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Author: Sarah Schulman
Feasting with Panthers (and Palestine): Edmund White's Jean Genet #LPW2020
Sarah Schulman	on February 1, 2020
If writing is a committed utopian action, then the Jean Genet of Edmund White's engaging, impressive, transformative Genet: A Biography was the epitome of manic depression. Genet wrote his five novels in five years, from 1942-47. After seven years of sadness and silence, he wrote his three best known plays in two years. The subsequent 1960's were filled with death as his lover, Abdallah (a high wire performer) committed suicide, his agent and English translator Bernard Fruchtman committed suicide, and Genet himself tried to commit suicide. Then he entered into the other utopian endeavor: activism. From 1970 until his death in 1986, Genet was aligned with oppressed people and supported them in energetic ways, on their terms and on his own. White calls him "an apostle of the wretched of the earth."
White's use of the word "apostle" is, of course, an open invitation to question it. Apostles believe that the mortals they adore are not mortal. And, in that way, they err. Sartre, who, White points out, was an atheist, called his homage Saint Genet, so there was an ironic anti-religiosity to the book. But Genet was a man for whom adoration was deification; he described lovers as Gods. Genet's love was possible, encompassing, invigorating – and annihilating. And since many people can only love in one way, one could assume that he might emotionally connect with oppressed people in the same manner that he loved his Nazi soldier lover/apparition turned underdog when left behind in liberated Paris in the novel Pompes Funebres.
Edmund White, if his life's works are an indication, has loved far more rationally than Genet. He has been torn open, sure, and been impulsive and been destructive- i.e. human – but he has also been sensible, reasonable and accepting. His books are often a process of coming to terms. I would not use the world "apostle" to describe Edmund White as a lover, yet the concept of the "wretched of the earth" does unite the two. When White co-founded Gay Men's Health Crisis in 1982, he got up from the typewriter on behalf of a despised group of people with no rights who were abandoned by their families and societies. They were living in illegality and were facing a terminal disease for which there was no epidemiological information, no treatment, and no cure. White – who has himself been openly HIV positive for decades – was one of them. Genet, on the other hand, died in 1986 at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. Although he had been poor, outcast and incarcerated, he was never, for example, Palestinian. There are universes of difference between the conditions of people with AIDS and Palestinians – though when I began to become a conscious and active worker for Palestine, I did notice some resonances. In both cases these were categories of people who were profoundly oppressed, who were treated with brutal abandonment and indifference, who were falsely cast as dangerous when they were in fact endangered, and who were treated like predators when they were the ones being attacked. In my carefully considered estimation, both people with AIDS and Palestinians have been lied about, pathologized, and inhumanely discarded. If a despised gay man, who had spent his life unjustly blamed when he hadn't done anything wrong, truly understood his own condition he could – perhaps should – relate to Palestinians. That would, to me, be a rational response to oppression. Unfortunately, history shows that oppressed people often identity more strongly with the element of their demographic that still connects to domination. Many white gay people aspire to the unjustified powers of whiteness. Many male homosexuals rue any obstacle to male supremacy. When we are debased by ruthless ambition, we look up longingly towards the corruption of domination as we wish better for ourselves.
Born in 1910, Genet had already been arrested 8 times by the age of 17 for running away, for taking trains for free, for embezzling money to go to a carnival, and for stealing pens and notebooks. He was sentenced to two years at an agricultural prison for juveniles. White tells us that in order to get out of Mettray (a place that looms large in his work), Genet joined the army and was promoted to corporal. He then "volunteers" specifically for duty in the eastern part of the Mediterranean known as the Levant. In other words, at the age 19, he chose to be in an Arab place – in this case Syria. So the Arab world offered him an escape from the pain of France. The Arab world is to the young and French Jean Genet what France becomes to the young and American Edmund White: a place of permission. And permission is a kind of romance. It's a rhapsody of relief, indulgence, and light-headed elevation. Of course, Genet's arriving as a French soldier gave him a different source to his permission than Edmund White who not only loves men, but also graceful stylish beautiful things, sophisticated ways, and elevated traditions. Genet also found in the Levant male beauty, ancient cultures and intoxicating aesthetics, but his permission to do so came with the power of the French state. He had a uniform, a gun, a rank, and an historically imposed social role. The marginalized, despised, punished and alienated Genet came to his place of peace as a colonial. White had only the willingness to be reconstructed as a Francophile.
White describes Genet's commitments to Palestine and to the Black Panthers as support for the "homeless," and, it could be argued, both African Americans and Palestinians are living in exile, diasporic displacement, and elaborate fantasies of resolution and repair. Even Edward Said understood Genet's pro-Palestinian position as the identification of one oppressed person with another. "Genet made the step, crossed the legal borders, that very few white men or women even attempted," Said has written. "He traversed the space from the metropolitan center to the colony; his unquestioned solidarity was with the very same oppressed identified and so passionately analyzed, by [Frantz]Fanon," Said continued, referring to the Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary concerned with the psychopathology of colonization. And while it is easy and truthful to say that Genet also was homeless, in the most intimate sense of the word, unlike Palestinians, he did have a nation state, a passport and la langue natale which allowed him to be a writer with readers who also have passports, nation states and their own indigenous language.
White writes of Genet's perspective of himself as an exception in the eyes of the various Arab communities he was sent to occupy. Of course, we don't know what the Syrians actually thought of him, but we do learn that he felt they saw his difference in a positive light. Like Genet, I also see myself as a "friend of Palestine" and yet I do understand that that has nothing to do with whether or not individual Palestinians like me. Political relationships of solidarity are rife with the problem of supremacy, no matter how alienated or excluded the dominant party feels from their own societies. And it is easy to project one's own enthusiasm of connection onto the less powerful partner. White wisely acknowledges this by pointing out that one of Genet's favorite fantasy tropes is that of the benevolent/enamored cop, or complicit soldier, transgressing the rules of punishment because he is so moved by a vulnerable – and fictionalized – Genet.
At the age of 21, Genet re-enlisted, this time volunteering to go to Morocco. In 1934, at 23 and out of the army for only six months, he signed up for a third tour of duty, this time volunteering for Algeria. In 1936, for reasons I do not understand, he did not show up for roll call and deserted. He falsified his passport with the name Gejietti, was arrested in Albania. Then arrested in Yugoslavia. Then arrested in Vienna. Then arrested in Czechoslovakia, where he asked for political asylum. Despite some kind of asylum, he fled again and was arrested in Poland before crossing over into Nazi Germany. (Nazis were never a problem for Genet.) He got to Paris and was yet again arrested, this time in a department store for stealing twelve handkerchiefs. Over the next two years, he was arrested and incarcerated for desertion, expelled from the army, arrested for more free train riding, for stealing bottles of aperitifs, for carrying a gun, for stealing a shirt, for vagrancy, and for stealing a piece of silk. At the age of 30, he spent ten months in prison for stealing a suitcase and wallet, then anotehr four months for stealing history and philosophy books. He worked as a book-seller on the Seine, where he met readers, writers and intellectuals. Then he was arrested in front of Notre Dame and sentenced to three months for stealing a volume of Proust. In prison, at the age of 31, he started writing his first novel. Notre Dames des Fleurs. Two former customers, one of whom was a right-wing editor, introduced him to Jean Cocteau, who helped him immeasurably. Arrested again for stealing a rare edition of Verlaine, he was then eligible for life imprisonment but Cocteau argued in court that Genet was "the greatest writer of the modern era" and thus he was sentenced instead to 3 months, during which he wrote Miracle de la Rose. Three weeks after being freed, he stole more books and was jailed for four more months.
It's a manic cycle, and most obviously filled with repetition and pervasive disregard for the obvious consequences of actions that might have alternatives. In this place and this time, Genet was a man who could not solve problems, unless his goal was to remain in prison. Certainly the meeting with Cocteau was lucky, but even luckier was the fact that Cocteau helped him at all – and to the extent that he did. I have to disclaim here that Edmund White himself helped me by reviewing my lesbian erotic, formally complex, 1994 novel Rat Bohemia in The New York Times and, thereb, elevating me with his accomplishments in the tradition of Cocteau's helping Genet. But, I assure you, that most people with real power in literature do not help people who cannot help them back. That Cocteau, himself the homosexual author of Les Enfants Terribles (about a love affair between a brother and sister), understood Genet's talents and bothered to make the effort is just a fluke of literary history. Lucky, lucky Saint Genet.
It was now 1943 and France was in the midst of its Nazi occupation. French people – especially Jews among them – were being deported to concentration camps in Poland and exterminated. Genet found himself held in Camp des Tourelles, a deportation cite. He was visited by Marc Barbezat, the powerful publisher of the magazine L'Arbalete who, with other powerful people, got Genet released. n I have no idea what role this publisher or Cocteau or any of Genet's other powerful supporters played in interfering with the deportation of Jews. Cocteau did flirt with the German power elite, and other artists like Max Jacobs and Robert Desnos were deported and exterminated for being anti-Nazi or Jewish. Genet's friends were not deported and continued to publish during the occupation. So, despite his homosexuality, his desertion, his endless incarcerations for crimes petty and pathetic, this homeless man's life was saved in a period in which thousands of citizens of far greater social standing were sent off to be murdered because they were Jews, communists and Nazi resisters. I would like to know more about this and to understand more about Genet's feelings about Jews, French anti-Semitism and the European Holocaust. Sartre claimed Genet to be an anti-semite, but understood it as a revulsion of other oppressed people. White quotes Sartre: "Since Genet wants his lovers to be executioners, he should never be sodomized by a victim. What repels Genet about Israelites is that he finds himself in their situations." But actually, no, he was excused from their situation. So, given that he had more power than Jews, just as he had more power than Arabs, there is a contradiction in the theory of Genet as pro-Palestinian because he identified with the oppressed.
In 1944, still under Nazi occupation, Genet's first novel, Notre Dame des Fleurs appeared in except in L'Arbalete. He met Sartre, also still in France, at Café Flore, which was still open despite the Nazi seizure of resources and severe rationing. And Genet's lover, Jean DeCarnin died on the Communist barricades fighting to liberate Paris. Strange juxtaposition of events: one dies, the other drinks coffee. From then on, most of Genet's important love relationships were to be with Arab men. The Nazis were defeated in 1945 and three years later Sartre and Cocteau petition for amnesty for Genet. In 1951, Gallimard published the complete works of Genet. All his books were banned in America until Grove Press broke the ban in 1963. This was another good reason for Edmund White, future author of explicitly gay literature, to have been enamored with France. It offered him a legacy of freedom.
But there is such a strange imbalance of values in all of this. A France brutally colonizing the Arab and African world – and deeply complicit with the deportation of Jews – listens to its own intellectuals and frees, publishes and awards its own homosexual experimental writer ex-convict. Then again, perhaps the things that made white homosexual men intolerable to American culture – principally the refusal to build families and reproduce – didn't really matter that much to the French. Overt empires reproduce in their own brutal ways, and histories such as Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, which is about the colonization of the Congo by Belgium, depict colonial culture as a homoerotic, homosocial and, in many cases, homosexual refuge. It is similar perhaps to our own genocidal westward expansion and cowboy culture.
