Gypsy Fires

Russell Patrick Brown, PhD
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  • Philosophy
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Short audio transmissions from an American Gypsy. Insights from the road and the teachings my family has carried for centuries crafted through decades of research. Lacho drom. newsletter.gypsyfires.com

Episodes

  1. 3d ago

    Prayer for a Young Man

    A Young Man Goes in Circles May you find strength in every gentle touch. May you find your voice in listening to those who have not been heard. May you find wisdom in forgiveness. May you find your heart in the boy inside you. May you find the man in all that you are to become. Gypsy Fires is completely independent and depends on support from readers like you to continue. Please consider supporting at just $6 a month. Dear young folk, I wrote this prayer for a young man I knew who was lost, and all the more so because the same problems in his life just kept happening again, again and then again. He had elders in his life, but the gap of lived experience was just too damn wide for the wisdom to flow into his life where it needed to, and the elders were too far away to see what was happening to his world around him. And somehow, it was all his fault—or so it seemed to him. That young twenty-something was me. I know you don’t know me, but I don’t need to be your grandfather to tell you that I care about you, your hopes and dreams, your future, and—one day—the young people you will help. I wish I had more decades (I’m 43) before writing something like this to you, but things are changing quickly now. The threads that have traditionally connected us together through the generations are no longer just cut, they’re being forgotten. I’m a lifelong carrier of what many call folk culture and a dance PhD in the embodied history of us—that is I study how being human has changed for the last 500 years. In my work and artistic life I am seeing really important things go missing from our lives every day at a faster pace. People used to sing when they worked with the land. They used to dance with their toddlers. They used to hold each other and sing love songs in public. They used to gather at night around the kitchen table or fire and tell each other stories. Men and women alike had visions from beyond while doing household chores. Things may not have been perfect, but we had this—and it was everything. It may not seem so important right now, but as you get older and need some guidance, folklore is that compass, wheel and watch to help you down the road of your life. Many peoples all over the world are resisting this silent erasure, but there is no mistaking that there is a war on our humanity, and we need you right now. There are a lot of people who want to control you who do not have your best intentions at heart. One of the ways these heads of business, media and government manufacture control is by creating tech-enabled youth cultures that keep you away from and mistrustful of those who care about you the most. Some will just say this is how it has always been, and that’s a lie. In so many cultures throughout human history, your desire to forge your own road in a new way doesn’t mean you must be cut off from family, community and tradition. Just because you want change doesn’t mean you no longer deserve the same love you received when you held your parents close all through the night. Wanting new things doesn’t mean you can’t also learn from and benefit from the old. And if you haven’t had that, well, I know myself and many, many others are here for you. So, for today, we don’t have to solve all the world’s problems. I just want you to know that yes, you’re being robbed of so many things, but you don’t have to let them take your love for nature, your body, your community, your family, your creativity, your voice, your art, your ingenuity, your hope or even your tech on your own terms. As a Gypsy, I can say that in the worst of times this inheritance is what gets us through, and in good times we’ll need this to rebuild and remember what really matters. I don’t know how you need to solve the problems you are facing, but I know how much harder it feels when you’re alone. I know how hard it can be to make connections when you don’t have what seems like everyone else has. I know what it’s like not to get all the guidance you need from your family and have to look for adopted elders to help make you whole. In the face of all these things that can leave you feeling like you’re not enough and it’s all unfair or even impossible, there is some age-old wisdom that can help. It’s very simple and cuts through some of the b******t: What tables will you sit at in your life? Tables are important but transient spaces. Some of the most valuable things you will do in your life is at a table, but you also must be invited to sit at them. And most of the time, you’re not looking for tables you’ll sit at just once, you want to come back and—importantly—you want the other people at it to want you to come back. Some people spend their lives dreaming about tables that they might one day sit at, while throwing away the ones where they could never, ever be replaced. Some get there and realize it’s not what they thought it would be. Others are strategically invited to some tables, where their presence is symbolic and their voices aren’t welcome. Then there are those who force themselves upon someone else’s table, or coerce others to sit at theirs. Tables can get very complicated. So maybe you have tables you already sit at, and you don’t appreciate them yet. Perhaps there are tables you should leave and never come back to. Or maybe you already know what it’s like to sit and share a meal or cup of tea at a table with friends on a Tuesday afternoon, and it’s time to teach it to someone else who might have never had a table to sit at. Maybe, that table-less person is you, and you can’t see that there people right now waiting to sit at a table that you’ll put together one day. Looking back, what I’d share with the young man I wrote this prayer for is that the circles he was going in were the returning and returning to a table of his own making. One that he had to forage, harvest and carve alone—a traveling table that one day he could invite his family, elders, peers and youth to share in, and his heart would be fed with a love he never imagined possible. I can’t promise my table will be here forever, but you’re welcome to come back. I hope you do. Lacho drom, Russell Thank you for joining me by the fire. If you had someone in mind when you read this, please consider sharing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsletter.gypsyfires.com/subscribe

