Generally, we do not use our comment response as a posting but thought to ourselves that considering this we should.
A wonderful new little sculpture created in the late 1500’s by Giambologna has entered the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art’s collection. The sculpture was purchased using endowment funds. A person named Joy asked us what we thought about this, and we responded.
Striding Mars (c. 1565–70), Giambologna
Striding Mars is a beautiful artwork, but what is behind the curtain is not.
Q. A bit off subject but wondering what you guys think of the 4 million $ spent on Giambologna’s Striding Mars just purchased by the Wadsworth.
A. Interesting question and thank you. One thing is for certain we do not care one bit what the museum spends their endowment on. What we are more interested in is Mars. Who was Mars? Is Mars the type of ______ that we wish to emulate? To celebrate? Yes, we know it is just a story, a myth but what is the story telling us. We know it was long ago and longer ago still what can this story tell us today. Some say, we want the story the whole story. We do not wish to just ga, ga over a tiny little naked man created long ago now standing in his birthday suit in an art museum. We think one very important question is how will the story of Mars be told?
The God Of War
What do we see every day before our eyes with the genocide of the people of Palestine. WAR! What do we see every day with destruction of the Ukraine. WAR! WAR on earth. So now let us praise war. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) reveals that there are 27 ongoing conflicts in th world today. Our Rule of Law in Armed Conflict Online Portal (RULAC) classifies all situations of armed violence that amount to an armed conflict under international humanitarian law. Today, it monitors more than 110 armed conflicts. So let us raise a toast to the Mars the god of war.
Gaza today. (Stop the War NOW!!)
Mars striding naked, manly Mars, who raped Rhea Silvia while she was sound asleep, another story says she went to the well to draw water and was chased by Mars into a cave where he raped her. From this rape the twins Remus and Romulus were born. Escaping the executioner’s sword, after birth they were put in a basket and floated on the Tiber until a “she wolf” found them.
Mars is hot. In the old stories it is stated that Mars is a figure of primal masculinity, desired by many who fell for him and when they did not, he took. We didn’t find any queer reading on this sculpture or on Mars or on the artist’s work. We bet the porno men are swooning over Mars.
A real treat this year, Spanish Blue Bell. We planted the bulbs last fall.
We purchased another Foxglove for the Shed Garden, and it is looking good.
Corner of the shed garden along the back fence.
An example on how we learn without consulting Google.
We experimented this year with the Joe Pye Weed. In years past the Joe Pye was over 8ft. tall. Knowing from last year that after I cut a flower the Joe Pye branched out. So yesterday we cut a grouping to see if we could keep in short and a bit under control. We left a lot of it towards the back to grow as tall as it wants to. Here are two photos from last year. The Joe Pye Weed has the large pink flowers, and the bees love it. Its folk name is Queen of the Meadow and when you see the bees buzzing all about you know why. In the foreground is a Mugwort plant that has since been re-located. The metal building in the background is the shed.
Early morning Joe Pye Weed. The tall, large stalk is a Mullein plant. 8/23
May 6 Shed Garden
The little space saver in the front is waiting for the Voodoo Lily to come up. Along the back of the garden Zinnias will be planted. This garden also holds Sage, Parsley, and Dill.
(Furbirdsqueerly was asked to post this powerful statement today. We stand up and out behind this statement by the Network of Caribbean Feminists and their statement.)
For release on May 6, 2024
Caribbean Feminist Statement Against Israel’s Settler Colonial Project and Ongoing Genocide in Palestine
Feminists, women’s rights advocates, and civil society members across the Caribbean are aggrieved by the continued genocide in Palestine and the equivocation of many CARICOM Member States in response. We note with distress, disgust, and embarrassment the lack of a unified CARICOM position that plainly and unreservedly condemns Israel’s ongoing settler colonial project and racist genocide in Palestine.
We affirm the humanity and dignity of the Palestinian people, and we rebuke the violence enacted against them, including bombardment, starvation, sexual violence, ethnic cleansing, and the intentional destruction of educational, cultural, healthcare, political, and religious institutions. More than 35,000 Palestinian people have been killed since October 7, 2023. Most of them are women and children. More than 80,000 Palestinian people have been injured. Over 8,000 Palestinian people are missing. Almost 2 million Palestinians are currently displaced in Gaza, and 1.1 million are facing catastrophic food insecurity.