In 1970, Genet was arrested with Marguerite Duras at a demonstration protesting the death of four African immigrant workers. As a Frenchman, he had often traveled in Africa, especially in French colonized countries. Yet he had little contact with African Americans outside of James Baldwin who was in sexual and racial exile in France. But once he surfaced as an activist, Genet was contacted by Black Panthers Connie Mathews and Michael Persitz to speak out on the jailing and government murders of much of their leadership. How the Panthers made the decision to ask him for help is unclear. A lot has been written about the macho nature of the Panther party, and much of that has also been softened, retrospectively. Huey P Newton, party chairman, famously said, "The homosexual may be the most revolutionary," which is certainly very far from the white left, busy yelling "Pull her off the stage and fuck her," when Marilyn Webb of Women's Liberation tried to talk feminism at an anti-war rally that same year. Certainly the handsome Panther, Chairman Huey P Newton, and the stylish rank and file were a lot sexier than white leftists whose torn, baggy jeans and flannel shirts de-sexualized working class clothing, which would soon be tightened and re-masculinized by gay clone culture. Wanting to help the Panthers, Genet was denied a visa by the US because of his homosexuality, and so crossed the border illegally from Canada. For two months, he traveled the country, giving many public talks at universities and to the press on behalf of the Panthers. His many American adventures included a cocktail party at Stanford's French department where he compared the Panthers to the Marquis de Sade due to their shared authenticity. He had a crush on Panther leader David Hilliard. Jane Fonda proposed doing a film with Genet. And one night he danced for some Panthers in a pink negligee. He may have been a Marxist, but he was still camp. The Panthers gave him a black leather jacket. He met 26-year-old UCLA Philosophy professor Angela Davis, who was a fluent French speaker from a family of learned French speakers. On May 1, he spoke to 25,000 people in New Haven and his speech was published by the Black Panther Party. He then hastily departed America when contacted by the Office of Immigration. Back in Europe, he published a defense of Angela Davis, who was now on FBI Wanted posters, named "Public Enemy Number One." When she was arrested, he agreed for the first time to go on television where he delivered a talk "Angela Davis Is At Your Mercy." In Prisoner of Love Genet reflected that "The Panthers symbolism was too easily deciphered to last. It was accepted quickly, but rejected because it was too easily understood."
As the Panthers fractured, Genet became friends back in France with Mahmoud El Hamchari, the Paris representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization. His wife told Edmund White that Genet would come to their house unannounced and have long talks with El Hamchari about the divisions and corruption within the Panthers. So, as one political partner crumbled, another was born. White writes, "After following events in Jordan that proved disastrous for Palestinians, known as 'Black September,'" Genet "accepted an invitation" to visit Palestinian refugee camps for one week. He stayed for six months and returned four times over the next two years. In November, 1970, he met Yasser Arafat for less than thirty minutes. But Arafat did give Genet a pass permitting free travel in any PLO territory and asked him to write a book about Palestinians, which Genet completed fifteen years later. White writes that Genet "preferred to think that the Arab world should be Palestinized rather than the Palestinian revolution should be Arabized. To Genet the only positive vision of the future should be socialist, not theological: his analysis of the failure of Zionism was that it had begun as a socialist experiment but had degenerated quickly into a theological state."
Just as in Syria, there is not much information about how the Palestinians experienced Genet, most of the information coming from Genet's version of the relationship. As in Syria, he described himself as well-liked. Genet says that he shocked Palestinians by telling them he was homosexual and an atheist, "an avowal that made them burst out laughing," he claimed. But who knows what really happened. I am fascinated by Genet's "invitations." As an openly lesbian woman who is a "friend of Palestine," I wonder if Genet was the first out queer in political solidarity with Palestinians, as opposed to colonials whose only investments were a sexual interest in Arab men.
The visit took place after the 1967 Six-Day War, and much of the world was troubled by the Israeli occupation of more territory and the creation of yet more refugees on top of the people still in exile from their expulsion by the founding of the Israeli state in 1948. Although Palestine is and was a "place", the specific geographical boundaries of this "home" were different in people's minds than in legal realities. In fact, "Palestine" was now The West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, refugee camps in Jordan and in Lebanon and in Syria, as well as a global diaspora of refugees from Kuwait to London to Detroit. "Palestine" was also the memories, the still-standing houses now lived in by Israelis, and the land, sea and hills that many Palestinians would never see again. His visits stimulated a series of articles and petitions and participations with Michel Foucault on anti-prison work and with Gilles Deleuze in support of Arab workers in France, as well as the rights of North African immigrants.
At the age of 64, Genet met his last lover, Mohammed El Katranai, in Tangiers. They lived together in a small apartment in the Saint Denis suburb of Paris. At the age of 72, suffering from throat cancer, Genet moved to Morocco. From this base, he traveled to Lebanon with Leila Shahid, a young Palestinian activist. In September, 1982, Genet was in Beirut when Israelis invaded. This assault enabled Christian militias to massacre Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps where Palestinians are still living in 2017.. Jim Hubbard and I visited Sabra with Lebanese queer activist Lynne Darwich in 2013. Genet was one of the first outsiders to enter Shatila on September 19, 1982, and found the place strewn with corpses. He wrote "Four Hours at Shatila," which was published in The Journal of Palestinian Studies. I don't know if he chose this venue to support the journal, or if the piece had been rejected by more widely-read and mainstream publications. Returning to Morocco, he started to write Prisoner of Love, based in fifteen years of notes about the Black Panther and Palestinian experiences. On April 15, 1986 he died of cancer at the age of 76. He was buried in Larache, Morocco. Prisoner of Love was published one month later.
If Genet ever had a "home," it was in the Arab world, a world he first entered as a colonial soldier. It was as a colonial soldier that Genet had his first experience of authority, group belonging, sway. It was in the Arab world that he found lovers, often younger, poorer, with less social currency. It was Palestine that "invited" him, while America refused his request for a visa. American homosexuals now have, what Rutgers Professor Jasbir Puar has named "Homonationalism," i.e. those of us who are white and male, who marry and reproduce, who are documented, who are not incarcerated, who have homes and who support the military and US imperial wars, are now invited to identify with the American, Canadian, British, German, French, Dutch, and Israeli state apparatus of punishment and enforcement. Despite being a homosexual convict, Genet experienced this same elevation by being a French soldier. But the status of Palestinians has not changed since Genet walked into Shatila and witnessed murdered civilians lying on its grounds in 1982. Palestinians are still mass murdered; they are still denied a "home." There are still questions for us to grapple with regarding Jean Genet. Was his support for Palestine – which was unusual, energetic, sincere, effortful and significant – rooted in the identification of one homeless person with another, one marginalized, unjustly punished person with another? Was it, simultaneously, a relationship of a French person to an Arab one, a Frenchman whose only place of supremacy in his own cultural framework was in relationship to the Arabs he could love and to whom he could make a difference? Or was he attracted to the Palestinians and the Black Panthers who needed "Jean Genet"?
What Does a Queer Urban Future Look Like?
Sarah Schulman	on January 28, 2020
[ *Back during the making of Cidade Queer (an inquiry opened by Lanchonete.org), I got the chance to ask some colleagues their views on queerness and a right to the city. I asked Sarah Schulman if 'the urban'—yes, cities as well as urban encounters…but also the space and right(s) to live in, work in, and share the contemporary city—is an important source or reference for her work? Jose Esteban Muñoz begins his book, "Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity" (2009), with these words: "Queerness is an aspiration toward the future. To be queer is to imagine better possible futures." So I guess what I'm asking is what a queer urban future might look/feel like to you? xo, Todd ]
Obviously, great cities are in terrible trouble as gentrification homogenizes their souls. However, there are still some core experiences of difference that make a place like New York City a center for the production of new ideas. After all, it is the mix that signifies urbanity, the irrefutable knowledge that people are different, which is built into real city living. In some places people wake up in privatized houses, they walk through their front doors and step into cars, and then drive to work and park.
This twice-a-day seminal experience is one of isolation and repetition. But waking up in an apartment building means recognizing your neighbors' realities: who was fired, who is sick, who is in love, who can't control their drug use, whose kid has finally gotten a job. By the time you get outside, there is already the knowledge that other people are real. Then, we walk through the neighborhood, see which businesses have been driven out, what new chains are devouring territory, which brave independent entrepreneurs are trying something new, waving, avoiding, chatting, making amends. Jump on the subway, where the knowledge that people suffer, have contradictions and need support is always present. And finally, get to work. This is an experience of recognizing difference. Of having to think about other people, notice them, and maybe even talk. This engagement is the source of great inspiration.
I have written so many books about the people in my building, my neighborhood, on the subway, on the street. They embody my life and my pages. So, when I imagine a future for myself and for my city, they are inseparable. My city is part of my heart, not something to drive through on the way. And New Yorkers love to talk to each other. We practice recognition. Recently, I have come to understand, profoundly, the difference between provincial cities and really urban ones: the range of communities.
In NYC, if you burn out on one queer, black, arts community, there are actually several other queer, black arts communities to connect with, and all the other larger communities that also include queer and black. There isn't one clique controlling experimental film. There are many. While of course, being on the outs with those in power can be awful—just the worst—the machine is just too big to stay stagnant. And while some people are afraid of speaking back to power, plenty are not. When I see what kind of group bullying goes on in smaller places, where queers and artists act like In The Heat Of The Night, or those realist horror films where all the "best" citizens are secretly in the Klan and there is no escape, well, in NYC, there is always an escape. And what that means is that we have the freedom to change. Despite gentrification, there are still subcultures, substructures, undergrounds—some of which desperately want to be recognized, and others which absolutely don't. There are hundreds of dance scenes, multiple ethnicities of Chinese, everything you could ever want to eat, more musicians than there are places to hear them, the greatest actors in the country, and beauty at your fingertips. There is the petty and there is the very deep.
"Queer" is a category in flux, and urban queer is on a huge continuum. We have the banal, the spoiled, the exploitative, the boring. We have the expansive, the inquisitive, the creative, the open hearted. We have the consumer, and the producer. We have the new abject object, the new queer: the undocumented, trans*, HIV positive, the queers whom the police shoot to kill. We have those of us who are not in families, and therefore not the ideal consumer, the community-based queers, who share a public space, and the privatized queers who put their citizenship first. Right now, everything "queer" that has a place of honor is somehow rooted in the family. Just this year in media: Transparent, Fun Home, The Argonauts, even Carol—who, in the book, was somewhat repulsed by her child, but in the film became a mother, giving that famous plea for tolerance speech that is required by the tolerant.