  2. Aug 14

    KALIPEN: Darkness in Sinti and Roma Culture

    What happens when we see color not as a map of hierarchy, but as the world in time? At a summer camp on water ecology in high school I had a friend who was taught all the wrong names for colors by her older brother, and purple-for-orange haunted her into adulthood. I know it sounds poetic but it really was not for her. I did learn the standard English names for color and how to see them, but my interest in visual arts education stopped there. Puce, teal and ochre remained fabulous, unpainted words to me. Over a dinner of Daire’s tacos, Jackie—holding up a glass of champagne to the light coming from Daire’s edible fairy garden—showed us a tawny pink that could not be captured in paint. Like when Maria taught me to dance with the yellow of gorse blossoms, it just seemed to happen. I began to feel color. This was not however the first color that Jackie showed me. In early August of 2025 as famine began to set in on the people of Gaza, she drew a red line. Perhaps the mark across the white page could suggest that good and bad were either side. But genocidal famine became the watercolor stroke itself—bleeding through the page. The fading, pressing and splattering of a brush dripped a massacre without beginning or end. When murder, theft and greed engulf self and society, the primordial fear of falling stirs. Will we plunge into catastrophe? Will we rise above? For millennia, there have been maps ready to explain who is allowed to fall, and who is destined to ascend above all. These colors are drawn onto my family’s skin. Gypsy Fires is completely supported by readers like you. I have been waiting for immigration to process for a year and have been unable to work. Please consider a paid subscription of just $6 a month so that I may continue this work. Inventing Light Supremacy When the Normans sought to cement their rule over Britain after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, they relied heavily on ideological propaganda. The most famous example, the Bayeux Tapestry, presents a heavily sanitized narrative that favored William “the Conqueror.” A century later, the crown continued to gather power and took aim at the local Church, culminating in the 1170 murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket under Henry II. It was within this climate of elite consolidation that the aristocratically commissioned Winchester Psalter (c. 1150–1160) visually reinforced these rigid new hierarchies. Among its most famous illuminations is the “Hellmouth,” which scholars interpret as a demonic vagina dentata swallowing souls into primeval darkness while an archangel locks the door. Paired with medieval cosmological maps ranking Heaven, Earth and Hell, this imagery confirms that to those in power, blackness, femininity and the earth were framed as chaotic forces to be demonized and subjugated. This visual coding was matched by an audible one. In the medieval liturgical imagination, Satan was painted black and stripped of song. In The Play of Adam, a 12th-century church drama that helped stage the Christian cosmos, Satan enters “niger et deformis” (black and misshapen), unable to make music. The absence of melody marked his distance from divine order; blackness became both a visual and sonic shorthand for separation from grace. Through these visual and theatrical performances, the Church taught that to exist outside divine light was to exist outside harmony itself. Centuries later, European empire gradually translated this theology into secular philosophy. During the “enlightenment”, the medieval framework of “divine light versus chaotic darkness” was reframed through scientific rationalism. The “light of God” became the “light of Reason,” placing white European men at the pinnacle of a global hierarchy while categorizing non-European peoples, lands and traditions as also dark, irrational and subject to mastery in the form of colonization, slavery and genocide. Rather than dismantling medieval theological dualism, modernity gave it nonsensical “scientific” authority and globalized it. These re-coded binaries culminated in 19th-century scientific racism and eugenics: pseudosciences engineered to rationalize violence that continue to shape modern institutions and algorithms today. It reflects how numbers can be used to quantify self-serving fiction in order to elaborately hide nothing more than the greed, lust, ignorance and vanity of lesser men. It takes blackness, darkness, African-ness, “others” them and relegates them to primitive “beginnings” found below, wrapped in disparaging or exoticizing tropes. Kalipen in Sinti and Roma Culture The fear of falling into nothingness within a system engineered to benefit the few at the expense of the many haunts us still today. And there are those of course who were never allowed to get up in the first place because we were put outside the system entirely. A recent popular narrative among gadje (non-Roma) historians is that