While the cruelties of occupation violate everyone, those who are already vulnerable suffer disproportionately. We therefore call urgent attention to the heinous attacks on women and girls, and the deliberate deployment of gender-based violence as a tool of control, humiliation, and degradation. Read the rest of this entry »
**This blog stands firmly against the genocide of the people of Gaza and call for an end to this war now!
I think we will start with a song on this one. Why not the era that was set off by hair as long as we could grow it our hair. Our long hair, our hair that defined an era. Up against the brylcreem crowd, the slick, the conformist. Up against the father knows best, the mother who stayed home and tended house, the leave it to Beaver crowd climbing the ladder of success, and all was well in the American dream. But we began to see that the dream was really Amerikkkan and we said NO! Our ticket was our hair out of this nightmare we went forward to change the world. The struggle was our art.
Mommy cried and Daddy got mad, rednecks called us names, construction workers dropped brick on us while we demonstrated, but our hair grew and grew. We let it. No magic liquid was poured on it. Terry looked like an angel with his long blond hair. Gale had a huge Afro, here she comes down the street a little short lady with big hair. That is what was noticed first her big hair. No mistaking her from some other little, short lady. Tim with his big Afro, natural curly hair picked, done out big. And the flowers, remember the flowers in your hair even if you weren’t on your way, with your thumb out hitching to San Francisco to join the crowd.
Downtown Hartford April 26, 2024
Coming around the corner all we could say at first was, “Oh My, What a beautiful garden.” To the gardeners we say thank you for these beautiful Daffodils and Red and Purple Tulips. Struggling in our old age to recite the poem about daffodils, by Wordsworth. “Here,” said Goosey Bell, “the opening lines go like this”,
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
The show folks, the show. So here goes. A collage, a gathering together of ideas, a cut, a paste, a collage in the service of the people.
“It is easy to show diversity when you only take on the voices that aren’t too strange.”
From the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art website about this exhibition:
Everyone Has A Hair Story To Tell
“Hair is an integral part of us. It is personal and intimate while also being one of the most visible ways we express our identity to the world. We use it to reinvent or disguise ourselves. We style our hair to make a statement: to follow trends and conform, or to forge our own path in defiance of social norms. But hair is more than symbolic—it is a tangible manifestation of our DNA, tying us to our ancestors. We keep hair as a token of love and remembrance, honoring a child’s first haircut or a loved one who has passed. Its significance on both a personal and societal level has made hair a powerful focus of art throughout human history.”
and then there is this an apology? maybe something to get one off the hook, a disclaimer, or maybe we will do better next time. But of course, some history is lost, some not recorded, some denied, suppressed, omitted and erased. Maybe some has fallen apart, landed in the bottom of the ocean or yet to be discovered in someone’s special hiding place.
“We realize it’s impossible for one exhibition to fully tell the story of hair, but the Wadsworth Atheneum’s exhibition Styling Identities: Hair’s Tangled Histories aims to tell a story about what hair means to us—to our individual staff, to our museum, and to our Hartford communities. Organized by a team of curators passionate about hair, drawn from across levels and departments at the museum, this exhibition is about us as much as it is about hair.”
OKAY—
Yes, give me a head with hair, even though I am bald and going through the show I didn’t even think about my head until I saw a woman staring at me. Big bald me. I felt like a Dadaist in the room at the academy. Should I tell her that if she rubs my head like the Buddha belly that she could make a wish and it would come true? To tell the truth I never once since I started to go bald missed my hair, I was never a man to cry over the loss of hair, never rubbed onion juice, bat dung, horseradish, used gram or chickpea flour as a shampoo or rushed out to buy a toupee. When I first came to this town my hair was way down my back. Perhaps next week I will shave my head completely and get those little round granny glasses and pass myself off as a newly born Mahatma. No combs, no tangles—just the breeze on a smooth scalp that will be me. If I see a comb on the railroad tracks, I will leave it for someone else. A hobo, a wanderer, a kid to pick it up and throw it into the stream. Who knows maybe to be carried off by a tribe of ants who like the smell of hair lotion.