But what about the rest of us? Where are we? Looking around, I see queer in the leadership of Black Lives Matter and the new Black Student Movement. I see queer inside Palestine Solidarity. I see a place for queers who have an agenda bigger than their queer selves. And for the rest, I see an invitation into the status quo. And some of us are inside each room. And some of us don't have a room as the city struggles to find homes for its own children. There is a building on 57th Street in which every apartment is a floor through and costs 100 million dollars. Real estate is like a security box for some of the globe's elite. It's a safe place to put your money. East New York was offered graduated income housing, but it's not a graduated income neighborhood. We need 500,000 housing units to save our soul. At least we know the terms of the goal. We need to be rescued and to save ourselves. The homogenized lose consciousness, and don't understand the fight. But it only takes a critical mass to make the change. A new society is literally being built on top of the old. All extant housing stock is already claimed; now, they are constructing towers without public aspects: no hospitals, no schools, a heliport on a building's roof. And yet, my over-crowded classroom has 16 nationalities. My job is to open their hearts.
*To read 10 more responses to 'What does a queer urban future look like?', click here.
'People in Trouble' at Thirty: On Realism, Trump, and the AIDS Cataclysm
Sarah Schulman	on November 6, 2019
Thirty years after its completion, my novel People in Trouble has taken on resonance far beyond my original passions and intention. Its most notorious cultural eruptions: the uncredited derivations of the novel into the musical Rent, and the premonitional nightmare of Donald Trump as a world "leader"–are filled with meaning and have been fodder for speculation. Yet these later manifestations stray far from the originating emotions, influences and open-hearted vulnerabilities that led me to write it in the first place.
In 1986 I was 28, and met and fell in love with an older woman in a long-term relationship with a man, who both occupied seats in a mostly straight avant-garde art movement. I wanted her to accept me and our relationship as something worth protecting, but that was impossible because of her ideologies. Some were rooted in fears, some in privileges, some in fear of loss of those privileges, some in fear of having to acknowledge those privileges, some in freedom from having to change. In some ways what stood between us was an investment in a particular kind of bohemianism filled with great ideas, huge amounts of fun, unconscious sustained class protections and its accompanying supremacy perceptions. I remember the one time I brought her to meet my parents, hoping she would use her age and class to help them love and understand me, but she ended up lecturing them on the history of the avant-garde, and complaining about how under-recognized she was in her art career, thereby re-enforcing their degraded thoughts about me. It was a waste with long-term consequences, losing this singular opportunity to show them that I was, in fact, loved. In the end, all of these constructions that were in fixed positions before I ever came along kept her from being able to learn from me, and all that I had lived and was living and longed to share.
I, on the other hand, learned a great deal from her. She'd had a superior education, an exceptional arts experience, and exposed me to people, scenes, histories, objects, places, communities, ways of living, that I had never noticed or even heard of. These introductions have enriched my thinking and my art making all of my life, opened up enormous skies of possibility, and formed my aesthetics, informed my sense of humor, my willingness to take artistic chances, and my ability to appreciate and take in a wide range of ideas. Now I am sixty-one years old and she is in her seventies. After decades of ignoring my work, never reading a single thing, never coming to any public events, not a play, not a reading, in short–pretending that I was not doing what I was doing and not becoming who I had become, she suddenly showed up one day to a screening of the feature film Jason and Shirley, that I had collaborated on with director Stephen Winter and my co-actor Jack Waters, about the filmmaker Shirley Clarke and the making of her 1964 classic Portrait of Jason. We were all shocked to see her come into the theater, and we feared what she would say, but when she raised her hand, it was finally to offer some kind of kindness, and it was really very sweet.
We actually walked home together. She had just had her 70th birthday and she said she felt "lucky to be alive," so I guess—ultimately–she changed. She realized something about the simple value of acknowledging. And that change made her able to be kind. And whether or not she still believes in the possibility of superior aesthetics, as she once did, the concrete innovations of her artistic peers that required skill, talent, labor and courage to create handmade works in the visual arts, sometimes taking years of painstaking construction, are now available to all through software, and have taken on such a flattened tone, as they have been assimilated into marketing and public technology, that they are hardly noticeable as distinct decisions requiring selective choice.
This whole question of living long enough to understand that the human game of cruelty, superiority, separation is a pose that can simply be dropped, that itself is a very emotional subject among my queer generation, because at the very time that this woman and I fell in love, 1987, I was surrounded by my queer world dying of AIDS, and me and my friends were obsessed with keeping these men and boys alive. So many never had the chance to live long enough to finally be kind. I was in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) while we were involved, and yet she never came to a meeting, nor to a demonstration. It was so separate at that time, the straight world and the gay one. People could step in and out, but they literally took place in distinct spaces, consciousnesses. One of the revelations of this searing relationship was that my lover and her boyfriend seemed to be only peripherally implicated by the raging AIDS crisis, while I was drowning in death. Yes, they knew people who suffered and died. And yes, they cared. But it was hard for me to grasp how we could be so physically close–literally our bodies entwined, and living only a few blocks away from each other, and have such dramatically different daily lived realities of this mass death experience that was the epicenter of the AIDS cataclysm.
Two years after we met, I was at an ACT UP demonstration on May 9, 1988, at the Food and Drug Administration, trying to force the US government to release drugs faster so that dying people could try them. In a historic speech called 'Why We Fight', the late film critic Vito Russo described this separation experience exactly:
Living with AIDS is like living through a war that is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches. Every time a shell explodes you look around and you discover that you've lost more of your friends but nobody else notices. It isn't happening to them. They're walking the streets as though we weren't living through some kind of nightmare. And only you can hear the screams of the people as they're dying. And their cries for help.
But at this point I had already finished the manuscript. Remember that there is a gap between the creation of a novel, the time when a publisher agrees to take it, and the additional wait of a year or two until it is physically published. So even though People in Trouble appeared in 1990, it had to have been completed 2-3 years earlier. This time frame is important because I imagined an AIDS activist organization or movement in People in Trouble before ACT UP actually existed–as it was founded in March 1987. In my novel, I named the group JUSTICE, which was a far less creative name than ACT UP. And I imagined JUSTICE doing a small action of defiance in Saint Patrick's Cathedral, which was modeled on a small, earlier gay liberation action I'd participated in with 10-20 others when we went inside the church and silently turned out backs on Cardinal O'Conner. Again, reality was far more dramatic than fiction, because in December 1989, a few months before People in Trouble appeared on the shelves, ACT UP held a demonstration of 7,000 at Saint Patrick's Cathedral and disrupted mass–an event that will be described in detail in my forthcoming 2021 book Let the Record Show, a nonfiction political history of ACT UP based on the 188 interviews that Jim Hubbard and I conducted with surviving members of that organization over 18 years, and which you can view at www.actuporalhistory.org
The title came from a book by Wilhelm Reich that I was introduced to by activist Maxine Wolfe. Reich's People in Trouble opens with him observing soldiers firing on workers, and as he watches the unjustified brutality, the pointless carnage, he sees that the workers and the soldiers are the same people, from the same class, but one has been taken over by the state. Their uniforms are the sign of this control that compels them to kill their own mirror images, who are instead fighting for justice. My model for the style of People in Trouble was Germinale by Zola, a 19th century French Realist novel about a miners' strike that I had studied with Francoise Meltzer at the University of Chicago before I dropped out in 1979. This version of "Realism" helped me to parse the details of the eye of the hurricane that was life inside the AIDS crisis at that time. It was my job to record the specificity of the experience. I remember reading a story about Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet who was sent to Stalin's gulag where she composed poems with burnt matches on bars of soap. One day a fellow prisoner recognized her, since poets were celebrities in Russian society at that time. And the prisoner asked "Can you describe…this?" Realism helped me describe…"this." The carnage. Not the loss, which came later, but the chaos of constant suffering. I made pages and pages of notes of details of the crisis, and then selected key observations and scattered them throughout the novel, anchoring my characters in the real.
Ironically, it was the use of some of these details that were the original clues that the musical Rent by Jonathan Larson had used characters, settings, themes, and ideas (and details) from my novel without optioning my book, as he should have done. Of course, at that time queer art was haphazardly considered to be a free feeding trough for mainstream work, the most classic example being Madonna's hit song "Vogue" based on the Black queer art form of Voguing available to be cherry-picked from the streets of New York. The full and complete story of this strange cultural appropriation has already been told by a number of journalists in fancy legitimate places (Achy Obejas in Chicago Tribune, Dudley Saunders in New York Magazine, June Thomas in Slate,) and in my book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America, which was published by Duke University Press in 1998. So, I won't repeat that information here. But, Jonathan Larsen died on opening night of Rent of an aortic aneurysm and perhaps if he had not died, the show wouldn't have become a hit. Or if it had, and he had lived, I assume he would have settled with me in some token financial way that would have changed my life entirely and not made a dent in the Rent fortune. But he died mythically, leaving people to falsely believe he had died of AIDS–which is what young men died of in those days, and all I got was the legend. I would love it if someone would make a movie of People in Trouble, so the story could be told properly. Now that 30 years have passed, perhaps the world is ready for it.
The Trump issue is an entirely other matter. Ever since his father got rich by refusing to rent to Black people in Queens, New Yorkers have known and hated the Trumps. The late 80s were the turning point in visibility of gentrification, and New Yorkers knew that developers like Trump and the Helmsleys were receiving corporate welfare in the form of tax breaks to build luxury housing, offices and hotels. As expensive new real estate replaced affordable housing, the numbers of homeless people soared, and I was becoming increasingly aware of the overlap of AIDS and homelessness. It seemed like a reasonable act of imagination to envision Trump coming to real power and sacrificing the homes, and therefore the lives, of the vulnerable for simply more profit. If you look back at the reviews of the novel, no one found this far-fetched or extreme. How sad to have been right, thirty years in advance, in somehow understanding the supreme role this man would play in destruction of the fabric of human relationship, and the suffering he would cause.
My subsequent AIDS novel, Rat Bohemia (1995), while still organically a product of the AIDS immersion, and surrounded by the death of the young, benefited artistically from being the second of my works about the epidemic. People in Trouble relied on a Social Realism approach as part of the message: trying to explain what it was like to be drowning in disaster. By the time I wrote Rat Bohemia, I had my own foundational creation to stand on, and was able to then be more formally inventive without losing the soul of the experience being conveyed. I then went on to write the novels The Child and The Mere Future which reflected the crisis in even more varied ways, and the AIDS-focused nonfiction books The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2013), Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, And The Duty Of Repair (2016) and next this history of ACT UP. AIDS has been only one of a number of arenas of human experience that have occupied my creative and emotional life, but it has been consistent. And that is itself meaningful, since most of the writers who began to convey the AIDS experience from the beginning in the early 1980s have died. So while I, of course, hope that each work stands on its own and creates a distinct aesthetic, historical, and emotional experience, the continuity itself also, hopefully, creates an experience for the reader.
(NOTE TO READERS: VINTAGE UK JUST RECENTLY RE-RELEASED MY 1990 NOVEL PEOPLE IN TROUBLE FOR WHICH I WROTE THIS AFTERWORD, BUT THEY DECLINED DUE TO BRITISH LAWYERING.)
This piece was first published on October 8th 2019 on Lambda Literary


