history of arrests? Why had no one flagged an officer repeatedly returning to the home of a child who had reported a sexual assault? Why hadn’t Vicknair been pulled from active duty as soon as the photo surfaced of his body pressed against Nicole’s?

They wanted to understand what NOPD was doing to ensure that what happened to Nicole didn’t happen to another child. But when the sergeant in charge of all department policies was asked that question, he could not cite a specific policy or training method that had changed because of the case.

“You don’t know of anything NOPD has done differently,” the attorney confirmed, “to prevent another Officer Vicknair?”

The sergeant’s answer was one word:

“Correct.”

URL

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2024/new-orleans-police-child-sexual-abuse-rodney-vicknair/

Weed Gone Wild: 34 Cannabis Shops — But Just One Licensed — on the Lower East Side
New York’s marijuana legalization was supposed to bring order and justice to the market. Instead, one year later, it’s created a confusing potpourri of vendors.
BY ROSALIND ADAMS 
JAN. 5, 2024, 6:00 A.M.

A map shows unlicensed Lower East Side cannabis shops near state sanctioned smoke shop Conbud. Credit: Illustration by Naomi Otsu

This article is a collaboration between New York Magazine and THE CITY.

On a recent Friday afternoon, a line of people wrapped around a corner of Delancey Street waiting for a turn to get into Conbud, one of the city’s 15 legal weed dispensaries. It’s the kind of scene New York State lawmakers imagined would be commonplace when they legalized cannabis in March 2021: customers neatly queuing up at a limited number of suppliers. 

But instead such crowds are a rarity outside Conbud, and this particular one wasn’t even there for the weed. People were there to see Mike Tyson, the boxer, who grinned and flexed with fans inside to promote the New York launch of his cannabis brand. 

On line, I met Vinay, 23, who had invited a group of his college buddies to the event. “My roommate sent me the email, and my friends are in town, so why not?” Vinay told me. “We love weed, and Mike Tyson is cool,” one of his friends interjected. 

While we chatted, dispensary staff moved through the line with iPads to take orders (a purchase was required to snap a photo with Tyson). Vinay told me he had never been to Conbud before. He said he usually bought weed from one of the smoke shops a couple blocks away on Clinton Street. None of those are licensed to sell cannabis products, though. When I mentioned this, Vinay shrugged.

“I guess if I knew it was illegal, I wouldn’t go, but you don’t realize,” he said. 

There are, in fact, only 43 legal retailers across the state, including delivery operations — and they are all run by people impacted by cannabis charges. When lawmakers legalized pot, they intended to give those harmed by prohibition a head start in the market. But a year after the first legal store debuted near Astor Place, the pace of licensed dispensary openings has been painstakingly slow. 

Just to open their doors, legal dispensaries had to overcome a gamut of regulatory hurdles that came with a steep price tag. Anthony Crapanzano, who has a dispensary license in Staten Island, said he has racked up about $1.6 million in expenses so far, including $200,000 in legal fees, and is still not open. Coss Marte, the owner of Conbud, said he’s spent more than $1 million getting ready to open. 

Once in business, state-approved weed shops can only carry products cultivated by New York farmers and are subject to strict regulations on how they market their goods. Neon colors, bubble letters, and colloquial references to cannabis itself are barred from store advertisements. Everything must be tested — and taxed.

While the cannabis-impacted entrepreneurs waded through Albany’s new marijuana bureaucracy, an estimated thousands of unlicensed smoke shops popped up in New York City. Because there’s little oversight, the exact number remains unclear. Around Conbud alone, rival smoke shops and weed bodegas line the blocks, flouting the rules with their white fluorescent lights and bright signage that make them so instantly recognizable as cannabis stores with names like Zaza City and Smoke Kave.

These unlicensed shops can be cheap and easy to set up (some keep just a small amount of product in the store in case they’re raided). And unlike their legal counterparts, the unlicensed stores don’t pay state taxes on cannabis sales, which means their weed is often cheaper. Some of them try to get around the regulations by operating as private membership clubs where pot isn’t sold outright but “gifted” or held onto for a friendly patron. Others are bodegas that dedicate a small amount of shelf space to cannabis products alongside the usual offerings of pints of ice cream and cans of Arizona iced tea. 

The rapid rise of unlicensed shops has alarmed lawmakers who are trying a number of solutions to deter them. This past February, the Manhattan DA sent out letters warning more than 400 smoke shops that they could be evicted for unlicensed activity. In June, the Office of Cannabis Management and the Tax Department began the first of hundreds of armed raids of shops around the state, seizing product and posting vibrant warning signs in store windows. The city has filed lawsuits against dozens of shops in Manhattan for allegedly selling cannabis to minors. The New York City sheriff, too, has been inspecting unlicensed shops and seizing their goods. While a few shops have shuttered, the sheer volume of stores is proving to be a difficult test of these efforts.

THE CITY and New York counted at least 33 stores selling cannabis within a few blocks of Conbud on the Lower East Side. We visited five of the stores in the neighborhood to learn more about how the weed market has developed a year after the first legal sale of cannabis in the state. 

Conbud – The Sole Licensed Dispensary

Conbud, which finally opened in October, is the only licensed dispensary in the neighborhood so far. Owner Coss Marte, who has three felonies for dealing drugs, was awarded a special license back in April. But after a lawsuit challenged the legality of the license program, a court injunction prevented stores from opening for months. Marte’s plans for a summer launch were derailed. Meanwhile, he and other licensees were racking up expenses paying pricey New York rents for idle storefronts. 

In the meantime, the delay gave unlicensed stores an opportunity to gain more of a foothold in the neighborhood, Marte acknowledges. “The market has already matured in the Lower East Side specifically. Some of the stores around here have already been open two or more years,” he told me. “Consumers are just thinking that this is what it is, not that the stores are illegal.”

Inside, the shop borrows a lot from Marte’s personal story: There are product displays reminiscent of the milk crates he used to sit on outside a bodega selling drugs. A full-screen television shows a loop of Marte at a local farm tending to cannabis plants that would soon be harvested and sold in the store, an employee told me. On one wall, the text of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, is posted in bold letters. Conbud-brand T-shirts with the law’s text are available for sale, too. The effect is twofold: Marte is selling customers on the store’s cannabis products, like gummies marketed for sleep or energy and locally grown cannabis flower, but more broadly on the idea that legalization can be a form of reparation to those harmed by the war on drugs. 

One of the most popular products is an ounce of Hudson Cannabis that’s grown upstate and runs for $185 — the best deal in the store but not as inexpensive as what some of the unlicensed shops offer.

A week before the Tyson event, Conbud threw a party to celebrate the launch of the Dr. Midtown brand, owned by a former legacy operator who goes by Nas. He told me he used to run a 1,200-person delivery route in Manhattan and was arrested in January 2021, right before the law changed. “I grew up in Queens, and it’s just been constant harassment,” he said. To see his brand now in stores, he added, “is exactly what we’ve been fighting for.”  Promotional flyers for the party were printed with both Marte’s and Nas’s old mug shots along with the slogan “From Legacy to Legal.”

Part of the goal in hosting events like the one with Tyson and the launch party for Dr. Midtown is to educate people, Marte said. People living in the neighborhood see the long lines or hear the music and stop by to see what’s going on. That gives Marte an opportunity to explain that Conbud is the only legal cannabis store in the Lower East Side, he said. 

“The more events we do, the more the community is aware that, ‘Hey, we’re here and we’re legal.’” 

Flame Zone – A Shiny Smoke Shop

Shortly after Conbud opened in October, a flashy new smoke shop called Flame Zone Convenience appeared right across Delancey Street. The store employs several of the marketing techniques that legal stores are specifically prohibited from using. Its signage is written in a neon-green rounded bubble font. A sign advertised a grand-opening sale of an eighth of an ounce of weed for $20 (less than half what an eighth of Mike Tyson’s brand costs across the street), while another says the vape shop has the lowest prices around. If there was any doubt the store sold weed, there’s a towering inflatable joint just inside and a second one suspended from the ceiling. 

Before Flame Zone opened, the business here was called Gee Vape and Smoke Shop. In February, Gee Vape was one of more than 400 stores the Manhattan DA warned in a letter could be evicted for selling cannabis. The store later closed. Flame Zone, according to the employee at the counter, is a different business from Gee Vape. “This is a new owner. She changed everything,” he told me. 

While the shop may have a shiny new exterior, the property owner has been the same since 2007, city records show. Enforcement efforts have started to increasingly target landlords, not just the stores. But so far those measures have done little to deter a landlord from simply leasing the space to a new smoke shop. The volume of shops is simply too high. 

In mid-November, shortly after Flame Zone opened, the Office of Cannabis Management and the New York State Tax Department raided the store. The two agencies are one part of the enforcement effort to curb the illegal shops. Last year, the state inspected 350 storefronts and seized more than $50 million worth of product, according to its latest figures LOOK BELOW. Though a pink slip from the raid is still posted in the door, it’s open for business.

Behind the counter, there are vape cartridges and pre-rolls branded with major California companies like Stiizy and Jungle Boys. House pre-roll joints are three for $20. When I ask the shopkeeper where the weed is from, he says, “Here, it’s in-house.” Only New York–grown weed is permitted in legal shops, and it remains illegal to transport cannabis across state lines. But for years California brands have faced allegations of “backdooring” their product to other states, and a number of websites sell counterfeit packaging from California brands down to a randomized serial number and QR code. That makes it hard for customers to know what they’re really buying. 

Despite the bright lights and the low prices, the store still gets little foot traffic on a chilly December evening. In a half-hour or so, I see only one woman go into the store. She popped in while waiting for her order at Wingstop next door, she told me. When I asked what made her choose that particular store, she shrugged. “It’s just the closest one,” she said. 

MetroBud – A Private Members Club

Owned by Joe and Jason Coello, two brothers from Queens, MetroBud on Allen Street operates as a private membership club. Blue velvet ropes guide customers to the entrance, and an employee checks IDs before letting anyone inside. The shop differentiates itself by encouraging people to stay awhile. Inside, two televisions loaded with video games are available to rent, and there are a few couches where you can just smoke and chill. MetroBud also hosts events like a weekly yoga class. 

Joe Coello started planning to open the store as soon as legalization passed in March 2021, reasoning that a membership model was a way to get started without a state license. “We were trying to operate as above board as we could,” said Coello. “We were operating legally, as far as we were concerned.”

When the cannabis law passed, it included protections for people possessing weed as well as giving it away to their friends. Interpreting the latter to mean that they may legally “gift” weed to patrons or possess weed on behalf of members, cannabis membership clubs like MetroBud began popping up across the city. At one club I visited, customers pay for a photograph — and then are “gifted” cannabis in return. 

There are no specific regulations that govern how the clubs operate because the distinction is not sanctioned by the state regulatory agency and there’s no specific license category for the model. 

On many days, MetroBud seems to function like any other weed store. Daily membership is effectively free, so anyone with ID can walk in off the street and make a purchase. On a recent Saturday night, there was little foot traffic and just one customer inside fixated on playing Mortal Kombat. The store carries various branded MetroBud strains of weed from New York farmers as well as other brands. Prices are divided by tiers and at the low end can beat prices that legal shops like Conbud offer.

The membership-club interpretation of “gifting” hasn’t been tested in court, but last year, the Office of Cannabis Management sent out letters warning operators that running unlicensed shops could potentially jeopardize their ability to get a license in the future. The letters specifically stated that a membership-club model was not allowed. 

Despite the state’s warnings, Coello still hopes to go legal and has applied twice for retail licenses since opening MetroBud. “It would be nice just to not have to look over our shoulder,” he said. 

Meanwhile, Coello defends his business model — and the crop of unlicensed shops in the neighborhood. “I believe in a free market,” he said. “As long as they’re putting out products that are safe and don’t have heavy metals, mold, or pesticides in them, I don’t see a problem with it.” 

Allen Convenient Exotic – Twice Raided

Walk down Allen between Delancey and Broome Streets, and you’ll find two more smoke shops near MetroBud: Green Apple Cannabis Club and Allen Convenient Exotic. Red, green, and purple lights from the trio of stores overwhelm passersby. As I stood outside on a recent evening, I watched a couple point to the fluorescent lights. “Why do all these places look so ugly?” one asked. 

Cannabis was legalized just one year into the pandemic, as restaurants and retail shops were struggling to stay afloat. Some smoke shops have opened in place of establishments that stopped paying rent in the pandemic. The space occupied by Allen Convenient Exotic had been a smoke shop for years, selling items like vapes and glass pipes and cigarettes. But Green Apple Cannabis Club used to be a clothing store, and MetroBud was previously a pop-up space hosting events from brands including PornHub and Subway. 

The three stores are an example of how ineffective state enforcement has been in curbing unlicensed sales. While Green Apple and Metrobud’s owners both say they’ve never had any major issues with state or local law enforcement, Allen Smoke Shop has a poster in the window with loud red letters: ILLICIT CANNABIS SEIZED. The store has been raided at least twice by state officials, according to the posted notices.

To allay any doubt that it still sold cannabis, the shop projects a roving image of the cannabis plant on the sidewalk outside.

Inside, there’s a wall of sodas and chips and even a small shelf of Bounty paper towels as in any other neighborhood bodega. Much more discreetly than in a place like MetroBud, the cannabis products like THC-laced edibles as well as “mushroom extract” gummies are confined to just a small section at the front counter. With a few cannabis-plant signs in the window and a bit of shelf space, the shop is an example of how easy it is for owners to add on a few products.  When I snap a photo with my phone, it immediately catches the attention of the shopkeeper. “Hey, no photos. You can’t take a photo in here.” With the flip of a switch, the clear glass counter turned a frosted white, concealing the contents from view. 

Dubai Cannabis Supply – Sued by NYC

I head over from Allen to Stanton Street, which has its own row of unlicensed shops selling cannabis. I pass by a few of them and head into Dubai Smoke, which the city sued in July, to see how it’s currently operating. 

The complaint cited three instances in which the shop allegedly sold illegal psilocybin products. Created in the 1970s as a means to shutter undesirable businesses like places of prostitution, the nuisance-abatement law is one more tool the city has to curb illicit cannabis shops. In 2023, it filed at least 35 cases against smoke shops and their landlords for selling cannabis products to minors. Inspections are typically carried out by the NYPD, which documents at least three instances of the unlicensed activity before seeking a court order to close the store for one year. The city settled with Dubai in November on the condition that it would not sell unlicensed cannabis or tobacco products.

But a December visit shows that’s plainly not the case yet. Inside, the shop looks like the color palette of a Jojo Siwa concert. The walls are covered in rainbow graffiti, and under the glass cases there are glass tubes of pre-rolled joints for $20 labeled ZKITTLES. The man at the counter pulls out the tray of ones that come in flavors labeled Cotton Candy, Jungle Juice, and Froot Loops. A row of vape cartridges has options in lilac and teal and fuchsia. There are more California brands, like Stiizy gummies, on display here, too. None of these rainbow offerings would be allowable at the neighborhood’s one legal dispensary, Conbud.

Outside, I spot a group of what appear to be teen boys passing a joint among them. I nod to the joint and introduce myself as a reporter working on a story about cannabis shops in the neighborhood. 

One tells me loudly they’re all 21 before laughing. 

“Bro, no you’re not, no you’re not,” one of them shouts.  

“Okay, yeah, we’re all 16.” 

“I’m actually 35,” says a third. (I start to believe they are indeed 16.)

Dubai Smoke Shop wasn’t cited for selling to minors, but at least 34 other shops in Manhattan last year were, according to a review of nuisance-abatement complaints. This has been a rallying cry of lawmakers looking to shut down unlicensed shops with no oversight of its sales. 

When I asked the teens where they liked to go for weed, they brushed me off. “I mean wherever they will sell to us, there’s only a few places around here,” one said. 

“We’re not gonna tell you which ones.”

Article link
https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/01/05/weed-gone-wild-cannabis-lower-east-side/

referral 
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/new-york-fined-unlicensed-weed-shops-more-than-25-million-and-collected-almost-none-of-that/ar-BB1iHoNr

New York Fined Unlicensed Weed Shops More Than $25 Million — and Collected Almost None of That
Gov. Kathy Hochul has said she wants to shut down the illegal stores, but the lack of enforcement reveals just how hard that task will be.
BY ROSALIND ADAMS 
FEB. 22, 2024, 5:00 A.M.

The state has levied more than $25 million in fines against unlicensed smoke shops for selling cannabis products since last year, but so far only a minuscule percent of those fines have been collected by both the state Tax Department and the Office of Cannabis Management, THE CITY has learned.

The two agencies were granted greater authority last year to enforce the 2021 cannabis law and began joint raids against smoke shops for selling cannabis products without a license last summer. They levy and collect fines separately, however. Fines may be levied against individuals who operate the smoke shops or the business itself when it’s difficult to track down an owner. 

The Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) said it has collected $22,500 in fines from unlicensed shops. The Department of Taxation and Finance has collected $0 in fines so far, said sources familiar with the state’s enforcement progress. 

Last October, THE CITY reported that the state cannabis agency, citing a lack of resources, had paused the enforcement hearings that follow state agency raids on unlicensed shops. Lawyers for unlicensed shops told THE CITY at the time that they had received notices on behalf of their clients that the cases were being withdrawn. Meanwhile, the raids have continued.

But while OCM has withdrawn many cases, some shops and their operators have separately received letters separately from the tax department warning them of fines more than $150,000, according to notices obtained by THE CITY.

“Currently, the State is prioritizing shutting down illegal shops and seizing unlawful products,” said Aaron Ghitelman, a spokesperson for OCM. “While we recognize entities being fined have a right to due process, we are committed to working within the confines of the law to collect the fines once the legal process is complete.”

Fines levied by the tax department may be appealed, for example. And shops fined by the Office of Cannabis Management may be challenged in the administrative hearings the agency paused back in October, which lengthens the state’s timeline to collect the fines. 

Ghitelman added that the state has seized tens of millions of dollars in illicit products as part of its enforcement measures. Gov. Kathy Hochul has repeatedly emphasized the amount of product seized in press releases about the progress of the raids. 

The governor’s office and the state tax department declined to answer questions and deferred to the statement provided by OCM. 

The dearth of fines collected so far highlights the challenge of enforcing the cannabis law in a state with a booming gray market.

In New York City alone, unlicensed shops are rampant throughout some neighborhoods. Though there is no official count of the number of unlicensed smoke shops, it is estimated to be in the thousands. Last month, local news outlet CNY Central reported that OCM has only 14 investigators on staff. 

The two state agencies are not the only ones involved in enforcement. The Sheriff’s Department is inspecting smoke shops in New York City as well, and the NYPD has done undercover inspections of shops suspected of selling cannabis to minors. 

In Hochul’s annual state of the state address last month, the governor said that she would seek new enforcement powers this year as part of the annual budget. 