Yeah, back in the day I was within the rebellious tribe called Hippies. Non-conformists conforming to our own style. Short haired folks keep out. The tribes of Johnson who told the nation have no fear of escalation, and I wasn’t lying, lying Nixon led their tribe up against ours. Well, ours won a lot of battles and many of the freedoms we celebrate today, or maybe never even think about today because they are so commonplace, came out of those great wars of the late 60’s and 70’s. Think about it while you are not constrained by a bra or by the heavy hand of LGBT oppression under the thumb of straights. We won mostly cultural idea, we never were able to stop war for good, we were never able to abolish poverty, we never were able to distribute the wealth, solve the problem of homelessness, and we never were able to shake off fully the straight jacket, the between the lines the problems with straight society but we tried, and folks today try still. All we can say is FIGHT ON!!
The Flying Egg Head #3. Bald as bald can be but he doesn’t care for he can fly. Try that with your big hair. It might get tangled in your wings. (The Flying Egg Head’s play was rejected by the Hartford Fringe Festival as being just too theater of and in the mind and out fringing the fringe. )
So on to the show. Let’s Go! The hair show. Remember as the Wadsworth says, “Your Hair Is A Work Of Art. 100+ Objects Tell The Story Of Style, Society, and Community.” Hank says, “if you have a bald head get a wig, a tattoo, paint a picture in pretty colors, wear a hat, pretend you are a 5’1” penis and get a job in a porno movie or just go about enjoying the look. Don’t worry the girls and the boys will still love you.
Here is the advertisement for the Exhibition.
Is there life after the rainbow crosswalk?
There are queer folks, queer artists dotting this exhibition, just like the old saying here, there and____. (or we should say queer thoughts, gestures, hellos, we are here, we are queer just look between the lines.)
One person to thank for representing our people is Andrea Miller Keller who was the Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art 1968-1998, and who ran the Matrix program and brought to us in Hartford LGBTQ artists and purchased their works for the collection. Over the years more of our people’s art has been added. Politically now is the time to show it, show it and show it again. Say no to the fascist takeover of amerikkka. Say no to censorship and the road to the perhaps, the once again, the oh no, a degenerate art show. (we can only hope that anyone who is reading this knows what the Degenerate art show was)
Got to be a favorite at any time. Moving us from here to there, striking out on another road.
I love art that pushes us all in another direction. Art that crosses the boundaries that have been set by those who have come before or should I say extends itself. I always thought of Janie Antoni as a sage, who goes about the business of inventing new tools for creating art. When Antoni got down on the floor and painted it with Loving Care hair dye using her hair as a brush the act of painting was never the same. (1) *
Sure we had Nam June Paik way back in 1961 using his head, hands and necktie slowly crawling across a piece of paper on the floor recording the smallest and largest gestures of his body as he went. Paik revisited this performance on September 8th of the following year at the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik held at Städtisches Museum, Wiesbaden. For this performance Paik dipped his head in a mixture of ink and tomato juice and slowly crawled on a 4-meter (13-feet) long piece of paper. (2) Art history tells us of Yves Klein painting blue on nude woman and dragging them across canvases to make an image using the models as living brushes to make the work. (3)
Zen for Head, Nam June Paik Performance 1961
This Queer Artist Uses Their Hair to Create Epic Performance Art
From them. Interview with Jarrett Key 2018 is found HERE.
There’s a nearly indescribable way in which one is changed after experiencing fine artist Jarrett Key’s boldly experimental performances. Their genre-bending work forces viewers to reconsider their assumptions about art, race, gender, spirituality, and much more, and in their performance, “Hair Paintings and Other Stories The artist applies paint to stretched canvases, walls, and other surfaces, using their own hair as a painting implement. Again the head and hair as a brush. The song and movement that accompanies the process — at times pre-conceived, at times improvised — can result in a soul-stirring, church-style experience for the audience. The painted works that result are the documents of Key’s performance. Key, who has explored Blackness, queerness and other facets of identity in their work, is also a co-founder of Codify Art, a collective of queer and trans artists of color who are elevating and showcasing each other’s creativity via collaboration.