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Q: iOS app validation fails because it can't find Info.plist I've recently recreated an app (a PhoneGap one) and it builds fine, but when it comes to validation it fails because it can't find the Info.plist. I had to rename the project which is probably why. There are two references as far as I've found using Find, in the project files, both set to "isys Collect/Info.plist", pointing to a directory called "isys Collect".
Does anyone know if there are other references, or if the file needs to be called something else?

A: Turns out the issue was not that it wasn't finding it, but there was another validation error. I guess it doesn't hit the code that says it's found the plist until it's successfully validated all the items within it. Ugh.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Q: Get event object from SequenceWaiter When I add SequenceWaiter step into the SequenceRunner, how can I get event object which was passed into the event? There is the code from my test function:
var sequence: SequenceRunner = new SequenceRunner(this);
sequence.addStep(new SequenceCaller(manager, function(): void {
    manager.startUpload();
}));
sequence.addStep(new SequenceWaiter(manager, PackageUploadEvent.BEFORE_PACKAGE_UPLOAD, 1000));
sequence.addStep(new SequenceCaller(manager, function(): void {
    // TODO: Get event object from PackageUploadEvent.BEFORE_PACKAGE_UPLOAD event
}));

A: Answered on flexunit forum. The basic idea is to extend SequenceWaiter class, override setupListeners function to set up additional event listener and save event object to the public field in this listener.


For the first time in the nine years that Scott Tobias and Michael Phillips have been dropping by for Filmspotting's year-end countdown, no single film made it onto all four lists. This week, the Top 5 of 2015, plus Massacre Theatre and more.
Filmspotting assembles the film critic Avengers -- Michael Phillips (Chicago Tribune) and Scott Tobias (A.V. Club) -- to finish off the Top 10 Films of 2012 countdown and reflect on the year in cinema.
Josh and Adam didn't set out to meet their makers, but they do tackle the Promethean task of counting down their Top 10 Films of 2012 with the help of some special guest contributors.
From the cosmic grandeur of "The Tree of Life" and "Melancholia," to the everyday existential crises of "Take Shelter" and "Martha Marcy May Marlene," 2011 was a fascinating year in film. To help make it even more fascinating, old acquaintances Michael Phillips, Scott Tobias and Josh Larsen drop by to help ring in the new year with a countdown of the Top 10 Films of 2011.
The moment of truth is finally here as Adam and Matty unveil their Top 10 Films of 2010!


How can we help you on your quest to find the best Android TV box?
If you're searching for an Android TV box, then chances are, you already own an Android device, whether it's a phone or a tablet. If that's the case, you should already be quite familiar with the Android operating system. That's good, because an Android TV box basically turns your TV into a big tablet.
The thing with Android TV boxes are that they have more connection and software options compared to phones and tablets, but this also means that they are more susceptible to malfunctions. This is especially common in generic and cheaper models.
At BestAndroidTVBox.co.uk, we're here to present you with the best models based on user reviews, technical specifications, software features and reliability. We've done the research so you don't have to.
The most important aspects are the speed of the processor (app loading times), graphics (particularly if you're going to play 3D game) and ultimately, reliability which trumps over all. There are just too many Android TV Box's that fail when it comes to the reliability test. We've filtered out the bad eggs for you in our comparison table.


This blog is part of a series where I look briefly at some of the classic, or historic, or original Anglican teachings. Each week I look at one of the Articles in the Thirty-Nine Articles. By the way, these Articles are a key component in Messiah's Statement of Faith. I will quote the Article accurately, but I may modernize the language sometimes.
First, this is a wise article! All grace and power in worship and in preaching and in the sacraments comes from God, not human beings. This article helps protect us from accidentally having a human-centred/based understanding of the Christian's common life. If most of the power and grace comes from human beings, then having an unbelieving or evil pastor is disastrous. If all of the power and grace comes from God, then a bad minister cannot stop it.
Second, note that sacraments and ordinance are used interchangeably.
Third, note that the article frankly acknowledges that the visible church is a mixed-bag, not pure. Too many churches fall into the trap of demanding that the local church only be made up of the saved and the holy. In a fallen world, this is an idol and an illusion. The local church and denominations will always be a mixed-bag; praise God the power and grace comes from God; not us!
Fourth, the fact that the local church is always a mixed-bag does not mean we should give evil or unbelieving ministers/leaders a pass. This article teaches patience for those in the congregation, but vigilance and courage when it comes to those in positions of authority who minister. The local church and the congregation are to fairly judge those who are accused. If it is found that the minister is not an orthodox Christian and/or they have done serious wrong, then they are to be removed from office. By the way, I believe this article wisely portrays the bottom-line/big-picture, but leaves the steps to be worked out.


Rolls-Royce führt das Stabilisation-at-Rest (SAR)-Konzept ein. Die neueste Version der Stabilisierungssysteme ist für Schiffe mit Eisklasse geeignet.
Please note: If the online registration is not successful (e.g. because the "@" cannot be typed or the form cannot be submitted please contact us. Send a message to [email protected]nsa-online.de or to [email protected] or phone in. Contact: Sylvia Wilde, +49 (0)40 / 70 70 80-211.


Putting the MMCA on my places to visit list when I'm next in Iowa!
What a truly fascinating, magical place filled with all sorts of art. Such a blessing to have locally.
Thanks Jillian for highlighting the MMCA and arts in NE Iowa. There truly are some very talented people up on these bluffs and in the valleys !
You're so welcome and I couldn't agree more!


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Ѝнъмкло̀ () е град в окръг Кинг, щата Вашингтон, САЩ. Инъмкло е с население от 11 116 жители (2000) и обща площ от 10,1 km². Намира се на 232 m надморска височина. ЗИП кодът му е 98022, а телефонният му код е 360.

Бележки

Градове във Вашингтон
Окръг Кинг

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


The guidance department through individual and group counseling assists students in scheduling appropriate courses based on graduation requirements, providing information for transition to post-secondary education, and coordinating career and college placement exams and explanation of results.
College Equipped Readiness Tool (CERT) - students take the CERT assessment three times per year; once in the fall, winter, and spring. Data from each of the assessments is accessible at the completion of each section. Reports review college readiness standards, content performance, and section answers. Students are able to review their results and take part in online study hall and subject remediation activities as well as course content lessons.
ACT Tessera - students taking the ACT Tessera can identify strengths and areas for improvement in student motivation, social engagement, and self-regulation, all of which are related to student academic success. Reports include student scores, interpretative statements, and advising reports that provide academic success and retention indices.
Pre ACT - students take the Pre ACT in the fall. Student and aggregate reports summarize student performance, identify early intervention needs, and provide item-by-item performance for each Pre ACT examinee.
PSAT - offered to students who wish to take the test during their sophomore year. Students receive their test results along with their test booklet and answers to each question. Students can use results to review incorrect answers.
Practice ACT - students take the practice ACT in the fall through a partnership with Torchprep. Students are provided their test results to gauge their level of readiness. School counselor receives student results in order to advise students regarding test preparation opportunities.
PSAT - offered to students who wish to take the test during their junior year. Students receive their test results along with their test booklet and answers to each question. Students can use results to review incorrect answers. As a junior, score results from the PSAT may qualify students for the opportunity to become a National Merit Scholarship Semi Finalist.
District Choice ACT - students take the District Choice ACT in February/March. Test results are college reportable. Students have a level of comfort taking the college reportable test in a familiar environment. Student and aggregate reports summarize student performance and identify intervention needs.
District Choice ACT - students take the District Choice ACT in October. Test results are college reportable. Students have a level of comfort taking the college reportable test in a familiar environment. Student and aggregate reports summarize student performance and identify intervention needs.