“We know there’s more to be done and we need more tools to do it. We’re going to continue working with local leaders, including in New York City, to shut down illegal cannabis stores once and for all,” she said. 

Sen. Jeremy Cooney, the chair of the Senate Cannabis Committee, agreed that more enforcement powers are needed, but added that the effort has to be in tandem with opening up new stores. 

“The way forward is to make sure that we have more legal stores operating on our streets,” Cooney told THE CITY in an interview. “It’s a parallel track – one is to close down stores and make sure enforcement is happening, the other is to make sure that new ones are opening.” 

“We’re not moving fast enough,” Cooney added. 

At a Senate hearing in late October, executive director Chris Alexander testified that he did not think fines were enough to deter unlicensed shops. In response to questions, he said that he expected OCM’s administrative hearings to resume within weeks. But months later, the hearings have not resumed. OCM said it is seeking expanded enforcement powers to padlock stores instead of issuing fines. 

Sen. Cooney told THE CITY he was unaware of this and found it “very concerning.”

The fines levied by the Tax Department are  determined by a formula that assesses that unlicensed shops owe up to two times the amount of tax that would have been due on that illicit cannabis, the deficiency notices said. 

Both letters reviewed by THE CITY say that more than 12 pounds of illicit cannabis had been seized but do not show specifically the details of the calculation. The law affords people the right to appeal the fines, which may be part of the reason why the agency has not collected any fines from unlicensed shops yet.

But in both instances, the shops had been raided by the OCM and the Tax Department and had product seized but the state cannabis agency had withdrawn their proceedings.  

“Of course no one is paying them,” said Paula Collins, a lawyer who represents clients who operate unlicensed smoke shops. “They thought it was over.” 

URL
https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/02/22/new-york-state-hochul-fines-illegal-cannabis-shops/

CANNABIS FIGURES

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 4, 2023

CONTACTS: Aaron Ghitelman /Aaron.Ghitelman@ocm.ny.gov / 518-728-9570

NEW: OFFICE OF CANNABIS MANAGEMENT NOVEMBER ENFORCEMENT UPDATE ON STATEWIDE ACTIONS AGAINST UNLICENSED CANNABIS SHOPS The Office of Cannabis Management and the Office of the Attorney General win major court victory; new precedent set for State to use Cannabis Law to permanently close illegal businesses More than $50 million worth of illicit cannabis seized to date Additional court victory and new trainings for localities also announced NEW YORK, NY – Today, the New York State Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) published the second in a monthly series of enforcement action updates against unlicensed cannabis shops across the State. These updates will be released on the first Monday of each month through the end of the year. Inspections & Seizures: During the month of November, investigators from OCM and the Department of Taxation and Finance (DTF) inspected 71 shops, including 13 re-inspections, suspected of selling unlicensed cannabis. These inspections resulted in the seizure of 812 pounds of flower, 701 pounds of edibles, and 61 pounds of concentrate, with an estimated value of $7,284,986. These actions bring the total of inspections to 350 locations, 88 of which have been re-inspected, to yield over 11,000 pounds of seized illicit cannabis worth more than $54 million. OCM and DTF investigators will continue inspections each and every week across the State. Court Victories: On November 21, OCM, in collaboration with the Office of the Attorney General (OAG), won its first petition for emergency relief under Section 16-a of the Cannabis Law, a new section of the law that just went into effect this year. This victory established an important precedent allowing the State to seek longer term closures for businesses found to be illegally selling cannabis. In this case, the Court issued a permanent injunction and one-year permanent closing order against illegal operator David Tulley of "I'm Stuck" in Wayne County. The Court agreed with OCM and the OAG that Tulley had engaged in unlicensed sale of cannabis and rejected Tulley's argument that the “cannabis consulting business model” did not require a license. The Court’s Order continued the padlocking that had been granted by the Court on an emergency basis earlier this year. An assessment of total penalties will be finalized in the coming weeks. On November 29th, OCM, in collaboration with the OAG, also successfully secured a temporary restraining order and temporary/closing/padlocking order against the unlicensed operator George West of Jaydega 7.0 in Canandaigua. A hearing on the request for a permanent injunction and closure of Jaydega 7.0 is scheduled for next month in Ontario County Supreme Court. Training for Municipalities: With a continued focus on collaboration and coordination with the goal of maximizing enforcement partnerships, OCM and the OAG will host a public webinar for municipalities across the state on Thursday, December 7 to provide vital education and resources around best practices and opportunities to shut down illicit operators. “As we look ahead to this next chapter in New York’s cannabis market, we continue to prioritize safety across the state by working diligently to shut down illegal operators,” said Chris Alexander, Executive Director of The New York State Office of Cannabis Management. “The number one remedy for the problem of these illicit shops is getting more legal businesses open. New Yorkers want to know where their products are coming from, and they know they can rely on safe, trusted, and locally grown cannabis when they walk into one of our legal dispensaries. We will continue to seize illegal products, and we know that the collaborative work continues across all levels of government to address this public health crisis.” Fines for the illegal sale of cannabis start at $10,000 per day and can rise up to $20,000 per day for the most egregious conduct. An additional fine of $5,000 can be levied for removal of the Order, and the inspected businesses may also be subject to additional violations and penalties under the Tax Law. Additional fines may be assessed. The enforcement legislation passed in May 2023 also authorizes OCM to seek a State court order to ultimately padlock businesses found to be in repeated violation of the law. In addition, the law makes it a crime to sell cannabis and cannabis products without a license. To bring many levels of government together to combat the illicit sale of cannabis, Governor Hochul announced partnerships between OCM and the OAG through which municipalities across the state can receive training on how to utilize a particular provision -- Section16-A -- of the new enforcement law signed by Governor Hochul in May 2023 to pursue padlocking orders in State Court. 16-A authorizes local governments, including county attorneys, with OCM’s approval, to pursue padlocking orders from a court against an unlicensed cannabis business found to be engaged in egregious conduct. This authority significantly augments the ability for different levels of government to work together to shut down illegal cannabis operators. In addition to these new partnerships with localities, the Governor announced that additional State agencies will now be bringing the weight of their business enforcement powers to bear as part of the State’s creative and aggressive approach to combating the illicit market. The Department of Labor and the Workers Compensation Board are joining these efforts to ensure businesses selling cannabis without a license are compliant with New York State labor and workers compensation laws. This approach, which combines the enforcement powers of labor law, tax law, and cannabis law, can result in non-compliant business owners potentially facing tens of thousands of dollars in penalties as the result of a single inspection and violations, significantly enhances the State’s ability to crack down on those who engage in illicit sales, and reaffirms the Governor’s deep commitment to ensuring that the law is being followed and that New Yorkers are protected from potentially unsafe products. New York State currently has 27 licensed adult-use cannabis dispensaries and has approved 44 Cannabis Growers Showcases. All regulated, licensed dispensaries must post the Dispensary Verification Tool sticker near their main entrance. Any store selling cannabis that does not display this sticker is operating without a license. ### Follow us on all of our social media at @nys_cannabis

URL

https://cannabis.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/12/new-office-of-cannabis-management-november-enforcement-update-on-statewide-actions-against-unlicensed-cannabis-shops.pdf

Google's New AI Text-to-Video Tool Is Fun to Look At. But What Next?

Story by Lisa Lacy • 38m

Google has teased an AI-based video generation tool, but it's not clear when — or if — anyone outside the search giant will be able to kick the tires. It's certainly fun to look at, though.

On Wednesday, Google's Research arm released a video highlighting this new text-to-video model, which is called Lumiere.

In a LinkedIn post, team leader Inbar Mosseri said the tool "generates coherent, high-quality videos using simple text prompts" that New Atlas says run up to five seconds. Sample inputs include, "A fluffy baby sloth with an orange knitted hat trying to figure out a laptop" and "An escaped panda eating popcorn in the park."

In the year or so that generative AI has been the hottest technology going, much of the attention has been focused on tools like ChatGPT that produce text answers to prompts, or those like Dall-E that create still images. Video creation from text prompts is arguably the next frontier, so if Lumiere really can "demonstrate state-of-the-art text-to-video generation results" as Google says, we may already be evolving beyond the "grotesque abominations" of the AI-generated images of 2023.

As the video illustrates, Lumiere's capabilities include text-to-video and image-to-video generation, as well as stylized generation — that is, using an image to create videos in a similar style. Other tricks include the ability to fill in any missing visuals within a video clip.

That includes the ability to animate famous paintings, like Van Gogh's Starry Night ("A timelapse oil painting of a starry night with clouds moving") or Da Vinci's Mona Lisa ("A woman looking tired and yawning"). While the Starry Night example works almost flawlessly, Mona Lisa looks far more like she's laughing than yawning.

And while many of the animals — such as "a muskox grazing on beautiful wildflowers" and "a happy elephant wearing a birthday hat walking under the sea" — look realistic, there's something off about some of the dogs. Both a toy poodle riding a skateboard and a golden retriever puppy running in the park are close to passing as real, but their faces — and perhaps their eyes specifically—betray the fact that they're CGI.

Nevertheless, the video editing tools hold a lot of promise. Using a source video and prompts like "made of colorful toy bricks" or "made of flowers," users can purportedly change the style of the subject completely. And with inputs like "wearing a bathrobe," "wearing a party hat" and "wearing rain boots" to add said items to an image of, say, a baby chick, Lumiere may very well make fiddling with videos more accessible to those of us who didn't major in graphic design.

Though the assets shared so far certainly make Lumiere seem like it's user-friendly, the description of how it works isn't. (Google didn't respond to a request for additional comment.)

A project page < https://lumiere-video.github.io/  > describes Lumiere as "a space-time diffusion model," which sounds like something Doc Brown was working on in Back to the Future. Google Research said this means the text-to-image model learns to generate a video by processing it in multiple space-time scales, which helps create videos that "portray realistic, diverse and coherent motion."

According to Google, this is superior to existing models, which "synthesize distant keyframes followed by temporal super-resolution." 

Jason Alan Snyder, global chief technology officer at ad agency Momentum Worldwide, explained it this way: "It's like the difference between watching a puppet show and experiencing a ballet at Lincoln Center."

That's because Lumiere "doesn't just focus on snapshots, it crafts smooth, flowing motion for every frame," he added.

In other words, if you think about the traditional method of making a movie, you'd have to build key scenes and fill in the gaps later.

"Lumiere is different. It sees the whole movie in its mind, understanding how characters move, objects interact and everything changes over time," Snyder said. "It's like drawing the entire flip book simultaneously, ensuring every page flows perfectly."

So this "space-time thinking" helps Lumiere create videos that feel real, which, he added, means no more jumpy transitions or robotic movements. (Except maybe for puppy eyes.)

Time will tell.

In the meantime, as fans of Beauty and Beast will know, Lumiere is French for "light."  

Editors' note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, see this post. < https://www.cnet.com/ai-policy/#ftag=MSF491fea7 >

URL

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/googles-new-ai-text-to-video-tool-is-fun-to-look-at-but-what-next/ar-BB1hgBUi

King of Dead Horses Ring

coloring page
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-King-Of-Dead-Horses-Ring-b-w-997831321
adoptable page
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-King-Of-Dead-Horses-Ring-adoptable-997831587

A Call for Submissions
for the Killens Review of Arts & Letters
Spring 2024

All That We Carry: Where Do We Go From Here?

Deadline: Friday, December 1, 2023

The Killens Review of Arts & Letters is a peer-reviewed journal that welcomes Black writers and artists whose work speaks to the general public and to an intergenerational range of readers represented throughout the African diaspora. For the Spring 2024 issue of the Killens Review, we are seeking short stories, essays, creative nonfiction, poetry, art, and photography. Inspired by questions posed by Dr. Tiya Miles, eminent historian and creative writer, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we are soliciting content that reflects how Black creatives from all parts of the world move forward when all around us is in disarray. Specifically, we ask that you submit original writing or art that explores the themes of legacy, memory, inheritance, and/or radical hope (or pessimism), with an orientation toward the future and future generations of Black peoples.

Application

https://centerforblackliterature.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/CFP_Killens-Review-Spring-2024.pdf

Who is the First Woman? Meet our new graphic novel hero!
Artemis [ https://www.nasa.gov/specials/artemis/ ] is the first step in the next era of human exploration. This time when we go to the Moon, we’re staying, to study and learn more than ever before. We’ll test new technologies and prepare for our next giant leap – sending astronauts to Mars. 

With today’s release of our graphic novel First Woman: NASA’s Promise for Humanity [ https://www.nasa.gov/CallieFirst/ ; free to read: ] you don’t have to wait to join us on an inspiring adventure in space.

Meet Commander Callie Rodriguez, the first woman to explore the Moon – at least in the comic book universe.

In Issue No. 1: Dream to Reality, Callie, her robot sidekick RT, and a team of other astronauts are living and working on the Moon in the not-too-distant future. Like any good, inquisitive robot, RT asks Callie how he came to be – not just on the Moon after a harrowing experience stowed in the Orion capsule – but about their origin story, if you will.

From her childhood aspirations of space travel to being selected as an astronaut candidate, Callie takes us on her trailblazing journey to the Moon.

As they venture out to check on a problem at a lunar crater, Callie shares with RT and the crew that she was captivated by space as a kid, and how time in her father’s autobody shop piqued her interest in building things and going places.

Callie learned at a young age that knowledge is gained through both success and failure in the classroom and on the field.

Through disappointment, setbacks, and personal tragedy, Callie pursues her passions and eventually achieves her lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut – a road inspired by the real lives of many NASA astronauts living and working in space today.

Callie''s official page
free to read or listen
https://www.nasa.gov/CallieFirst/

Video Trailer

First Book Audio
 

URL
https://nasa.tumblr.com/post/663314232247549952/who-is-the-first-woman-meet-our-new-graphic-novel

Episode 2 cover page, use links above to read or listen to more

Ask Mission Control agents a question
https://nasa.tumblr.com/ask
more about them

The problem in modernity is we approach industries as if they started today. In visual media, women from :runway models to thespians to porn stars only recently were in labor environments where their physical quality dictated their opportunities or access. And for most of the past 150 years in the usa at least, the average woman who didn't want to be a housewife or maid or secretary was in a visual media role. This is not to mention the industry of being a wife. Women may not want to hear it but being a trophy wife is a job and some women go from man to man or keep up appearances to satisfy a male lust. Many women literally hunt for men with money and their body is part of that hunt. And I conclude with the cultures throughout humanity that may not be visile online which is dominated by the usa, but exists. In the fiscally poorer places in humanity women are still living in communities where their appearance to suitors is the beginning/middle/end of their life and so in the immigration winds the culture from said places reenters on a dally basis the usa, which is an underrated reality as to why cultures reoccur in the usa that many think should be more reduced.

The Hemiclitoris of the snake

Scientists finally discovered the snake clitoris, and they're 'very excited'

News

By Joanna Thompson

 published December 16, 2022

Megan Folwell stood over a female Australian death adder (Acanthophis antarcticus), armed with a scalpel. The snake was dead, donated by a venom supply company. Very carefully, Folwell, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, made an incision near the animal's tail. She was about to go where no scientists had gone before.

"I went into it not knowing what I was going to see," Folwell told Live Science. 

Until now, no one had taken the time to look for and describe a snake's clitoris. With the exception of birds, clitorises are found in every vertebrate lineage, including snakes' closest cousins, lizards. But when Folwell went looking for literature about the organ in serpents, she came up empty-handed. "It just didn't make sense to me," she said. "I knew there had to be something going on."

So she and her team decided to investigate. Their results, published Dec. 14 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, describe the structure of the forked "hemiclitoris" in snakes for the first time.

In contrast, male snake genitalia have been well documented across a variety of species. Male snakes have a structure called a hemipenis, essentially a two-pronged penis tucked under the base of the tail (and often held inside the body until mating). Much scientific ink has been spilled over the past 200 years describing differences between hemipenes, which range in size and shape from tiny twin toothpicks to huge, elaborate organs with "a lot of spines on them and whatnot," said Richard Shine, an evolutionary biologist at Macquarie University in Australia who was not involved in the study.

Despite more than two centuries' worth of data on hemipenes, however, nobody had described an equivalent structure in female snakes. The lack of evidence caused some scientists to speculate that snake hemiclitorises might not exist at all — or that, if they did, they had been reduced to a stunted evolutionary remnant.

A lack of research around female anatomy is a troubling scientific trend. Even in humans, surprisingly little is known about the clitoris. The full structure of the organ, which includes not only the little nub at the top of the labia but also two large internal bulbs full of nerve endings, wasn't discovered until the mid-1840s. Even then, it remained relatively obscure to the medical establishment until Australian urologist Helen O'Connell's work in 2005, which showed that typical textbook depictions of the clitoris were riddled with inaccuracies. In fact, just last month, scientists counted all 10,000 nerve fibers in the human clitoris for the first time.

Data about female reproductive anatomy and behavior in nonhuman animals are even more scarce. A November analysis published in the journal Nature found that between 1970 and 2021, more than seven times as many papers were published about sperm competition in animals compared with female mate selection. A 2014 perspectives article published in the journal PLOS Biology found that about 50% of all studies of animal genitalia published between 1989 and 2013 focused exclusively on males, while 10% focused only on females. 

"If genetal evolution research only investigates the male parts, it gives a very lopsided understanding of nature," Malin Ah-King, an evolutionary biologist and gender researcher at Stockholm University in Sweden who was not involved in the new research, told Live Science. This bias has led scientists to overlook certain important aspects of female reproduction — such as the existence of entire organs.

Thanks to Folwell's efforts, we now know that hemiclitorises exist in at least nine snake species. Folwell carefully dissected preserved specimens from four snake families (Elapidae, Pythonidae, Colubridae and Viperidae) and ran them through a CT (computed tomography) scan, noting the size and shape of each hemiclitoris. She found that they varied as much as hemipenes.

"Seeing the nerve structure, it was really exciting," said Folwell, the study's first author. And in other scientists' defense, she said, the tissue that makes up snakes' hemiclitorises is quite delicate (even though, in some cases, the organ was fairly large). 

Shine described the new research as "an excellent piece of work." "It certainly convinces me that there is a structure there," he told Live Science. 

For Folwell and her team, this study is merely the start of this research. She hopes that future work will uncover a fuller picture of the hemiclitoris's evolutionary history and how it fits into snake mating behavior. "We're really very excited about all of this," she said.

URL

https://www.livescience.com/snake-clitoris-found

First evidence of hemiclitores in snakes
Megan J. Folwell, Kate L. Sanders, Patricia L. R. Brennan and Jenna M. Crowe-Riddell
Published:14 December 2022https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.1702

LOOK IN THE FIRST COMMENT FOR THE ABSTRACT

URL

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.1702

DESCRIPTION
A Climate Week NYC Virtual Event

Welcome to the live stream of:
Under Pressure at the Noho Space
Joining the panel are Ana Teresa Fernández, the artist and activist behind the Under Pressure, Cristina Gnecco, Founder of HOPE Hydration, and Whitney McGuire, Director of Sustainability for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Founder of Sustainable Brooklyn.

Uniform Resource Locator
https://automattic.space/under-pressure-live-stream/

MY THOUGHTS AS I  LISTEN

6:52 introductions 
three women, two own or manage organizations in climate organization and an female thespian who advocates.

6:54 how do you influence the environment

6:54 a panelist say art creates access and leads to agency. But I oppose. Art doesn't have the ability to influence finance that way. 

6:58 a panelist said, if you know better you do better, but that miscomprehends education. Having knowledge doesn't force your mind to certain conclusions That isn't true. 

7:00 a panelist is right about contracts, but laws to diminish the leeway of the legal system will help.

7:01 quesitonaire, how do you see culture, identity heritage playing a role in your work?

7:02 a panelist said, in usa she was in a big huge clean school and in colombia she would see someone her age in a school with trash and she asked why is one this way and one that. She blamed environmental waste instead of imperialism. The immigrant community is unwilling to criminalize the usa so tries to work around blaming the usa by changing the usa. and the global empire it centers about. 
Yes nyc waste pollutes others, but show a technology that can absord and reutlize that waste.

7:04 a panelist remembers a stench from a refinery near the beach she lived by, she felt all beaches have petroleum jelly or smell, and when she moved to san diego california, it was a shock to her. 

7:06 the same panelist, only one in three women know how to swim , less than 55 % of the population knows how to swim. the migration due to dislocation around the sealine. 

7:07 a panelist , lived next to landfills in dayton ohio, and neglected manufacturing buildings. 
At this point all three women are women who migrated as children somwhere. Said panelist said juxtaposition is needed. 
Well, her problem is the idea that the problem is ignorance. IT is control. 

7:10 the questionaire, the people most impacted are not the voices in the room. What has the challenge been like, what is missing from the climate change movement?

7:11 a panelist, said I exist in a Black fem body. She says "our society" doesn't work or fit for people like me.  The problem with the idea that you own a thing or are part of a thing that doesn't serve you is very dysfunctional. Imagine someone saying, I like to gamble but gambling is totally illegal. 

7:12 said panelist,  continues to say that trash is one of the most profitable global exports.

7:13 said panelist said fast fashion was said to pollute the planet most and she wanted to disrupt that narrative. 

7:14 odd delay,  people , especially a room of liberals always think a clapping is warranted

7:15 a panelist,  she recalls three women , with climate and emotions while two men were talking about climate and economics. She called it contrived. 

7:16 said panelist, joined two organizations where surfers taught poets how to surf while poets taught surfers how to write. Her idea is bringing access. Growing up in NYC was a benefit. 

7:17 a panelist, 80% of the world biodiversity is protected by 20% of the populace, indigenous people, and she wonders why no indigenous is in the room. well, I can tell her that indegenous people have been exited from power or influence at the heart of the usa. 

7:19 said panelist, said redistribution of wealth is key, but redistribution of wealth starts wars, no one wants to be poor or lesser than and few invite that to their children or descendents. 

7:20 said panelist asks how many of you work at a well funded organization and many in the audience raised their hand. well, shouldn't the people who fund the organizations be using their money straightly?

7:21 questionaire, name an inspiring moment

Whitney McGuire < http://www.whitneyrmcguire.com/ > 

7:21 She said her father was incarcerated and recently he called her and said he was proud and he didn't know what sustainability was . her work has changed her father's life.
She mentioned her aunt who is 78, a retired teacher, and said she is changing their direction

Cristina Gnecco < https://www.linkedin.com/in/cristina-gnecco/ > 

7:24 she heard a bunch of children who are doing things, and a 12 year old girl helped pass legislation as she was born with bad lungs. so she loves the children coming up and their activity. 

Ana Teresa Fernández < https://anateresafernandez.com/ > 

7:25 She recalls a 70 plus year old help a child surf. That gift of access with the laughter, a non violent exchange. She was captivated. Her husband spoke to her his pride to her, and he explains to neighbors what he has learned from her and he isn't artsy or environmental.

7:28 Questionaire, open to questions from the audience

question: What do you think is the most important thing in sustainability that people don't know about?

7:29 
panelist: several thousand languages will be dead in a century. so climate migration will start creating an extinction of languages. several thousand languages, obliterating a people by that. humanity loses a language every forty days. 

7:31
question: iS their an effort or should their be an effort to pull activities into a more unified approach of the various communities or individual efforts?

panelist: our technology is only a reflection of us. Technology will serve silos as long as we do. She doesn't have an answer as to why humanity is disunfiied and exhausted by the lack of unity. But how are we unifying in our own lives. 

another panelist: a great question but I wish i had a solution. Competition exists for funding. But why do we feel like we need to compete, cause their isn't a large redistribution of wealth behind sustainability. Some companies can show their is space for all in sustainability to come together and unify and they didn't pay me to say that. 

7:35 
question: equity may involve access but underserved populations have less access or more affected, with information over there isn't enough. 

panelist: I know someone who knows someone. I do alot of cross polination. Their needs to be a foundational ripping to create equity. No ministry of culture exists in the usa. 

panelist: it isn't a sustainability issue. People from underserved communities are the most artistic. The artists come from the mud. Redistributing resources to support artists is the key. the artists are their, the sustained funding is key. Yes I concur to her, can you enlargen and unbias patronage.
This is a private sector and a public sector issue. 

7:40 end

They had a wine tasting, from the wine tasting, and the one behind is a wine firm speaker to a french firm that ships wines with the lowest carbon emission. 

7:44 
they made a wave, they literally did that. 

7:09 
END

MY CLOSING THOUGHTS
Mcguire side Gnecco said the most important point. The money behind most sustainability measures is a non affecting fractional to the larger fiscal system that maintains the global financial order. I add that makes sense, cause the money in control of things isn't going to cut its own throat. I will add all three woman as many women in these scenarios speaks of change absent violence as fatiguing while the wall to overcome. The blunt truth is peace has limits. Redistributing wealth is one of the true war starters in humanity. No one wants to risk being financially poor. It is too risky. And that explains why the artists of the world are blockaded from embracing patronage or the indigenous are blockaded from being advisors.  And I will be blunt, a president named Barrack Obama once said, change you can believe in. But when he became president he presented no one with anything to believe in. Why? talking the talk isn't enough when you have large goals. Large goals require not just technology or imagination but daring behavior. 

Sustainable Brooklyn- the organization founded by Whitney Mcguire < http://www.whitneyrmcguire.com/ >  who is on the panel. 
https://www.sustainablebk.co/

COURSES
Artist Conracts series + Intellectual property 101
https://whitneymcguire.gumroad.com/l/ArtistContractsIP
Address common clauses
https://whitneymcguire.gumroad.com/l/ArtistContractsProtect
How to sustainably price your work
https://whitneymcguire.gumroad.com/l/ArtistContractsRates
Intellectual property comprehension through the fashion industry
https://whitneymcguire.gumroad.com/l/FashionIPWorkshop
How force majeure clauses impact your money
https://whitneymcguire.gumroad.com/l/GNIAK
What is the difference between patent , copyright, trademark
https://whitneymcguire.gumroad.com/l/jywMc
Comprehending the freelance isn't free law in nyc
https://whitneymcguire.gumroad.com/l/dXNNm
How to set a sustainable and profitable rate
part 1
https://whitneymcguire.gumroad.com/l/iHikC
part 2
https://whitneymcguire.gumroad.com/l/pUzjT

Jann Wenner Defends His Legacy, and His Generation’s
The co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine on the legacy of boomers and why he chose only white men for his book on rock’s “masters.”

In 2019, Jann Wenner officially left Rolling Stone, the magazine he co-founded in 1967, but he hasn’t left it behind. Since stepping away from the iconic publication, where I briefly worked as an online editor a decade ago, Wenner, 77, has written two books rooted in his time there. The first, a hefty, dishy memoir called “Like a Rolling Stone,” was a best seller after it was published last year. The second, “The Masters,” which will be published on Sept. 26, consists of interviews that Wenner conducted during his Rolling Stone years with rock legends like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Bono and others, as well as a new interview with Bruce Springsteen.

Those interviews — lengthy, deeply informed, insightful — are the kinds of pieces that helped Rolling Stone earn the reputation it held for so long as the music publication. Under Wenner’s guidance, the magazine also developed a reputation as a source of crucial and hard-hitting investigative journalism. But it has taken some reputational hits over the years. Chief among them a widely read investigative piece on an alleged rape at the University of Virginia — which turned out to never have happened.

As befits a man who has been held up as an avatar of his generation’s achievements and failings, Wenner has left behind a complex legacy. But it’s one that he’s happy to defend. Talking to Wenner, who spoke from his home in Montauk, N.Y., I couldn’t help but suspect that he missed the cut-and-thrust of his journalism days. He was very willing, eager even, to engage in discussion about his approach to interviewing his famous rock star friends, his own and his magazine’s possible missteps and what the baby boomers really achieved.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Q: You developed personal friendships with a lot of the people you interviewed in “The Masters.” I’m curious how you think those friendships helped the interviews, and are there any ways in which they hindered them?

A: By and large, they helped. Because the interviews I did, they’re not confrontational interviews. They’re not interviews with politicians or business executives. These are interviews with artists. They’re meant to be sympathetic, and they’re meant to elicit from the artist as deep as possible thinking that they’re willing to reveal. I think that the friendships were critical. I mean, the example of Mick Jagger — he just didn’t give interviews to anybody, and he still doesn’t. It’s because we were friends, I got him to do it. I had a particular kind of relationship with Bob Dylan. Jerry Garcia, we were old buddies from years ago. So, it really works. The only place it hurt was with Bruce. That was the interview I did for the book, not for the magazine. And my friendship with Bruce is very deep at this point. It makes it difficult to ask questions that you know the answers to. You’re trimming your sails to the friendship.

Q: = Question

A: = Answer

Q: In the Maureen Dowd profile of you last year, you said that the Rolling Stones look like “Lord of the Rings” characters. Did Mick Jagger give you a hard time about that?

A: Oh, yeah.

Q: What did he say?

A: He couldn’t believe I had said that. I had to say, Look, I’m so sorry. I was just, in the pursuit of publicity, trying to be super clever and please forgive me. Of course, he did. But it was one of those careless remarks. A friend shouldn’t say that kind of thing. You don’t want to read it in Maureen Dowd’s thing in The New York Times. Oh, Mick Jagger looks like he’s Gandalf the wizard. He was absolutely right and I felt terrible.

Q: In the introduction to the Bono interview in “The Masters,” you mentioned that he edited and reviewed the transcript. What does editing mean in that context?

A: Looking for grammatical stuff, usage stuff; changing a word here and there, if he’d want to use a different word that’s more precise; maybe something was too intimate and he decides he doesn’t want to put it on the public record. I’m happy to do that with these subjects. As I said before, these are not meant to be confrontational interviews. These are profiles in a way. If I have to trade the level of trust that is necessary to get this kind of interview, to let people put a few things off the record, nothing of any value, maybe something about their kids or their family or not wanting to put down somebody. I let John Lennon edit his interview, and everything he said in that interview ——

Q: Oh, is that true? This is a famous interview from 1970. He unloaded his public feelings about the Beatles. But I didn’t realize that you let him edit it.

A: Yes. He went through, and he made changes here and there. Basically, it’s interview subjects clarifying what they want to say, making it more precise. Because it’s a long stream of yap and verbiage and you sometimes don’t think through every word. I want them to have the opportunity to say precisely what they meant.

Q: I think it’s fair to say that the average reader assumes that what shows up in the publication is basically what was said. But you’re saying, actually the subjects go over the transcripts. And, for example, you got pilloried for reviewing Mick Jagger’s “Goddess in the Doorway,” giving it five stars, when the critical consensus on that album was that it was kind of a dud. The broader question is, when it comes to interviews with the people that you admire, who are also your friends, are you shading into something that’s a little more like fan service, or a kind of branding, than objective journalism?

A: Look, nothing was ever substantively changed from the original interviews. These are all minor changes that really get to accuracy and readability and all that stuff. Secondly, these were not meant to be confrontational interviews. They were always meant to be cooperative interviews.

Q: But there aren’t two kinds of interviews.

A: Yes, there are. The kind of interview I wanted to do was to elicit real thinking, not to confront or challenge or get somebody defensive. But let’s go to the underlying thing: Did my too-cozy relationships alter our coverage?

Q: That’s right.

A: OK, let’s go to the example of the Mick Jagger thing. The editors themselves put it at four stars, and there was not a critical backlash to the thing. The only backlash to it was from Keith Richards, who, instead of calling it “Goddess in the Doorway,” called it “Dogshit in the Doorway.” It’s still quite a good album. So I personally intervened. Having sat there and listened to Mick make it, I was in love with it. I confess: I probably went too far. So what? I’m entitled.

Q: Rolling Stone had a history of producing certain kinds of stories that ended up being definitive. But there were a handful of stories that raised questions of integrity. The U.Va. campus rape story would be one of those. Even Hunter S. Thompson — I don’t know that anyone would hold him up as a beacon of factual accuracy, regardless of the literary merit of his stories. Was there anything endemic to Rolling Stone that caused you to put the pursuit of the juicy story ahead of concerns with accuracy?

A: One word answer: no.

Q: Is it just one-offs?

A: The University of Virginia story was not a failure of intent, or an attempt to be loose with the facts. You get beyond the factual errors that sank that story, and it was really about the issue of rape and how it affects women on campus, their lack of rights. Other than this one key fact that the rape described actually was a fabrication of this woman, the rest of the story was bulletproof. It wasn’t for recklessness. I mean, we made one of those errors — every publication in the country, including The Times, makes every 50 years at least. You get slammed for it. We took our beating. But it wasn’t indicative of how we operated. It wasn’t an error of being casual with the truth, or trying to stretch it, or mission creep, or anything like that.

Hunter, well, you know, sui generis. Hunter, in fact, was as accurate a reporter as I’ve ever had, but it’s just that his stories went beyond facts, into areas of the truth and spirituality and pharmacology that none of us are really able to judge on our own. My mission always, journalistically speaking, was the truth is the most important thing. As we all know now, if somebody really wants to hoax you, there’s very little you can do about it. Except have the kind of hypervigilance that would mean you could probably publish nothing.

Q: So almost a decade later, there are no lessons that you drew from that experience? In your mind, it’s just wrong place, wrong time? That seems like sort of a glib response.

A: There are two main things in the story. One was the account of this gang rape given to us by this source, Jackie. That turned out to be a fabrication. Because we didn’t want to identify her, we didn’t demand to meet people to corroborate her story. Our mistake was to let her out of that demand, not wanting to put her through the trauma again. That was one story that ran through the long piece. The other story, having nothing to do with Jackie, was about the handling of rape on that campus by other people — handling rape in general across the country. It was a conscientious, serious attempt to do that issue, and that was like the third piece by that particular individual on sex crimes and one of our second or third pieces about campus rape. So then the hoax was discovered and we lived with the consequence of that. It was one of the most miserable professional experiences I’ve ever had. I don’t mean to be glib about it, but I don’t feel wholly to blame for this, or that it’s some terrible black mark. I think the lesson I learned is, yes, it does happen to everybody. The other thing is, of course, we could have been tighter. So, you know, there’s a series of circumstances. I can’t pull out the hara-kiri knife for that one.

Q: To go back to the book now, in the introduction to the book ——

A: Am I let off the hook, David? Am I forgiven?

Q: That’s not for me to decide.

A: History will speak.

Q: History will speak. This is also a history-will-speak kind of question. There are seven subjects in the new book; seven white guys. In the introduction, you acknowledge that performers of color and women performers are just not in your zeitgeist. Which to my mind is not plausible for Jann Wenner. Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Wonder, the list keeps going — not in your zeitgeist? What do you think is the deeper explanation for why you interviewed the subjects you interviewed and not other subjects?

A: Well, let me just. …

Q: Carole King, Madonna. There are a million examples.

A: When I was referring to the zeitgeist, I was referring to Black performers, not to the female performers, OK? Just to get that accurate. The selection was not a deliberate selection. It was kind of intuitive over the years; it just fell together that way. The people had to meet a couple criteria, but it was just kind of my personal interest and love of them. Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.

Q: Oh, stop it. You’re telling me Joni Mitchell is not articulate enough on an intellectual level?

A: Hold on a second.

Q: I’ll let you rephrase that.

A: All right, thank you. It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses. It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock.

Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as “masters,” the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.

Q: How do you know if you didn’t give them a chance?

A: Because I read interviews with them. I listen to their music. I mean, look at what Pete Townshend was writing about, or Jagger, or any of them. They were deep things about a particular generation, a particular spirit and a particular attitude about rock ’n’ roll. Not that the others weren’t, but these were the ones that could really articulate it.

Q: Don’t you think it’s actually more to do with your own interests as a fan and a listener than anything particular to the artists? I think the problem is when you start saying things like “they” or “these artists can’t.” Really, it’s a reflection of what you’re interested in more than any ability or inability on the part of these artists, isn’t it?

A: That was my No. 1 thing. The selection was intuitive. It was what I was interested in. You know, just for public relations sake, maybe I should have gone and found one Black and one woman artist to include here that didn’t measure up to that same historical standard, just to avert this kind of criticism. Which, I get it. I had a chance to do that. Maybe I’m old-fashioned and I don’t give a [expletive] or whatever. I wish in retrospect I could have interviewed Marvin Gaye. Maybe he’d have been the guy. Maybe Otis Redding, had he lived, would have been the guy.

Q: The last interview in the book — Springsteen, you ask him: Did we change things? You were talking about the boomers. And he has this humble, positive answer: We didn’t fix all the world’s problems, but we moved some social ideas and practices forward. What’s your answer to that question?

A: Bruce is a little more modest than I am. I think that we made striking changes socially and morally and artistically. I don’t think rock ’n’ roll changed everything. I don’t think rock ’n’ roll overturned segregation or the war in Vietnam, but we played huge parts in it. Both consciously and unconsciously. Despite the Trump thing, despite the Republican presidents of the last 30 years, which have held back enormous amounts of progress, society has become so much more liberal. I think rock ’n’ roll played a huge role in that. Did it do everything? No. Was it the sole thing? No. But we did a lot.

Q: So what are valid criticisms of your generation?

A: What didn’t the rock ’n’ roll generation do? I mean, it didn’t get everything done. But I have no fundamental, deep criticisms. Is there something that you think we didn’t get right?

Q: I did one of these interviews a few years ago with Pete Townshend, and I asked him a similar question about the promise of rock ’n’ roll — how it ended up playing out. He was much more negative and, I think, realistic about that — basically saying that the promise ended up being abandoned as soon as there was enough money and stardom. I think that’s a valid criticism. Something that had potential as a social force was reduced to entertainment.

A: Well, God bless Pete. I could have predicted what he’d say. Pete has got a pox on everybody.

Q: But a smart man who has some good ideas.

A: Smart, articulate, a wonderful person to talk to. So you are saying, and Pete is saying, Oh, it became commercial?

Q: That it ceased to have meaning beyond itself.

A: So it became commercial. It became successful. I think I say this somewhere in my introduction to the book that, despite the fact that it became a billion-dollar business, the ideals and goals were never abandoned. I mean, to reach the peak in our society is now being called becoming a rock star. Yes it became commercial, but so what? It’s still a music that speaks to people’s deepest desires and innermost thoughts. It’s still a music of political consequence.

The financial success that these people had didn’t require them to sell out. It required them to do more of the same. Be just as outrageous; do what you’re doing. Nobody said, You have to tone back your message now. I mean, God bless Pete, and I know he’d say that. But it’s not true. The work was worthwhile, we had fun doing it. It was meaningful. We were very lucky. We’ve lived really privileged lives. Now we get to rest. At the same time, we can look at our kids and the world we leave behind as being as motivated and as inspired to do the same thing. In that sense, rock ’n’ roll still lives — and will live.

Q: Well, thank you for taking the time to talk with me.

A: I enjoyed doing it. I wouldn’t mind seeing the written transcript. I’d be curious to look it over.

Q: Yeah, right!

A: After it’s published. God, forgive me.

URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/arts/jann-wenner-the-masters-interview.html

MY THOUGHTS

AS a writer and someone who has interviewed a few people. Wenner is correct, the fact that most interviews don't allow for the interviewer to edit exposes the baiting commercial culture in most news firms. Notice I said baiting commercial. The issue isn't making money, all who live in fiscal capitalism are trying to make money de facto but can one make money while not using baiting techniques? Can one be true to oneself and still make money. To non whites plus women, Wenner hurt himself or showed less sharp intellect by not admitting the simple truth. non whites plus women entertainers communicate more guarded plus are less trusting to open their true thoughts in the mediasphere. why? both are more afraid to lose their revenue streams or opportunity. Sequentially, he does feel a greater kinship to white male artists who through a combination of individual character plus environmental allowance, are more than likely speak their mind or not give a fuck. To the 1960's multiracial youth movement in the USA. They did fail their goal which was a united human race on earth with the smallest amount of biases. But why is their saving grace? THey failed because they didn't have support outside the usa. while the youth movements in the usa were rallying most youth in humanity were being indoctrinated in systems that are heavily negatively biased. Everyone is racial,the word is biased. They failed because the unity they seek is a very hard thing to create. Many humans are individuals, but most humans like community. They bend to community and all communities have an unwanted other. 

“Unbury the Future”: Martha Wells’ Full Speech from the 2017 World Fantasy Awards
Martha Wells
Tue Nov 7, 2017 10:00am

The convention defines “secret history” as tales which uncover an alternative history of our world with the aid of fantasy literary devices. Like alternate histories or secret tales of the occult.

A secret history might also mean a lost history, something written in a language that died with the last native speaker. It might mean something inaccessible, written in a medium too fragile to last. Like the science fiction and fantasy stories published in U.S. newspapers in the late 1800s. We know a few of those authors, like Aurelia Hadley Mohl [ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fmoae ]  and Mollie Moore Davis [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollie_Evelyn_Moore_Davis ] , but how many others were there? Those stories were proof that everybody has always been here, but the paper they were printed on has turned to dust.

We might know that C.L. Moore [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._L._Moore ] wrote for Weird Tales, but I grew up thinking she was the only one, that a woman fantasy writer from that time period was like a unicorn, there could only be one, and that she was writing for an entirely male audience. But there were plenty of other women, around a hundred in Weird Tales alone, and many of them, like Allison V. Harding [ https://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/2011/05/who-was-allison-v-harding.html ] and Mary Elizabeth Counselman [ http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/blog/summer-of-unknown-writers-mary-elizabeth-counselman/ ] , didn’t bother to conceal their identity with initials.

Weird Tales had women poets, a woman editor named Dorothy McIlwraith, women readers who had their letters printed in the magazine. There were women writing for other pulps, for the earlier Dime Novels, lots of them. Including African American Pauline Hopkins [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Hopkins ] , whose fantasy adventure novel appeared in a magazine in 1903.

These women were there, they existed. Everybody knew that, up until somehow they didn’t. We know there were LGBT and non-binary pulp writers, too, but their identities are hidden by time and the protective anonymity of pseudonyms.

Secrets are about suppression, and history is often suppressed by violence, obscured by cultural appropriation, or deliberately destroyed or altered by colonization, in a lingering kind of cultural gaslighting. Wikipedia defines “secret history” as a revisionist interpretation of either fictional or real history which is claimed to have been deliberately suppressed, forgotten, or ignored by established scholars.

That’s what I think of when I hear the words “secret histories.” Histories kept intentionally secret and histories that were quietly allowed to fade away.

The women writers, directors, and producers of early Hollywood were deliberately erased from movie history. Fifty percent of movies between 1911 and 1928 were written by women. In the 1940s there were a last few survivors at MGM, but their scripts were uncredited and they were strongly encouraged to conceal what they were working on, and not to correct the assumption that they were secretaries.

With the internet, it shouldn’t be possible for that to happen again. But we hear an echo of it every time someone on Reddit says “women just don’t write epic fantasy.”

You do the work, and you try to forget that there are people wishing you out of existence. But there are a lot of means of suppression that are more effective than wishing.

Like in 1974 when Andre Norton discovered the copyeditor on her children’s novel Lavender Green Magic had changed the three black main characters to white.

Or like in 1947, when African American writer and editor Orrin C. Evans was unable to publish more issues of All-Negro Comics [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-Negro_Comics ] because there was mysteriously no newsprint available for him to purchase.

Or like all the comics suppressed by the Comics Code Authority in 1954, which acted to effectively purge comics of people of color and of angry violent women, whether they were heroes or villains, or of any perceived challenge to the establishment. Like the publisher Entertaining Comics, which was targeted and eventually driven out of business for refusing to change a story to make a black astronaut white.

There’s an echo of that suppression when DC bans a storyline [ http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/batwoman-authors-exit-claim-dc-621274 ] where Batwoman proposes marriage to her girlfriend. And again when Marvel publishes a storyline that makes us think Captain America is a Nazi. When we’re supposed to forget that his co-creator Jack Kirby was Jewish, that he was an Army scout in World War II, that he discovered a concentration camp, that he was personally threatened by three Nazis at the New York Marvel office for creating a character to punch Hitler. (Maybe the Nazis would like to forget that when Kirby rushed downstairs to confront them, they ran away.)

There’s been an active level of suppression in movies since movies were invented. At least a white woman writer and director like Frances Marion [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Marion ] could win two Academy Awards before she was banished from history, but that wasn’t the case for her contemporary Oscar Micheaux [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Micheaux ] . An African American, Micheaux worked as a railway porter before he wrote, directed, and produced at least 40 films in the black movie industry that was entirely separate from white Hollywood.

That kind of suppression is still alive and well, and we see it when the movie about the Stonewall riots shows the resistance against police attacks through the viewpoint of young white guys and ignores Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera [ https://sites.psu.edu/womeninhistory/2016/10/23/the-unsung-heroines-of-stonewall-marsha-p-johnson-and-sylvia-rivera/ ] . Or when Ghost in the Shell features a white actress [ https://www.tor.com/2016/04/20/why-are-we-still-white-washing-characters/ ]  instead of Japanese.

We’ve forgotten Sessue Hayakawa [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sessue_Hayakawa ] , a Japanese actor who was one of the biggest stars in the silent film era of Hollywood, who was well known as a broodingly handsome heartthrob.

Sometimes history isn’t suppressed, sometimes it just drifts away. The people who lived it never expected it to be forgotten, never expected their reality to dissolve under the weight of ignorance and disbelief.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly unburied the history of the African American women of early NASA, of Katharine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughn and the hundreds like them. They were just forgotten over the years, as the brief time when women’s work meant calculating launch and landing trajectories and programming computers passed out of memory. Like the Mercury 13 [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_13 ] , the “Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees” in the 1960s, all pilots, all subjected to the same tests as the men. They retired, they went away, everyone forgot them.

Sometimes when they’re remembered, their contributions are minimized, like when a photo caption calls bacteriologist Dr. Ruby Hirose a “Japanese girl scientist” or labels Bertha Pallan, who was one of the first Native American women archeologists, as an “expedition secretary.” Like the photo post on Tumblr that over and over again, identified Marie Curie as a “female laboratory assistant.” Anybody can be disappeared.

We think we remember them, but then we’re told over and over again, all over the internet, that women don’t like math, can’t do science. That’s the internet that’s supposed to preserve our history, telling us we don’t exist.

Mary Jane Seacole was a Jamaican nurse who helped the wounded on the battlefields of the Crimean War, just like Florence Nightingale. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the mother of rock and roll. Sophia Duleep Singh was a prominent suffragette in the UK. They’re all in Wikipedia, but you can’t look them up unless you remember their names.

The women who worked in the Gibson Guitar factory during WWII were deliberately erased, their existence strenuously denied, despite the evidence of a forgotten group photo that the company still would like to claim never existed.

Jackie Mitchell, seventeen years old, struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game in 1931. Her contract was almost immediately voided by the baseball commissioner. Baseball was surely too strenuous for her.

In 1994, Gregory Corso was asked, “Where are the women of the Beat Generation?” He said, “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock.” Some of them survived, like Diane di Prima, and Hettie Jones.

Book burning draws too much attention. In science fiction and fantasy, in comics, in media fandom, everybody was always here, but we have been disappeared over and over again. We stumble on ourselves in old books and magazines and fanzines, fading print, grainy black and white photos, 16 millimeter film, archives of abandoned GeoCities web sites. We remember again that we were here, they were here, I saw them, I knew them.

We have to unearth that buried history. Like Rejected Princesses [ http://www.rejectedprincesses.com/ ] , by Jason Porath, which chronicles the women of history too awesome, offbeat, or awful to be animated. Or Nisi Shawl’s series the Expanded Course in the History of Black Science Fiction [ https://www.tor.com/tag/history-of-black-science-fiction/ ] . Or Malinda Lo’s LGBTQ YA By the Numbers [ https://www.malindalo.com/blog/2017/10/12/lgbtq-ya-by-the-numbers-2015-16 ] posts. Or Medieval POC [ https://twitter.com/medievalpoc?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor ] , sharing information about people of color in European art history. Like Eric Leif Davin in his book Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction. Like Cari Beauchamps’ book Without Lying Down, about the women writers, directors, and producers of early Hollywood. Like Catherine Lundoff’s series on the history of LGBT Science Fiction and Fantasy. Like Saladin Ahmed’s articles on the early history of comics or Jaime Lee Moyer’s article on the erasure of early women scientists[ http://www.jaimeleemoyer.com/we-all-know-what-they-did-to-witches/ ] . Like all the librarians and researchers and writers and archivists and fans who work to unbury our past so we have a chance to find our future.

And we have to continue to move forward toward that future in the fantasy genre, like the nominees on this year’s World Fantasy Award ballot, like all the other fantasy novels and short fiction last year that pushed the envelope a little further, or pushed it as far as it would go.

We have to break the barriers again and again, as many times as it takes, until the barriers are no more, and we can see the future our secret history promised us.

Author’s note: I’d like to thank Kate Elliott for reading an early draft of this, and for her help, inspiration, and encouragement.

Editor’s note: Martha Wells’ toastmaster speech was delivered at the World Fantasy Convention on November 5, 2017 and is reproduced here with the author’s permission; a few minor edits have been made and links have been added to the original text for additional context/clarity.

Martha Wells is a science fiction and fantasy writer, whose first novel was published in 1993. Her most recent series are The Books of the Raksura, for NightShade Books, and The Murderbot Diaries for Tor.com. Besides many fantasy novels, she has also written short stories, media tie-ins for Star Wars and Stargate Atlantis, YA fantasies, and non-fiction.

URL
https://www.tor.com/2017/11/07/unbury-the-future-martha-wells-full-speech-from-the-2017-world-fantasy-awards/

MY THOUGHT

But I think the greater question is not about presence, but action. "We" have always been here is the truth but what do "We" do when lifetimes of merit don't force "Them" to honor or treat "We" at the least equally? 
 

Ahsoka Tano the badass jedi superheroine we need
My Reply
Well... Disney-StarWars has made female strong characters in most of their recent work: star wars episode 7/8/9- ray who finally ends the emperors reign and stars a new era absent the sith or jedi; rogue one- the daughter of the death star engineer, absent any force, who sacrifices all and guides others to make important choices and sacrificial choices to do one good while very powerful deed;Mandalorian show- Boka Tan changes from a defeated isolated leader to a better communal leader, even getting guidance by a man plus older woman, still with great fighting skill, who succeeds in fufilling her goal of uniting her people; Book of Boba- fennec shand <I do enjoy her> survives being betrayed by a younger man and becomes the trusted second in command, while visibly more dangerous than her boss, an older m, to an independent underworld empire; Ashoka Tano- has Ashoka who: admits she was/is wrong, survive failure, is extremely skilled plus lethal, trusts others to help to a collective goal, and moves in a very non offensive way, and chooses to continue training a child, no one, not even a very experienced purely logical machine, thinks has a chance of finishing her education. And is accompanied by a green skinned female general who always seems level headed but never follows orders blindly and is very sharp minded. A female padwan with the least amount of obvious impressiveness, a sign of how self loathing moth gideon was, who is full of love, who finally accepts her mandalorian roots. With female strong villains in a grey haired witch who is strong and in charge, but not flashy, while a young female warrior dedicated to a master but with a honest cruel streak. So the writers at the Star WArs section of disney have been working on female strong characters from the Stars wars films for a while, and they seem to be getting better with age. And the quality of male characters to the writers credit don't seem to be getting worse but are staying with them. I think the problem with the hans solo movie or the obi wan kinobi show was the male leads. 

https://aliciamccalla.com/blogs/blog/ahsoka-tano-the-badass-jedi-superheroine-we-need

The Mystery Behind ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ Cover Art Is Solved

Sleuths have wondered for years who made a striking cover for Madeleine L’Engle’s novel. A podcast host and a blog writer who contacted hundreds of people figured it out.

By Amanda Holpuch

Sept. 6, 2023

For certain corners of the internet, a 1976 paperback edition of Madeleine L’Engle’s novel “A Wrinkle in Time” has been the source of an enduring mystery: Who was the artist behind its spooky, glowing-green cover art?

After a few hours of research, the podcast host Amory Sivertson thought she had found the answer. She had emailed a gallery to ask if an artist it represented had made the cover and a worker said yes.

She was wrong: A day later, the gallery worker apologized for the miscommunication. It would be two months, hundreds of emails and a number of awkward cold calls before she actually found the correct name.

The mystery cover art shows a strapping centaur with delicate wings flying above a menacing green face with bright red eyes. Craggy mountains and fluffy dark clouds surround the haunting figures. The website Book Riot called the art “nightmare fuel.” The artist’s name isn’t mentioned anywhere in the book.

Ms. Sivertson thought that finding the artist’s name and giving the person credit were important for a work that is “on people’s bookshelves and in their hearts and in their memories.”

“This is one of the pieces that outlives him,” Ms. Sivertson said of the cover. “It’s just — you have to know. We have to find out who is behind it.”

The mystery reached Ms. Sivertson because she is the co-host and senior producer of the podcast “Endless Thread,” which sometimes delves into mysteries. On the show — produced by Boston’s NPR station WBUR — Ms. Sivertson and her co-host, Ben Brock Johnson, find explanations for quandaries such as Geedis, a warthog-like character that dazzled the internet, and a pile of plates dumped in the woods in Pennsylvania.

For the book art mystery, the podcast picked up where S. Elizabeth, who writes the blog Unquiet Things, had left off.

Ms. Elizabeth said she had first developed an “idle curiosity” about the artist behind the “Wrinkle in Time” cover art in 2019. In 2021 and 2022, her curiosity increased as she worked on her latest book, “The Art of Fantasy,” a compendium that comes out on Thursday.

In May, she described her search for the artist in a blog post, hoping it would generate new leads. She said that she had contacted people online who were connected to the novel, the fantasy art world and Ms. L’Engle. Ms. Elizabeth reached out to Ms. L’Engle’s granddaughter on the social media platform X to ask if she knew who created the cover, but the account responded with a shrug emoji.

Ms. Elizabeth posted about the search on Reddit, and a commenter there said the mystery would be a good fit for “Endless Thread,” so Ms. Elizabeth shared her request for help on the podcast’s subreddit.

Ms. Elizabeth didn’t have an especially deep connection to the book. When she first started looking for the cover artist, her primary memory of the novel was that the plot involved a liverwurst sandwich — “I’m a foodie,” she said — but she cares deeply about artists getting their due.

The search for an answer resonated online with many, who sent Ms. Elizabeth guesses about the artist’s identity and tips for her search.

“I think realizing that the artist was not so easily found — that just lit a fire under a lot of folks, because this book was so formative to so many people,” Ms. Elizabeth said.

People had guesses (spoiler: Some were correct https://twitter.com/wallacepolsom/status/1663664852764618752?s=20 ), but Ms. Sivertson’s hundreds of calls ultimately led to an answer. “I really was sustained by people who would write back and say, ‘I have a few ideas, let me make a few calls,’” she said.

Ms. Sivertson said these calls were “an industry coming back together,” with people who worked in publishing and illustration in the 1970s speaking with each other for the first time in decades.

In late June, she was given the correct name: Richard Bober. Mr. Bober died last year https://www.wow-art.com/richard-bober, but Ms. Sivertson was able to speak with his relatives in early July, and she said they found proof that he had made the cover art.

Ms. Elizabeth said that she wanted to burst into tears when the mystery was solved because even though Ms. Sivertson was tenacious, finding the answer had seemed like a long shot.

Ms. Elizabeth had actually seen a work by Mr. Bober before, “Lady Vampire,” which she said depicts a vampire girl who looks “like a snotty, mean girl,” with a dog looking at her adoringly. “At the time I thought, ‘This artist is so cool,’” Ms. Elizabeth recalled.

This cover art mystery appears to be solved, but Ms. Elizabeth has a long list of queries she would still like answers to, including who made a cover for the next book in Ms. L’Engle’s series: “A Wind in the Door.” Each year on social media, Ms. Elizabeth also posts a photo of a topless woman in an enormous headdress taken during what appears to be the 1920s, hoping someone will know who it is.

“Everyone has tons of guesses,” she said. “And some people are like, ‘Definitively, yes, this is that person.’ But show me the proof of it.”

URL

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/books/wrinkle-in-time-book-cover-artist.html

Partnering with Black Women Photographers to Amplify Black Creatives

Photo: © Edwina Hay (Flickr: eatsdirt < https://www.flickr.com/photos/eatsdirt/>)

We’re excited to officially announce our second grant in partnership with the Black Women Photographers community! <<  https://blackwomenphotographers.com/ >>With this grant we hope to help a photographer from both the Black Women Photographers and Flickr communities to further hone their photography skills.

