Eldritch screech

obsessed with this letterboxd review for CHALLENGERS (2024) by rocky/WAYSTIAR

Gute sheep/gutefår and feathered friends. Värmland, Sweden (March 25, 2018).

something I think more people need to understand is that rape culture has a very simple way to maintain the plausible deniability that enables mass support and investment, and that is the complete separation of the rhetorical construction of "The Rapist" and "The Pedophile" from any actual specific person who engages in sexual violence.

so often people do not believe that we could possibly live in a rape culture, they do not believe it could possibly be true that people do not care about children who were sexually abused-- they say but everyone hates rapists and pedophiles! but that's not really true. they hate the conceptual idea of The Rapist and The Pedophile, but do not actually oppose--in real world contexts, with real actual complicated people--the use of sexual violence to control, degrade, and otherwise abuse other people. they do not hate their friend who joked that their date "took some convincing" or their neighbor who publicly humiliated their adolescent child by telling their church group he was "caught" masturbating, or the cop who performs cavity searches or the guy who posted tips for "stealthing" online, or their uncle who says he "made some mistakes with women" when he was younger, or the person on social media publicly speculating about a stranger's sexual desires and sharing their nudes to degrade and humiliate them, or their granddad who was "falsely accused" of sexually abusing his daughter when "all he did" was leer and not touch, or their professor who has relationships with their students, or their acquaintance who recommends dating girls with "issues", girls who are "crazy", girls who are trans or fat or queer or have low self-esteem, because "they'll do anything", or the person they organize with who is so valuable to the movement but everyone kind of knows not to be alone in a room with them, or...

specific people who rape are usually not the deviant that most people already want a reason to expel from the community, they are the center of power and influence. they provide vital support or resources to people, they are likable and intimately connected with many people, they have an embedded role in the social fabric and many people benefit from it (whether economically, politically, spiritually, etc). Specific people who rape are incredibly buoyant. They are usually buoyed to places of power no matter how far they're attempted to be pulled down from that power, and most people see this and will cling to a person like this, defending them, because people who rape are the social equivalent to a life preserver, whereas people who have been raped are the social equivalent of an anchor-- no one wants to be dragged down by allying themselves with the person who was raped by the beloved person everyone loves and relies on.

On the other hand, The Rapist" and "The Pedophile" as cultural tropes are treated very differently from specific people who have raped others. "The Rapist"/"The Pedophile" is often a racialized, gendered, and classed archetype that exists to be the ideological load bearing pillar of rape culture, to reinforce the belief (against the weight of evidence) that rape is something committed by Deviant Others who can be identified and expelled from social life. When sexual violence is not understood as one of many possible tactics of control and is instead as the result of the uncontrollable desire of innate deviants, then accusations do not even require there to be a specific person who was harmed by a specific act. All you need is evidence of "deviance" and all the justified anger at sexual violence can be offloaded onto whatever scapegoat you want.

In fact, within rape culture, harassment campaigns are much more successful than any actual instance of a survivor asking for support. That is no coincidence either! Rape culture hates survivors! But because in harassment campaigns there is no actual survivor speaking up, rape culture's default of disbelieving specific, actual survivors is never triggered, and so the accusation becomes perceived as more credible because there is no victim to discount.

If there is no actual specific instance of someone engaging in sexual abuse of another specific person, there are no details to question and pick apart ("but why was she naked if she didn't want to have sex?" "was he really raped if he had an orgasm?" "how do you know it was sexual? adults have to bathe their kids" "why did she post that photo if she didn't want it shared?" "I've never seen that side of him!" "maybe you misunderstood" "maybe she didn't hear the safeword" "why wait until now to bring it up?") and no demands of the public that implicate them and demand change from them (are you sending survivors funds to help them move out? to help them afford therapy? are you examining why you didn't notice it was happening or didn't believe it could be true? are you able to understand that as part of this person's community, you failed to protect them, and that actual restorative justice involves you changing your beliefs and behavior too? that it's not just about rehabilitating the person who raped someone?)

If there's no survivor, then the imagined victim can be perfect, innocent, and worthy to rally around. The imagined victims are only good and only hurt and have no problematic opinions about anything (no opinions at all! so they can be imagined to believe whatever you believe), no burdensome expectations of you, no resentment towards you.

Focusing on identifying "The Rapist" as a deviant instead is so easy; it only requires condemning someone who you probably either already dislike or a complete stranger who has no direct connection to your life. It's so much easier to pin responsibility for the entire (abstracted) concept of Rape onto someone you already hate and is already a social outcast and show how much you're "against rape" by venting all your anger and fantasized violence against them. It feels good too! the way righteous anger always does. It can be energizing when a whole community comes together to hate the same person.

Supporting actual survivors does not feel energizing, it feels exhausting. It requires so much work and effort, and you don't feel righteous while you do it, you may even feel ashamed, frustrated, deeply sad, resentful, angry, hopeless, or emotionally numb. It enters the deepest parts of your consciousness and you find it hard to breathe during certain scenes in movies, seeing certain arguments play out in the news cycle. It changes you, too, and that is the point.

We want to be against rape culture, because we want to be good people. but we don't want it to be hard.

I think this reality is the reason why a lot of young organizers think they can throw themselves into restorative justice and then find themselves completely burnt out a few months or a year later. People start thinking it'll be energizing, and then have to contend with the reality of what is, essentially, providing material support for disabled people whose health and capabilities have been permanently decreased from trauma. Some folks think they're gonna be "fixing things" so everyone can continue their reliance on the person who raped someone and the survivor can "move on" and everything can be "restored."