Modern valve block with monel pistons. Key of Bb. 1st and 3rd valve rings. 4 1/2" Bell. Genuine Schiller mouthpiece and deluxe Enthral™ pod case included.
Responsive Nickel Plated Cornet for Open Sound complete with Shepards Crook Tube Flair.
Modern valve block with monel pistons. Key of Bb. 1st and 3rd valve rings. 4 ½" Bell. Genuine Schiller mouthpiece and deluxe Enthral pod case included.
Authoritative projection Free Blowing Wide Tone. With their hands on approach, Schiller band instruments achieve their goal of producing quality instruments that are affordable to all musicians.
Authoritative projection Free Blowing Wide Tone With their hands on approach, Schiller band instruments achieve their goal of producing quality instruments that are affordable to all musicians.
Model 930 Bb Cornet - Classic Shepherd's crook design with first valve slide trigger.


Paramount Coffee has been in business seventy-five years! That alone tells you that they know what they are doing. But what makes Paramount Coffee different from those other companies is that it is entirely owned by its employees. This way, it can't be bought by a national company. They are one of the biggest coffee roasters in the Midwest, with a loyal following and new customers everyday.
I like to drink my coffee a few ways. I like it hot and black, hot with some liquor in it or I like it over ice with cream and sweetener. My daughter loves flavored coffee, but I've never been a fan, except when it's the liquor doing the flavoring.
We've been bouncing off of the walls lately; drinking so much coffee! But it's not all a bad thing. I love coffee and with two ambitious teenagers, I can use all of the energy I can get. Not to mention all of the great deals going on at the shops!
I've had a lot of fun trying the Ugly Sweater Coffees - Almond Amaretto, Creme Brulee and Santa's Gift To You. I will tell you that my daughter's favorite of the three is the Creme Brulee. It's a medium roasted coffee, slightly sweet and creamy. I had a hard time slowing her down - she loves this coffee!
I, on the other hand, really enjoyed the other two. The Almond Amaretto has a faint flavor of almonds really reminded me of the amaretto liquor, which I put in my coffee a lot. It almost has the same flavor, but without the alcohol content. A medium roast that is full-bodied and just bursts with flavor on the taste-buds.
The Santa's Gift To You Coffee though, the sky is the limit. I've been drinking this medium roasted coffee is very rich, dark and wonderful. Not only have I been drinking this delicious coffee black, but I've been chilling it and pouring it over ice with cream and sweetener. I am in love!
Paramount Coffee has over 100 varieties of Premium Coffee, so you're sure to find something you'll enjoy or to gift. They are backed with a 100% guarantee and are Fair Trade, USDA Organic, UTZ, and Rainforest Alliance Certified.
Paramount Coffee is your stop for coffee shopping! Great for yourself, entertaining or gift giving! They also have holiday coffee sets, but be aware, these flavors won't last forever. It's for a limited time only, while supplies last - so get yours today!
*I received coffee samples to facilitate this review but all opinions are expressly my own.
I love 'Ugly Sweater'! Fun gift idea and stocking stuffers!
The Almond Amaretto sounds amazing! I love the name of the coffee's too, to cute!
I don't drink coffee, but my husband loves it. I think he'd really like the Creme Brulee too. Great stocking stuffer!
I'm with your daughter - Creme Brulee sounds amazzzzing. My favorite dessert combine with coffee = WIN!


Hmmm,.. I gust you have to join to tune in hate that they use to be free to listen.
Hey...I said ON my computer! hehe I do have a lot more than I actually have loaded on this thing.
I am a roller blader and I skate at the Park on a 2 mile oval asphalt trail. I play my music (blues and Jazz) just loud enough for those I pass by to hear so they don't think I am a total loon. I skate in rhythm to the music and use my arms and body to "jam" to the music. Whatever I want to do, direct music, swim strokes, aerobic arm exercizes. In otherwords I try to get a full body workout. It's great fun and my core and my back are getting strong. I really don't care much if those around don't like it. Most of those who are there to work out can see the benefits of it. My thought is that this is my workout time and I'm gonna make the best of it. It's my sport and my rules. I'm old and stubborn. It's so much fun I will never stop till I die. Are there other skaters doing this type of skating? Or what type of skating is this most like?
Great List that List took a lot of effort.
"on the loose" by the tubes. the "on the loose" i know was a group called saga. maybe you got the group name mixed up? it's a fast song though, i guess if you like something racy. good song though.
rag poppin'. that's the right artist, but i guess not popular enough. maybe look up the album title, "the one giveth, the count taketh away". the whole album's pretty good.
"i like it" cameo, may be "she's strange". maybe because they keep saying "i like it" throughout the song threw you off.
great thread, Agree with the post that thinks this would make a great CDset.
you can't skate and not love music.
Activate and Time to Jam – Teachmaster P.E.B.
Skatefm is easily found on the Tune-in Radio app.
Do you have a particular fave channel from their streams?


Inchcolm had the most liked content!
Bruno Fornaroli - "El Tuna"
Joyce too rigid. He was playing against 10 men and still played 2 defensive midfielders. Never looked like beating 10 men.
Rd. 19 - Fri. 15th February 2019 vs. Newcastle, Away, 7.50 pm.
Rd. 18 - Sat. 9th February 2019 vs. Adelaide, AAMI, 7.50 pm.
Maclaren off with 7 mins remaining. He could have played for that length of time. He is our only striker do not take him off unless he is injured.
He will not start Harrison, he is a smoke screen. Someone brought in to appease the supporters. He has had very little football over the past 2 years and that was mostly as a sub in the English 3rd and 4th tier. I also recall a post stating he was injured for a long period this season and played minimum football for QPR development squad.
Rd. 17 - Sun. 3rd February 2019 vs. Sydney, Kogarah, 5.00 pm.
They will practice penalties just like other set pieces. I would guess he was the best in practice. But as a good coach will tell you, taking a penalty in practice where there is no pressure is completely different from taking one under pressure in a match where you must score.
More than WJ need the sack. You can start with him and his coaching staff and work your way up.


The fundamental marksmanship skills historically taught to our troops are often skipped in today's "tactical shooting" world. We cover the bases ensuring nothing is left out during our methodical progression of training. In combat numerous shooting positions may be required. Getting into position quickly and engaging accurately, may be the difference between life and death.
Clients are introduced to numerous shooting positions essential to combat marksmanship. We test accuracy and proficiency level with the use of a shot timer. This course can be challenging for new shooters, our intro to AR15 course perfectly prepares our clients for success. If you already have a solid foundation we welcome you to sign up and attend our Rifle 100.
AR15 platform, AK47 and all other carbine rifles with 20 - 30 round magazines are appropriate for this course.
Positions – Standing, Sitting, Kneeling, Prone and variations of each.
Contact us directly for more information on Prerequisites.


Maike is a health behaviour change scientist with more than 10 years' experience in research and practice. She holds a Masters Degree in Psychology and a PhD in Public Health. At the Centre for Online Health, Maike applies her passion for research translation by leading the Centre's consultancy services. Prior to joining the Centre for Online Health, Maike was responsible for the evidence-based development, implementation and evaluation of health behaviour interventions at UQ's Cancer Prevention Research Centre as well as the Centre for Research in Geriatric Medicine. During her PhD, Maike identified effective strategies to reduce sitting, a newly identified health risk behaviour, in office workplaces. Maike has been contributing to UQ's teaching program as regular tutor and guest lecturer since 2012.