The grant includes funds of $2,500 to be used by the recipient towards furthering their photography practice. It also includes a two-year Flickr Pro membership, as well as  a one-year SmugMug Pro membership. Ten additional recipients will each receive a one-year Flickr Pro membership and one-year SmugMug Pro membership. 

In order to be eligible for the grant you must:

Be a member of the Black Women Photographers community << https://blackwomenphotographers.com/join-the-community  >>

Submit a photo aligned with the theme of “Light in Motion” to the Black Women Photographers group on Flickr <<  https://www.flickr.com/groups/blackwomenphotographers/ >>>(Explain how to be a member of the group < < https://www.flickrhelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404069536532-Add-or-remove-photos-in-Flickr-groups > >)

Explain why the photo you chose stands out to you 

Be an active member on Flickr (completing the step above fulfills this requirement!)

Applications will close on October 6th, 2023. Please apply << https://blackwomenphotographers.com/smugmug-flickr  >> and spread the word before the deadline!

This grant is open to Black women and non-binary photographers who are members – new and old –  of Black Women Photographers and Flickr. The grant recipient will be selected by  BWP founder Polly Irungu<<https://www.pollyirungu.com/>>, veteran BWP and Flickr member Edwina Hay.  Flickr Community’s MacKenzie Joslin < https://www.flickr.com/photos/kenziej/  

SmugMug’s Senior Global Brand Manager & Head of Ambassador Relations Alastair Jolly https://www.flickr.com/photos/alastairjolly/

 and This Week in Photo’s Frederick Van Johnson. https://thisweekinphoto.com/author/frederick/

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Join the community

Over the last two years, we’ve had the opportunity to work directly with Polly Irungu, founder of Black Women Photographers, as well as get to know members of the BWP community and learn more about their work. The collective’s mission is to help get Black women photographers hired and supports its members by promoting their work in an active database distributed to photo editors and art buyers. The collective also offers education and support for its members through regular programing like webinars, workshops, and portfolio reviews.

If you’re a Black woman photographer looking to connect with a larger community, you can learn more and apply to be part of Black Women Photographers. And if you’re new to Flickr, we’re here to help you get started! Check out our Flickr FAQ series and say hello in the Black Women Photographers group.

Note: The photo included in this blog post and in communications about this grant was taken by Edwina Hay, a music photographer and member of the grant panel. You can see more of her work on Flickr.

en

URL

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Writeup as I listened

12:10 
Secrets to writing great horror

12:12
He wrote the Kundalini equation < https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-kundalini-equation-1 >

originally wrote to have a best seller and increase his career. A white guy was put on a peers cover. The firms back in the day to the original publication was not willing to look at their own responsibility. 
True, the white audience in modernity is used to 

17:36 
STeven sees the potential to do something unique to him. He will rewrite a former novel and turn it into something it should had been, and he will collaborate with Tananarive in the script form. He wants to use Tananarive practical historical smoothing.

18:46 
People suggest Tananarive Due is one of the greatest horror writers alive. 

20:10 
what makes a great horror story?

22:06
What is the greatest extent, what is the most extreme moment?
There is a point where it is too much or that is not enough. A symphony of different emotions to feel the experience. Using vision boards matters.  You can feel your way before you write it. 

23:50 
Now that a cardboard treatment, and now a written treatment and ask what is the experience of this movie be.
What is the difference between action or horror movies?
In action movies, people are getting hurt in a sequence, like in horror. 
For Tananarive, the difference is the depth of characters.
For example, a horror movie about a bunch of college students on a ski trip. She can relate to college students through friends who like skiing.
Then a mercenary on a mission is on a ski lift. She can't relate to a mercenary or being on a ski lift. 

26:31 
Horror needs a relatable character who is experiencing fear, a haunted house is not enough. You need a customer who has never been in that haunted house and something goes wrong. A couple for example trying to work out their stuff and it makes the external side internal.

27:41 
Tananarive has a template. 
If she has to write a horror story and has three weeks.
->What scares you?
She uses survivor horror as that is scary to her and she has been camping, rafting. 
->How do you make the story yours? 
So more than bears, it becomes about a cult. Stephen King was a teacher growing up
->Believe in the characters
Suffered a trauma, and committed a transgression is common among writers of horror. Grief is common , the one horror no one overcomes. 

31:29 
All horror is about surviving what you are in.
Imagine Get Out if Chris wasn't in grief over the lost of his mother.
Steven makes a point, deer antlers were used as a symbol to defend himself, which is like the deer he hit in the beginning of the film.

32:37 
Tananarive, she weaponized his Grief, and by the end, he has weaponized his own grief. To make it his strength and overcome. 

34:09 
Tananative You can make "Get Out" a drama. Is Chris in love with the secret psycho white woman? 
Peele discussed Guess who is coming to dinner in the early screenplay version of "Get Out" 
< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpGmCLcqgAw >
< https://www.shadowandact.com/what-is-black-horror-the-sunken-place-professor-tananarive-due-explains > 

36:27
Peele started with social anxiety. It wasn't about phenotypical frictions, merely the frictions of the stranger among a group of friends and amplify it. 
Turn it up to 11. 
Tananarive isn't into human horror. She is triggered by Human horror and make it a journey. It is a journey of self revelation. 

37:39
Liam Neeson, eyes in the grey.
She loves that film, for not about the wolf winning but standing up. Even though many call the end a downer. The film is about who the character becomes. 

38:44 
Tananarive considers gaslighting her least favorite horror. PArents or spouses gaslighting children or spouses in her opinion is poor storytelling. Is it going to kill your character to cut on a flashlight in the dark room? She feels it is overdone. She calls it an artificial conceit. She loves Miles in the good house. Miles doesn't believe but stands by the female character. 
< https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-good-house-2 > 

40:47
You want psychological realism, nothing breaks more than when people act away from common responses. If you do not pick up a weapon going to a dark place you are an idiot.

41:36
STeven Barnes, asks is that why meetings are the best part in horror to Tananarive. 
Tananarive loves the meeting in horror.  

42:40 
Steven talks of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, people of normal intelligence with no idea what is about to happen. In alien, normal people of normal intelligence. Whereas in prometheus, they were scientist and should had known better. 

43:57
Steven, Difference between action in horror, something killing you in the dark is horror, in the light as a tiger is action. 
Horror is unknown, playing on the minds ways to whatever the truth is in the darkness. Action is more strategic, allows for knowable assessment. 
 
45:20 
Tananarive, the feeling of fear is different in action. 
Steven, it will be interesting to take a liam neeson skill set taken man into a situation where he finds himself in a situation beyond his comprehension that he realizes. 

46:42
Tananarive, war time horror is like that. ala Predator. 

47:25 
Steven, talks of Prey, the predator underestimates the human female lead. 

48:25 
Elegance usually takes years. Steven says, the best pieces of horror were not primordial, they evolved. 

49:33 
Tananarive, Think about the antagonists too. Make sure their is logic to Zombies. What is different in the way you write zombies?
< https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/devil-s-wake > 

Put your own unique spin. For example, the reason for haunting of ghost matters. 
The interaction between characters side antagonist matters. 
Steven, your god of the universe in your story
Alot of readers like the antagonist more than anybody else in the story, make it pop ,and don't repeat things. 

52:55 
September 23rd 5-8 on the east coast , 
3 hour workshop. It is 197 dollars. If you can't afford it. You can email us and ask for a lower price.
how to format screenplay, all the hacks. 
www. hollywoodloophole.com
< https://store.payloadz.com/details/2686637-other-files-arts-and-crafts-10-secrets-of-hollywood-writers-live-zoom-workshop.html > 

They want engaged people. 

The Intruder 1962

Directed by Roger Corman

Written by Charles Beaumont

Starring William Shatner

The Beautiful People

By Charles Beaumont

---

Mary was a misfit.
She didn't want to be beautiful. And she wasted time doing mad things—like eating and sleeping.

The Beautiful People

By Charles Beaumont

MARY sat quietly and watched the handsome man's legs blown off; watched further as the great ship began to crumple and break into small pieces in the middle of the blazing night. She fidgeted slightly as the men and the parts of the men came floating dreamily through the wreckage out into the awful silence. And when the meteorite shower came upon the men, gouging holes through everything, tearing flesh and ripping bones, Mary closed her eyes.

"Mother."

Mrs. Cuberle glanced up from her magazine.

"Hmm?"

"Do we have to wait much longer?"

"I don't think so. Why?"

Mary said nothing but looked at the moving wall.

"Oh, that." Mrs. Cuberle laughed[6] and shook her head. "That tired old thing. Read a magazine, Mary, like I'm doing. We've all seen that a million times."

"Does it have to be on, Mother?"

"Well, nobody seems to be watching. I don't think the doctor would mind if I switched it off."

Mrs. Cuberle rose from the couch and walked to the wall. She depressed a little button and the life went from the wall, flickering and glowing.

Mary opened her eyes.

"Honestly," Mrs. Cuberle said to a woman sitting beside her, "you'd think they'd try to get something else. We might as well go to the museum and watch the first landing on Mars. The Mayoraka Disaster—really!"

The woman replied without distracting her eyes from the magazine page. "It's the doctor's idea. Psychological."

Mrs. Cuberle opened her mouth and moved her head up and down knowingly.

"Ohhh. I should have known there was some reason. Still, who watches it?"

"The children do. Makes them think, makes them grateful or something."

"Ohhh."

"Psychological."

Mary picked up a magazine and leafed through the pages. All photographs, of women and men. Women like Mother and like the others in the room; slender, tanned, shapely, beautiful women; and men with large muscles and shiny hair. Women and men, all looking alike, all perfect and beautiful. She folded the magazine and wondered how to answer the questions that would be asked.

"Mother—"

"Gracious, what is it now! Can't you sit still for a minute?"

"But we've been here three hours."

Mrs. Cuberle sniffed.

"Do—do I really have to?"

"Now don't be silly, Mary. After those terrible things you told me, of course you do."

An olive-skinned woman in a transparent white uniform came into the reception room.

"Cuberle. Mrs. Zena Cuberle?"

"Yes."

"Doctor will see you now."

Mrs. Cuberle took Mary's hand and they walked behind the nurse down a long corridor.

A man who seemed in his middle twenties looked up from a desk. He smiled and gestured toward two adjoining chairs.

"Well—well."

"Doctor Hortel, I—"

THE doctor snapped his fingers.

"Of course, I know. Your daughter. Ha ha, I certainly do know your trouble. Get so many of them nowadays—takes up most of my time."

"You do?" asked Mrs. Cuberle. "Frankly, it had begun to upset me."

"Upset? Hmm. Not good. Not good at all. Ah, but then—if people did not get upset, we psychiatrists would be out of a job, eh? Go the way of the early M. D. But, I assure you, I need hear no more." He turned his handsome face to Mary.[7] "Little girl, how old are you?"

"Eighteen, sir."

"Oh, a real bit of impatience. It's just about time, of course. What might your name be?"

"Mary."

"Charming! And so unusual. Well now, Mary, may I say that I understand your problem—understand it thoroughly?"

Mrs. Cuberle smiled and smoothed the sequins on her blouse.

"Madam, you have no idea how many there are these days. Sometimes it preys on their minds so that it affects them physically, even mentally. Makes them act strange, say peculiar, unexpected things. One little girl I recall was so distraught she did nothing but brood all day long. Can you imagine!"

"That's what Mary does. When she finally told me, doctor, I thought she had gone—you know."

"That bad, eh? Afraid we'll have to start a re-education program, very soon, or they'll all be like this. I believe I'll suggest it to the senator day after tomorrow."

"I don't quite understand, doctor."

"Simply, Mrs. Cuberle, that the children have got to be thoroughly instructed. Thoroughly. Too much is taken for granted and childish minds somehow refuse to accept things without definite reason. Children have become far too intellectual, which, as I trust I needn't remind you, is a dangerous thing."

"Yes, but what has this to do with—"

"With Mary? Everything, of course. Mary, like half the sixteen, seventeen and eighteen year olds today, has begun to feel acutely self-conscious. She feels that her body has developed sufficiently for the Transformation—which of course it has not, not quite yet—and she cannot understand the complex reasons that compel her to wait until some future date. Mary looks at you, at the women all about her, at the pictures, and then she looks into a mirror. From pure perfection of body, face, limbs, pigmentation, carriage, stance, from simon-pure perfection, if I may be allowed the expression, she sees herself and is horrified. Isn't that so, my dear child? Of course—of course. She asks herself, why must I be hideous, unbalanced, oversize, undersize, full of revolting skin eruptions, badly schemed organically? In short, Mary is tired of being a monster and is overly anxious to achieve what almost everyone else has already achieved."

"But—" said Mrs. Cuberle.

"This much you understand, doubtless. Now, Mary, what you object to is that our society offers you, and the others like you, no convincing logic on the side of waiting until age nineteen. It is all taken for granted, and you want to know why! It is that simple. A non-technical explanation will not suffice—mercy no! The modern child wants facts, solid technical data, to satisfy her every question. And that, as you can both see, will take a good deal of reorganizing."

"But—" said Mary.

"The child is upset, nervous, tense; she acts strange, peculiar, odd, worries you and makes herself ill because it is beyond our meagre powers to put it across. I tell you, what we need is a whole new basis for learning. And, that will take[8] doing. It will take doing, Mrs. Cuberle. Now, don't you worry about Mary, and don't you worry, child. I'll prescribe some pills and—"

"No, no, doctor! You're all mixed up," cried Mrs. Cuberle.

"I beg your pardon, Madam?"

"What I mean is, you've got it wrong. Tell him, Mary, tell the doctor what you told me."

Mary shifted uneasily in the chair.

"It's that—I don't want it."

The doctor's well-proportioned jaw dropped.

"Would you please repeat that?"

"I said, I don't want the Transformation."

"D—Don't want it?"

"You see? She told me. That's why I came to you."

The doctor looked at Mary suspiciously.

"But that's impossible! I have never heard of such a thing. Little girl, you are playing a joke!"

Mary nodded negatively.

"See, doctor. What can it be?" Mrs. Cuberle rose and began to pace.

THE DOCTOR clucked his tongue and took from a small cupboard a black box covered with buttons and dials and wire.

"Oh no, you don't think—I mean, could it?"

"We shall soon see." The doctor revolved a number of dials and studied the single bulb in the center of the box. It did not flicker. He removed handles from Mary's head.

"Dear me," the doctor said, "dear me. Your daughter is perfectly sane, Mrs. Cuberle."

"Well, then what is it?"

"Perhaps she is lying. We haven't completely eliminated that factor as yet; it slips into certain organisms."

More tests. More machines and more negative results.

Mary pushed her foot in a circle on the floor. When the doctor put his hands to her shoulders, she looked up pleasantly.

"Little girl," said the handsome man, "do you actually mean to tell us that you prefer that body?"

"Yes sir."

"May I ask why."

"I like it. It's—hard to explain, but it's me and that's what I like. Not the looks, maybe, but the me."

"You can look in the mirror and see yourself, then look at—well, at your mother and be content?"

"Yes, sir." Mary thought of her reasons; fuzzy, vague, but very definitely there. Maybe she had said the reason. No. Only a part of it.

"Mrs. Cuberle," the doctor said, "I suggest that your husband have a long talk with Mary."

"My husband is dead. That affair near Ganymede, I believe. Something like that."

"Oh, splendid. Rocket man, eh? Very interesting organisms. Something always seems to happen to rocket men, in one way or another. But—I suppose we should do something." The doctor scratched his jaw. "When did she first start talking this way," he asked.

"Oh, for quite some time. I used to think it was because she was such a baby. But lately, the time getting so close and all, I thought I'd better see you."

"Of course, yes, very wise. Er—does she also do odd things?"[9]

"Well, I found her on the second level one night. She was lying on the floor and when I asked her what she was doing, she said she was trying to sleep."

Mary flinched. She was sorry, in a way, that Mother had found that out.

"To—did you say 'sleep'?"

"That's right."

"Now where could she have picked that up?"

"No idea."

"Mary, don't you know that nobody sleeps anymore? That we have an infinitely greater life-span than our poor ancestors now that the wasteful state of unconsciousness has been conquered? Child, have you actually slept? No one knows how anymore."

"No sir, but I almost did."

The doctor sighed. "But, it's unheard of! How could you begin to try to do something people have forgotten entirely about?"

"The way it was described in the book, it sounded nice, that's all." Mary was feeling very uncomfortable now. Home and no talking man in a foolish white gown....

"Book, book? Are there books at your Unit, Madam?"

"There could be—I haven't cleaned up in a while."

"That is certainly peculiar. I haven't seen a book for years. Not since '17."

Mary began to fidget and stare nervously about.

"But with the tapes, why should you try and read books—where did you get them?"

"Daddy did. He got them from his father and so did Grandpa. He said they're better than the tapes and he was right."

Mrs. Cuberle flushed.

"My husband was a little strange, Doctor Hortel. He kept those things despite everything I said.

"Dear me, I—excuse me."

The muscular, black-haired doctor walked to another cabinet and selected from the shelf a bottle. From the bottle he took two large pills and swallowed them.

"Sleep—books—doesn't want the Transformation—Mrs. Cuberle, my dear good woman, this is grave. Doesn't want the Transformation. I would appreciate it if you would change psychiatrists: I am very busy and, uh, this is somewhat specialized. I suggest Centraldome. Many fine doctors there. Goodbye."

The doctor turned and sat down in a large chair and folded his hands. Mary watched him and wondered why the simple statements should have so changed things. But the doctor did not move from the chair.

"Well!" said Mrs. Cuberle and walked quickly from the room.

The man's legs were being blown off again as they left the reception room.

MARY considered the reflection in the mirrored wall. She sat on the floor and looked at different angles of herself: profile, full-face, full length, naked, clothed. Then she took up the magazine and studied it. She sighed.

"Mirror, mirror on the wall—" The words came haltingly to her mind and from her lips. She hadn't read them, she recalled. Daddy had said them, quoted them as he put it.[10] But they too were lines from a book—"who is the fairest of—"

A picture of Mother sat upon the dresser and Mary considered this now. Looked for a long time at the slender, feminine neck. The golden skin, smooth and without blemish, without wrinkles and without age. The dark brown eyes and the thin tapers of eyebrows, the long black lashes, set evenly, so that each half of the face corresponded precisely. The half-parted-mouth, a violet tint against the gold, the white, white teeth, even, sparkling.

Mother. Beautiful, Transformed Mother. And back again to the mirror.

"—of them all...."

The image of a rather chubby girl, without lines of rhythm or grace, without perfection. Splotchy skin full of little holes, puffs in the cheeks, red eruptions on the forehead. Perspiration, shapeless hair flowing onto shapeless shoulders down a shapeless body. Like all of them, before the Transformation.

