#theemptychair

#YesAllWomen, #SurvivorPrivilege, #TheEmptyChair, #WhyIStayed, #MeToo—each of these hashtags highlights women’s experiences with interpersonal and institutionally enabled violence, and each was precipitated by high-profile events involving male perpetrators.

Gendered violence has been framed as an individual problem in public discourse in a multitude of ways. From questions about women’s dress and behavior to laws that eschew the possibility that wives can be raped by their husbands, U.S. culture is rife with narratives that blame victims and normalize violence against them. On social media, victim blaming can intensify. But the #YesAllWomen network and those that followed it are part of what has come to be known as “Feminist Twitter,” where misogyny is challenged online in the tradition of the early feminist press.

Ultimately, these hashtags are embodiments of the feminist demand that “the personal is political,” and illustrate how storytelling on Twitter raises consciousness, creates solidarity, promulgates new cultural narratives, and articulates demands for change. What has become known as the “#MeToo moment” was not so much a moment but a loud chorus of voices that had for years been using Twitter and other social networks to tell the stories about women’s experiences with violence that were not and had not been told in mainstream media, by politicians, or by most journalists. In these networks, unlike in most other public spaces, women told their own stories, women were believed, male allies helped elevate women’s voices, and women—experts in their own lives—added nuance to the all too often oversimplified and inaccurately reported systemic issues of gender, violence and victimhood.

Each hashtag, from #YesAllWomen to #MeToo, did different work as part of a larger movement, creating cultural interventions in response to particular news stories and events that reached the public sphere. These hashtags provided a source of discursive and collective energy that catalyzed both online and offline movement work, leading to powerful cultural repercussions—and, yes, change.

THE EMPTY CHAIR: Murder in the Caribbean Penny Goetjen

My Rating ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️▫️

Publisher: Secret Harbor Press Publication Date November 15, 2016

SUMMARY Olivia Benning travels to the Virgin Islands to settle affairs after receiving news that her mother has died in a boating an accident. Upon arrival she meets a handsome guy who comes to the rescue when her ride fails to show. Olivia soon discovers that the police have no record of her mother’s death or even an accident. Olivia desperately needs the truth even if she has to find it herself.

A bar brawl, a break-in, and her mother’s Caribbean bungalow ransacked. Can things get any worse at picturesque Magen’s Bay? Olivia search takes a sinister turn when a charming man claiming to be her mother’s lover is shot and she’s the prime suspect.

Entangled in the same dark web of crime that may have ensnared her mother, Olivia is low on cash, high on mistrust, yet must rely on the ruggedly handsome stranger who seems to surface when she’s most in need of saving, but is he her rescuer turned lover or her deadly foe?

REVIEW THE EMPTY CHAIR is like riding on a roller coaster. The story has up and downs, and twists and turns, it’s fast and then it’s over, way to soon. An adrenaline pumping, heart pounding ride. Once you start it, it’s hard to put down. And you really don’t want it to be over.

The descriptive setting in the St Thomas, Virgin Islands was picturesque and idylic. Who wouldn’t want to go there! I felt as if I was riding in the blue jeep right next to Olivia, so afraid of going over the side of those narrow mountain roads. I would love to be able to sit in Olivia mom’s turquoise adirondack chair at Serenity Villa and absorb the stunning views of the bay and the ocean and feel the sultry heat from the August sun.

Olivia, a five foot two, blond dynamo has a knack for finding trouble. Or rather trouble seems to follow her from the minute she leaves the Cyril E. King airport. In the first forty-eight hours there’s a bar fight, a missing car, a strange fax and a visit to the police department that knows nothing about her mom’s disappearance and she is rescued by the handsome Colton not once, but twice!. The blue-eyed Colton seems to be everywhere just when Olivia needs him. He might be some kind of knight in shining armor, and don’t we all need one of those!

Last week, on one day, my seat and the one behind the counter were empty, on a Thursday, the chairs up, when it should have long been open. The rooms were empty for everyone, not just for me, passing by and missing the one I wanted again. There were possibilities, perhaps, in other words, on other occasions, but today is today, not the time of other decisions. My seat remains empty. When we meet, it is somewhere in the city, by chance, as our paths happen to cross.

This is an Indonesian movie that is made possible under the direction of Lakonde with the screenplay by Alim Sudio and the story made by Monty Tiwa.

#TheEmptyChair

#horrormoviereviews

#ThrillerHorror

Oh man, I'm a crying mess over here. Here I was listening to a Hollywood Reporter roundtable with songwriters from 2016 and Sting starts talking about the song "The Empty Chair" he wrote for a documentary about a photojournalist Isis held in captivity and then killed very publicly. He starts talking about how he told the filmmakers he couldn't write a song about the film because it was too emotional and too intense. After seeing the film he went home thinking about it, went home to Thanksgiving dinner with his family and thought, what would it be like to lose a member of my family to captivity? What would we do to unify ourselves? They could leave a chair open at the table. "The Empty Chair" became the metaphor that helped him write the song.

This just goes to show the power of music and how the art of it can mean one thing to one person, and something totally different to another. So my mom LOVED Sting, so I'm already thinking about her as I hear this song for the first time. But then I start really picking apart the lyrics and I'm suddenly crying because it feels like it was written about her and her fight with cancer.  

He literally sings about being in a prison cell like this man would have been and I think about how having terminal cancer must have felt like being in a prison — both in your mind but also literally living out your days in the hospital or the nursing home. His lyric "there's a shaft of light where I count my days" makes me sob thinking of how her days were numbered and she knew it every single second of every single day. 

But then the tears really start to flow when he sings "Some days I'm strong, some days I'm weak. On days when I'm broken I can barely speak.” I can’t even begin to explain how sad it is to watch your mother, your caretaker in life, stare listlessly through you in a medicated stupor. Or how she stopped returning my texts in the week or so leading up to her death because she had gotten terrible news from a check up. Or how the weekend before she died I went to visit her and we just sat in silence for a couple hours. Some days she was boisterous and great. Other days, the weight of her impending death clung to her so much so that it seemed like she was gone already.

I chuckle a little when he sings “I was always late for every meal, you’ll swear,” because she/we literally were always late to family gatherings even though we arguably lived the closest. But the tears start to fall again as I think about how it feels like a piece is missing from our family now. Family gatherings are missing her laughter. My wingman is gone. She’s the first big death in this generation’s Retka clan and it weighs on every holiday like a sad veil.

As a family we tend to scatter around the house for those big holiday meals, so we don’t really occupy one table where we’d physically leave a chair open for her. But that metaphoric empty chair is definitely always there. I know I’ll be thinking about her at Easter this year, as I do at every family gathering. Sometimes I can’t bring myself to go to family gatherings because I miss her too much and I see her in every family member. In my aunt Kathy who looks so much like her, in my Grandpa’s hands and eyes, in every room of my grandparent’s house where she once sat or stood or hugged someone goodbye.