Two Queens The imitation of power is /maybe the downfall of us all.
Two Queens one from France and one from England who influenced the court and the country (those who could afford it, and sometimes those who couldn’t) influenced those who wanted to be among what was the in-crowd, those who were the followers, the needful, the imitators of the powerful. The ones who needed to be just like someone else. How much we still suffer today from that. One would think that by now there would be an end in sight of such nonsense.
Partons maintenant en France et en Angleterre pour découvrir les Big Hair et les Hair in a ring.
Even the animals are startled. The French Lady In London
Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, 1733–1794 *
Title: The French Lady in London Date: ca. 1771, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Talk about big hair.
Yes, it’s an extreme style, first worn at the French Court before traveling to England. It’s a status-fashion, too. The complexity of the styles showed that the wearer had both the leisure-time to devote to her hair, and most often the wealth to employ a professional hairdresser or accomplished lady’s maid to achieve it. The height framed the face, and balanced out the full skirts of the period, creating a proportion that was much admired at the time. The pouf is a hairstyle derived from 18th-century France. Queen Marie Antoinette made it popular. She first sported it in 1774, when she attended her husband Louis XVI’s coronation. The famed hairdresser of the day Leonard Autie created these diverse styles. It quickly became widespread amongst noble and upper-class women in France during the time. It was highly creative and artistic.
Hair at that time was powdered (during this period there was a storage of food, and the poor could barely afford a loaf of bread while at the court hairdos were dusted with enormous quantities of flour.) The poor, already angry about the extravagant lifestyle of the wealthy, finely exploded with anger about the waste of perfectly good food and so began the French Revolution (1789-99). In October of 1789 marketplace women and others marched from Paris to the palace of Versailles to pressure the royal government. The march, which began in the marketplaces of Paris as a reaction to food scarcity and anti-revolutionary actions by the king’s soldiers. High bread prices led to conspiracy theories that the nobility was purposely starving the people, pushing tensions close to their boiling point. ‘It is estimated from eyewitness accounts, as many as 30,000 people laid siege to Versailles and petitioned the king and the National Constituent Assembly. Via la revolution!
Fall in Line. You can be just like the queen.
The guillotine’s shadow danced in their eyes
The Coiffure à la Belle-Poule
Noble ladies of the court of Versailles felt obliged to imitate the queen’s new and daring hairstyles. Not only the nobility but the young ladies of Paris were also enthralled by the newfangled trends and many times according to accounts they went into debt.
In the end, Marie Antoinette rode to the guillotine in a wooden cart, her head shaven. A lock of her hair, braided together with strands from her beloved friend Princess de Lamballe is preserved in a ring in the Musse Carnavalet. Yes, the people, living in holes, dying in holes, holes in their bellies and holes in their clothes. No wonder they acted the way they did.) Wouldn’t you?
Of course, all praise if we have any must go to the artist who created these hair styles for Antoinette and noble women. The hairdresser Leonard Autie.
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Queen Victoria made mourning jewelry fashionable and imbued the pieces with romance. Everyone from the court to the general public followed suit. Except of course those too poor to even have a pot to piss in. For an excellent essay go to HERE.
Human hair was popular in lockets because it was a way to keep people close to you, even in death. (what’s that about helping to hold their spirit to the earthly realm?) Hair was braided into earrings, necklaces, brooches, and chains. Prince Albert’s death in 1861 sent Queen Victoria into mourning for the rest of her reign.
Victorian Mourning Ring Woven Hair and Seed Pearls.
The tradition of mourning jewelry began in the Middle Ages at a time when life expectancy was short, and disease was rampant. The jewelry did not commemorate a particular person but brought forth the idea that death wasn’t far off. One would gather that the poor did not wear mourning jewelry but just died. We died of the plague, malnutrition, famine, and war. Sweating sickness, infections smallpox, and diphtheria, Our life ended on the gallows, tied to a stake, forgotten in the dungeon, torn on the rack. We died as a heretic we died all the same.