we, the Roma and Sinti, were India’s Untouchables who were so low we were cast out of the caste system to wander the world in abject poverty. As I will continue to write in pieces such as the history of medieval Roma and Sinti print and what we have created in our culture, these narratives of low caste have been crafted exclusively by non-Roma to hide their own ancestral history of impoverishment as medieval peasantry while obscuring the richness of our culture. Modern “gypsy science” and eugenics enclose our entire identity in a colonial understanding of Indian history where we have nothing, which easily facilitates perpetual, everyday looting of our culture. Meanwhile, many Roma and Sinti remember our deeper roads that reach through the trade networks of South Asia and across the waters to East Africa around what today is Somalia. Even still, I am not immune to misinformation with a thousand-year head start. When I confront this history and injustice, I can feel my insides stained with that inherited shame and internalized racism, while a bright, blinding fantasy tempts me to believe that if I just perform enough "good deeds," I can somehow earn my way into the light. I hear echoes of my dark-skinned grandfather teaching my mother how to survive racism in the United States: by dressing impeccably, having money and keeping backup plans and a shotgun close, just in case. Yet as a Gypsy, this internalized self-hatred for not being perfectly white is not my truth, it is just a gadjo dream I am experiencing. My truth is that darkness is not a curse or something to be understood in rigid doctrine, it is life and who we are. Quite literally, it’s what we call each other on the road: Calé in Spain, Kale in Wales, Kaale in Finland and so on. It is our kalipen: darkness or blackness. Kalipen certainly refers to our skin tone and features, which have survived even the most racist and white supremacist eugenics, slavery and genocide. But its history predates modern race theory, and also the medieval European construction of the Hellmouth that sealed away the dark, earthly feminine. We can find evidence of this in the Sanskrit, which Romani and Sinti language thread through. The ancient word Kāla (काल) holds concepts of destiny, death, the color black and darkness. It also refers to counting and calculations, or the perception of time itself. It represents both the dark, black or blue-black of time, the universe, origins and endings, but as well how we perceive, confuse and limit this as death-bound beings. When we speak of the wheels, the chakras in Sanskrit and Romungró (my language), we connect to the Kālachakra or “wheel of time". This is not the evil “dark one” of Robert Jordan’s Whee of Time. It is the experience of existence . It is what I know when I choose to close my eyes and sit in silence. In playfully naming each other kali and kalo, we are stating the obvious, but we are also enacting the courage to do what so many fear to do—remember deep time. It is the confidence to remember before the borders were laid down, before the caste systems and before the hierarchy of a light heaven and dark hell were even formed. It is a memory through time. It is a word that does not create a map of hierarchy, but one of how to move, understand and embody in the world that holds the rich hues of the earth and vastness of the universe in our very skin. Kalipen does not need a pedestal, a monument or center on a map. It’s simply what we call each other on the road. It holds a wide, decentralized memory, destiny and reality of South and Southwest Asia, of threads through Africa, of the night sky and of the brown earth that feeds us. Kalipen carries no lineage of sin, rank or formal theology. Blackness in our own tongue is not something to be counted, assessed or centralized, but the fluid movement of time, memory and relation. Kalipen restores space and time between all people and things. It is what reminds me to resist owning anything with my own presenting whiteness and instead guard peace, allowing and deliberation. It has always lived beyond the eugenics map and acts as a living, felt choreonavigation. Kalipen does not co-opt the specific history or political reality of Black folks of the African diaspora, but orients in solidarity and reciprocity with them and all people of color, and away from the pale vampires of our lore that drain our life. Many Sinti and Roma traditions, especially in France, traditionally honor Sara e Kali (Saint Sara the Black). She is not elevated onto a cathedral altar; at her shrine in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, she arrives by sea alongside the Three Marys as a companion. Her dark face is not a warning of damnation, and she offers no ladder to climb. She stands as a living refutation of the Scala Intellectus: proof that the divine is always present. Unrecognized by church and empire, she will endure in the earth itself and medallions over our hearts if necessary. She dances with the Godde