And then (if they're serious and not just performing at activism) they are inevitably faced with the terrifying reality of trying to make ends meet, with cobbling together strategies to meet community needs outside of the person who everyone relies on. they are faced with this person who raped someone losing interest after a few meetings and deciding "the accountability process" is dragging on too long and interrupting "more serious things than one person's emotions." they are faced with trying to get more people involved supporting the acute needs of the survivor even when the survivor is "difficult" or "ungrateful", and realizing that no one wants to do it. it is overwhelming to realize how deep the roots of rape culture run through everything, how much stability is upturned when you uproot any structures and beliefs that rely on rape culture. it is deeply demoralizing when you realize nothing can change without collective effort and very few care enough to do it.

It's so much easier to do nothing and pretend you don't know what happened. It's so much easier to decide it doesn't have anything to do with you and maybe this is something the survivor should "work out" with the person who raped them. It's so much easier to not try.

that's the function of rape culture. and we are all implicated in it.

Chomp

In honour of his passing, posting Steve Albini's legendary polemic against the music industry.

[...]

The worst thing is, as bad as it was back in 1993, it's a thousand times worse for musicians in 2024. 1993 was before "Pay-to-Play" venues were as ubiquitous, and before some venues started taking a cut of the merchandise sales. 1993 was before CD sales collapsed, before file sharing, before Spotify ruined things further with its dismal royalty payments, its algorithmically driven discovery mechanism which is biased against the experimental, the daring, and the difficult (and women for that matter), and its proliferation of fake artists. It is not a good time to be a musician.

The other day I was walking along one of the bayous near my house, just looking and trying to absorb the changes the freeze has made to the landscape.

I saw a few vultures picking at a carcass on the other side of the steep bank and some hawks looking on from the canopy. The vultures were flashing their wings at each other to make the other move from the carcass after each mouthful.

I was a little excited because I thought perhaps it might be one of the young deer that use the bayous as a way to travel between the fragmented coastal prairies, so I got a little closer to see. I planned that if it was, I’d jump the bayou and drag the carcass farther up the bank so that it could finish getting picked clean without being washed away and I could come by at a later date and collect some of the bones.

Alas, it was possum, but as I was approaching the vultures both stood together and raised their wings at me. Without thinking, I copied the gesture back at them and they both moved away from the carcass sullenly.

I had barely looked away from it before they moved back in to feed. I was near the car before I realized I instinctively tried to communicate back to them when they had signaled to me that they wanted me to move away and that it worked.

I think that this is one of the ways that humans are made to live connected to nature. It comes completely naturally to meow back to a cat whistle a bird’s tune or whinny to a horse. Humanness is our intense drive to communicate with everything around us, human and non-human individuals alike.

I think that when you do not have this cross-species communication, it is a deprivation and so many people have this deprivation, this emptiness, and have had it so long that they don’t even understand what fits in this emptiness they carry.

free online james baldwin stories, essays, videos, and other resources

**edit

James baldwin online archive with his articles and photo archives.

---NOVELS---

Giovanni's room"When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend's return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened - while Giovanni's life descends into tragedy. This book introduces love's fascinating possibilities and extremities."

Go Tell It On The Mountain"(...)Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves."

+bonus: film adaptation on youtube. (if you’re a giancarlo esposito fan, you’ll be delighted to see him in an early preacher role)

Another Country and Going to Meet the Man Another country: "James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit." Going to meet the Man: " collection of eight short stories by American writer James Baldwin. The book, dedicated "for Beauford Delaney", covers many topics related to anti-Black racism in American society, as well as African-American–Jewish relations, childhood, the creative process, criminal justice, drug addiction, family relationships, jazz, lynching, sexuality, and white supremacy."

Just Above My Head"Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses--and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land."

If Beale Street Could Talk"Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions-affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche."

also has a film adaptation by moonlight's barry jenkins

Tell Me How Long the Train's been gone At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty. 

---ESSAYS---

Baldwin essay collection. Including most famously: notes of a native son, nobody knows my name, the fire next time, no name in the street, the devil finds work- baldwin on film

--DOCUMENTARIES--

Take this hammer, a tour of san Francisco.

Meeting the man

--DEBATES:--

Debate with Malcolm x, 1963 ( on integration, the nation of islam, and other topics. )

Debate with William Buckley, 1965. ( historic debate in america. )

Heavily moderated debate with Malcolm x, Charles Eric Lincoln, and Samuel Schyle 1961. (Primarily Malcolm X's debate on behalf of the nation of islam, with Baldwin giving occassional inputs.)

----

apart from themes obvious in the book's descriptions, a general heads up for themes of incest and sexual assault throughout his works.

Hermann Nitsch

A pair Bura funerary heads

Niger, circa 14th / 15th century

terracotta, with applied eyes, nose and mouth

Woolley and Wallis

Lucian Freud

thierry mugler's nipple piercing dress, from the haute couture ss98 collection IM IN LOVE

a (very small) group of columbia students continued protest action by picketing in front of trustees' manhattan mansions this morning. at two locations, they were punched by zionists; at a third, a zionist tried to run them over—the kicker is that he is a close relative of the founder of the fascist kahanist movement, and that the injured student he ran over was arrested instead, handcuffed to a hospital bed. this follows days of violent zionist squadristi assaults on protesters in LA, chicago, and DC, among other locations, leaving many injured.

a few hours later, biden went on air and talked about how violent and antisemitic the protesters are.

Calgary Herald, Alberta, March 3, 1936

— Jeanann Verlee, from Jezebel Revisits the Book of Kings (via tristealven)

West Bank, Palestine 2003

Photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti