Category Archives: Hedonism

What would San Francisco be like if the plague of AIDS had never struck? Two whole generations of gay men might largely be with us. Western SoMa would probably have more than a handful of bars. And erotic photographer Robert Mapplethorpe would not only be alive hed be a mainstream artist with a billion Instagram followers.

Thats how Leo Herrera imagines it, at least, in his 45-minute, five-part film Fathers. A raucous and occasionally heartbreaking what-if, its final episode premiered at Mannys in the Mission on Dec. 1, 2019 (World AIDS Day). The film has subsequently been viewed 100,000 times on platforms like YouTube and Vimeo or more if you count the parts shown in a 2019 Emmy-winning PBS Behind the Lens documentary about the project.

The Fathers universe is one where poppers (a.k.a. amyl nitrate) are advertised on TV and protect sexually active people from STIs. The fashion designer Halstons robes help people evade surveillance. There is no Jerry Falwell although, in a way, Fathers grapples with the Christian rights outsize role in American life by setting up a queer parallel.

We dont know much about the evangelical lifestyle, but it affects our elections, Herrera says in late January outside Four Barrel Coffee, wearing a vintage T-shirt honoring the AIDS quilt. His vision gives queers that outsize influence instead. In the America that Fathers imagines, no matter where you were, there would be these pockets of queer people creating their own sort of culture. I thought that was fascinating.

A project five years in the making, Fathers is a rejoinder to decades of moral panic about sex, drug use and disco. Narrated by a female voice with an affectless British accent, it has the air of a bizarro-America documentary. Stonewall Nation and the Queer Colonies are the films more or less interchangeable terms for Herreras LGBTQ country-within-a-country, a loose constellation of communes rooted in 20th century gay Mardi Gras krewes. They are joyous, uninhibited places, the vital center of American cultural life, marshaling hedonism to bring about social change, reinvigorating decayed cities and becoming home to the highest life expectancies in the nation.

Herrera, 38, was born in Mexico, grew up in Phoenix and lives in Hayes Valley. In addition to filmmaking, hes also a painter, essayist and occasional politico, having managed Tom Tempranos campaign for S.F. school board. Post-Fathers, hes revisiting a novel he began writing in 2005 that describes a dystopian San Francisco whose problems are todays afflictions in reverse, a sort of cyberpunk Tales of the City if that city were also broke and under constant surveillance. Herrera hasnt found his Michael Tolliver yet, but the characters are based on people he knows.

There is one character whos obsessed with free plastic surgery, he says. One of them is Mother, a big bear whos a matriarch of this commune of wayward boys living in a burnt-out version of the Vida complex in the Mission. But instead of a beacon of gentrification, its this community hub, a derelict, dilapidated apartment complex where all these squatters live.

At times, Fathers revels in similar tensions between utopia and dystopia. Colonies, for instance, is a curious term, generally referring to places in need of liberation, not exponents of it. Herrera chalks this up to the type-to-text software that gave the narrator her voice.

She said colonies better, he says. But my idea of liberation would be that we live in these uninterrupted communes. The most utopic moments Ive had were when we were left on our own, like the Radical Faeries, a loosely affiliated movement of left-leaning, artistically inclined queer pagans.

Even the phrase Stonewall Nation isnt pure. It hails from an unrealized, back-to-the-land movement by early-70s San Francisco gays to take over rural Alpine County in the Sierra Nevada and run it as their own. The Oakland Museum of Californias Queer California exhibit in 2019 included a not-so-fast response to that idea from local indigeneous leaders, who took a dim view to being dispossessed. Herrera, who is Latinx, acknowledges this while also observing that queer and Native identities are hardly in conflict; many indigenous cultures have long accepted nonbinary or two-spirit people.

The inclusive, utopian vision of Fathers is not a separatist one, either. In it, the activist and film historian Vito Russo who authored The Celluloid Closet, the definitive account of gay Hollywood is an ambassdador from the Queer Colonies who wins the 2020 presidential election. He therefore becomes the leader of the whole of America, not just Stonewall Nation.

In the films internal chronology, it is legal advocacy by a real-life 1980s GOP attorney and leatherman named Duke Armstrong that helps the Colonies gain recognition as a religious organization, elevating gay bars to the status of churches and protecting them from evictions. In other words, this utopian vision owes itself in part to a white Republican, albeit one who fought to keep the bathhouses open before dying at 39.

Fathers was filmed over several years in New York and Fire Island, New Orleans, Mexico, San Francisco, rural Northern California and Provincetown, Mass. Queer-identified Bay Area residents will surely recognize locales like SF Underground in Lower Haight, the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park, or the Saratoga Springs Retreat Center near Clear Lake in Lake County, along with performers like Sister Roma from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and Jake Shears.

As for the future of Fathers: Herrera has submitted the project to multiple film festivals, although, as he says, not all of them have a category for episodic features, so thats a little bit of a challenge. Hes also at work at finding widespread distribution and recutting it for Dolby Surround Sound, which would eliminate the credits that conclude each episode.

Except that its not finished. Like Tony Kushners two-part Angels in America which the playwright has rewritten several times, even after it won a Pulitzer and a Tony Fathers is something of a palimpsest. A section on the performer Sylvester was taken out to give space to Roxana Hernandez, a trans migrant who died of complications from AIDS in 2018 while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Herrera makes these alterations less out of dissatisfaction than because creating the film largely on his own has been such a costly, time-consuming undertaking.