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Features: Economy
Redesigning the Welfare State
by Brian Easton
A new report raises questions about the past and future of the support that we give to those in need.
The Child Poverty Action Group has produced a report, Further Fraying of the Welfare State, describing the ongoing undermining of the welfare safety net under the Key-English National Government. It needs to be put into a context which begins before 1984 where the report starts.
Starting points always involve judgements because things happen before then. Even so, it makes sense to start with the 1972 Report of the Royal Commission on Social Security because it consolidated what had gone on in the 34 years since the introduction of the 1938 Social Security Act. There is much to admire in the report and I shall draw on that below. However, it was at the end of an era. All social policy is based upon assumptions about how society works. Critical ones which the RCSS assumed became obsolescent over the following decade. They included (in alphabetical order):
- new and diverse family structures;
- the Maori urban migration which shifted them from subsistence rural living to living in the urban market;
- mothers entering the paid workforce;
- increased social diversity;
- higher (structural) unemployment.
Each undermined the analysis of the 1972 RCSS.
Anne Hercus, the Minister for Social Welfare in the Lange-Douglas Labour Government, wanted a new royal commission on social security to grapple with the changes, but her proposal was kidnapped by those who wanted to head off Rogernomics, extending it into a wider Royal Commission on Social Policy.
The 1988 RCSP was a disaster. Perhaps that was inevitable. Social security is based on legislation, which royal commissions review well, as the 1972 RCSS did. Social policy is a vast morass of law, practices and beliefs. The 1988 RCSP struggled to make sense of them. It was not helped by some poor decisions and weak advisors. Many people concerned with social policy have warm hearts, perhaps some understanding of a particular policy issue, but no appreciation of the broad social policy issues nor the analytic skills to bring them together. Each was eager to pursue their special interest. The consequence was that the April Report had no overall vision but lots of bits and pieces by those with warm hearts and small heads.
The objective observer might well have concluded that there was no coherent alternative to the neoliberal proposals and so the 1988 RCSP inadvertently opened the way to the 1990 Economic and Social Initiative, in which Ruth Richardson and Jenny Shipley promised to redesign the welfare state. Instructively, nobody used the 1988 RCSP report to defend against the attack; I went back to the 1972 RCSS report.
The ESI became the foundation for social policy over the next three decades. Even the Clark-Cullen Labour Government did little to reverse the underlying framework. Although it was a little more generous, its advisers were mainly neoliberals or those with warm hearts/small heads who accept the neoliberal framework without knowing it.
I draw attention to two features of the current regime by going back to the 1972 RCSP. First it set two standards for benefit levels. It said (original's italics)
The aims of the system, should be
(i) First, to enable everyone to sustain life and health;
(ii) Second, to ensure, within limitations which may be imposed by physical or other disabilities, that everyone is able to enjoy a standard of living much like that of the rest of the community, and thus is able to feel a sense of participation in and belonging to the community.
The first aim is consistent with a notion of maintaining everybody at or above an absolute level of poverty; the second defines a notion of relative poverty. The 1972 RCSS supported the second notion as the basis of society.
The ESI cut back social security benefit levels to an absolute level of poverty. (There are some good graphs in the CPAG report on page 28 which show just how vicious the cuts were.) We may argue whether they got it right – the chosen level is a bit mysterious but seems to have been based on the work of an American consultant who was so unaware of New Zealand conditions that she did not know her method had been rejected by the 1972 RCSS two decades earlier. That an absolute poverty level was the intention is evident because since 1990 it has been indexed to the consumer price index. By contrast New Zealand Superannuation is indexed to wages, so the elderly share in the rising prosperity.
Had I space I would explain the relationship between poverty lines and inequality. (Another day, except to say it is more complicated than the warm hearts/small heads say.) But at the heart of the change was separating out the deserving from the undeserving poor and treating the latter very badly. The distinction would be an anathema to the 1972 RCSS and leftish governments before 1984.
The CPAG report illustrates the distinction between the poor who are in the paid labour force are treated differently and those who are not. Recall that the Clark-Cullen Government consolidated the principle in the Working For Families scheme in which only those in a certain amount of paid work were given support. (The practice had been introduced earlier by the Bolger-Birch National Government and seems to have been copied from the US.) The report describes how under the Key-English Government the principle of driving beneficiaries into the paid labour force intensified.
The 1972 RCSS would have been perplexed. Had it argued to a group of National-aligned matrons in the 1970s that mothers of young children should be forced to go into paid work it would have been howled down. Times and circumstances change; the matrons of the 2010s seem to take exactly the opposite approach if the approach of their government is any indication.
Does it make sense to socially value paid work while ignoring unpaid work such as caring of children? Anyone who thinks that caring for children is not a demanding form of work has never had any children or left the stress to their wives or hired someone else to do it (the outsourcing adding to GDP but not to total work activity). Pretending it is not socially valuable is foolish – and generates a society which has serious embedded poverty.
Patterns of child rearing have got more complicated since 1972 but the fact is that children still require care; at some times and in some circumstances it can be very demanding, at others less so. How social policy responds to that efficiently and fairly is a challenge which requires a lot of careful analysis. The CPAG report illustrates that we currently do it badly.
Lined up today outside ministers' doors are many of the warm hearted/small headed. It is doubtful any have the skills to offer the comprehensive analytic vision we need to get out of the muddle. But let me not finish with the pessimistic thought that the current Labour Government may end up, like its predecessor, with merely a slightly more generous version of a neoliberal framework.
The precipitant may be the poverty-reduction target legislation. It is easy to be warm with fuzzy thoughts about it, but cool analytic thinking leads one to conclude that if a government wants to succeed with the target they will be making numerous ad hoc, expensive and inefficient incremental changes, out of which may evolve an alternative vision more in keeping with the principles set out by the First Labour Government and the 1972 RCSS, albeit adapted for changing social circumstances. Perhaps in 34 years' time – 2042 – another royal commission will review what has evolved and be able to commend it.
by Sue Bradford on March 08, 2018
Kia ora Brian for putting the most recent CPAG report 'Further fraying of the welfare state' into clear historical perspective. I'm not sure exactly whom you mean when you talk about well-meaning types with 'warm hearts and small heads', but I hope it's not a number of the people and groups who put a lot of work into submissions to the Royal Commission of Social Policy in 1987-1988 and who did have an analysis that went well beyond accepting the neoliberal capitalist approach being enacted so fast and furiously at that time. The fact that the wide reaching submissions of our unemployed workers' groups & others were completely ignored is down to the political powerholders of that time, Phil Goff and others, whose legacy lives on in Labour today.
I realise there are many people at the moment who believe, or are simply daring to hope, that this new Labour/NZF/Green government will initiate the major reforms needed in welfare. However, on present evidence your 'pessimistic thought' that Labour may come up with only a slightly more smiley, friendly version of the same neoliberal welfare system is all too likely to come true.
There is no sign of any will from Carmel Sepuloni & her colleagues to overturn National's punitive reforms of the last nine years, much less to turn the tide on Labour's own momentous decision in the 2000s to make paid work the goal of social security, rather than return to the kind of safety net envisaged - and enacted - by their 1930s predecessors. Even promises to end the toxic culture at Work & Income offices and to to lift the punitive sanctions against mothers who can't or won't name the father of their child seem to be on the backburner.
Sadly, I don't think fine words and legislation for poverty-reduction will change any of this. Any real desire to go back to those 1972 goals - lifting benefits levels and ensuring everyone has a decent chance at full participation in society - seems as distant as ever. I would love to be proved wrong.
by on March 08, 2018
On the contrary. There must be a culture of promoting talent. And I note one of Carmel Sepuloni first meetings was with social workers at the coal face, whether this translate into a culture of promoting talent only time will tell. Over 2 years MSD will transform or die in draconian committees reading from little PH.D. books. Once analytical and accurate individuals are pulled through the system, they will appreciate there position in the system, and that it is there role to maintain the integrity of the system. Otherwise tax payers will speak against the salaries of untalented social workers.
by Charlie on March 09, 2018
In the long term we cannot afford a welfare system that promotes intergenerational failure. The 'warm heart & small minds' (great phrase!) need to realise there is a international wolf at the door against which we need to remain competitive.
In some instances that "welfare safety net" has become a matress.
IQ tests have been used by the system for a hundreds years to identify the deserving poor who could be streamed into government jobs in say like police officers and so forth or even skills training programmes, to move people from the underclass to at least the working class and above so every ones got a fucken stake in this. The system wants to find people and the system wants to sort them properly and they want to do some good when they're not trying to steal Māori land let's say, which is often called civilising behaviour. But the terrible thing is less than 10% of all recruits make it into the police force so there is not a dam thing the system can do for these people, around 100k-200k New Zealanders who live in persistent poverty.
So we've got this enterprise desperately looking for people and drag them up into working class and the police conclude that more than 10% of all recruits can not be sufficiently trained and move them up into working class. And like I say not only are these guys not going to find a stable job they are not going to be able to find a liveable wage especially now that service jobs now require a fair high degree of computational skills or the ability to have a high degree of interaction with computational technology. Even a till at McDonald's is often far beyond the abilities of those at the lower end of intelligence distribution.
An intelligence researcher by the name of Earl Hunt claims of you have an IQ below 90 that its difficult for you to read well enough to translate what you read into action. So you can't actually read well enough and follow instructions because they don't have that level of literacy.
So this bottom 10% translates into about fourth five thousand New Zealanders including about fifteen thousand children all through the education system. Given that the population is rising this trend can only magnify the problem with an untalented system.
I started my life as a Chef so I'v come across many of these below 95 IQ distributions and at the top of the distribution and it highlights the incredibly dismal facts about the range of possible outcomes the system produces. Some needed help opening up a bank account, some needed help with there pregnancy and they basically make people feel sorry for them in order to survive and that's the harsh truth of understanding what every day life is like if you have an IQ of 80-94. They make there way independently in the world but everything is a challenge.
I had an employee with an IQ of about under 80, the non verbal part of it. He was indistinguishable with let's say a normie. But there's nothing mark to mouth about the particularly intellectually impaired. It took me about 30 hours to train him up with sufficient procession to be able to wheeled a chefs knife so that the food stuff wouldn't get so mangled in the cooking process. And there was high performance demands on him too, he had to whip through prep work quickly. And some times carrots grow in twins so then he had to calculate how to that to fit into the automatic chip maker and like this level of complexity just did him in. So I had to get the nozzle custom built so he could just slam it in there.
Ordinarily if leadership was united we wouldn't be having this debate because the welfare system should be managed by a competent workforce. We all know that every beneficiary means $50 thousand fucken dollars for somebody. And the struggle has since been about the struggle of the dispossessed to have the means to a better life.
Sam, you've clearly been there. What you talk about is harsh reality.
Scratching beneath the surface, what's creating these broken, hopeless people?
I refuse to accept that certain groups have inherently low IQ. There is lots of evidence to show that IQ is largely a function of nutrition, parenting and education. I recall the Youth Court claiming it can predict criminality with a 98% accuracy based on birth circumstances alone. So by the time you get them as kitchen hands, the damage is mostly done. It may have already been done before they start school.
What we are talking about is:
> Extreme parental neglect
> Physical and mental abuse
> Fetal alcohol syndrome
> Addiction
As long as our welfare system is providing cash for babies, this problem will not go away.
To me everything is an engineering challenge but that is not how politicking is done. When people begin to work they start to say what they really think, telling friends, family and every one else what they really want and need. When something is left undone they will act to correct it. Then workers of all kinds begin to find new and subtle ways of correcting wrongs. Once past this youthful exuberance workers will then be able to move past the failures of life because they will no longer be compounded by bitterness and deceit. The moment workers are made redundant is the moment they'll vote for the first party promising jobs. Once you are able to bring peace to your family and friends you will then be in a position to lead the community, and then a city or a nation once peace has stepped up a level.
On the other hand one could be seeking to bring down the status quo, the tyrants Hitler, Stalin and Mao are perhaps it's greatest proponents and where brutality defeated. Those that seek to otherise people and aim down hard by focusing on the wrongs with half the skill of the original tyrants can only know brutal defeat.
We can quantify and measure things but there must be something else going on. Something deeper. So if one mother is cruel to her three children, and those children are cruel to there children and we let that grow exponentially over 10 generations humanity would end up with up with 10 billion people and we are not at the point yet, so there must be something else going on that brakes the cycle of misery and abuse. And in my honest opinion that process of death decay and rejuvenation & renewal is worth state investment.
So business people make good managers who run things efficiently because they are conservative and do not typically say what they mean. That's not very good for creativity so you don't see many conservative entrepreneurs. But we need the too disciplines to come back closer together. Whether we move back to a point when finance droVe innovation and entrepreneurship, or let the Crown continue its jobs programmes seems obvious to me. The coalition government put there welfare and jobs programme to the vote and succeeded. Now it is time to pick a side or face defeated.
Further Fraying of the Welfare State, welfare state, Royal commission on Social Security, Royal Commission on Social Policy, Economic and Social Initiative
Penalising the Poor
Middle Class Welfare
Giving something back: it could be John Key's legacy
Improving the Child Poverty Reduction Bill
Also by Brian Easton
Doubts and Hopes About The Treasury
Shirley Smith: In Her Own Right

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


What is the content of your order? Don't forget weekends. Those days don't count. Most orders are going to take between 5-7 days of handling time because of the holidays... Some phones bring even more wait time because of supplying issues it seems... I'm also waiting for my phone.
Has it been 10 business days?
@QQya Looks like the limited quantity in the colour of the device your orderes was the reason why the order was delayed a couple of days. I see that we have restocked and your order should be under way very soon. Thanks for your patience!


text:
Ζωντανό ραδιόφωνο▷Ραδιοφωνικοί σταθμοί▷Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο▷BBC Radio Derby
", "articleBody" : "The latest news, sport, travel and weather for Derbyshire & East Staffordshire from BBC Radio Derby and BBC Local Live. BBC Radio Derby is the BBC Local Radio station for the English county of Derbyshire, covering all but the northern tip of the county, and also serves eastern Staffordshire, mainly Uttoxeter and Burton upon Trent. The station broadcasts from its studios in Derby on 104.5, 95.3 and 96.0 FM and 1116 AM.", "url" : "http://play.pea.fm/21380-bbcradioderby.html", "aggregateRating" : { "@type" : "AggregateRating", "ratingValue" : "4.5", "bestRating" : "5", "ratingCount" : "4" } }
The latest news, sport, travel and weather for Derbyshire & East Staffordshire from BBC Radio Derby and BBC Local Live. BBC Radio Derby is the BBC Local Radio station for the English county of Derbyshire, covering all but the northern tip of the county, and also serves eastern Staffordshire, mainly Uttoxeter and Burton upon Trent. The station broadcasts from its studios in Derby on 104.5, 95.3 and 96.0 FM and 1116 AM. BBC Radio Derby είναι ένας ραδιοφωνικός σταθμός μετάδοσης στην Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο, ο οποίος μεταδίδεται σε μορφή Συζήτηση
4.5/5 με βάση 4 ψήφους


text:
Dustin Kyle Ingram (born January 25, 1990) is an American actor and musician. He is best known for his role as Bert in the 2016 remake of Cabin Fever, as Duane Ogilvy in Nickelodeon's Unfabulous, and as Agent Petey in HBO's Watchmen.

Early life and career
Ingram was born in Riverside County, California to Randy and Cindy (née Johnson) Ingram. The child of two actors, Ingram developed an early appreciation for theater and production. Ingram had his first role at the age of 6  in a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

After his time in theater, Ingram sought a career in film and television, saying that he asked himself the question, "What would it be like to strive for complete and ultimate truth in a performance rather than making sure the people in the back row of a 3,000 seat theater knew what you were feeling?". At 15, he landed his first major role as Duane Oglivy in Unfabulous (2004-2007).

In 2016, Ingram starred in a remake of Cabin Fever, a 2002 horror film directed, written, and produced by Eli Roth who also produced the remake.

In 2019, Ingram was cast in Watchmen, a TV series based on the DC Comics limited series of the same name.

Despite his current focus on television and film, Ingram continues to occasionally star in plays. In 2012, he portrayed the lead role of Jared in Annie Baker's Barrymore Award-winning Body Awareness.

Ingram is also a musician, leading the "one-man band" Gypzïrafe.

Filmography

Film

Television

References

External links

1990 births
Living people
American male television actors
American male stage actors
American male musicians


