In trying to quickly buy some basic groceries , a conversation a few weeks ago where the person bagging groceries shared that a pattern in my clothing reminded her of the carpet in The Shining. ( Edit , actual shorts not pictured not promising a future edit in that beard , though crazier shit has has opened , so )
Question : Who was the designer of the custom carpet that she was referring to ,
One might ask themselves when quickly trying to adequately respond -
( “ W H A T / ) ,! “Oh these !”
cue continued employee enthusiasm where she shares her interior design replications at previous living environments somehow also in the very short window of interaction
Answer , that I previously was not yet acutely aware of !
“ DAVID HICKS was perhaps the "Dyvid Byley" of interior designers: the only exponent of that profession the man in the street might be able to put a name to. For nearly 40 years Hicks has been a household word - to many a household god - and his style a touchstone of good, mad, but never indifferent, taste.In Hicks's incandescent glamour and vaunting talent, they saw vast potential. Some dazzling union must be achieved: a marriage of patrician wealth and raw ambition. It was. In 1958, joined by the equally brilliant young decorator Tom Parr (who went on to head Colefax and Fowler), Hicks and Parr opened in London on Lowndes Place, off Belgrave Square. No one who was there that first evening will forget the 27 metal African lances hung exactly five-and-a-half inches apart, horizontally, on one wall, or a thousand watts lighting, in relief, a vast baroque torso. The spare sparse energy, the space, the scale, were literally breathtaking. The David Hicks style had truly arrived. He was let down, himself, however, by a disastrous business liaison which wreaked unaccustomed havoc. Hicks, with his reserve of courage and that irrepressible ego, retrenched and reorganised, building and decorating in many countries, but concentrating now on garden design, at which he was perhaps even more talented and original. The best example of his new- found genius is his own garden at the Grove, the lovely house in a fold of the valley below Britwell, where Pamela and he lived their elegant, harmonious, rock-and-royalty life for the past 20 years.”
“Here he could indulge in forcing nature into the linear and geometric patterns he so loved to use indoors, and devise elaborate humours - a trompe church steeple was attached to a hay-cart so that he could instantly terminate a distant view. And it was here, his handsome family around him, that David Hicks left, in tranquillity, the life he had so exuberantly adorned. David Nightingale Hicks, interior decorator and garden designer: born Coggeshall, Essex 25 March 1929; director, David Hicks Ltd 1960-98; married 1960 Lady Pamela Mountbatten (one son, two daughters); died Britwell Salome, Oxfordshire 29 March 1998.”
First though
“The Prison Policy Initiative launched a movement to protect our democracy from the prison industrial complex. And we’re winning; 49.6% of US residents now live in a state that has formally rejected prison gerrymandering. Here is the progress at a glance…”
“Drawing from the work of Judith Herman and her observations on violence within the domestic sphere, Haughton notes, “one may conclude that the most dangerous place for women and children is the home” Indeed, the home is depicted as a highly ambivalent milieu in both of our films, and in ways that seem to respond to one another. Greg Keeler approaches films like The Shining through a synoptic analysis articulated around the duplicity of the home. The Torrances's problems, he writes, “are no sooner confronted than they go whipping into the void of the huge ‘home’ which isolated the three of them.”
“In the climactic sequence of The Shining, Jack uses an axe to take down not one, but two doors during his rampage into the heart of the family quarters “Wendy, I’m home!” he emphatically exclaims as he hacks through the first one (02:01:56), and just before hacking into the second one, he recites the words of the fairy tale antagonist, This anticlimactic doubling of the intrusion,”
“…embedded in the narrative through Jack’s complete negligence of the facility’s maintenance, as Wendy (Shelley Duvall) is shown fulfilling those daily duties. Grady then encourages Jack’s legitimate reclaiming of the title: he is, and has always been, the caretaker.”
“Here, it seems relevant to high- light the pivotal role of the figure in the etiology of trauma akin to domestic violence. As Herman states in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror,
“chronic childhood abuse takes place in a famil- ial climate of pervasive terror, in which ordinary caretaking relationships have been profoundly disrupted. Thus, in the midst of a scene concerned with patriarchal violence, the heavy emphasis on the polysemous term betrays its subversive- ness—While the band’s “home” filters through the walls, bringing this ambivalent caretaker back to the ambivalent home he personifies.”