Its never going to be complete, he says. I want to say that my part will be done and if I did get hit by a bus Its hard to work on a project where all the people died making art at your age and youre constantly thinking about them.

One scene that has proven to be a roadblock in terms of promotion depicts footage of a real-life orgy in New York. Setting a new benchmark for NSFW art meant that censorship on YouTube and Instagram was probably inevitable. But Herrera also believes hes been occasionally shadowbanned for violating vaguely worded community standards, particularly by the third-party processor that handles payments for the crowdfunding site Indiegogo.

Our Indiegogo campaign was shut off a day before it was supposed to be finished, which is the most important day, he says. And Facebook wont let me take out ads for Fathers. They wont let me promote articles about it, even if the clips are G-rated.

What really pisses me off is that if I have two men kissing, or if theres a butt or too many shirtless men, Im not allowed to post that or the sponsored posts get taken down, he adds. But if you do a search for Burning Man girls, theres half a million half-naked women running around the playa.

But Herreras targets arent just hypocrites and puritans. Fathers allots screen time to a NOLA Carnival-goer who dismisses San Francisco AIDS documentaries as overly grim, saying that you have to have something to laugh about. Outrage can be exhausting, the film argues, and for people to get up and fight another day, they need to be touched. They need to be surrounded by beautiful things. They need exposure to radiant joy, even if that looks like cruising at funerals.

This is the camp essence of Leo Herreras queer theology, perhaps with the baroque freak Klaus Nomi as its pope. Liberation, as Herrera defines it, is strength in numbers and freedom from the heterosexual gaze. Hes consequently nonplussed by reactions to Fathers that boil down to AIDS was almost a blessing because it helped LGBTQ people win political rights.

Thats wrong, he says, because it depends on the straight, cis gaze to dictate what made us human. So his touching and gleefully raunchy film is a plausible path away from that. The pre-AIDS moment of liberation in the late 1970s was so achingly brief that its practically a Greek tragedy, and the films attempt to recapture its dynamism demonstrates the ur-hope of progressives everywhere: A better world is possible.

Peter Lawrence Kane is a Bay Area freelance writer. Email: culture@sfchronicle.com

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Leo Herreras film Fathers asks: What if AIDS never touched San Francisco? - San Francisco Chronicle

She thought it was an opportunity for a relaxing Caribbean vacation.

Instead, for a few weeks in the late 2000s, she said she found herself squarely in a den of iniquity, captained by its hedonistic owner Winnipeg fashion mogul Peter Nygard at his compound in the Bahamas.

"I wasn't a part of the sexual lifestyle and I never witnessed any sex or sodomy but everybody went around topless," a former Winnipeg woman, who asked her name not be published, said Friday.

The woman said she was visiting the Nygard Cay compound as the guest of an employee.

"(Nygard) would have 'pamper parties' he had a (stripper's) pole on his plane... There was a lot of parties... I took one girl to a dentist once, and I saw a dental assistant and I said, 'I didn't recognize you with your clothes on.' I'd seen her at the pamper parties bouncing around, but now she looked totally professional."

Another time, at the dock as Nygard's yacht came in, the woman said she saw the multi-millionaire on the deck, with a woman performing a sex act on him.

SUPPLIED PHOTO

Nygard at his home in the Bahamas.

"He just stood up, zipped up his pants and that was it," she said. "I heard people asked for the morning-after pill I didn't even know what that was at the time."

Nygard, 78, is currently facing claims in a class-action civil lawsuit that he lured women some under the age of 18 to his Bahamian estate, where he drugged, assaulted, raped and sodomized them. The allegations of 10 women are listed in the 99-page lawsuit, filed in New York City.

Since news of the lawsuit went public more than a week ago, lawyers heading the court action say dozens of other possible victims have come forward, as well as numerous alleged witnesses.

No statement of defence has been filed, and the allegations haven't been proven in court.

Nygard through his lawyer has denied all of the allegations.

Meanwhile, the former Winnipeg woman said Friday she never saw any acts at Nygard Cay that weren't consensual. She said she didn't take in the nightlife there on a regular basis, and only ventured once into the compound's disco.

"No one ever came down asking for assistance," she said. "I didn't hear anybody being raped. If I had, I would have tried to help them.

SUPPLIED PHOTO

Nygard claims to have hosted many star-studded events at the residence.

"You have to remember: it was invite-only; no one snuck in there. The gates... have to be opened by security," she said. "People were there and (Nygard) knew they were there. They would take a photo of everyone going in and they would keep it.

"It wasn't just women anyone who went in had their photo taken."

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The woman said she wasn't just bothered by the hedonism she witnessed, but also the shoddy treatment of employees at the compound.

"There would be workers standing on two-by-fours on top of rocks washing the windows and there were a lot of windows there," she said. "But, if they were to complain, there were 20 people in line to take their jobs.

"It didn't matter which way you looked, there were always people trying to do what they could to survive... I was glad to leave."

More than a decade later, the woman said just hearing the Nygard name or seeing clothes from his fashion lines takes her back to those few weeks.

"I still wear his clothing, I like the quality of some of his clothes," she said. "But it's not somewhere I want to go back and visit."

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

Kevin RollasonReporter

Kevin Rollason is one of the more versatile reporters at the Winnipeg Free Press.Whether it is covering city hall, the law courts, or general reporting, Rollason can be counted on to not only answer the 5 Ws Who, What, When, Where and Why but to do it in an interesting and accessible way for readers.