text:
Infamous New York
A Gangland Tour of New York City's Most Infamous Crime Scenes
Posts Tagged 'Five Families'
The Death of Albert Anastasia: Park Central Sheraton Hotel Barbershop 870 7th Avenue
Posted in Albert Anastasia, Five Families, Gambino Crime Family, Genovese Crime Family, Mafia, Mafia Commision, Uncategorized, Vito Genovese, tagged 870 7th Avenue, Albert Anastasia, Carlo Gambino, Crazy Joe Gallo, Five Families, Frank Costello, Gambino Crime Family, Genovese Crime Family, Joseph Bonanno, Mafia, Mafia Commision, Murder Inc., Park Central Hotel, Park Sheraton Hotel, The Five Families, Times Square, Vincent Squillante, Vito Genovese on April 17, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Address:870 7th Avenue
Status: Starbucks
Now a Starbucks like everything else in New York City, the old barbershop in the Park Central Sheraton Hotel may be one of the most infamous spots in Manhattan. The Park Sheraton hosted two of Manhattan's most notorious mob hits. On November 4th, 1928, Arnold Rothstein walked into the Park Central's front door and few hours later he spilled out of the service entrance with a bullet in his gut (click to read the Death of Arnold Rothstein). 29 years later, the Park Central would see blood again, but this time in its barbershop.
Two hitmen rubbed out Albert Anastasia in the Park Central Sheraton Hotel located at 870 7th Avenue.
Albert Anastasia's Last Shave
At 10:30 A.M., October 25, 1957, Albert Anastasia, the highlord executioner of the mob and retired CEO of Murder Inc., strutted into Grasso's Barber shop in The Park Sheraton Hotel with his pint sized godson and protege, Vincent Squillante. The duo plopped down into barber chairs (now in the Mob Museum) and ordered shaves and haircuts, unusual behavior considering a massive mob war had just been averted.
The old barbershop in the Park Central Sheraton Hotel is now a Starbucks like everything else in New York City.
Anastasia nearly went to the mattresses five months earlier by declaring war on Vito Genovese for an attempted rubout of Frank Costello (Click to read the story about Frank Costello). After threatening scorched-earth revenge, The Highlord Executioner had assurances from the Five Families that there would be no bloodshed. According to Joseph Bonanno:
"…Anastasia and Genovese met at a select dinner gathering… Albert and Vito exchanged accusations and made counter charges. They clarified and rationalized their positions. But at last, though reluctantly, they renounced going to war against each other. The rest of us raised our glasses in a toast for peace. Albert and Vito kissed each other on the cheek." – Joseph Bonanno, Man of Honor
Now at the apex of his power, Anastasia sat back and let his barber cover his face with piping hot towels. The bad blood had coagulated and Genovese could be trusted, or so Anastasia thought. According to Bonanno, Albert finally conquered his explosive temper. He had matured, and it would cost him his life.
The Trifecta: Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese
Rather than blood feuding with Genovese, Anastasia spent the next few months expanding his empire into Cuban casinos with Santos Trafficante and built a mansion in Fort Lee., while Genovese maneuvered to overthrow the CEO of Murder Inc.
Genovese and Lucchese crept through the underworld seeking tacit approval for the death of Anastasia. They contacted Meyer Lansky and wooed Carlo Gambino, Anastasia's underboss, to set up Anastasia's downfall.
The Missing Bodyguard
For a man who dealt in death his entire life, Al Anastasia threw caution to the wind. Arrested for homicide six times with diverse weapons which ranged from ice picks to revolvers, Anastasia perfected the unsolvable mob hit and the "one way ride".
Anastasia's protege, Vincent Squillante survived the barbershop attack.
Despite the homicidal resume, Anastasia had gotten lax. On the day of his assassination, his bodyguard and chauffeur, Anthony Copolla, was nowhere to be found. Copolla dropped Anastasia off at the barbershop, parked the Chevy in a lot and never returned. Even more unthinkable, the mobster took a barber chair with his back facing the door. A setup loomed and the new mature Anastasia missed the tell-tale signs.
The Barbershop Quintet
The attack was a classic mob hit. Two identically dressed gunmen hidden beneath aviator sunglasses, fedoras, and scarves wrapped around their faces walked into the hotel lobby. A wheelman and lookout in the lobby were waiting for them outside.
The renovated lobby of the Park Central Hotel. The door into the barbershop (now Starbucks has been removed).
Entering from the lobby, the gunmen walked around a partition which screens the shop's chairs and walked directly to Chair No. 4, taking aim at Anastasia's back. One hitman strode to the left of Anastasia and pushed aside the barber with the muzzle of his gun. The other killer strode to Anastasia's right. Suddenly, they opened fire with their .32 and .38 caliber revolvers.
Five bullets tore into the mafia chieftain. Dazed, Anastasia lunged at his own reflection in the mirror before collapsing into a heap of bloody towels. The hit squad fled through the lobby sparing both the barber, and Squillante, Anastasia's protege, who yelped, "Let me outta here!"
Albert Anastasia was gunned down in the Park Central Hotel.
Who Murdered Anastasia?
The police never apprehended the mob hitmen and the crime remains unsolved. According to New York magazine, a police informant named Sidney Slater claimed Crazy Joe Gallo bragged that the rubout was the handywork of his hit team. According to New York Magazine, Crazy Joe remarked:
"From now on Sidney… You can just call the five of us the barbershop quintet." New York Magazine, 1972- The Mafia at War.
Unsanctioned by the Mafia Commission, the hit squad consisted of Crazy Joe Gallo, Joseph Gioielli, Carmine Persico, Albert Gallo and an unidentified co-conspirator.
Vito Genovese: The Don of Greenwich Village. His Homes, Apartments and Businesses
Posted in Castellammarese War, Five Families, Genovese Crime Family, Greenwich Village, Joe The Boss Masseria, Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous, Vito Genovese, tagged Anna Genovese, Benito Mussolini, Castellammarese war, Ernesto The Hawk Rupolo, Ferdinand the Shadow Boccia, Five Families, Genovese Crime Family, Greenwich Village, Joe Masseria, Joe the Boss Masseria, Joe Valachi, Lucky Luciano, Mafia, Mafia in WWII, Mike Miranda, Thomas E. Dewey, Tommy Eboli, Tommy Ryan Eboli, Tony Bender Strollo, Vito Genovese on September 9, 2016| Leave a Comment »
43 5th Avenue- Apartment in 1935
Status: Standing
29 Washington Square- Apartment in 1937-1944
180 Thompson ERB Strapping Co.- Legal Business
Suave, shrewd, cunning and cruel, Vito Genovese's tentacles stretched out across the globe from a tiny parcel of land in Manhattan's bohemian Greenwich Village. Surrounded by clannish Sicilians on all sides and the Irish waterfront mob to the west, the Neapolitan gangster carved out a Mafia dynasty on the streets of the Village through a blend of treachery, gunplay and subterfuge.
A scoundrel until his dying breath, Genovese's lifelong criminal career would take him from stick-up kid to Joe The Boss Masseria's ace hitman to Mussolini's bosom buddy. Over time, Genovese grew to be a gangland legend that would one day topple Lucky Luciano.
1. Vito and Anna Genovese's first luxury apartment at 43 5th Avenue. 2. Vito and Anna Genovese's second luxury apartment at 29 Washington Square West. 3. Headquarters of Genovese's ERB Strapping corp, 180 Thompson Street.
The Streets of Greenwich Village
Born in 1897 in the outskirts of Naples, Genovese jumped a steamer bound for the United States at the age of 16 and settled in the Neapolitan Italian colony in Greenwich Village.
The bohemian neighborhood, known for its unorthodox sexuality, artists, writers and drug users, proved to be fertile incubator of the Genovese Crime Family. Vito's first arrest sent him to the workhouse on Blackwell's Island for carrying a loaded revolver.
The young Vito excelled in gunplay, assassinations and murder for hire, and by the time of Prohibition, his talents were in incredible demand. Collars for illegal guns, felonious assault and homicide followed, but Vito always beat the odds and the charges. According to Genovese's 1958 Bureau of Prisons Classification Study:
"He is a suave, shrewd, cruel, calculating, cunning, ruthless individual, who would use any means to accomplish his objectives."- Bureau of Prisons
The Greenwich Village Crew:
Tony Bender Strollo, Mike Miranda & Tommy Ryan Eboli
Prohibition was very good to Genovese and his gang tightened its grip around the Village's rackets. Narcotics, prostitution, and bootlegging, Genovese's Neapolitan mob ran the streets of the Prohibition Era Greenwich Village where law breaking became sheik. And pet gangsters were all the rage.
Tony Bender Strollo served as Genovese's second in command, specializing in illegal lotteries. He eventually became wealthy beyond his wildest dreams bankrolling nightclubs, burlesque joints and gay bars. Tommy Ryan Eboli, a volatile ex-boxer and wheelman, provided the muscle battering anyone who stood in the way. In the future, Ryan would make a name for himself as a boxing promoter who cold-cocked a referee during a bout. Gunman and narcotics pusher, Mike Miranda rounded out the violent Greenwich Village heavies.
Joe Masseria's Top Gunman
Genovese's penchant for solving problems with murder eventually caught the eye of Lucky Lucanio who introduced Vito to Joe Masseria a mafia kingpin warring with Toto DeAquila, the mafia's reigning Boss of Bosses.
An old-fashioned Sicilian, Masseria preferred to work only with Sicilian gangsters but Lucky convinced Masseria to overlook Vito's Neapolitan ancestry.
A NYPD mug shot of Vito Genovese.
On August 11, 1922 the duo put the blast on Umberto Valenti, DeAquila's favorite assassin, at famed Italian eatery John's of 12th Street. Later in 1928, Luciano and Genovese picked off DeAquilla on Avenue A.
During the Castellammarese Mafia War (1930-1932), Geneovese's trigger finger served Joe The Boss well offing Gaetano "Tom" Reina with a double barrel shotgun. According to Lucky Luciano in the Last Testament of Lucky Luciano:
"Vito told me that when Reina saw him he started to smile and wave his hand. When he done that, Vito blew his head off with a shotgun."—Lucky Luciano
However, Masseria's lust for power would be his undoing and Vito would eventually turn his aim against the boss, helping to gun down the mafia chieftain at the Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant in Cony Island, ending the Castellammarese War for good.
A Vito Genovese Love Story
Following the end of the Castellammarese War and the death of his first wife Donata, who died of tuberculosis, the love sick and forlorn Genovese made eyes for another bride, his cousin, Anna Vernotico. Unfortunately, Anna was already married, but that didn't deter Genovese.
On March 16, 1932, Police officers discovered Anna's husband, Gerard Vernotico, hog tied and strangled on the roof of 124 Thompson Street. According to The Valachi Papers:
"According to New York City Police records, one Gerard Vernotico, age twenty-nine, of 191 Prince Street, was found dead at 2:15P.M., March 16, 1932. On the roof of a building at 124 Thompson Street.
To propose to his future wife Anna Vernotico, Vito Genovese had her husband strangled to death on the roof of 124 Thompson Street.
Twelve days after the homicide, the loving couple tied the knot in the Municipal Building with Tony Bender Strollo serving as best man. To celebrate, the newlyweds moved into a palatial apartment at 43 5th Avenue, just north of Washington Square Park on tony Fifth Avenue.
Anna and Vito Genovese's Apartments
The Beaux Arts, Parisian style, apartment building defined style and sophistication. The 11-story building boasted a grand entrance with limestone lampposts, a 24-hour doorman, and apartments with soaring 10-1/2 foot ceilings. Future tenants at 43 5th Avenue would include Marlin Brando, Julia Roberts, Noah Baubach and other top flight New Yorkers. Click to see inside the building.
Vito and Anna Genovese lived in the palatial 43 5th Avenue apartment building.
For decoration, the Mafia Chieftain began amassing an art collection that would be worth $200,000 at the time of his death, despite the fact that he filed taxes as a "surplus paper dealer."
To be closer to his Thompson Street social clubs, Genovese moved to 29 Washington Square West. Located across the street from the Hanging Elm, the oldest tree in New York City, the apartment had views of Washington Square Park and the Empire State Building.
Anna and Vito Genovese's second apartment at 29 Washington Square West had stunning views of Washington Square Park and the Empire State Building.
Greenwich Village Exile
The end of prohibition left Genovese richer and more powerful than his wildest dreams, but a Boy Scout prosecutor from Michigan sent the Mafiosi on the run for over a decade.
In 1935, New York Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey began sweeping the streets of racketeers, winning convictions against Lucky Luciano, Waxy Gordon, Jimmy Hines, and other underworld scions.
29 Washington Square West Vito Genovese's Apartment / home for most of the 1930s
Following the conviction of Luciano, Genovese moved up to boss of the family and unwittingly climbed into Dewey's crosshairs. To evade Dewey's wrath, Genovese moved out of the special prosecutor's jurisdiction to a sprawling estate in New Jersey. but Vito's taste for blood became his undoing.
In 1937, the Ernesto "The Hawk" Rupolo admitted to murdering Ferdinand "the Shadow" Boccia at the behest of Genovese. Without missing a beat, Vito skipped town and escaped to fascist Italy, spending the Second World War as an aid to Benito Mussolini. Il Duce knighted Genovese, bestowing the rank of Commendatore upon the mobster.
After the Allied capture of Italy, Vito switched sides again, working for the Allies as a translator and as a spy, both covers for his real occupation: black marketeering. Agent O.C. Dicky, of the U.S. Army eventually caught up with Genovese and brought him back to New York to stand trial for the Murder Boccia in 1946, but like usual Genovese beat the rap.
Vito Genovese after his return to the U.S. in the 1950s.
The Return of Genovese
Back in Greenwich Village after a decade long exile, Vito set up shop with a bonafide business to explain his lavish lifestyle. He entered into partnership with the Erb family, owners of a dock-working firm that placed iron straps around pallets of cargo. Within a year, ERB Strapping had a virtual monopoly on iron strapping in the port of New York.
For a corporate headquarters, Genovese purchased the apartment building at 180 Thompson Street, where Joe Valachi, Vincent the Chin Gigante, and other well-known mobsters congregated.
Genovese owned this apartment building at 180 Thompson Street in Greenwich Village. It served as the headquarters for his ERB Strapping corporation, a powerhouse in the Port of New York.
But, being a megalomaniacal scoundrel, Vito wanted more. Not only did want to depose Frank Costello, the patriarch of the family. Genovese also wanted to overturn the Commission's ban on narcotics and become the Boss of All Bosses. Vito's newest acolyte, Vincent Gigante stuck on 1957, blasting Costello in his Central Park West apartment building.
However, Vito's reign was short. In 1958, Genovese was sentenced to 15 years for narcotics trafficking. He would never see Greenwich Village, or freedom, again.
Albert Anastasia
Arnold Rothstein
Castellammarese War
Corlear's Hook
Dutch Schultz
Fiorello La Guardia
Five Families
Frank Costello
Fulton Fish Market
Gambino Crime Family
Genovese Crime Family
Humpty Jackson
Irish Mob
Italian Squad
Jewish Mob
Joe The Boss Masseria
Johnny Torrio
Joseph Petrosino
Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous
Lucchese Crime Family
Lucky Luciano
Mafia Commision
Mob Speak Institue: Mouthpiece Marconi Puppet Gangster
Monk Eastman
NYC Jails & Prisons
Owney Madden
River Pirates
Tammany Hall
Tenderloin / Satan's Circus
Tong Wars
Vincent "The Chin" Gigante
Water Street Revival
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Q: Attributes on custom HTML elements When working with custom HTML elements in web components, should I still name custom attributes with the prefix data?
For example:
<!-- Should form be data-form? -->
<my-button form="foo">click me</my-button>

A: No, that's not necessary.
Existing HTML elements have a defined set of attributes, which means you would invalidate the HTML by just adding any attribute. By introducing the data- attributes, it was made possible to extend existing elements without invalidating them.
Web components are custom elements. They have no defined set of attributes, you define them yourself. Whether or not you use data- attributes is completely up to you, but you don't have to. Your component cannot become invalid because there is no definition of valid for it.
If you care about semantic/valid HTML, this answer may be relevant to you too: Are custom elements valid HTML5?. In short: use a dash in your component name to make sure it's picked up as valid HTML.

A: In general, there is no difference between custom elements and predefined. You might create an element of your choice with document.createElement and register it with document.registerElement. The result would be:
console.log(document.createElement('my-button').constructor);
//⇒ function HTMLElement() { [native code] }
console.log(document.registerElement('my-button'));
//⇒ function my-button() { [native code] }
console.log(document.createElement('my-button').constructor);
//⇒ function my-button() { [native code] }

As you could see, once registered, the element is awarded with it's own constructor. That provides an ability for components to behave in it's own way. But:
console.log(document.createElement('my-button').__proto__.__proto__);
//⇒ HTMLElement

is still a good old plain HTMLElement. So, the rules for attribute naming were not changed.
Please note, that libraries, like polymer, might add additional attribute handling; the above is true for plain web-components only.