Did they all look like this, before? Did Mother, even?

Mary thought hard, trying to remember exactly what Daddy and Grandpa had said, why they said the Transformation was a bad thing, and why she believed and agreed with them so strongly. It made little sense, but they were right. They were right! And one day, she would understand completely.

Mrs. Cuberle slammed the door angrily and Mary jumped to her feet. She hadn't forgotten about it. "The way you upset Dr. Hortel. He won't even see me anymore, and these traumas are getting horrible. I'll have to get that awful Dr. Wagoner."

"Sorry—"

Mrs. Cuberle sat on the couch and crossed her legs carefully.

"What in the world were you doing on the floor?"

"Trying to sleep."

"Now, I won't hear of it! You've got to stop it! You know you're not insane. Why should you want to do such a silly thing?"

"The books. And Daddy told me about it."

"And you mustn't read those terrible things."

"Why—is there a law against them?"

"Well, no, but people tired of books when the tapes came in. You know that. The house is full of tapes; anything you want."

Mary stuck out her lower lip.

"They're no fun. All about the Wars and the colonizations."

"And I suppose books are fun?"

"Yes. They are."

"And that's where you got this idiotic notion that you don't want the Transformation, isn't it? Of course it is. Well, we'll see to that!"

MRS. CUBERLE rose quickly and took the books from the corner and from the closet and filled her arms with them. She looked everywhere in the room and gathered the old rotten volumes.

These she carried from the room and threw into the elevator. A button guided the doors shut.

"I thought you'd do that," Mary said. "That's why I hid most of the good ones. Where you'll never find them."

Mrs. Cuberle put a satin handkerchief[11] to her eyes and began to weep.

"Just look at you. Look. I don't know what I ever did to deserve this!"

"Deserve what, Mother? What am I doing that's so wrong?" Mary's mind rippled in a confused stream.

"What!" Mrs. Cuberle screamed, "What! Do you think I want people to point to you and say I'm the mother of an idiot? That's what they'll say, you'll see. Or," she looked up hopefully, "have you changed your mind?"

"No." The vague reasons, longing to be put into words.

"It doesn't hurt. They just take off a little skin and put some on and give you pills and electronic treatments and things like that. It doesn't take more than a week."

"No." The reason.

"Don't you want to be beautiful, like other people—like me? Look at your friend Shala, she's getting her Transformation next month. And she's almost pretty now."

"Mother, I don't care—"

"If it's the bones you're worried about, well, that doesn't hurt. They give you a shot and when you wake up, everything's moulded right. Everything, to suit the personality."

"I don't care, I don't care."

"But why?"

"I like me the way I am." Almost—almost exactly. But not quite. Part of it, however. Part of what Daddy and Grandpa meant.

"But you're so ugly, dear! Like Dr. Hortel said. And Mr. Willmes, at the factory. He told some people he thought you were the ugliest girl he'd ever seen. Says he'll be thankful when you have your Transformation. And what if he hears of all this, what'll happen then?"

"Daddy said I was beautiful."

"Well really, dear. You do have eyes."

"Daddy said that real beauty is only skin deep. He said a lot of things like that and when I read the books I felt the same way. I guess I don't want to look like everybody else, that's all." No, that's not it. Not at all it.

"That man had too much to do with you. You'll notice that he had his Transformation, though!"

"But he was sorry. He told me that if he had it to do over again, he'd never do it. He said for me to be stronger than he was."

"Well, I won't have it. You're not going to get away with this, young lady. After all, I am your mother."

A bulb flickered in the bathroom and Mrs. Cuberle walked uncertainly to the cabinet. She took out a little cardboard box.

"Time for lunch."

Mary nodded. That was another thing the books talked about, which the tapes did not. Lunch seemed to be something special long ago, or at least different. The books talked of strange ways of putting a load of things into the mouth and chewing these things. Enjoying them. Strange and somehow wonderful.

"And you'd better get ready for work."

"Yes, Mother."

THE office was quiet and without shadows. The walls gave off a steady luminescence, distributed the light evenly upon all the desks and[12] tables. And it was neither hot nor cold.

Mary held the ruler firmly and allowed the pen to travel down the metal edge effortlessly. The new black lines were small and accurate. She tipped her head, compared the notes beside her to the plan she was working on. She noticed the beautiful people looking at her more furtively than before, and she wondered about this as she made her lines.

A tall man rose from his desk in the rear of the office and walked down the aisle to Mary's table. He surveyed her work, allowing his eyes to travel cautiously from her face to the draft.

Mary looked around.

"Nice job," said the man.

"Thank you, Mr. Willmes."

"Dralich shouldn't have anything to complain about. That crane should hold the whole damn city."

"It's very good alloy, sir."

"Yeah. Say, kid, you got a minute?"

"Yes sir."

"Let's go into Mullinson's office."

The big handsome man led the way into a small cubby-hole of a room. He motioned to a chair and sat on the edge of one desk.

"Kid, I never was one to beat around the bush. Somebody called in little while ago, gave me some crazy story about you not wanting the Transformation."

Mary said "Oh." Daddy had said it would have to happen, some day. This must be what he meant.

"I would've told them they were way off the beam, but I wanted to talk to you first, get it straight."

"Well, sir, it's true. I don't. I want to stay this way."

The man looked at Mary and then coughed, embarrassedly.

"What the hell—excuse me, kid, but—I don't exactly get it. You, uh, you saw the psychiatrist?"

"Yes sir. I'm not insane. Dr. Hortel can tell you."

"I didn't mean anything like that. Well—" the man laughed nervously. "I don't know what to say. You're still a cub, but you do swell work. Lot of good results, lots of comments from the stations. But, Mr. Poole won't like it."

"I know. I know what you mean, Mr. Willmes. But nothing can change my mind. I want to stay this way and that's all there is to it."

"But—you'll get old before you're half through life."

Yes, she would. Old, like the Elders, wrinkled and brittle, unable to move right. Old. "It's hard to make you understand. But I don't see why it should make any difference."

"Don't go getting me wrong, now. It's not me, but, you know, I don't own Interplan. I just work here. Mr. Poole likes things running smooth and it's my job to carry it out. And soon as everybody finds out, things wouldn't run smooth. There'll be a big stink. The dames will start asking questions and talk."

"Will you accept my resignation, then, Mr. Willmes?"

"Sure you won't change your mind?"

"No sir. I decided that a long time ago. And I'm sorry now that I told Mother or anyone else. No sir, I won't change my mind."

"Well, I'm sorry, Mary. You been doing awful swell work. Couple of[13] years you could be centralled on one of the asteroids, the way you been working. But if you should change your mind, there'll always be a job for you here."

"Thank you, sir."

"No hard feelings?"

"No hard feelings."

"Okay then. You've got till March. And between you and me, I hope by then you've decided the other way."

Mary walked back down the aisle, past the rows of desks. Past the men and women. The handsome, model men and the beautiful, perfect women, perfect, all perfect, all looking alike. Looking exactly alike.

She sat down again and took up her ruler and pen.

MARY stepped into the elevator and descended several hundred feet. At the Second Level she pressed a button and the elevator stopped. The doors opened with another button and the doors to her Unit with still another.

Mrs. Cuberle sat on the floor by the T-V, disconsolate and red-eyed. Her blond hair had come slightly askew and a few strands hung over her forehead. "You don't need to tell me. No one will hire you."

Mary sat beside her mother. "If you only hadn't told Mr. Willmes in the first place—"

"Well, I thought he could beat a little sense into you."

The sounds from the T-V grew louder. Mrs. Cuberle changed channels and finally turned it off.

"What did you do today, Mother?" Mary smiled.

"Do? What can I do, now? Nobody will even come over! I told you what would happen."

"Mother!"

"They say you should be in the Circuses."

Mary went into another room. Mrs. Cuberle followed. "How are we going to live? Where does the money come from now? Just because you're stubborn on this crazy idea. Crazy crazy crazy! Can I support both of us? They'll be firing me, next!"

"Why is this happening?"

"Because of you, that's why. Nobody else on this planet has ever refused the Transformation. But you turn it down. You want to be ugly!"

Mary put her arms about her mother's shoulders. "I wish I could explain, I've tried so hard to. It isn't that I want to bother anyone, or that Daddy wanted me to. I just don't want the Transformation."

Mrs. Cuberle reached into the pockets of her blouse and got a purple pill. She swallowed the pill. When the letter dropped from the chute, Mrs. Cuberle ran to snatch it up. She read it once, silently, then smiled.

"Oh, I was afraid they wouldn't answer. But we'll see about this now!"

She gave the letter to Mary.

Mary let the paper flutter to the floor. She walked quietly to the elevator and set it for Level III. When the elevator stopped, she ran from it, crying, into her room.

She thought and remembered and tried to sort out and put together. Daddy had said it, Grandpa had, the books did. Yes, the books did.

She read until her eyes burned and her eyes burned until she could read no more. Then Mary went to sleep, softly and without realizing it, for the first time.

But the sleep was not peaceful.

"LADIES and gentlemen," said the young-looking, well groomed man, "this problem does not resolve easily. Dr. Hortel here, testifies that Mary Cuberle is definitely not insane. Drs. Monagh, Prinn and Fedders all verify this judgment. Dr. Prinn asserts that the human organism is no longer so constructed as to create and sustain such an attitude through deliberate falsehood. Further, there is positively nothing in the structure of Mary Cuberle which might suggest difficulties in Transformation. There is evidence for all these statements. And yet we are faced with this refusal. What, may I ask, is to be done?"

Mary looked at a metal table.

"We have been in session far too long, holding up far too many other pressing contingencies. The trouble on Mercury, for example. We'll have to straighten that out, somehow."

Throughout the rows of beautiful people, the mumbling increased. Mrs. Cuberle sat nervously, tapping her shoe and running a comb through her hair.

"Mary Cuberle, you have been given innumerable chances to reconsider, you know."

Mary said, "I know. But I don't want to."

The beautiful people looked at Mary and laughed. Some shook their heads.

The man threw up his hands. "Little girl, can you realize what an issue you have caused? The unrest, the wasted time? Do you fully understand what you have done? Intergalactic questions hang fire while you sit there saying the same thing over and over. Doesn't the happiness of your Mother mean anything to you?"

A slender, supple woman in a back row cried, "We want action. Do something!"

The man in the high stool raised his hand. "None of that, now. We must conform, even though the question is out of the ordinary." He leafed through a number of papers on his desk, leaned down and whispered into the ear of a strong blond man. Then he turned to Mary[15] again. "Child, for the last time. Do you reconsider? Will you accept the Transformation?"

"No."

The man shrugged his shoulders. "Very well, then. I have here a petition, signed by two thousand individuals and representing all the Stations of Earth. They have been made aware of all the facts and have submitted the petition voluntarily. It's all so unusual and I'd hoped we wouldn't have to—but the petition urges drastic measures."

The mumbling rose.

"The petition urges that you shall, upon final refusal, be forced by law to accept the Transformation. And that an act of legislature shall make this universal and binding in the future."

Mary's eyes were open, wide. She stood and paused before speaking.

"Why?" she asked, loudly.

The man passed a hand through his hair.

Another voice from the crowd, "Seems to be a lot of questions unanswered here."

And another, "Sign the petition, Senator!"

All the voices, "Sign it, sign it!"

"But why?" Mary began to cry. The voices stilled for a moment.

"Because—Because—"

"If you'd only tell me that. Tell me!"

"Why, it simply isn't being done, that's all. The greatest gift of all, and what if others should get the same idea? What would happen to us then, little girl? We'd be right back to the ugly, thin, fat, unhealthy-looking race we were ages ago! There can't be any exceptions."

"Maybe they didn't consider themselves so ugly."

The mumbling began anew.

"That isn't the point," cried the man. "You must conform!"

And the voices cried "Yes" loudly until the man took up a pen and signed the papers on his desk.

Cheers, applause, shouts.

Mrs. Cuberle patted Mary on the top of her head.

"There, now!" she said, happily, "Everything will be all right now. You'll see, Mary."

THE Transformation Parlor Covered the entire Level, sprawling with its departments. It was always filled and there was nothing to sign and no money to pay and people were always waiting in line.

But today the people stood aside. And there were still more, looking in through doors, TV cameras placed throughout the tape machines in every corner. It was filled, but not bustling as usual.

Mary walked past the people, Mother and the men in back of her, following. She looked at the people. The people were beautiful, perfect, without a single flaw.

All the beautiful people. All the ugly people, staring out from bodies that were not theirs. Walking on legs that had been made for them, laughing with manufactured voices, gesturing with shaped and fashioned arms.

Mary walked slowly, despite the prodding. In her eyes, in her eyes, was a mounting confusion; a wide, wide wonderment.

The reason was becoming less vague; the fuzzed edges were falling[16] away now. Through all the horrible months and all the horrible moments, the edges fell away. Now it was almost clear.

She looked down at her own body, then at the walls which reflected it. Flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone, all hers, made by no one, built by herself or someone she did not know. Uneven kneecaps, making two grinning cherubs when they bent, and the old familiar rubbing together of fat inner thighs. Fat, unshapely, unsystematic Mary. But Mary.

Of course. Of course! This was what Daddy meant, what Grandpa and the books meant. What they would know if they would read the books or hear the words, the good, reasonable words, the words that signified more, much more, than any of this.

The understanding heaped up with each step.

"Where are these people?" Mary asked half to herself. "What has happened to them and don't they miss themselves, these manufactured things?"

She stopped, suddenly.

"Yes! That is the reason. They have all forgotten themselves!"

A curvacious woman stepped forward and took Mary's hand. The woman's skin was tinted dark. Chipped and sculptured bone into slender rhythmic lines, electrically created carriage, stance, made, turned out.

"All right, young lady. We will begin."

They guided Mary to a large, curved leather seat.

From the top of a long silver pole a machine lowered itself. Tiny bulbs glowed to life and cells began to click. The people stared. Slowly a picture formed upon the screen in the machine. Bulbs directed at Mary, then redirected into the machine. Wheels turning, buttons ticking.

The picture was completed.

"Would you like to see it?"

Mary closed her eyes, tight.

"It's really very nice." The woman turned to the crowd. "Oh yes, there's a great deal to be salvaged; you'd be surprised. A great deal. We'll keep the nose and I don't believe the elbows will have to be altered at all."

Mrs. Cuberle looked at Mary and smiled. "Now, it isn't so bad as you thought, is it?" she said.

The beautiful people looked. Cameras turned, tapes wound.

"You'll have to excuse us now. Only the machines allowed."

Only the machines.

The people filed out.

Mary saw the rooms in the mirror. Saw things in the rooms, the faces and bodies that had been left; the woman and the machines and the old young men standing about, adjusting, readying.

Then she looked at the picture in the screen.

And screamed.

A woman of medium height stared back at her. A woman with a curved body and thin legs; silver hair, pompadoured, cut short; full sensuous lips, small breasts, flat stomach, unblemished skin.

A strange, strange woman no one had ever seen before.

The nurse began to take Mary's clothes off.

"Geoff," the woman said, "come[17] look at this, will you. Not one so bad in years. Amazing that we can keep anything at all."

The handsome man put his hands in his pockets.

"Pretty bad, all right."

"Be still, child, stop making those noises. You know perfectly well nothing is going to hurt."

"But—what will you do with me?"

"That was all explained to you."

"No, no, with me, me!"

"Oh, you mean the castoffs. The usual. I don't know exactly. Somebody takes care of it."

"I want me!" Mary cried. "Not that!" She pointed at the screen.

Straps. Clamps pulling, stretching limbs apart. The screen with the picture brought in. The men and the woman, more women now. Dr. Hortel in a corner, sitting with his legs crossed, shaking his head.

Mary began to cry above the hum of the mechanical things.

"Shhh. My gracious, such a racket! Just think about your job waiting for you, and all the friends you'll have and how nice everything will be. No more trouble now."

The big machine hurtling downward.

"Where will I find me?" Mary screamed, "when it's all over?"

A long needle slid into rough flesh and the beautiful people gathered around the table.

They turned on the big machine.

THE END

URL

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/36258/pg36258-images.html

The following is my neutral reply to a reply to my words appended after.

science just means knowledge. 

Using my own linguistic style, I will say, Researchers , who are able to be concurred to or refuted by others, suggest based on their studies that bias, communal positions based on interpreting race, has no genetic source.  

I concur that biases , like linking intelligence or emotional quality to a racial factor like phenotype or gender,  are not genetically based most of the time.

Yes, one can argue that downs syndrome, which is a known, publicly known,  genetically derived condition with symptoms of mental inaptitude or uncommon difficulty does at the least prove genetics has instances where it influences intelligence, but the genomes which tend to be variant in those with downs syndrome do not occur bounded to the presence of other genetic markers for gender or phenotype or other, at least to my knowledge.

Yes, one can argue that women during pregnancy, which is a genetically based condition < men if healthy can not get pregnant whereas a woman who is healthy can> , have a long history of recorded emotional swings but like downs syndrome, it isn't bounded to the presence of other genomes. 

I will speak for myself. 

I am not being dishonest, I have said no lie, or betrayed my thinking. Nor have I spoken illogically, absent a structured reason,  or ignorantly, meaning absent knowledge. 

And as this is the African American Literature Book Club, I think a greater point is being missed. The most important point of the trilog and that is use of words, especially in the black community of the usa.

In literature, the use of words is logically the most important aspect of literature, not culturally or heritagewise but logically. That is why the word gay doesn't mean happy anymore for most people in the anglophone. 

To me, as I said before, I didn't explain myself to get anyone else to change. I explained myself cause I felt it was warranted as functional reasoning that needs to be emitted, and not silent. I don't think any conflict exist between the three in the trilog. All explained themselves, and I said what Troy said makes sense, is logical,  based on the  elemental parts. But my elemental parts are other. It doesn't make me right or the other two  wrong., or them right and me wrong. We have two different definitions of race that have no middle point and in my eyes, none of us have a reason to utilize the other, unless we as individuals want to. 

But, Troy, a member of this group, asserted at the end, that I , or anyone else, shouldn't have a different use of words than websters or majority users. And I oppose that 100%. Just because websters has decided on a definition doesn't make it irrefutable , regardless of how many people are taught it or are indoctrinated to it. 

And this goes into the black community. If one hundred black people live in a room and 99 say things one way and have a different mind to the room, why should the one be uncomfortable because they are alone. Some speak of individualism quite often in the black community in the usa, yet they often suggest in parallel that individualism should give into communalism when one is not comfortable, defined as opposed to a majority. 

And yes, I reject more than one word in websters. As a poet I study words and I have found heavy levels of misuse in words. So much so I do it often myself, cause the USA environment has made common a lot of incorrect word usages. I will love to have a chance to work on a dictionary for a less known or used  language. I wish Black people in the USA had not thrown away our many dialects for .... websters. 