‘God had put people in their place in life and this must not be interfered with because the life after death was more important.’
Essay on the Earliest Mourning Ring is found HERE.
Hair Work was popular in the United States from the 1770s until the early years of the 20th century, human hairwork had its heyday in the 1850s to 1880s. Hairwork became an important ritual object for a Victorian white middle class that placed high value on sentimentality. Hairwork was seen as an outward expression of the inner emotion of grief.
In the show there is a whole case of mourning Jewelry from the 1800’s and on the wall above examples of Hair wreaths, and Hair Flowers.
Here is a piece from the Wadsworth Atheneum’s collection. *
Hair bracelet and pair of earrings, c. 1848, made by Christian Linherr, New York. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
Wreath made of hair by Martha Jewitt Coe, Middlefield, 1859. Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, Hartford. (more on this later in the essay)
Here is a video we found that will get you on your way making this type of jewelry.
Molly Elizabeth Agnew who has a blog called Eternal Goddess says this about Mourning Jewelry.
“Hair jewelry became particularly popular in the Victorian era as many Victorians held the belief that hair had a sacred quality, that it possessed the essence of that person. The fact that it is pretty much imperishable, hair also symbolized immortality. Hair jewelry could simply hold a lock of hair or be braided and displayed or used to create elaborate scenes. It was truly a craft of its own and took immense skill to create, and it was a worthy business to enter.” To read the entire article go to HERE.
In London, in 1830, the average life span for middle to upper-class males was 44 years, 25 for tradesman and 22 for laborers. Fifty-seven of every 100 children in working class families were dead by five years of age.”
A discussion by May Day.
So, we have taken a look at Victorian Mourning Jewelry, at long hair beauties who after 16 years of age put their hair up and only let in down at night in the presence of their husband if they had one, we have looked at a queen, and in the exhibition are dazzled by the Colt dressing desk, and the miniature portraits of the Colt Family. All of this and much more gives people a false impression of the past. The genteel life we picture as “Victorian” only applied to the upper classes. This is where the whole idea of museums comes into question. This is/could be about our fight. But what about us? Us, being the working class, you know the ones who get their hands dirty, the ones who are too busy working to spend all day washing their hair. The ones who came home 6 days a week tired out from hard work. To tired but then expected to do household chores as well. (see later in this essay for a look at working people in this period)
No we were at least most of us right down there and dirty with the house maids and domestic workers, workers working the coal mines, (women in pants no less) collecting garbage, dog feces, and horse manure from the streets, joining our poor sisters and children making bricks 6 days a week carrying pounds of clay on her head, Fisher women who pulled their skirts up, tucked them into their belts exposing their legs. “Not being women of the middle classes, their modesty was not a consideration.” Victorian women worked the blacksmith forge, carried pounds of milk using bucket yokes, worked in the mills and again they certainly didn’t have time to spend all day washing their long hair or spending their hard-earned meager pay on hair jewelry.
Though many thousands of people earned somewhat of a living doing all sorts of “dirty” work in terms of cultural representation our people were practically invisible. Henry Mayhew interviewed such working people and published his findings with illustrated drawings in a four volume books series published between 1851-1861, the book has been republished by Dover Books. It is interesting to note that Mayhew decided that these people would be the foundation of his work. And those in the background would be thrust into the foreground. (for anyone who is interested in the real deal of the Victorian age these books are highly recommended I have pulled it off my shelf many times)
“We learn this abut Henry Mayhew: Mayhew interviewed everyone — beggars, street-entertainers (such as Punch and Judy men), market traders, prostitutes, laborers, sweatshop workers, even down to the “mudlarks” who searched the stinking mud on the banks of the River Thames for wood, metal, rope and coal from passing ships, and the “pure-finders” who gathered dog feces to sell to tanners. He described their clothes, how and where they lived, their entertainments and customs, and made detailed estimates of the numbers and incomes of those practicing each trade. The book describes how marginal and precarious many people’s lives were, in what was at that time perhaps the richest city in the world.”
Not finished with the soap box yet!
May Day…
Fly back to the Hair Show. Here is one that there is much debate about.