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'I didn't recognize you with your clothes on': woman recounts visit to Nygard Cay - Winnipeg Free Press

The Positivus lineup will also feature SAINt JHN, EarthGang, Ari Lennox, Georgia, Yves Tumor & Its band, Black Midi, FLOHIO, Working Men's Club, JC Stewart and Beissoul & Einius on July 17 and 18 in Salacgrva, according to festival organizers on February 26.

SAINt JHN began his musical career writing songs for such artists as Usher, Jidenna, Hoodie Allen and others. His most well-known collaborations include working with Beyonce to create the song Brown Skin Girl and working with Lenny Kravitz on the song "Borders". The remix to his song "Roses" is currently one of the most popular tracks in the world.

The Atlanta-based hip hop duo Olu (aka Johnny Venus) and WowGr8 (aka Doctur Dot) are the two members of EarthGang, which co-founded the musical collective Spillage Village and is currently represented by the Dreamville label. One of their most successful tracks to date is a collaborative project with Young Thug on a single called "Proud of You".

American singer and songwriter Ari Lennox has a unique voice frequently compared to the vocal accomplishments of Mariah Carey. Her debut album "Shea Butter Baby" (title track is a collaboration with J. Cole) has been nominated for the "Soul Train Awards".

Georgia is one of the summer's most in-demand artists with her eclectic electronic music inspired by MIA and Hudson Mohawke. Her dance music flirts between hedonism, other-worldliness and personal self-discovery combined with influences from hip hop, punk and Missy Elliott. Her single About Work the Dancefloor has gained wide popularity.

Yves Tumor & Its band is glamorously grotesque visually, selectively eclectic musically and has always had interesting live performances. Their album Safe in the Hands of Love" performed a sold-out concert tour in Eirop and was acclaimed by Pitchfork as best new album. Their new album "Heaven to a Tortured Mind" will be released on April 3.

The new indie group Black Midi began performing at festivals last summer. The combine experimental rock music, jazz and avant-gardemusic through improvization. The New York Times named their newest album "Schlagenheim" one of the top 10 new albums in 2019.

FLOHIO has announced herself to the world of hip hop with their new album "Wild Yout". The UK-based rapper's music has influences of grime, EDM and trap elements.

The newly founded post-punk group Working Men's Club is influenced by both techno, as well as jazzy piano riffs. Despite being relatively new they've had two strong hits: the post-punk style "Bad Blood" and electronic "Teeth".

Irish singer JC Stewart creates emotional, heart-warming music. Hisvoice has a soaring soulfulness, while managing to be saturated with emotional resonance. Hisnew single "Have You Had Enough Wine?" has gained recognition from critics and audiences.

Beissoul & Einius is the newest pop sensation from Lithuania. The duet calls themselves global electronic music style icons. Their live concerts feature charismatic, movement-filled, hypnotic electronic music with surrealistic costumes.

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Positivus lineup to include SAINt JHN and EarthGang - Eng.Lsm.lv

"When Tim is telling this story [in the film] he gets choked up, because he said he'd never seen anything more compassionate," Lunch continues. "It was his friend, who then not only wrote me this incredible letter but also he got sober and has been sober ever since.

"That moment really flips the script of the documentary. It makes you go, 'Well of course, she's f---ing compassionate'."

I am always trying to get to the root of not only my own insanity, but this global and political patriarchal insanity.

Skyping from her Brooklyn apartment, Lunch speaks with the ravaged resonance of a woman who's been shouting all her life. Her musical output is staggering, from her noise-punk debut with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks in 1976 to countless other bands and collaborations (Rowland Howard, Sonic Youth, Die Haut)

Her spoken-word works are no less intense. Daddy Dearest from 1988 contextualises her rage in harrowing detail. The sexual violence began at her house when she was six or seven. She left at 16 and has been flipping that script ever since. The results are not for the faint-hearted.

"My goal has always been to try to make sense of those things that nobody else was talking about," she says, "whether it was familial trauma, imbalance in all power relationships, climate change [since 1984, for the record], the prison-industrial complex when Bill Clinton was president...

Retrovirus featuring Lydia Lunch (left).Credit:Jasmine Hurst

"I am always trying to get to the root of not only my own insanity, but this global and political patriarchal insanity. I still feel like I am the woman on the mountain with a bullhorn. I do feel like the town crier. And this is no time to stop crying," she adds with a dry cackle.

The ever-present gallows humour is one weapon that signifies Lunch's refusal to surrender power alongside the abrasion of her music, the unflinching content of "a pathological f--king truth-teller", and a truly ravenous hedonism.

Her "message of resistance," says Retrovirus guitarist Weasel Walter, is about "turning abuse outward instead of inward." Just don't infer victimhood, and nobody needs to get hurt.

"Oh please. Mine was far from the worst situation," she says. "By the age of nine, I was getting vindictive. I was actually becoming very murderous and having dreams every night of murdering my family."

She started writing at 12, she says, "so that I could actually defend myself. I also realised when I started reading Selby, Miller, Foucault, de Sade when I saw the pattern [of abuse], that it never starts with the person in your house. They had to be polluted by this behaviour. So once I recognised this, not only did that makes sense to me, but then I knew what path I had to take."

The phrase The War Is Never Over is an acknowledgement of eternal vigilance for those who have been on the wrong side of power. When she defines that as "any kind of persecution or abuse or trauma or prejudice or injustice," the size of her mission these last 45 years looms into view.

"Art is a salve to the universal trauma," she says. "If it burns in you, and you have to create, other people are going to be afflicted by the need to see or hear what it is that you're doing. Because people. Burn. Deeply."

Lydia Lunch's Retrovirus is at Melbourne's Corner Hotel on Friday, February 28, then Theatre Royal in Castlemaine on Saturday, and on to the Brisbane Hotel in Hobart on March 1.

Michael Dwyer is an arts and music writer

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'This is no time to stop crying': punk's high priestess is back - The Sydney Morning Herald

What does being a mother really feel like? Clover Strouds powerhouse of a memoir gets closer than anything else I have read to answering that question. The motherhood she describes is the very antithesis of the sanitised, smiling vision we are sold in washing powder ads. There are no pastel colours here; Strouds mother-love is as raw and rare as cutting through the soft dark crimson of uncooked liver. When someone gives her new baby a stuffed toy monkey, she longs to surround him with more ancient and serious things: the Bible, The Complete Works of Shakespeare. The business of bringing a person into the world, after all, is not cute or clean or fluffy.

The book follows Stroud and her family through a tumultuous year, in which her fifth child, Lester, is born. We get a remarkable 360-degree view of many different stages of mothering, all happening at once: she lives through the passionate intensity of her first attachment with Lester, just as her eldest son, 16-year-old Jimmy, is in the process of separation, his adolescence compelling us further and further apart, once magnets, now repelled. Meanwhile her daughter Dolly is grappling with dyslexia and the onset of puberty. As Stroud battles through pregnancy, labour, breastfeeding, and meetings with the school about Jimmys weed habit, her third and fourth children, Dash and Evangeline, wheel about in a world of spilled cornflakes and imaginary cats.

Stroud was shortlisted for the Wainwright prize for nature writing for her debut memoir, The Wild Other. Her new book is nature writing, too; but this is nature as experienced from the inside. She excels in evoking the feral, instinctive forces that motherhood unleashes, which can be so difficult to explain or describe (hence the shocked refrain of new mothers: Nobody ever tells you!). And while she is acutely alive to its joys sexual, exhausting, earthy joys these are always intertwined with darkness and difficulty. Motherhood hurts, she writes. And I like to be hurt.

Childbirth itself is the ultimate expression of this heady cocktail of pleasure and pain. For Stroud, there is no question of an epidural: labour is and needs to be an extreme experience, which takes her to the brink of life and death, and feels to me like the very reason I was put on this planet. As the baby crowns, pain rips through her body and Stroud reaches down to press her clitoris. Just as being fucked so hard it hurts can feel good, this pain becomes something I recognise as clearly as I know myself. The agony of early breastfeeding, too, is offset by the pure liquid heaven hormones that course through her, which she compares to the effect of heroin. These natural processes are strong drugs, and she proudly tells us shes an addict.

This is a vision of motherhood for the (now middle-aged) MDMA generation

This is a vision of motherhood for the (now middle-aged) MDMA generation. Its not about duty, or even about juggling the demands of kids and work; mothering for Stroud has more to do with hedonism and adventure, about escape, and exploring the outer limits of human experience. Her own mother was brain damaged in a horrific riding accident when Stroud was 16: Much of my life has been about seeking strong motion both to make me feel alive and distract from the pain of existence.

As a motivation for creating new humans, this is not without its ethical problems. Stroud briskly shrugs people off when they question the practicality of having a fifth baby (I want messy), and cheerfully admits that in many ways another child is the last thing they all need. But the imperative of obliterating her own inner pain is more urgent to her than the imperative of giving time and attention to the children she already has. After all, wheres the fun in providing boring old steadfast support when you could be out there getting buzzed on oxytocin? When they grow up and write their own books, perhaps her children will tell us how her messiness felt to them.

There is no arguing, however, with the sheer force of her writing. The reader is simply swept up in her painful, wonderful world. Buy it, read it, and enjoy it for the wild ride it is but do think twice before you throw away the contraceptives.

Alice OKeeffes novel On the Up is published by Coronet. My Wild and Sleepless Nights by Clover Stroud is published by Doubleday (16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over 15.

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My Wild and Sleepless Nights by Clover Stroud review what does being a mother feel like? - The Guardian

Dora Guo

Its an omnipresent trope to ascribe activist intent with varying legitimacy to theater. In a world wrought with political tumult, this approach is a popular way to endow a show with broader resonance. But its hard not to be skeptical of this lofty goal: much art for social change fails to deliver on its promise.

Enter Manahatta.

This new play by Mary Kathryn Nagle achieves its political ambitions through double casting, which reframes key narratives of Native American experience by grounding universal issues in intimate relationships, maintaining a multi-issue agenda and redefining home as a history, not a place.

Manahatta includes two separate timelines: first is the story of Jane Snake a young woman who just might be the first Native American on Wall Street and her family in Oklahoma. Then, there is the story of Janes ancestors on the island of Manahatta, the Lenape people, facing the violence of the Dutch East India Company. Switching between these periods, Manahatta tells a tale of destruction: in the modern era, the Snake family weathers the 2008 financial crisis; in the 1600s, the Lenape people struggle to save themselves from manipulation and massacre by the Dutch colonizers.