  3. Aug 7

    Romani Journeys Through Time: Survival Across Continents

    Dear Traveler, Thank you to so many of you who signed up for Gypsy Fires this last week. As a Rom and an academic, I am writing for more of you than I ever thought I would be, and I take this very seriously. Not only is your time and your thinking-space precious, but writing about my culture, my identity and my life in a way that honors all those who came before, share Romanipen with me now and will come after me is a tremendous responsibility. But on this I do not stand alone nor do I have to re-invent the chakra (“wheel” in our language). In the last year I have been exploring Substack, Alex Carberry came into my feed as a powerful figure of thought leadership, insight and gentle wisdom. His piece, Están Fritos, brings a highly critical yet honest perspective on the entanglements of market, desire and creole lived experience that assaulted my own grandiose visions of liberating futurisms; we do not have to keep producing our own salvation in a system that will never allow it but knows how to capitalize our hopes, dreams and resistance. But what then? Alex also does live conversation on Substack, and his most recent discussion with Meticulous Prime on the importance of understanding Ghana in the great colonial project helps with another piece of the puzzle of woe we find ourselves in. It is Alex’s systems thinking and pattern recognition that drove me to ask if he would be willing to do a live session with me, and thankfully he said yes not only to me but to a focus on Romani Journeys Through Time with a transcontinental perspective. The full recording is available above with links to podcast versions. Rethinking How We Remember The doorway of this conversation I think, is the observation that Alex makes in the clip below. We have choices about how we remember ourselves, and it is a choice to put the most violent men found in history in the center of our history classes. It’s a decision we can change. But if you’re here, you might already be aware of what oppressors do and what our harmful, sacrificial economic system does and will keep doing. What you might not be aware of is how the folk, the people, remember these mass murderers and highway robberies, as my grandmother called it. Gypsy Fires is completely self-funded and your support allows me to keep going. Please consider subscribing and upgrading to a paid subscription Genocide as Theft, Not Just Hatred Before you might listen, I want to add emphasis to a critically important point: genocides and racism are never, ever just about supremacy or prejudice. They are about stealing—and then calling the victimized the thieves who deserve the gas chamber. “Highway robbery” is a memory of a time in England (1600-1800) when the privatization of the commons drove people into dire poverty and desperation. Their social contract was being most cruelly re-written in real time, and they were blamed for it. The real thieves, of course, were the capitalists using gibbet cages, transportation and slavery to make enormous profits while they decimated ecologies, including deforesting most of Ireland and many other lands. But this is not what is taught in school. Race-fueled genocides and ethnic cleansing are about stealing, and more importantly, using hatred, ignorance and apathy to hide that theft is what is happening. This happens because if everyone realized that genocides today are still about stealing from victims and then blaming the oppressed for it, the conversation would have to change and maybe, just maybe, we all would realize what has been taken from us and what it is used for. Our conversation though, is more about the memory of these events. For the Roma and Sinti, I believe, it is our long recall of ourselves and the world as travelers that helps keep us tied to our humanity while others lose their humanity to protect stories of borders, labels and empires. This is part of timedancing and that we are timedancers—khelašia e cejteske. The Disappearing Record of the Samudaripen The samudaripen of the Sinti and Roma in WWII, the Holocaust, is commemorated in many countries August 2nd-3rd, which is when in 1944, 2,897 Roma, mostly women, children and elderly people, were killed in the Gypsy family camp (Zigeunerfamilienlager) at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Although it has taken 80 years, more people are aware of the Sinti and Roma genocide today than I ever thought they would be. They are still given, however, an incomplete picture. Not only did the genocide fail to begin to be recognized until 40 years after WWII ended, the numbers of those murdered are underreported. Our own people 20 years after counted some 4 million dead—and remember they would know best as most Roma and Sinti were shot on sight and not counted by tattoo and IBM punchcard. Then that has fallen to 2 million. Then ten years ago 500,000 and then now I’m seeing 250,000. The need for the system to keep lying is plainly evidenced as well when BMW blocked a memorial to slaves from the Dachau concentration camp who died in their factory in Munich. BMW has never had to pay reparations for that slave labor, and their business today still stands upon those profits (think of all the companies today profiting from genocide and how rich they are getting while many slide into poverty or disappear entirely). Or how the German government wants to remove the Memorial to The Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered Under National Socialism for public transport construction. The memorial sits in a park. And somehow they need to tear this site apart for the public good. All this lying however, still hides the deepest lie. The one that Alex mentioned from Martin Luther, that we ought to “call a thing what it really is.” And that’s theft. Not only did the Nazis and their collaborators in many countries target Roma and Sinti families of all economic classes, they did so to steal what wealth they had. To steal their jobs. Their trades. Their traditions. They did it re-write centuries of European history which includes the Roma and Sinti bringing print to Germany decades before people claim Gutenberg invented the printing press. They wished to settle the score, and this would have enduring implications far beyond Europe, especially in the world of the arts. As I highlight in the clip below, the idea of the wandering artist and free-spirit was inspired by Roma and Sinti trade routes, practices, ingenuity and embodied knowledge. The most famous, well-regarded and beloved American musical of all time is undoubtedly Gypsy, and that name is no accident—nor is it an accident the producers of the recent Broadway revival declined to educate the public on the history of that word even as academics and journalists discussed representations of race within the show and the broader theater world. I will have a chapter out with Routledge next year further in depth on these topics with a focus on what I call “American Bohemianism”. Cultural Appropriation & Modern Erasure Among the fallouts of the Holocaust was a large scale deletion of the public memory of our long-standing contributions and development within European culture. It is the erasure that allowed the Judson Dance Movement in New York City and somatic movements from Europe to Australia to claim to discover “movement analysis” (Laban), “human-to-human” transmission (Forti), Body-Mind Centering (Cohen) and other nonsensical frameworks intended to cash in on what families like mine have always known and claim exclusive ownership of it. Genocide gave the permission slip to Rudolf Laban, who worked in the Nazi party, and many other artists to claim to discover, copyright and own what was already widely known for thousands of years in dance communities European and American empires were actively murdering and stealing from. Dance always keeps a record of what happened, and it’s why in my conversation with Alex I keep returning to it. It’s why I opened Gypsy Fires: not to call you or anyone thieves, but to help you see what was stolen from you because occupation is a disease, and it doesn’t just spread through war—but in plain sight. If you have any thoughts or feedback, please do share in the comments or send me an email. I’m eager to hear what you think. Lacho drom, Russell This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsletter.gypsyfires.com/subscribe

  4. Jul 31

    Bankers Always Use New Tech To Burn Books

    In early 2023 I was working in engineering for America’s largest publisher, and I could see something was going very wrong with the publishing industry. For years billionaires had already consolidated ownership of almost all US American presses and news outlets, an obvious conflict of interest as journalists are supposed to expose bad dealings in business and politics. Now “Artificial Intelligence” was gaining mass popularity after a couple decades of floundering under the much less sexy name of “Data Science". While my colleagues were excited, I went on our public AI enthusiast Slack channel and threw water on the party: * This is not AI, it’s just algorithmically brilliant machine learning, or glorified N+1 math * They’re using the term “AI” to hide that they are scraping all our content, training their models on it and then stealing our customers! I had learned how to use Machine Learning years ago, and knew that the models themselves don’t know how to do anything other than predict—they’re worthless without content to train upon. While I received silence from my colleagues, months later the primary owner of our business, Barry Diller (famously the inspiration for “Mr Burns” in The Simpsons), sounded an alarm that publishing and print were in danger from copyright violation on a massive scale. Now, Anthropic has been revealed in their secret Project Panama to be buying millions of books—especially old and rare—scanning them and then destroying them. Anthropic’s apparent ethical advantages over scandal-ridden OpenAI has not only collapsed, but revealed solidarity with OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman’s desire to create “a future where intelligence is a utility.” Suddenly, the original open-source dream of AI and a world with more access to information becomes a dictator’s dream of paying for access to machine-curated information. The destruction of the books after ingestion by bots has the internet particularly up in arms, and with good reason. This is an old playbook to enclose knowledge, put a price tag on it and destroy anything or anyone that isn’t in line with the propaganda. But the pattern goes much further back than people realize, and reveals the power of the alternative libraries of the body and how they resist and survive consumption. The Machine Behind Gutenberg When the story of the European Renaissance and Age of Discovery is told, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type printing press in the mid-15th century is typically cited as a reason for the “Enlightenment” from the Medieval Dark Ages. But this myth hides a much older story of theft of technological innovation and the banking strategy that would be used to enclose this technology, enabling centuries of book burning, genocide and the suppression of human memory. Kristina Richardson’s groundbreaking text on the Roma in the Medieval Islamic World confirms that the Roma had been using print since the 10th century. We had this technology thanks to our highly-valued work within Asia, and the technology had been developed earlier still in China. As Roma and Sinti crossed into Southern Germany in the early 1400s as “Gyp-sees” (from Little Egypt), German medieval monks came into contact with our block printing presses and the diverse religious texts we were printing with them. The deep irony, of course, is that the technology we helped pioneer would later be turned into an instrument of our own erasure. Now is the second part of the history of print most people also do not know. To pull off his invention, Gutenberg took on enormous loans from Johann Fust, a wealthy goldsmith and financier. When the press was finally operational, Fust sued Gutenberg for debt repayment, foreclosed on the shop and seized control of the enterprise alongside Gutenberg’s foreman, Peter Schöffer. Fust used Gutenberg’s press and amassed a large fortune from scaling it up. One of his earliest and most profitable enterprises was the morally bankrupt process of mass-printing letters of indulgence (paid forgiveness of “sin”) for the Catholic Church. When the elites saw the Roma and Sinti bring ingenuity, they saw not only profit but the possibility of control of all forms of knowledge. Gutenberg’s bible did not bring a new age of enlightenment of knowledge and democratic learning as we have been told, but one of global censorship and a transfer of knowledge and wealth. It created a centralized version of the bible so that other bibles and texts could be cast out and destroyed. Pedro Berruguete’s 1490s painting of Saint Dominic was commissioned at the height of the Spanish Inquisition and visualizes this exact doctrine of erasure. “Heretical” books burn in a public bonfire while the approved text miraculously floats unharmed above the flames. In the eyes of the Church, fire cleansed the world of blasphemous texts leaving all competing knowledge and many of the people who carried it to ash. This ideological violence was immediately scaled through banking’s support of the printing press. Texts like the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”) in 1497 were mass-produced, quickly becoming European bestsellers. The manual was weaponized across Europe and exported to the Americas to identify, torture, extract knowledge from and execute “witches.” Hand in hand with inquisitorial blacklists and imperial decrees, print technology systematically outlawed folk medicine, herbalism and indigenous codices worldwide. As feminist scholar Silvia Federici observes, this was not mere religious fanaticism; it was the enclosure and colonization of embodied, female-led medicine, ecology and community health. Indigenous libraries around the world were looted and destroyed. Centuries of localized wisdom were forcibly stripped from autonomous practitioners and extracted into the institutional hands of aristocratic, ecclesiastical and mercantile men. The Eye of the Machine This data-driven enclosure was not limited to medicine. The 1824 Ordnance Survey of Ireland—the most ambitious mapping program in history—demonstrated how cartography and print could be weaponized for imperial surveillance. But in the 19th century the obsession with observation turned to eugenics. By the 19th/20th century, British and American "Gypsy Lore" scholars were indexing Romani skulls, lives and lineages. In the 1930s the Nazi Racial Hygiene Research Center would take the colonization of our culture to an entirely new level. The Reich studied Roma and Sinti lineages, languages and social networks , and provided that data to IBM’s Hollerith punch cards. These cards were fundamental to the development of computing in the 20th century, and they were used by the Nazis to target, round up and kill at terrifying speed. They confirmed an ancient relationship between bankers who buy technology and despots looking for the power and financing for authoritarian rule. Today AI companies like Microsoft partner with OpenAI and seduce us into digitizing Romani languages in the name of “inclusion”. Meanwhile, Meta’s smart surveillance glasses offer real-time translation tools that ICE agents can weaponize during deportation raids of innocent people who are disappeared. In the United States, Roma and Sinti remain legally unrecognized and unprotected, leaving communities vulnerable under legacy “gypsy laws” designed to criminalize and expel. We cannot even count the crisis as European Roma and gadje academics remain focused almost exclusively on Europe. The Library of the Body How does knowledge survive when the state indexes information and industrializes deletion? It lives where it has always lived: in the body. How does it protect itself? By staying unwritten. When the Druids were invaded by the Romans, they continued to keep their most sacred teachings private and unwritten. They saw the machine for what it was—something coming for their resources and entire way of life. Their choice to withhold knowledge and resist led to the long-standing myth that they were barbaric and illiterate—a claim disproved by Julius Caesar himself, who recorded in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Book 6, Chapter 14) that the Druids could read and write for everyday matters. Their rich oral culture did not prevent their stronghold on the Isle of Mona off the Welsh coast from being sacked, their sacred oak groves cut down and their lands torn up for copper. (Sound familiar?) Yet, it did protect their wisdom so that it could live on as embodied, lived knowledge that people still carry today. This tension between written state records and unwritten survival lived directly in my own upbringing. When my mother was the first in our family to go to university, she wanted to study journalism. Along with my father, they read books at incredible speed, reading entire novels in a day. We had a computer in our house before almost all of my classmates, and we always believed in the power of what I call embodied engineering. This means to intuit and move with machines on their own terms and adapt their use in order to communicate through hostile terrain. A couple decades later I ended up doing just this: managing websites for America’s largest publishers. We did not know the written history of our ancestral connection to print. It was our ingenuity that carried this knowledge—a lifelong practice of translating our somatic intelligence into something the world might understand. This allowed me as a software engineer to understand code as choreography and choreography as code and work in the complex world of online publishing for brands like the Fortune500 and People Magazine. As I will repeatedly argue in Gypsy Fires and in my post on the practice of Timespinning, knowledge carried in our bodies can never be destroyed so long as the longing remains to remember it and the morals and values to answer the calling through y. To put it simply, we remember more than