Macaroni Dressing Room *
A Macaroni Dressing Room offers a window into the intimate world of the Macaroni, or the fashionable mid-18th-century Englishman who dressed and spoke in an affected manner. Oxford Magazine reported in 1770, “There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately started up amongst us. It is called Macaroni.” From 1760 to 1800, hundreds of humorous prints, also known as drolls, were produced in London. The engravers and print sellers Mary & Matthew Darly became known as the “Macaroni Print-Shop” because of their merchandise. In this print, a fashionable printed-cotton dressing gown, or banyan, is worn by the sitter, who is having his wig powdered. The pictures on the wall show such topics as “Rotten Row Macaroni” and “Morning Devotion.” A banyan worn by the Prince of Wales faces this print. Artist, Rebel, Dandy. Men of Fashion. Wall Label RISD Exhibition 2013. (talk about stirring up trouble, Mary and Matthew were truly trouble makers)
What is this my son, Tom?
18th Century Queer Cultures #1-the Macaroni and His Ancestors, essay by Danielle Thom, curator Victoria and Albert Museum is found HERE. Read the rest of this entry »
Some folks love a joke. Here is one that landed on our page the other day. All I can say is no honey you didn’t yank my chain, turn my crank or get me all in a huff. Your stupid idea gave us a push to write. For then for now forever here is how we would respond to BS from apologists for the wealthy and telling of tall tales about them:
Here is what the cat dragged in.
“When the Titanic sank, it carried millionaire John Jacob Astor IV. The money in his bank account was enough to build 30 Titanics. However, faced with mortal danger, he chose what he deemed morally right and gave up his spot in a lifeboat to save two frightened children.
Millionaire Isidor Straus, co-owner of the largest American chain of department stores, “Macy’s,” who was also on the Titanic, said: “I will never enter a lifeboat before other men.”
His wife, Ida Straus, also refused to board the lifeboat, giving her spot to her newly appointed maid, Ellen Bird. She decided to spend her last moments of life with her husband.
These wealthy individuals preferred to part with their wealth, and even their lives, rather than compromise their moral principles. Their choice in favor of moral values highlighted the brilliance of human civilization and human nature. credit:” Paulyn Pickle
Yeah, yeah Paulyn Pickle.
There are conflicting accounts of John Jacob Astor IV’s actions during the Titanic disaster. Some reports suggest that he did try to use his wealth and influence to secure a spot on a lifeboat but was denied. This would contradict the original post’s claim that he gave up his spot to save children.
The original post’s claim may have been an exaggeration or a myth that has been perpetuated over time as the details don’t really line up. It would be great if he gave up his seat, but I don’t think that is how it went, I think it was added to make him sound better.
They made their billions without doing much to improve workers lives. Resisting unions and protective health & safety legislation, etc. Let’s not delude ourselves. Being rich is not a measure of moral integrity and never was. Unless of course they saw GOD and had a great moral awaking and knew that their sins against humanity were listed in the great big book that St. Peter held at the Pearly Gates, check off names and sending the sinners to hell. I hear lots of folks are like that. You know the bit, “Here poor little rag-a-muffin is a seat for you. Go to america and work your ass off and always remember that the rich will be with you forever.
Well now here are some interesting facts. Maybe why this could be why many poor folks hate the rich and would never fall for the bullshit of Ms. Pickle.
From Social Class and survival on the S.S Titanic written by Wayne Hall we learn this:
The data on sex and class differences in survival were obtained from the British inquiry into the sinking which was conducted by Lord Mersey in 1912.
There were marked sex and social class differences in survival among passengers on the Titanic. The former were the result of policy. The factors that seem to be of relevance in explaining the social class differences in survival were: (1) the positioning of the lifeboats on the deck where first and second class passengers were located; (2) a policy of looking after the first and second class passengers first; (3) neglect of third class passengers who were left to fend for themselves, and who could only find their way to the boat deck by trial and error; and (4) some unsystematic exclusion of third class passengers from the Social Science and Medicine 1986.
Blame the poor again.