As the story progresses, Nagle weaves in many different aspects of Native American life. Characters address the perils of preserving the Lenape language, Christian missionaries role in Native American assimilation, white male predation on Native women, the tokenizing experience of breaking the glass ceiling, and cultural genocide inflicted on Native children. Nagle also touches on slavery, alcohol, border walls a la MAGA, being gay in a church, healthcare costs and Adjustable Rate Mortgages, among other things.

Its a lot to cover. But the plays audacity pays off: Nagle doesnt shy away from addressing so many vital issues, and by doing so, she paints an intricate portrait of the narratives that underpin Native American life. What allows these themes to jell are the historical echoes Nagle incorporates via double casting: each modern character has a counterpart in the past timeline. Jane Snake, the protagonist who ascends to power in Manhattan, is played by the same actress as Le-le-wa-you, a Lenape woman who trades fur with the colonists in Manahatta. Joe, the Lehman Brothers executive who bumbles through mea culpa allyship, is paralleled by Jakob, a Dutch settler who, despite sympathizing with Le-le-wa-you, barely hesitates to murder her loved ones.

The story oscillates fluidly between these chronologies: dialogue repeats and overlaps, actors change costumes onstage, scenes bleed into each other seamlessly. The two worlds coexist and intertwine with one stage, one set, one cast.

The purpose of this parallelism must be contextualized with the playwrights background: Nagle is a partner at Pipestem Law, where she advocates for tribal sovereignty; her belief in the power of theater is clearly informed by her legal ethos. In an interview with Shondaland, she described her understanding of legal activism as an issue of story: since the laws that harm Native American people are based on false narratives, the way to really counteract them is to change the narrative through storytelling. As important as precedent, Nagle claims, are the stories we choose to believe about the laws that govern us.

So Nagle confronts these narratives. In Manahatta, dual-casting parallelism which is not optional, according to the playwright challenges the historical amnesia that cleaves the past from the present. By overlapping the set, characters, costumes and scenes of Manahatta, Nagle forces us to understand that the problems of Native oppression are perennial, rooted in Colonialism and enduring through the present era. Nothing in Manahatta is isolated, and no action is decontextualized from its precedent.

This structure allows the power dynamics in Manahatta to recycle through disparate contexts: in the 1600s, the Dutch guile the Lenape into selling their ancestral lands on the grounds that natives will never understand the concept of ownership; in the 2000s, a bank offers Bobbie (the matriarch of the Snake family) a shoddy mortgage that costs her the house the Snake family has inhabited for generations the banker, confident that Bobbie will never grasp the economics of home ownership, neglects to explain the dangers of the deal. Themes of control, manipulation, and greed permeate every interaction between the mighty and the disempowered, telling a compelling story about a Native American experience that might vary in specifics, but persists in its most devastating effects.

When Bobbie loses her home to foreclosure, Nagle reminds us of the brutal ways Lenape people have been evicted throughout history. This culminates in perhaps the most potent moment of the play, when Jane offers to pay off her mothers debts, and Bobbie refuses the money how could she accept cash made from all those other idiots who got loans they cant repay?

This is a specific story about Bobbie, Jane, and predatory lending. But its resonance broadens when it is posed next to a scene between Le-le-wa-you and her mother, in which Le-le-wa-you gushes about trading with the Dutch for more wampum, and her mother replies, We trade with, not for, wampum. Modern Jane enters antihero territory, becoming a workaholic Wall Street shark, echoing the greed of the Dutch East India Company and straining for more. Here, Nagles point is clear perhaps our protagonist has succeeded, but shes done so by selling out, by extorting the innocent, by forgetting her culture and the people she loves. This is what Manahatta does best: it contextualizes complex power structures in intimate relationships.

As these themes develop, Nagle stays true to her story-for-social-change aim. She resists the urge to shoehorn her activism into a single, pithy mission statement. If some of the topics of Manahatta lack full exploration, it is only because the playwright sees so many Native American histories that need rewriting. To paraphrase Audre Lorde, Manahatta is not a single-issue play because its characters dont live single-issue lives. Sure, narrowing the shows thematic scope would allow for deeper examination of its subjects. But it would do so at the expense of historical justice.

Nagle portrays a myriad of experiences that reflect a wide range of truths: that the past matters, that trauma repeats itself, that stories especially the ones that tell us nothing ever like this has ever happened before, the ones that justify deeply-rooted evils matter. Manahatta takes on a world of false narratives, and, like its protagonist, it isnt afraid to be ambitious.

Yet Nagle never loses her laser-sharp devotion to her characters. We are grounded in the Snake family, in the 1600s Lenape tribe. While addressing large-scale Native American causes, Nagle always remembers the people for whom she is advocating.

Perhaps it is this duality the coupling of the intimate and the grand, the distant and the visceral, the bold goals and the delicate approach that makes Manahatta such a powerful work of activist theater.

As Jane becomes caught up in the flurry of capitalist hedonism, the journey of Le-le-wa-you dramatizes the world she is leaving behind. This culminates in the denouement, when Bobbie gifts Jane a sacred family wampum, a prescription that Jane remember who she is. At the heart of Manahatta is homecoming home to ones roots, to ones values, to ones past.

We end on Wall Street in 2008, this time with Jane wearing the sacred wampum Le-le-wa-you might have carried as she fled her Dutch-occupied homeland. All the loose ends of the narrative come together with a resounding message of return: Machi! Machi Manahatta!

Go home! Go home to Manahatta!