  5. Jul 24

    Taking Back What Was Stolen

    It is never too late to dance with your father while listening to the songs of your mother. Who is allowed to fall? What is the repertoire of the risen? What secrets are hidden in the silent, violent archive? What vampires guard their vaults, and when we meet them, will we know the truth? What, then, is the courage of the dancer, and what is the dance? For the last year, I have been returning to these questions in writing and in rhythm, and I invite you to do the same. As this project has moved from our community in Ennistymon, County Clare, to Spain—with my family, my digital mahala, and alongside activists and resistance movements around the world—my answer to what my dance is (and what I can teach others) has become crystal clear. Now is always a good time to sway to a lullaby, have your toes and fingers counted in song and bounce across the ballroom floor in the arms of someone who is half your whole world. If you bear with me on this, you have permission to do it—even if it never happened for you as a child. In fact, we need you to do it. And then keep doing it through time. When I first heard academic circles speak of decolonization, I wasn’t sure if I was listening to theory or practice. That is: are we actually going to do something about this, or are we just talking about it? If things were taken that shouldn’t have been, who is accountable to give them back, and to whom? As so many are observing online, what does any of this mean when the colonization never actually stopped? I doubt the ability of the academy and most NGOs to do anything other than use “decolonization” as just another tool for colonization. Like many children in marginalized families, my parents helped me understand from an early age that things were deeply wrong in our society. They taught us that we need to hold onto our humanity because no one is coming to save us. It seemed to me that the only thing any of us can truly do is hold ourselves accountable—and, if possible, hold each other together. When I began my PhD in a small, rebellious program in Ireland, I received confirmation of this. While I may not be able to stop colonization as a whole, I can rigorously examine my own life within it with humility. I can see what’s really there once the accounting is done. I can let myself be stripped bare to the beams and rafters, and then dance. I can study the choreography of our civilization to see which traditions I will, in sober truth, carry forward—and notice the impact they have upon others. This has led me to one truth I can stand by: the power of dance as a decolonial method. In my research, the ancestors in the archive brought me repeatedly to the reality of how Roma, Sinti and other oppressed peoples were subjected to bondage of all sorts—including being transported in fetters or wearing heavy wooden shoes at gunpoint to perform hard labor. Yet, even in these horrific conditions, dance allowed a reclamation of body, time and space. As I wrote in my PhD: Our percussive dance tradition is a creation like no other. Even if we lose it all tomorrow through some disaster or unfathomable new evil form of body control, someone would find the rhythm of life in their body again. They would tap on the futuristic cage around them, and no matter how many times they were stopped—the pulse would spread. Gestures are contagious. Rhythm propagates. When we are down or when we are gone, the weights we carried in our dance now carry us. I would go even further now. I have learned in this last year that impact-driven dance isn’t just decolonial or pre-colonial. It continues in a world where colonialism simply does not exist. Body rhythm is the world where my father woke me up every morning playing the tin whistle and carried me around the ballroom floor; where my mother taught me to walk around the house on the balls of my feet, just as dancing masters had centuries ago; where my grandfather sat in the kitchen playing his accordion for anyone entering, while my grandmother sang, painted and sculpted. This was always my land. It will only be colonized if I let it be taken away—or if I turn into an occupier myself, standing in traditions and timelines that are not mine to move through. The liberation so many of us are seeking is, if we are honest, so often a longing for that innocence of connection to our parents—that increasingly forgotten world of play in music, dance, nature and community. We can bury this longing and pretend it isn’t there, or we can finally be hospitable to it, let it in and give it a cup of tea. If you give this a chance, even for a moment, I think you’ll find that the longing is the evidence. The play of life was always there, waiting for you to accept it. Regardless of your relationship with your parents, your desire for this intimacy—for the truth of your body in dance—is proof that it has always existed in your ancestry, your lineage and your blood. All it needed was for you to start tapping, quite literally, into it. I created Gypsy Fires because I want to share my researched path through Romanipen, so that I might help you see what was never taken away from you. I aim to do this through these letters, inside the Timedancing Lab where I teach embodied liberation theories, and through micro-dances designed to help you make movement the primary method of your life. The courage of the dancer, then, is to keep dancing. What that dance will be, where it came from and where it is going—that is something only you will find, and we are all discovering it anew in every moment. Whether this choreography will decolonize our destiny or perpetuate harm is entirely up to us. We have the moves. We have the heart. We have the dance. I created Gypsy Fires to help you see what was never taken away from you. Subscribe to get free letters in your inbox every Friday on dance, living archive and embodied liberation. Ready to take this work off the page and into your body? Upgrade to a paid subscription to unlock full access to the Timedancing Lab courses and the new Micro-Dance School somatic toolkit. Thank you for tending the fire with your support. If these words and rhythms resonated with you today, consider sharing this letter with someone who needs it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsletter.gypsyfires.com/subscribe