I nearly hate the blanc  french but I have always been a fan of the following. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_Française

Why? I think the french are correct in the maintenance of language. In the same way the architects of timbuktu are correct in making buildings where aspects to their maintenance or  repair is part of their final structure.  Every language should have some organization to manage it to be within itself. American English is a terrible language in that way. It is unorganized, muddled, and ugly in the allowance of atemporal disjunction. 

The USA thought about it 

http://www.languagepolicy.net/archives/Adams.htm

The continental congress logic wasn't flawed. From the beginning they realized, that having language be fluid opened up allowances in expression, which allows for the composite nation speech point.

Composite nation from frederick douglass

 But Adams was correct. Language dictates the populace. When you look at the usa today and the individual liberty of it, it can be argued that the freedom of language plus the lack of management of language is a key to its populace's makeup. American English is looking to be mixed , so to speak. 

But it is interesting that so many Black people in my creative circle, writers especially, are willing to suggest my use of words is false based not on anything official, but merely majority use, absent any management. I suggest a managed and researched language is best in any community, or you end up talking muddle. 

John Adams penned this proposal while on a diplomatic mission to Europe during the Revolutionary War. Formally entitled "A Letter to the President of Congress," it was dispatched from Amsterdam on September 5, 1780.

As eloquence is cultivated with more care in free republics than in other governments, it has been found by constant experience that such republics have produced the greatest purity, copiousness, and perfection of language. It is not to be disputed that the form of government has an influence upon language, and language in its turn influences not only the form of government, but the temper, the sentiments, and manners of the people. The admirable models which have been transmitted through the world, and continued down to these days, so as to form an essential part of the education of mankind from generation to generation, by those two ancient towns, Athens and Rome, would be sufficient, without any other argument, to show the United States the importance to their liberty, prosperity, and glory, of an early attention to the subject of eloquence and language.

Most of the nations of Europe have thought it necessary to establish by public authority institutions for fixing and improving their proper languages. I need not mention the academies in France, Spain, and Italy, their learned labors, nor their great success. But it is very remarkable, that although many learned and ingenious men in England have from age to age projected similar institutions for correcting and improving the English tongue, yet the government have never found time to interpose in any manner; so that to this day there is no grammar nor dictionary extant of the English language which has the least public authority; and it is only very lately, that a tolerable dictionary has been published, even by a private person, and there is not yet a passable grammar enterprised by any individual.

The honor of forming the first public institution for refining, correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English language, I hope is reserved for congress; they have every motive than can possibly influence a public assembly to undertake it. It will have a happy effect upon the union of the States to have a public standard for all persons in every part of the continent to appeal to, both for the signification and pronunciation of the language. The constitutions of all the States in the Union are so democratical that eloquence will become the instrument for recommending men to their fellow-citizens, and the principal means of advancement through the various ranks and offices of society.

In the last century, Latin was the universal language of Europe. Correspondence among the learned, and indeed among merchants and men of business, and the conversation of strangers and travellers, was generally carried on in that dead language. In the present century, Latin has been generally laid aside, and French has been substituted in its place, but has not yet become universally established, and, according to present appearances, it is not probable that it will. English is destined to be the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age. The reason of this is obvious, because the increasing population in America, and their universal connection and correspondence with all nations will, aided by the influence of England in the world, whether great or small, force their language into general use, in spite of all the obstacles that may be thrown in their way, if any such there should be.

It is not necessary to enlarge further, to show the motives which the people of America have to turn their thoughts early to this subject; they will naturally occur to congress in a much greater detail than I have time to hint at. I would therefore submit to the consideration of congress the expediency and policy of erecting by their authority a society under the name of "the American Academy for refining, improving, and ascertaining the English Language." The authority of congress is necessary to give such a society reputation, influence, and authority through all the States and with other nations. The number of members of which it shall consist, the manner of appointing those members, whether each State shall have a certain number of members and the power of appointing them, or whether congress shall have a certain number of members and the power of appointing them, or whether congress shall appoint them, whether after the first appointment the society itself shall fill up vacancies, these and other questions will easily be determined by congress.

It will be necessary that the society should have a library consisting of a complete collection of all writings concerning languages of every sort, ancient and modern. They must have some officers and some other expenses which will make some small funds indispensably necessary. Upon a recommendations from congress, there is no doubt but the legislature of every State in the confederation would readily pass a law making such a society a body politic, enable it to sue and be sued, and to hold an estate, real or personal, of a limited value in that State.

ORIGINAL REPLY

CONTENT OF COMMENT

I can not tell you how many writing groups I have been part of where the following came up side my fellow crafters of words. Even as a child. 

But here we go again. Websters is wrong.  PEople are misusing the word, it is that simple. And I go one further. Webster's and many dictionaries in all earnest puts too much weight on figurative evaluations in words. I don't care if 99 percent of people use a word a certain way. 99% are simply using it wrongly. 

Racism/Bias/Prejudice are not as defined in websters.

And I will use the definition you gave to support my point.

You said

  Quote

1 : a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
From Merriam Webster:

 
also : behavior or attitudes that reflect and foster this belief : racial discrimination or prejudice

First, a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits. 

well how does your websters define race

  Quote

any one of the groups that humans are often divided into based on physical traits regarded as common among people of shared ancestry

That isn't race:) Troy, that isn't race. Race isn't a divider of humanity. Race isn't bounded to physical traits. Race is any classification scheme that can be applied on humanity by humans. 

Me , you, Schtrumpf, Nahomie Osaka are human beings, children of earth. That is the shared ancestry.  The fact that three of us are male and one is female. Three of us are black and one is white. One has recent asian lineage and three don't. One speaks japanese , three don't. All speak english.  These are not dividers, it is merely a classification scheme. 

So websters definition of race is false. Which makes sense cause their definition of racism is false. 

What divides human beings are rules or policies, not racism. The train track didn't divide towns because black people side non blacks don't share the same shades of skin. Non blacks power+ policies made the train track divide, and it was the bias in their use of power or creation of policies, not racism. 

No point in going further because the primary explanation to the word is false by webster. 

A classification scheme isn't even a belief. it is a tool.  But when webster placed race as webster defines it their definition is totally flawed. 

Race is a classification scheme applied on any grouping. 

When humans say, lions and tigers are cats that is racism. 

Racism is actions to define race. 

When humans make a book describing cats that is racism. 

Bias is making an opinion on a race

When humans say black cats are evil, that is bias. 

When humans say the pig can not be eaten, that is bias

When humans say the cow can not be eaten, that is bias

humans calling another human black is racism. 

humans calling another human stupid cause their black is bias

humans calling another human woman is racism

humans calling another human foolish cause their woman is bias

humans calling another human old is racism

humans calling another human weak cause their old is bias

humans calling another human christian is racism

humans calling another human fanatics cause their christian is bias

Now, having preached , I apologize again, I already know most folk don't use the words the way I do. I know. And I know you troy or others will continue to use words as you have. I comprehend 100%. But your wrong. that is what I will conclude on. it is that simple. Use words better, trust me, it matters. 

She makes a number of points that are not contiguous.

1) colleges admission process- Some of you may know history but the tragedy of the history of colleges is no college in the usa started as a public institution. I rephrase, most colleges start as race based organizations on whatever racial parameters the creators and financiers of the college set. So my first point is separating colleges started with racial entry rules, against colleges started as a truly public educational institution.

If I start and finance a college for black people, as I define them, exclusively and a white person, as I define them,  wants to join, shouldn't my school be allowed to block this person no matter what?

Forcing a college to find someone to join their school who fits the scholastic  racial requirements but not the financial or phenotypical racial requirements is what affirmative action is in the usa. The idea is to force only scholastic entry requirements but schools are financed. 

If a christian finances a school for christians only shouldn't a muslim be banned from joining no matter what? 

If a woman finances a school for women only, shouldn't a male be banned from joining no matter what? 

2) coming from being raised in majority black towns/communities in the usa and being into majority white educational institutions explains how some want to use integration. A smart person from a black town should be able to go to a historical black college since many of them were started in the 1800s. But, what is the point? The point of the black going to the ivy league isn't about education, it is about communal integration. The idea is, in an environment where the phenotypical + financial race is not their own, the black fiscally poor student will intermingle side the rich white and potentially integrate into rich white society in some way or form. The problem is the pretense of educational betterment is deleted with this point. The idea that harvard is this elite place educationally isn't why the affirmative action is needed, cause harvard isn't. The truth that harvard is a communal zone for the financially wealthy or powerful who are usually white is why affirmative action is needed, cause through harvard maybe the halls of power or channels of business ownership may change through the communal connection.

Why have so many Black people put so much effort in non black schools but then complain about non black schools being communally resistant to them? 

Do black people who go to Ivy LEague schools hate Historical Black Colleges?

3) The universality of affirmative action creates incongruent scenarios.  In Mississippi an all white elementary school had  affirmative action placed upon it so seats for black children were made. BUT, is any all white elementary school the equivalent to harvard? Harvard is a place for adults , truly of the greatest financial wealth. But is the all white elementary school the place of financial wealth or adults? The answer is no. Jefferson Davis elementary school in Mississippi isn't Harvard and too many all white educational institutions are more like jefferson davis elementary in mississippi, all white but not a hall of power or financial influence, and far from harvard or exeter.

4) Coming from being raised in majority black towns/communities in the usa and being into majority non black educational institutions puts black individuals in communities of disbelief. Of course among black people, a black child that has a talent or skill is merely praised. but around non blacks, it is questioned. All communities do this. White men can jump? It happens. Humans like to be in their own subgroups, their own kinds, ala Anita in west side story. The problem is why do people not raise their children to know this? I don't like when any person doesn't realize being the only other in a room will yield to being treated as unwanted, that makes perfect sense.

5) Black women in particular's rant about white inheritance. Yes, black women, white people are rarely like Mrs. PArkington.  < https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2371&type=status > who cut their descendants from the money if they don't earn or unwarrant it. but that is part of why you get money. And I argue in the black community many black people have developed an inverted sense of wealth through bloodline. Whites usually get money and believe it to be for their next generations no matter what, to make their life easier/lazier no matter what. But many black people seem to have this meritocracy idea in inheritance which is at best ideal for the usa that never was or will be, but at worst is a detriment to black growth. Yes, rich whites built harvard/yale/stanford/massachusetts instittue of technology/colombia , they built the museusm in new york city, shouldn't their children have a free ride in the institution that wouldn't exist if not for their forebears. 

Again, if I started and financed a school, and after I am dead, shouldn't my descendants have free admittance in the school? I built the damn school, if one spot is open shouldn't my descendant have the seat over any other, black or white or with better grades? 

6) and Yes, the whole point of the white community in the usa or the british colonies before it is, money talks. Yes, the descendants of the genocidal murderers to Native Americans + Enslavers to Blacks reap the rewards. That is fiscal capitalism. That is the usa. The USA isn't about equality, isn't about fairness, isn't about helping the weak or unopportune. It is about benefiting for self over others through their pain for your own benefit. And maintaining the benefits you earned for your descendants over the descendents of those you murdered or abused. Yes, that is the USA.

Why is it so many black people don't know this? 

Why do so many black people in the usa sound ignorant/stupid/dumb/foolish to what I said in point 6)? 

@africanheritagecity HBCUs MATTER! @attorneycrump • Exactly. The misconception that affirmative action meant unqualified people have been admitted into college solely because of their race was never true and is quite frankly an ignorant interpretation. Thank you @joyannreid for setting the record straight and sharing your truth! #andthisiswhyweshouldgotohbcus #hbcusmatter #blackexcellence ♬ original sound - African Heritage City

The USA wasn't started to be a place of fairness or equality or any similar positives and it can't change to be those. 

Black people have wasted a lot of time trying to make the USA what it will never be

phantom lady 1944 - portrait of ella raines - photography alamy

Column: How profit-driven turmoil at Turner Classic Movies placed a vast cultural heritage at risk

Michael Hiltzik

June 29, 2023

It wasn't that long ago that the cause of film preservation and film history seemed to be on a roll. Multiple cable channels such as American Movie Classics, Bravo and Encore were devoted to classic films from the 1930s through the 1980s. When streaming supplanted scheduled cable programming, FilmStruck offered viewers a huge library of classics from the libraries of Warner Bros. and other studios.

Through it all Turner Classic Movies, or TCM, was the much-admired king. The channel was founded in 1994 by entrepreneur Ted Turner to show the library of MGM classic films he had acquired. It evolved to not only screen classic films but also curate its offerings, providing historical commentaries and interviews presented by knowledgeable hosts.

All those other services have either disappeared or been repurposed away from classic films. Until a couple of weeks ago, TCM appeared to be one of the sole survivors in the classic movie landscape.

Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum

But on June 20, David Zaslav, chief executive of TCM's new owner, Warner Bros. Discovery, swung the ax. Layoffs wiped out the network's entire top management, including some figures who had been its leaders for decades. TCM was placed under the supervision of an executive whose other responsibilities included the Adult Swim channel and Cartoon Network.

The sense of dismay and betrayal that swept across Hollywood was almost indescribable. Film stars and character actors known to millions of fans took to social media to condemn the move. Film directors Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson and Martin Scorsese reached out to Zaslav to urge him to back off, advice he seems to have taken, partially.

The turmoil at TCM points to more than a single company's effort to squeeze as much profit as possible from a single asset. It reflects the impulse by the corporate stewards of America's immense film history to view that culture strictly in commercial terms.

"Whether Mr. Zaslav planned to or not, he has inherited an American cultural treasure that he is responsible for safeguarding," film historian Alan K. Rode, a director of the Film Noir Foundation, told me. "But he's also trying to run a business that's over $40 billion in debt. I don't know how you square that circle."

This is not a new conundrum. Almost all artifacts of film history are squirreled away in studios' vaults, where they've been subject to the vicissitudes of corporate accounting and the ebb and flow of mergers and acquisitions.

Occasionally, when they're encouraged by cultural fashions or the appearance of new technologies, the studios have burrowed into their film libraries to assess their marketability and try to untangle ownership rights.

Some 700 historic Paramount Studios productions, for example, are assumed to be nestled in the vaults of Universal Pictures, which inherited Paramount’s 1930s and 1940s film archive from its forebear MCA, which acquired the collection in 1958. (Universal was later absorbed by NBC and is now a division of the entertainment conglomerate Comcast.)

The studios don't repurpose their libraries wholesale. Converting old films to digital formats to be screened online or on cable, or shown in theaters equipped with digital projectors, is an expensive and complicated process. Only films thought to have commercial potential get the favored treatment. Most of the others remain largely inaccessible to the public.

Warner Bros., now absorbed into Warner Bros. Discovery, was long considered the best steward of its cultural hoard. Its Warner Archives division was the industry gold standard in the care and marketing of the past. Under division head George Feltenstein, now the Warner library historian, Warner put thousands of titles, including TV series, on sale as made-to-order DVDs and established a subscription video streaming service that has since been incorporated into the company's Max streaming service.

Choosing which films to market as DVDs or Blu-ray discs was sometimes an easy call, sometimes a challenge, Feltenstein told me in 2015. “There always will be a place on the retail shelf for ‘Casablanca,’ ‘King Kong’ or ‘Citizen Kane,’” he said. But others required finer judgments or innovative marketing. Warner Bros. still offers DVDs and Blu-rays from its classic and contemporary libraries for sale.

Classic-film cable and streaming services have tended to have short half-lives. Consider the fate of FilmStruck, which launched as the subscription-based streaming arm of Turner Classic Movies in November 2016 with an inventory of 500 films, including 200 from the classic movie library of the Criterion Collection. FilmStruck quickly became what Esquire termed "the new go-to movie destination for serious movie buffs."

Two years later, FilmStruck was dead, slain by Warner Bros.' new owner, AT&T, which couldn't wait for the service to grow beyond its base of 100,000 subscribers and reach profitability. For AT&T, as I wrote then, "mass subscribership and profits are the ballgame," patience be damned.

Other networks that had been founded to cultivate an audience of film fans suffered a similar fate. American Movie Classics was founded in 1984 as a premium cable channel to air classic films uncut and commercial-free. It even sponsored an annual film festival to raise money for film preservation. In 2002 it was rebranded as AMC and refocused on prestige TV. AMC produced "Breaking Bad" and "Mad Men," among other series — good TV, certainly, but not classic films.

AMC's sister channel, Bravo, was launched in 1980 to present classic foreign and independent films. After NBC bought it in 2002, it was turned into a showcase for reality series.

Yet audience interest in classic movies and film history continued to grow. "Ten years ago, I felt that we were in kind of a golden age of appreciation of film classics and appreciation, and TCM was a huge part of that," says Bruce Goldstein, the founding repertory artistic director of Film Forum, a New York repertory house. "Now it seems to be falling apart."

TCM and the Criterion Channel remain the go-to streaming destinations for classics. Netflix, am*zon Prime and other networks have minimal classic libraries and no learned curation.

On the surface, there is no great mystery about why Warner Bros. Discovery and Zaslav might want to draw in their financial horns a bit. The company is laboring under a crippling debt load of more than $49 billion, most of it resulting from the 2022 merger that brought together the cable programming company Discovery and the WarnerMedia division of AT&T, itself the product of AT&T's 2016 takeover of Time Warner.

Given the combined companies' loss of $7.4 billion on revenue of $33.8 billion last year, plainly something had to give. The question being asked by cultural historians, cinephiles and plain ordinary film fans is why TCM had to be part of the bloodletting. It was reportedly profitable, if not hugely so, but by any measure not a significant factor on the merged company's profit-and-loss landscape.

That low profile in corporate terms could be TCM's salvation. As my colleague Stephen Battaglio reported, an outcry in the film industry, including by Spielberg, Anderson and Scorsese, has prompted Zaslav to reassess the bludgeoning he visited upon TCM.

The network's longtime programming chief, Charles Tabesh, who had been fired, will stay on, TCM says. Spielberg, Anderson and Scorsese will have a voice on TCM's curation and scheduling. TCM's classic film festival, held annually in Hollywood, will continue. In a move aimed at quelling outrage in the industry, the network will report directly to Warner Bros. Pictures Group co-heads Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy.

Those developments generated an optimistic joint statement from Spielberg, Anderson and Scorsese: “We have already begun working on ideas with Mike and Pam, both true film enthusiasts who share a passion and reverence for classic cinema that is the hallmark of the TCM community," the directors said.

It's impossible to overstate the reverence that film historians and preservationists, and fans, have felt for TCM.

"They are the keepers of the flame," says Foster Hirsch, a professor of film at Brooklyn College and member of the Film Noir Foundation board. "They're an enormous resource for scholars and writers and fans of all ages. To start tampering with the brand or to view it in terms of marketing and data exclusively is horrifying. It's an assault on our common culture."

Among TCM's virtues is its eclectic approach. "They didn't show only well-known masterpieces," Hirsch says. "They showed obscure films, some which aren't good, they showed films for almost all tastes, different genres. From an artistic or historical point of view it isn't broken. There was no reason to 'fix' it."