Zoe Larkin | zoe.larkin@yale.edu

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Now More Than Ever: On Mary Kathryn Nagle's Manahatta - Yale Daily News

Taking a sip of a 1,280 sherry is an unusual experience even in rarefied wine circles. The usual line on sherry is that its one of the wine worlds cheapest luxuries. And it is: I dont think theres any other wine in the world that delivers such a great experience for such a small outlay. But good value wines are not all that sherry has to offer. Hidden away in the dark, cool cellars around the town of Jerez in southern Spain there are some very serious treasures, some of which have been lying there, quietly maturing for decades or more.

One of them is Barbadillo Reliquia Amontillado, which I tasted this week. This wine is one of four Barbadillo Reliquias - the name is derived from the Spanish word for relic, or heirloom a series of incredibly old and very rare sherries. Their origins date back to the nineteenth century and they are produced and carefully husbanded by Bodegas Barbadillo who release them in minute quantities so as not to deplete their ancient stock.

I asked Tim Holt of Bodegas Barbadillo how many casks of the Reliquia Amontillado there are. His eyes moved upwards and to the left. I realized he was visualising the bodega so he could count them. Fiveyes, five. Thats five barrels in the whole solera: the system of fractional ageing in which sherry to be bottled is drawn out of the last barrel, which is filled up with liquid from the one before, which in turn is filled up from the one beforeand so on.

We can only take about 30 bottles out of it each year, Holt went on. Thats 30 to sell around the world allocations go to Hong Kong and Singapore as well as London. Any more and we wouldnt be able to maintain the age and the quality. The solera is fed by our 30 Year Old VORS Amontillado, which is actually about 50 years old, so the wine comes into the system with half a century on it already.

The main experience of tasting a sherry like this is one of intensity. Yes, theres a complex mosaic of roasted nut flavours if you want to go down that sort of tasting note route. But the most striking thing is the force and vibrancy of the wine in your mouth. And the fact that after you swallow or spit, in my case - it just goes on and on you can take the whole thing with you in the cab or on the tube, in my case home. Avid sherry fans love the Reliquia wines. I gather there is one bottle in Hedonism - 1,280. Either snap it up or wait for the next bottling.

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How to drink a 1,280 sherry? Sparingly - there are only 30 bottles available worldwide - Telegraph.co.uk

Chanukah is when we tap into the spiritual debate between the Jews and the Greeks, as the Greeks specifically attempted to destroy our spiritual way of life. They aimed to cut off our connection with Hashem and replace it with the worship of the natural, physical world. Yavan means quicksand in Hebrew: The Greeks sought to drown us in their secular culture, replacing spirituality with atheism and hedonism. The midrash says that the Greeks attempted to darken our eyes, hichshichu et eineichem (Bereishit Rabbah 2:4). Darkness represents a lack of clarity, the inability to perceive true form. This was the Greek attack on the Jewish people: a distortion of truth, a darkening of knowledge and perception. For this reason, the Jewish people went to war against the mighty Greek army, and to this day we carry on that fight against Greek culture, a culture that we view as damaging and antithetical to Judaism.

However, if we take a deeper look into Jewish literature, we find a strikingly different picture of the Greek nation and their culture. In Parshat Noach, Noach blesses his two sons, Shem and Yefet, with a seemingly peculiar bracha: Yaft Elokim lYefet, vyishkon bohalei Shem (Bereishit 9:27): Hashem will grant beauty to Yefet, and he will dwell within the tents of Shem. Yefet is the precursor to the Greeks, and Shem to the Jews. This seems to paint the Greeks in a positive light, as a beautiful nation fitting to dwell within the framework and boundaries of Judaism. In a similar vein, the Gemara (Megillah 9b) states that despite the general prohibition of translating the Torah into different languages, it is permissible to translate the Torah into Greek because it is a beautiful language. According to both of these sources, it seems as though Greek culture does not contradict Judaism, but is meant in some way to complement it, harmonizing with Jewish ideology. How can we understand this contradiction? In order to explain it, we must first develop a deep spiritual principle.

How do we understand and perceive Hashem? Is Hashem within time and space, limited to this world alone, as Pantheists believe? Or is Hashem completely transcendent, beyond time, space and this physical world, as many of the ancient philosophers believed?

The Jewish approach, as explained by the Rambam, Maharal, Ramchal and others, is a beautifully nuanced blend of these two approaches. Hashem is transcendent, completely beyond our physical world of time and space, and yet He is also immanent, within our physical world. This principle applies to all spirituality; we believe that the spiritual and transcendent is deeply connected to the limited and physical world. In other words, our physical world is a projection and emanation of a deeper, spiritual reality. This is the meaning behind the famous midrash, Istaklah boraita, ubara alma (Bereishit Rabbah 1:1), Hashem looked into the Torah and created the world. This means that the physical world is an emanation and expression of the Torah, the spiritual root of existence. To give an analogy, imagine a projector: the image you see on the screen is emanating from the projector. The projector and film are the source, the image on the screen is the expression.

Thus, we are able to understand and experience the spiritual through the physical, as the two are intrinsically connected. If youre wondering how to understand this concept, consider the way other human beings experience, relate to and understand you. All they have ever seen is your physical body. Theyve never seen your thoughts, your consciousness or your emotions. The only way they can understand you is by relating to how you express yourself and your internal world through your physical body: your words, actions, facial expressions and body language.

The same is true regarding our experience of Hashem and the spiritual. We cant see spirituality, only physicality. We must therefore use the physical to connect back to the spiritual root.