The explanations of the class difference in survival preferred by the Mersey inquiry were that the emigrants had been reluctant to leave their belongings, and that their lack of English prevented them from following the crew’s instructions. The evidence for the former was a conjecture by the Attorney General that emigrants would be loath to leave the ship because they “would certainly be carrying all they possessed with them … more loath probably than a person whose property was not all in the vessel …” The evidence for the latter explanation was that many of the third-class passengers were ‘foreigners’ and thus did not understand what was required of them.
Two-thirds of the Titanic’s complement of passengers and crew went to the bottom with it.
Class Distinction in Death among Titanic Victims Defined by Clothing.
One interesting fact from the report is this:
Days later, bodies of the dead were pulled from the Atlantic Ocean. The bodies of the first- and second-class passengers and officers were taken to Halifax for burial. The bodies of third-class passengers and seamen were placed in weighted canvas bags and dropped back into the sea. Yes, sacrifices were made by the officers and first-class passengers, but it was mainly the people in third class who made the big sacrifice.
Titanic 3rd Class Passengers: Trivia, Facts, and Q&A Go to HERE.
Food for the fishes Sharks. As on land most who survived would have become victims of the wealthy. or Take a look, what clothes are the dead wearing, what’s in their pockets. Proceed from there.
“According to the recently recovered passenger records from RMS Titanic, the third class passengers who died when the liner sank were dumped back in the freezing waters so that the bodies belonging to the higher classes could be saved.
The crew of CS Mackay-Bennett, the ship that recovered the majority of bodies from the cold Atlantic waters, was overwhelmed with the operation and they came up with a tough solution — to bring aboard the bodies of first and second class and cast the poorest passengers back into the ocean.”
We just received this book from leftwing books, on sale too, and will open the pages on May Day, May 1, 2024.
The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day
Peter Linebaugh
Publisher: PM Press
Year: 2016
Format: Paperback
Size: 200 pages
ISBN: 9781629631073
“May Day is about affirmation, the love of life, and the start of spring, so it has to be about the beginning of the end of the capitalist system of exploitation, oppression, war, and overall misery, toil, and moil.” So writes celebrated historian Peter Linebaugh in an essential compendium of reflections on the reviled, glorious, and voltaic occasion of May 1st.
It is a day that has made the rich and powerful cower in fear and caused Parliament to ban the Maypole—a magnificent and riotous day of rebirth, renewal, and refusal. These reflections on the Red and the Green—out of which arguably the only hope for the future lies—are populated by the likes of Native American anarcho-communist Lucy Parsons, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, Karl Marx, José Martí, W.E.B. Du Bois, Rosa Luxemburg, SNCC, and countless others, both sentient and verdant. The book is a forceful reminder of the potentialities of the future, for the coming of a time when the powerful will fall, the commons restored, and a better world born anew.
About the Author
Peter Linebaugh is a child of empire, schooled in London, Cattaraugus (NY), Washington, DC, Bonn, and Karachi. He has taught at Harvard University and Attica Penitentiary, at New York University and the Federal Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. He used to edit Zerowork and was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. He is the author of Stop, Thief!, The London Hanged, The Many-Headed Hydra (with Marcus Rediker), The Magna Carta Manifesto, and introductions to Verso’s selection of Thomas Paine’s writings and PM’s new edition of E.P. Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. He lives in the region of the Great Lakes and works at the University of Toledo in Ohio.
Don’t worry we at furbirdsqueerly still fly the red flag. At our age we are not about to give up and in.
In the garden. An experimental hobby when I am not on my soap box.
Species Tulips and Primrose. I was told the primrose is a annual, has one flowering season and them dies. Ok so I panted it outside in the east garden, it was green all winter and now is full of flowers. So much for experts. Oh, let me tell the experts, I have two near the kitchen sink, annuals they say. The plants haven’t stopped flowering since I got them in late winter. Soon they will join the primrose section of the garden.
Everyone loves volunteers in the garden and in our organizations. This Johnny Jump Up jumped out of the pot 2 years ago, had flowers all winter and is back this spring more glorious than ever. No special soil, no treatment found on google and it grows in rocks.