The network has also been an almost unique portal introducing new generations to film culture. "It's been an essential part of people's film education, especially people of my generation," says Jon Dieringer, 37, founder of Screen Slate, a film culture website. "I grew up watching Turner Classic Movies."

Yet how assiduously Warner Bros. Discovery will follow through on its stated commitment to TCM's mission remains open to question, as does whether the network can retain its stature in the cinephile community. The confidence that the network's fans had in its staff and hosts and their ability to provide a curated approach to film history has been deeply shaken.

Many in the film community are hoping that TCM may have suffered nothing more serious than a near-death experience. Whether that's so won't be known for some time. Everyone will be watching, but experience suggests that when public companies pledge to treat the cultural assets under their control as more than generators of cash and profits, it's wise to expect the worst.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/column-profit-driven-turmoil-turner-120049275.html

Too many classic films remain buried in studios’ vaults

BY MICHAEL HILTZIKBUSINESS COLUMNIST 

OCT. 23, 2015 5:48 PM PT

Will McKinley, a New York film writer, is dying to get his hands on a copy of “Alias Nick Beal,” a 1949 film noir starring Ray Milland as a satanic gangster. For classic film blogger Nora Fiore, the Grail might be “The Wild Party” (1929), the first talkie to star 1920’s “It” girl Clara Bow, directed by the pioneering female director Dorothy Arzner. Film critic Leonard Maltin says he’d like to score a viewing of “Hotel Haywire,” a 1937 screwball comedy written by the great comic director Preston Sturges.

Produced by Paramount Studios, these are all among 700 titles assumed to be nestled in the vaults of Universal Pictures, which inherited Paramount’s 1930s and 1940s film archive from its forebear MCA, which acquired the collection in 1958. They’re frustratingly near at hand but out of reach of film fans and cinephiles.

Like most of the other major studios, Universal is grappling with the challenging economics of making more of this hoard accessible to the public on DVD, video on demand or streaming video. Studios have come to realize that there’s not only marketable value in the films, but publicity value in performing as responsible stewards of cultural assets.

I would have to break the law to see that film.

— Cinephile Nora Fiore, of a 1932 classic locked in a studio vault

No studio recognizes these values better than Warner Bros., whose Warner Archives division is the industry gold standard in the care and marketing of the past. The studio sells some 2,300 titles, including TV series, as made-to-order DVDs and offers its own archival video streaming service for a subscription fee of up to $9.99 a month.

The manufacturing-on-demand service, launched in March 2009 with 150 titles, has proved “far more successful than we even dreamed,” says George Feltenstein, a veteran home video executive who heads the division. “I thought that all the studios would follow in our footsteps, but nobody has been as comprehensive as we’ve been.”

Other major studios have dipped their toes into this market, if gingerly. Paramount last year stocked a free YouTube channel with 91 of its own titles, mostly post-1949. This month 20th Century Fox announced that as part of its 100th anniversary this year, it would release 100 remastered classic films, including silents, to buy or rent for high-definition streaming — “enough to make any classic film fan weep with joy,” McKinley wrote on his blog. Sony last year introduced a free cable channel, get.tv, to screen films from its Columbia Pictures archive, though it’s only spottily available and often preempted by cable operators.

Universal offers some manufacture-on-demand titles via am*zon as its Universal Vault Series and announced in May that it would restore 15 of its silent films as part of its 2012 centennial celebration. Curiously, Universal, owned by the cable giant Comcast, is one of the only majors without a dedicated cable channel or Internet streaming service for its archive. Universal spokesperson Cindy Gardner maintains that the studio is working on ways to improve: “Stay tuned.”

Film buffs and historians have easier access to more classic films than ever before. But that only whets their appetite for important — but perhaps forgotten — films.

The 1932 Paramount World War I drama “Broken Lullaby,” Fiore says, might provoke a reexamination of the career of its director, the master of graceful comedy Ernst Lubitsch. But a version that crept onto YouTube a few years ago was taken down at the insistence of Universal. “I would have to break the law to see that film,” laments Fiore, who blogs on classic films in the guise of the Nitrate Diva.

“The studios seem to be sitting on a lot of films, but they’re limited by budget and by their projected return on investment,” says Alan Rode, a director of the Film Noir Foundation. “But it’s not like you open a valve and films come gushing out. If they can’t realize a profit on it, they’re not going to do it.”

Adding to the challenge is that some of the major studios have become subsidiaries of large corporations, and not consistently huge profit centers. For example, Paramount last year contributed about 26% of the $13.8 billion in revenue of its parent, Viacom, but its $205 million in operating profit paled next to the $2.4 billion net income recorded by the whole corporation.

Converting a film title for digital release can be costly, especially under the watchful eye of cinephiles who demand high quality. Some black-and-white titles can be digitized for $40,000 or less, says Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive — with 350,000 titles, the second-largest in the U.S. after only the Library of Congress.

But the price rises exponentially for color, especially for important restoration. UCLA spent about three years and $1.5 million in donated funds on its heroic restoration and digital transfer of the Technicolor classic “The Red Shoes,” a 1948 backstage ballet drama revered for its beauty.

That means that when deciding which titles to prepare for digital release, archive managers must walk a tightrope between serving their audience and protecting the bottom line. Some classics are easy calls. “There always will be a place on the retail shelf for ‘Casablanca,’ ‘King Kong’ or ‘Citizen Kane,’” says Warner’s Feltenstein. But finer judgments are required for what Feltenstein calls “the deeper part of the library.”

“My job is to monetize that content, make it available to the largest number of people possible and do so profitably,” Feltenstein told me. To gauge demand, Feltenstein’s staff keeps lines open with film enthusiasts and historians via Facebook, Twitter, a free weekly podcast and other outreach. “They literally ask us, ‘What do you want to see?’” Fiore says.

That gives them a window into values that others might miss. Take B-movie westerns made in the 1940s and 1950s that landed in the Warners vault. To Allied Artists and Lorimar, their producers, “these films were worthless and they said it’s OK to let them rot,” Feltenstein says. Instead, Warner Archives packaged them into DVD collections, “and they’ve all been nicely profitable.”

Feltenstein says Warners is releasing 30 more titles to its manufacturing-on-demand library every month. “It’s growing precipitously and there’s no end in sight.” Universal’s Gardner says there’s “real momentum” at her studio behind “making our titles more available than ever before.”

But there’s always more beckoning over the horizon. “The good news is that every studio is actively engaged in taking care of its library,” Maltin says. “That’s a big improvement over 20 or 25 years ago. But access is the final frontier.”

[UPDATE: Nell Minow, whose excellent blog on film can be found at Movie Mom and who is a fan of “Alias Nick Beal,” reports that the title character, played by Ray Milland, is more than merely a “satanic gangster” as we describe him above--he’s Satan.]

Michael Hiltzik’s column appears every Sunday. His new book is “Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex.” Read his blog every day at latimes.com/business/hiltzik, reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @hiltzikm on Twitter.

https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20151025-column.html

First act, a set of educators, i think college are helping a colleague leave but they all have an affinity to this colleague, a curiosity about his nature. I concur with Bixby, real human beings are not alarmist and in this select case, all of these are seasoned educators used to slowly thinking about something, so they wouldn't call the cops or paddy wagon immediately. 

Why did I not guess the black leather jacket would call someone from outside first. I thought it would be billingly's character the physics or chemistry professor.

Second act, a female teacher loves him, reminds me of that twilight zone , Long Live Walter JAmeson, by the dead early Charles Beaumont, but extended.

I love Crude demonstration , hilarious, I am not superman. Loving Tony Todd's acting. 

27:34 first seeing the ocean

28:42 he studied with the buddha, and i loved the earlier birth of the vampire myth

29:06 the first betrayal of character, leather jacket should had considered he think of being outed. Considering he called someone he is either biding time or betraying himself.

29:38 ahh well done, he was expecting, 

30:31 i wish i had been here from the beginning, I concur:) 

32:16 he survived the bubonic plague, typhoid , smallpox

32:53 good point, being immortal in a cage isn't desired

33:33 black leather is wrong, common sense isn't insulted by an immortal being, common sense accepts tthe unique is plausible even if it can't not be explained.

35:19 true Tony todd, but time is also the most precious thing in existence.

35:52 exactly, the second is a human construct. an algorithmic truth, not assessed from nature.

36:27 funny moment. slow movie but for those who like to overthink and like dialog fun

37:21 is he lucky? that is the point of the story

39:41 exactly, he is outside most of humanity yet still human, a minority of one

41:46 I love that he didn't go into his past wives or children by the invasive psychiatrist

42:50 good point, the one great chaotic moment is the "immortal man" chose to even do this. I comprehend the writer's point. It is a random idea in one of many lives. But I must admit, my long lived characters wouldn't do this, unless they wish to be caught or have their cycle of lives undone.

43:07 he didn't think of these people's feelings before he told them ahhh, i disagree bixby.

43:37 the psychiatrist, white haired is trying to pull off a guilt trip, i bet he was diagnosed to die soon

44:50 ahh i knew it was a tragedy, the psychiatrist wife died yesterday
I love it, permit me to be infantile by myself. 

46:58 my first wedding funny charades

47:54 this movie clearly couldn't make it in theaters.

48:48 love his answer to 1292 ad

50:04 funny, about the primitive tribe in new guinea:)

51:03 the older woman is a hard core christian

51:47 no way skipping the biblical figure, and now he wants to call it a night, this is what you get when you ask those who study knowledge about a person who has lived longer than common

53:10 he is jesus hahaha! 

53:24 sit down edith, i know 

54:16 yes, sit down edith, lovely honesity from the biologist about his kin

54:41 tony todd, modern, that's good:)

55:29 ahh he is espousing the old belief that jesus learned buddhist ways. it makes sense historically in one way. Buddhism is older than the roman empire, and from the travelers, who were common at that time, labeled magi, who traveled freely in the roman empire because of the might of the roman empire... ok.

56:41 exactly, Tony Todd, christianity was born from the multiracial roman empire. 

58:26 good point, buddha /jesus/the christian god, may not be happy 

59:04 you can tell this was written on bixby's deathbed, a great mortuary story. I wonder what I will write in my last moments.

59:35 hhahaha, the psychiatrist came back:) haha soul saved:) 

1:00:00 nice bridge, we don't need to reintroduce the old topics for the psychiatrist, his shame on leaving.

1:00:53 great joke, nothing unusual in the path of the psychiatrist until the day he met a caveman who thought himself jesus

1:01:46 piety is the mistake they bring to the lessons haha, he is on a roll, Bixby is enjoying himself in his last days

1:03:10 thank you biologist, people make to light the influence of drugs, no, if he is taking a drug it isn't making him go up or down be violent or peaceful, it isn't changing him at all

1:04:20 thank you tony todd, i don't blame you, stay calm and relax.

1:04:55 exactly, psychiatrist, or the modern mythologies of MLKjr or Adolf Hitler

1:07:42 Its funny , in a group called african american literary book club, do you know how many black members suggest the usa will be forever? why is that? why is it, black people who knows kemet has all other human communities by thousands of years will be bested by the usa? what are blacks in the usa afraid of?.... 

1:08:20 how do you know?  I don't smell it. 
exactly, you know when it will rain , all humans do. 

1:09:20 etymology, this does happen. words matter.

1:10:25 good acting, they are all trapped by this story of their colleague

1:11:00 if edith says you aren't jesus one more time

1:11:56 edith have broken down , the psychiatrist had to shed light

1:12:49 the psychiatrist is wrong, he doesn't demand the truth, he demands the lie to keep peace

1:13:44 he is bluffing, well done, he is giving them safety

1:14:22 easy tonny todd:) he want to kill him

1:15:44 it ends safe, well done bixby, he lets the thinkers get off easy

1:16:25 exactly , the woman who lives him is right. 

1:17:59 edith knows. she will leave it

1:18:14 Tony Todd, a latitude in what we call reality... anything is possible
I am going to watch star trek. and yes, good move tony todd
Drop me a line whenever

1:19:34 the psychiatrist found out
easy psychiatrist , the break down. ahh well done, Bixby, ahh the psychiatrist was a man he knew. 

1;21:45 exactly, he never saw his own child again.

1:22:34 yes, let her decide

hahaha, great hook, who knows, let the viewer decide.

IN CONCLUSION
Ok, this movie was fun, but not for the general audience. Alittle careless of him, but that is part of John's humanity, humans even long living one's will make mistakes. 
I know this is an aside, but i love the credits , they are large enough to see and slow enough to follow, many movies have very uncaring or cheap credits.

I say, this is a well constructed example of someone long lived revealing themselves in a paraspontaneous way.

Just thoughtfulness.

I didn't time index from the begining cause I was watching it side relatives , we do those things in our home, but I am glad my relatives went to watch other things as I could write more specifically and i forgot some points early on:) 

Malenga Mulendema 

Creator of Supa Team 4

My Reply to her replies to the questions posed to Malenga Mulendema

0:12 What is the project that you pitched to the Story Lab?
Triggerfish is a firm in south africa, I think white owned, that was given opportunity by netflix to be an animation studio for their animation project in africa. 
Triggerish invited artist from africa, gardless of phenotype, to submit and Malenga was selected. 
her pitchline is four black teenage girls saving the world on a budget, not a premise I will think of but ok.

0:30 Why did you chose that story?
Well, as always I have a problem when people don't speak properly. She said, as a girl she liked watching cartoons absent stating all the cartoons were made outside africa. Araciality in assessing the genesis of art is a sin. Yes, a black girl from Zambia, didn't see cartoons made by black people or zambians  or involve black characters cause most cartoons in the market were made by whites of european or asian descent who made characters that are white of european or asian descent. No artist has to consider all groups in humanity in their art. 
I am happy she has the opportunity to have her creative vision. The four different types of young females will definitely attract an audience. She wants characters that showcase how the majority in the african continent, under governments that do not promote industry aside a wealthy minority that accept the usa/european imposed system of being a king in all but name  happily to evade responsibility to their larger community how they utilize their wealthy, have to figure out how to use resources that are scarce or foreign to come up with solutions. 

0:53 Why do you think your project was chosen?
Oh my fellow artists, very few have the honesty to admit, pure luck. She talks about how her story stayed true to something or has universal themes. hogwash, she got lucky. She was the only story triggerfish saw that stayed true to something or had universal themes, hogwash. She got lucky. Why do artists throughout history keep suggesting commercial opportunity is based on creative merit. It isn't. She was selected because she got lucky. ... I am hapyp for her luck, and hope she gets luckier, but all this, commercial meritocracy crap I hear many artists utter all the time is a lie. Creative assessment has artistic merits. Commercial opportunity is a thing of luck.

1:10 Describe the process once accepted in Story Lab?
Funny how Walt Disney was fired from the firm he worked at that stole his character and he decided to start his own firm and do as he pleased, and he got lucky and succeeded. While now, people from Disney are guiding people all over the world on how to get into animation without telling them to start their own business and create as long as you can, hopefully getting lucky.

1:43 How did the Project evolve during development?
It is called preproduction. But she is correct, the word refinement is best. Though remember, producers can demand things, ala Kevin Smith and the pitch to superman.

2:06 What was your main challenge during development?
The fact that she felt she didn't believe she belonged explains one thing, she never would had started her own animation studio or tried to make animations like walt disney who started the walt disney company. 
Not believing in yourself is devastating for any artist.

2:32 What was your main takeaway from the development process?
Well, she says you can always make better, but I don't like that language. 
Is any artists fully satisfied with a finished work? no. Butsaying you can always make better suggest a project is never finished, this isn't true. 
I prefer to say, I can always gain experience, not make things better. As you gain experience you grow.

2:47 Any advice for anyone wanting to create an animated series?
The one answer that showed wisdom from beginning to end, make the show you want to see.

3:07 Where are you now with the project?
3:21 What are the next steps?
This interview is behind. Supa Team 4 is coming out July 20th 2023
say Congrats folks!!

TRANSCRIPT
 

0:00

[Music]

0:06

my name is Mulenga me and Emma and

0:08

America from Lusaka Zambia

0:13

okay so the product has admitted to

0:15

trigger 50-lap competition is code my

0:17

Mac a super foe and it's an animated TV

0:20

series set in Lusaka Zambia about 4

0:22

African girls who are recruited to a

0:24

former secret agents low-budget

0:26

operation so basically they are saving

0:28

the world but on a budget

0:32

if the growing up I used to love to

0:34

watch a lot of cartoons so I'd never see

0:36

myself represented in any way so in my

0:38

Mackay super 4 I get to see myself on

0:41

screen and I get to see my city or the

0:43

context that I live in represented in a

0:45

way only cartoons can and this show also

0:47

shows how Africans are resourceful or

0:51

innovative

0:55

okay I think this show was selected

0:58

because it does a good balance of

1:00

staying true to what specific to to the

1:02

store in terms of the carat and the

1:03

location but it still has those

1:05

universal themes that anybody anywhere

1:06

in the world can relate

1:12

so why is the project

1:14

cept it in two-story lab I got the

1:16

opportunity to go to triggerfish and

1:17

attend the workshop so we had Pilar

1:19

lissandra a screenwriting consultant who

1:21

took us into different topics on spin

1:25

writing and we also had worked a

1:28

workshop with Aaron rose from Disney who

1:30

basically just told us a lot of

1:31

information about how to bring an

1:33

animated TV series to screen as I got

1:36

the opportunity to go to Disney World

1:37

and learn from different different

1:39

departments about bringing an animated

1:40

TV series to screen

1:44

so the project didn't change in a major

1:48

way but what happened is a lot of things

1:50

we're refined in the concept the

1:51

characters the story itself and and the

1:56

episodes that were written as well were

1:57

also refined so the overall project has

2:00

just been going through like a series of

2:02

refining

2:06

so my main challenge during the

2:09

development process was convincing

2:11

myself that I sort of belonged to this

2:13

animation world because it was very new

2:15

to me but I relied on the fact that at

2:18

least I understood story and story felt

2:21

like the foundation to everything so

2:22

every time I felt like I was going into

2:25

a panic I just remembered that okay I

2:27

have an understanding of story and

2:28

everything felt a little bit easier

2:34

my main takeaway from the development

2:36

process is that you can always you know

2:39

make your story better and you can

2:41

always make your characters better so

2:43

just keep working at at your story your

2:45

concept and your characters

2:50

my advice to anybody trying to create an

2:53

animated TV series is to create a TV

2:55

series that you yourself want to see

2:57

because once you think of something that

2:59

you want to see you in television you

3:01

become more invested and more

3:02

enthusiastic about about the story and

3:05

the show itself

3:09

so at the moment we are reworking the

3:12

pitch Bible and trying to get a pile of

3:15

script done and also we're trying to

3:17

create an animatic for the project

3:23

at the moment we've signed development

3:26

deal with kake entertainment a global

3:28

distributor and licensing agent and we

3:31

have deal with the major broadcaster

3:34

[Music]

English (auto-generated)

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