The Greeks sought to uproot this Jewish perspective, to detach the physical world from its higher root. They claimed that human beings have no connection to anything higher than the physical world itself, and that its therefore impossible to connect to Hashem. As the Ramban explains (Vayikra 16:8), the Greeks believed only that which the human intellect could grasp. Anything that requires spiritual sensitivity, that goes beyond rational proofs alone, was dismissed as false. Even the Greek gods were glorified humansas anything that transcended the physical, human world was dismissed. In essence, the Greeks served themselves.

The Jewish approach is much more nuanced. We embrace human intellect and reason, but are aware of a realm that transcends it. We recognize the wisdom of science, medicine, psychology, mathematics and other forms of madda, but also recognize a higher form of wisdom, the Torah. As the Vilna Gaon explains, where logic and human intellect ends, Jewish wisdom begins. The logic behind this principle is based on the aforementioned idea: the physical world is an expression of the spiritual world. Just as the physical world stems from a higher spiritual realm, physical wisdom is an expression of a higher form of wisdom, the Torah. While the wisdom of madda is true, it stems from a higher truth, the Torah. Torah Umadda means that Torah is the absolute foundation and root, and madda is its physical expression.

The ideal is for the physical wisdom of the Greeks and Yefet to be within the tent of Shem. For science and madda to be in harmony with Torah. The problem occurred only once the Greeks denied the existence of anything beyond their independent intellectual wisdom. This was the battle of Chanukah. The Greeks tried to destroy the Torah, which contradicted their ideology, and the Jews were forced to fight for their beliefs, to defend their spiritual connection with Hashem and the transcendent wisdom of Torah.

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The Chanukah Story That Could Have Been - Jewish Link of New Jersey

Personally, I identify with the Grinch. And yet, I find these waning weeks of December particularly festive if for no other reason than they signal that the whole crass consumerist schmegegge of Christmas is on its way out. In spite of all that, local seasonal synth ensemble The Spaceship of the Imaginations annual untraditional take on the Christmas pageant was an apt reminder theres an undeniable joy lurking beneath the hype. This years cast and crew offered quite possibly the most lit time to be had inside a church outside of Kanye Wests Sunday Service.

Though the synth-band-turned-performance-troupe doesnt have an affiliation with Trinity United Methodist Church, this is the third year that the sanctuary (through its Trinity Community Commons program) has hosted local piano man, keyboard wiz and SOTI orchestrator Matt Rowland and his Carl Sagan-inspired group. This years production, whose opening night I saw Thursday, marks the 11th year Rowland has convened his group. Hes assembled an increasingly more elaborate cast of familiar faces from the various local arts and music scenes. They pooled their talents for yet another absurdist, slightly psychedelic and wholly entertaining original stage production.

I unfortunately missed last years epic multimedia showcase Krampus Gone Wild which I understand included multiple green-screen sequences. This year, the technology was dialed way back, but the production (with a cast and crew of 28) wasnt poorer for it. Many of the players doubled as puppeteers something Werner Herzog might be proud of expanding the cast to something like 35 characters as the black-clad crew of stagehands hustled diligently between scenes to swap out sets. For the first time, the vast majority of the music was original compositions. There were literally no dull moments in this impressive three-hour opus (complete with intermission, of course).

Jessica Claus, Frosty the Snowman and Aurora the Polar BearPhoto: Laura E. Partain

This years show, Ms. Claus Saves Christmas, picks up after Krampus Gone Wild. As the show opens, we find Santas former wife Jessica Claus (ace singer Keshia Bailey), still recovering from their split and trying to put her life back together in her hometown of Paducah, Ky., aka The Pitiful Pad or The Dirty Ducah, after 150-odd years at the North Pole. Meanwhile, the half-goat, half-demon European folk legend Krampus (Seth Pomeroy, a pillar of Nashvilles stand-up and sketch comedy scene) had indeed gone wild, abandoning the now-canceled Christmas holiday in favor of an eternal summer of reckless hedonism.

The world mourns the loss, while Krampus, conspiring with his sidekick and hype-man Elfy and a couple of suits from Coca-Cola, embarks on a rap career. (The beats are genuinely dope, while Krampus bars are good-bad on an MST3K level and delivered with pitch-perfect swaggering gusto.) Soon, its clear that it will be up to Ms. C. and a lovable, ragtag group of North Pole loyalists a pair of reindeer, a couple gung-ho elves, a polar bear, an adorable snow couple to get Christmas back on track.

Was the production flawless? Nah. Acting styles meshed with mixed success, lines were flubbed, marks were missed and character was often broken by fits of laughter. But when a cast is having this much fun onstage, the spirit is infectious, which is ultimately the point. Rowland and his electro quartet laid an increasingly mean and funky flavor on traditional holiday tunes, and the show culminated in a candle-lit, audience-participatory chorus of Silent Night.

As a curmudgeonly holiday hater, I felt a little tricked as I found myself holding a tiny flame inside a church while swaying to a classic carol. However, with my face still sore from laughing through most of the last few hours, how could I gripe in the wake of this inspiringly DIY spectacle and wholly Nashville tradition? The Spaceship of the Imagination has landed on a universal translation of the holiday spirit. They continue to subvert any superficial or moral objections with an undeniably fun and impressive expression of goodwill.

You've got two more chances to see the show, tonight and Saturday. Tickets are $20 and available in advance. Below, check out photos from opening night by Laura E. Partain.