Toad Lily
Each year the Toad Lillies spread. We started with one plant. Now we have 6.
“This Lesbian Visibility Week Let us forever remember our fighting sisters and hope that more of the young break out of the rainbow cookie, trinket tribe and join up with those who know and fight back!” May Day and Red Zinnia Quartet.
Let’s talk Lesbian Power. You know the fighting Amazons. The lesbians who take no shit from anyone. A bit of our fighting stories here. In celebration and a biggest thank you to the
The Lesbian Avengers were founded in 1992, a year that Ana Maria Simo, a playwright and activist, remembers as an angry one. George H.W. Bush was running for re-election in part on his foreign policy successes, especially the relatively bloodless conclusion of the Persian Gulf War, in which 148 Americans died. AIDS had claimed over 140,000 lives in the U.S alone and the federal government was still responding with indifference.
The group’s mission was to increase awareness of lesbians — and promote their rights — both within queer culture (radical lesbian politics were mostly associated with second-wave feminists living in insular communities) and the mainstream.
“Lesbians are invisible, and we don’t want to be invisible,” Ms. Simo said recently over Zoom. “We want to make our existence known to the world. We want the streets to belong to us. We want to be out there.”
That June, at the Gay Pride March in New York City, members handed out “Club Cards,” colorful pamphlets that read, “Lesbians! Dykes! Gay Women” and “We want revenge, and we want it now!”
Lesbian Avenger’s activism was in-your-face and tongue-in-cheek. (Their manifesto calling on “all lesbians” read, in part, “closeted lesbians, queer boys and sympathetic straights should give us money.”) At their first action, outside a Queens elementary school where the school board had rejected the Children of the Rainbow curriculum, the Avengers arrived with a marching band, handing out purple balloons to children that read, “Ask About Lesbian Lives.”
At the New York City memorial for a lesbian and a gay man who had burned to death in Salem, Ore., after a Molotov cocktail was tossed into their apartment, members of the Lesbian Avengers ate fire and chanted: “The fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own.” (Fire Easting eventually became one of the group’s hallmarks.) Chapters cropped up in dozens of cities across the country and even abroad, many using the bomb logo, which the New York group made available for reproduction.
The Lesbian Avengers!!!
We can still hear the chant.
“The Fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own.”
In 1993 the first Dyke march happened in Washington D.C during the March on Washington for LGB Civil Rights. The Lesbian Avengers noticed that lesbians were nearly irrelevant in the D.C programing so they took matters in their own hands and organized a march, the DYKE March. According to Kelly Cogswell a member of the Lesbian Avengers, the use of the word dyke was big, bold and a declaration of independence from both the women’s and gay movements that has always sidelined lesbians. It also thumbed its nose at the trend of some LGBT activism that said, “Please give us a few crumbs. We are just like you, except for who we sleep with.” Over 20,000 women marched on the White House where a dozen Lesbian Avengers ate fire while the crowd chanted, “The Fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own.” The Dyke Marches today are usually held the night before Pride Marches in larger cities. The Dyke March: quotes from Kelly Cogswell, “Eating Fire-My life as a Lesbian Avenger.”
“The marches’ purpose was to encourage Lesbian activism within their communities and highlighting Lesbian and Dyke presence in LGBT communities and in the world in general. The Dyke Marches tended to be more political than the mainstream Pride Festivals.”
In response to what the Avengers saw as a male-dominated events calendar — and in the spirit of civil disobedience — the group called on women to take to the streets of the capital without a permit the day before. “We didn’t even realize how brilliant we were by doing it in D.C., where people had come from all over the world,” Ms. Schulman said. “The women went home to their towns and their cities, and they did the same. The next year these marches were everywhere, without any coordination, and some of them still exist.” Within a few years chapters formed in over 50 cities. Chapters formed in New Haven and Hartford Ct. (more research is needed, send comment)
NOTES
The Dyke March: quotes from Kelly Cogswell, “Eating Fire-My life as a Lesbian Avenger.”
The video is an excerpt of the 1993 documentary video, Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire, Too, produced and copyrighted by the Lesbian Avengers, and shared here on behalf of the Lesbian Avenger Documentary Project.
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