“Before filming, Kubrick and Diane Johnson read Freud’s famous essay, “The Uncanny,” which explored the disturbing effects of the strangely familiar. The word derives from the German “unheimlich,” which translates as “unhomely.” The essay’s central thesis is that the homely carries the unhomely; that it can become a place of terror rather than safety. The Shining as a whole is shot through with the uncanny residing in the familiar. Achieved through structurally impossible, disorientating architecture and simmering tension, the film is equally concerned with the undercurrents of violence as the violence itself. The change of atmosphere in a room is inexplicable to those without a heightened sensitivity to it; that the film amplifies these undercurrents so precisely is due in part to Kubrick’s technical prowess: The use of the Steadicam allows what Roger Luckhurst calls a “dream-like, subjectless glide through the spaces of the hotel.”
“Much of The Shining speaks so well to domestic abuse and its patterns: claustrophobia, confinement, misdirection. Which version of events is real? Who gave Danny the bruises on his neck? We’re encouraged, repeatedly, to doubt ourselves and our instincts—and this is the premise on which abuse rests. Even after we learn that Jack once dislocated Danny’s shoulder, he insists, “I love you more than anything else in the whole world. I would never do anything to hurt you. Never. You know that, don’t you?” It’s a familiar pattern: inflicting pain, and hoping that the expression of love withdraws its effects—or, worse, makes the action justified.”
“In her discussion of gaslighting in Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair,”
‘The Shining,’
Domestic Violence, and the Architecture of Horror
“Horror isn’t in the gothic and ghostly,
but in the people we’re taught to love. Horror is close to home.”
Domestic Violence Restraining Orders Laws and Forms: 50-State Survey
What Were Federal Agents Doing at a Puerto Rican Museum in Chicago?
“Felonies are often divided into sub-categories in order to determine punishment, such as first- second-, or third-degree offenses. Punishment may include imprisonment for one year to life, or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole in some jurisdictions. Federal criminal law and many states allow imposition of the death penalty in some murder cases.”
“At a criminal trial for a felony offense, the accused has the right to an attorney, including the right to a public defender if he or she cannot afford a lawyer. Defendants also have the right to have an impartial jury hear their case. The jury must reach a unanimous verdict in order to convict.”
“Felonies may also be punishable by a fine, often in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. If a defendant pleads guilty to a felony offense, a court may approve a period of probation, during which the defendant must avoid further legal trouble and meet regularly with a probation officer in order to avoid serving the prison term.”
The above proved to make for some insightful reading,
-Also Included Today
Some more incredible portraits , and
Economic Consequences of the U.S. Convict Labor System
10 ways that mass incarceration is an engine of economic injustice
Prison Policy Initiative, August, 2025
“Rather than alleviate poverty through jobs, housing, education, and healthcare, the U.S. uses criminalization to force people to comply with a deeply unequal economy.”
“The Prison Policy Initiative organized this website to be the starting point for anyone interested in learning more about the problem of prison gerrymandering.
“The website's navigation menu is designed to give you an overview of prison gerrymandering: the problem and the solutions. Separately, the menu provides some starting places to take action in your community or at the national level.”
“ The downside to producing so much information is that it can be difficult to find a particular piece of information that speaks to your specific need. This page provides an alternative introduction to the dozens of state-by-state and district-by-district reports, hundreds of articles and fact sheets, and thousands of communications with elected officials spread across both this topical website and our main organizational website.”
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“When incarceration rates soared to record highs in the 1980s and ’90s, some corporations saw a business opportunity. They promised lower costs and, in many cases, profit-sharing agreements. Prison and jail administrators started privatizing everything from food and commissary to entire operations of facilities.”
“Proponents of for-profit prisons say the government relies on contractors for services it cannot always provide on its own, from the brick and mortar of a new facility to phone time and food for those inside. And because it’s easier to cancel contracts, there is greater incentive to provide better service, “
“Ultimately, that leads to better living conditions and more effective reintroduction of the incarcerated back into society, with the ultimate goal of reducing recidivism” - “But not everyone agrees In 2019, criminal and immigration justice advocates successfully moved nine major banks,
including J.P. Morgan and Bank of America, to stop lending money to private prisons.”
Reminders, setting some reminders to remember to spend more time writing starting and ending each day when not recording and sharing music. Thanks for reading through and relating or not to some of the ways these interactions allow for. Made by a human and not a program , and sharing the pictures of cats that other people have added to the stock image option here because that’s in part a large part of why the internet exists in the first place.
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https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org