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The Spaceship of the Imagination Makes Spirits Bright - Nashville Scene

10Eamonn Doyle: Made in Dublin

Photo London, Somerset HouseAlongside his creative collaborators production designer Niall Sweeney and sound artist David Donohoe Irish photographer Eamonn Doyle created an ambitious nine-screen projection for Photo London. It was an immersive experience that threatened to overwhelm, but, once surrendered to, unfolded to its visceral soundtrack at a furious pace. Looming figures flitted across the viewers vision in constantly unfolding juxtapositions, making Doyles native city seem more Ballardian than Joycean.

Marian Goodman, LondonA long-awaited major London show for Nan Goldin, her first since the Whitechapel Gallery retrospective in 2002, Sirens is shadowed by her recent addiction to Oxycontin and the direct action anti-Sackler activism she has embraced since her recovery. Two of her new works, Sirens and the viscerally unsettling slideshow Memory Lost, draw deeply on lived experience. The latter in particular uses her signature diaristic approach to explore memory, mourning, death and dislocation. Tough, heartbreaking and utterly compelling. On until 11 January. Read the full review.

Tate Modern, LondonAn ambitious, sprawling and constantly surprising retrospective of an artist too long considered in the reflective light of Pablo Picasso, with whom she had a turbulent relationship. Her career began in earnest in 1932, when Henriette Markovitch, painter, became Dora Maar, photographer. The creative trajectory that followed took her from fashion to portraiture to street photography and on into surrealist-inspired experiments in photomontage and camera-less photography. An expansive portrait of a restless spirit. On until 15 March. Read the full review.

Tate Britain, LondonBritains most famous living photographer drew the crowds to Tate Britain for this expansive retrospective, drawn from an archive that stretches back 60 years. Best known for his war photography, the show reminded us of the wealth of other defining documentary images from closer to home: post-war working class life in Londons East End, the declining landscapes of the industrial north, poverty and homeless in the capital. Comprising over 250 photographs, all hand-printed by McCullin in his darkroom, it was a celebration of, and an elegy for, a time when photojournalism and documentary photography indelibly shaped our view of the world. Read the full review.

Les Rencontres dArlesOn the back of her acclaimed first book, Ex-Voto, which merged landscapes of contemporary sites of religious pilgrimage with starkly haunting portraits of latter-day pilgrims, the young English artist won the Audience Award at Arles for The Faithful. Here, the central subject of stark monochrome prints and a quietly compelling film was a young Orthodox nun named Vera, who works with captive wild horses in a convent in rural Belarus. The end result was another austere and affecting exploration of contemporary religious devotion.

Jeu de Paume, ParisPeter Hujars reputation has risen steadily since his death in 1987, his often deftly composed portraits possessed of an acutely intimate undertow. Hujar came of age in the downtown art scene in New York, his creative life bookended by two defining cultural moments: the Stonewall riots in 1969 and the Aids crisis of the 1980s. He once described his approach as uncomplicated, direct photographs of complicated and difficult subjects. They include avant-garde artists, gay activists, intellectuals and drag queens; among the most celebrated are a reclining Susan Sontag and, posing languorously on her deathbed, Warhol superstar Candy Darling. On until 19 January.

Hayward Gallery, LondonDevoted to the formative years in which Diane Arbus honed her dark vision, In the Beginning showed how her sensibility and signature style a crucial shift from 35mm to square format took shape on the streets of New York. Around two thirds of the 100 plus prints on view had not been seen before in the UK; what they revealed was a precocious talent for the eccentric and the perverse, whether tattooed strong men, circus performers, self-styled outsiders or passing strangers. Still unsettling, still singular. Read the full review.

The Photographers Gallery, LondonFor all their quiet stillness, Dave Heaths portraits possess an intensity that is by turns melancholic and unsettling. In that most exuberant of decades, the 60s, Heath emerged almost unseen as a master of solitude and introspection. His images, as this deftly-curated exhibition highlighted, instil a thoughtful silence in the space around them. An illuminating survey of a quiet American photographer who was a master of mood and sequence.

National Portrait Gallery, LondonA long overdue British retrospective showed the full range of Shermans work, from the iconic early series Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) to the more elaborately constructed Sex Pictures, which still shock in terms of their sheer grotesquery. She is a conceptual shapeshifter, whose one brilliant idea turning the camera on her transformed self in order to exaggerate and illuminate myriad female archetypes is one of the most fascinating creative journeys of our time. Read the full review.

Les Rencontres dArlesIn the 1970s and 80s, self-taught Czech photographer Libue Jarcovjkov relentlessly chronicled her wild life during a time of political repression. The results, shot in edgy monochrome, were one of the revelations of this years Arles photo festival. Jarcovjkovs diaristic approach brilliantly captures the low rent hedonism and self destructiveness of a semi-clandestine bohemian milieu. But there is something energetic, even joyful, in her laying bare of her own reckless life. Often, she is her own subject, the captions a kind of defiantly nihilist manifesto: I understand nothing and dont care. Life is pelting along too fast to understand. Im rarely sober. Elsewhere, she shot on the nocturnal streets and in dive bars, parties and scuzzy bedrooms, capturing the long nights and hungover days of a repressive, and thus doggedly dissolute, time in her homeland. Uncompromising and grittily poetic, Evokativ took me by complete surprise and stayed with me for days afterwards.

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Top 10 photography shows of 2019 | Culture - The Guardian