  6. Jul 17

    Male Loneliness

    Despite building so many roads, drawing powerful maps and driving much of the transportation, men are lost. Endless guidance on the importance of “strategy”(Seth Godin), the brilliance to “start with WHY” (Simon Sinek) and the promise of fulfillment if men just “build things that matter” (Simon Squibb) isn’t helping: Fires are burning in Wales, the Arctic winter has risen to 20C (68F), 150 Pacific Gray Whales have washed up dead on the American Pacific shore this year and Banda, India saw temperatures of 48C (118F) last month. As we turn up the heat from our consumption of fossil fuels to enable a world where private jets can be labeled green investment, endless compute for AI ambitions voided all climate agreements and endless consumption rips up and poisons the earth, we are returning to an era of the dinosaurs where the middle of the planet was uninhabitable, sea levels were 170 meters higher than today and temperate rainforests could grow in Antarctica—but now it’s a lot more toxic. Where’s the TED Talk calling out all this absolute b******t? We have been scammed by lust dressed up as virtue. The familiar faces of journalists and truthsayers risking their lives for a better world have been replaced by obscenely wealthy people draped in calm professionalism, podcasting headphones and frameworks that promise prosperity. As the world burns, influencers on Substack, social media and the press still promise “abundance” (Ezra Klein). Abundance of what? The call of a trillionaire(!) to colonize Mars isn’t the nobility of some male urge to adventure forth and find sustenance—something that in so many species such as lions is actually done almost entirely by the women. It is the grift and make-believe invocation of an old archetype of the male wandering alone into the wilderness without any of the demands to actually risk their own lives without the support of the 99% who are keeping them alive. It is impossible to live on Mars, and furthermore: If you or I got on a time machine, hit the buttons at random and went back to some point in Earth history, 90% of the time we would die as soon as we opened the airlock door. — Edwin Kite We are being called forth by the most powerful people on earth to venture forth and explore our annihilation. Even the most earnest of pleas to reset masculinity are mired in the same ambitions of desire. Scott Galloway gave us the reassuring “Protect, Provide, Procreate” from his Notes on Being a Man (2025), which reads as “what role play to expect of others in your relationships.” And critiques of this still say “why we need something more.” No. Enough of “more”. Dear Traveler, I return to this tired writing trope not only because I’m a Gypsy and I’m reclaiming it from people who do not know actually how to travel and only know how to be tourists and colonizers. I return to it because the condition of traveling is to, obviously, not be at home. To not have the entitlement that you can do whatever you want when you’re in someone else’s home. It is to admit that you are guest. It is to give yourself the permission to be lost. It is to free yourself from selfish demands that always end in pain, and instead give yourself the gift of allowing yourself to be found. Found by freedom. Found by people who might need you. Discovered by the world. But that’s jumping ahead. That’s getting back too quickly to a framework that’s going to allow us get busy again and avoid hopelessness along with confusion, uncertainty and fear of nothingness that comes with being alive. Throw out the podcasters, the think-tanks and the PhDs with all the answers. The “manosphere” is the womb we all wish we could return to where we’re magically just taken care of while we don’t even have the courage to admit that we occupy women’s spaces, bodies and thoughts already. I have been given the best education of feminism my entire life (and I’m gay), and I still cannot resist this pattern sometimes. But knowing this isn’t just my stepping back from my expectations to be seen, heard and loved. It’s my own permission to go into the wild. Let’s go into the wilderness together. While lots of institutions are going to lie to you right now about the history of Tarot and claim that cartomancy is just something people have always done, that is an exaggeration. Meanwhile, the divination of cards has always been part of a Roma, Sinti and Gypsy woman’s work and practices. The women in my family have known this for centuries and carried it quietly for our own safety—a lesson many gadji (non-Roma women) are learning right now as fascism threatens their influential intuitive voices online. But like astrology—another profession known well to Roma and Sinti although not exclusively—Tarot has gained mass popularity through extraction especially by turn of the 19th-20th century occultists, and gives us shared language right now for the archetypal. It is how I want to invite you to consider the Hermit—the wizard-y looking old man with a lantern and staff going into the night alone. The figure of the wizard is an old one, and much of his magic and insight was inspired not just by imaginations of Celticism and its Druids, but by the wandering minstrels, sages and travelers that are part of my people—the Gypsies. There is a lot of stereotype and misunderstanding around this, including the belief that we are free, careless people. This is not true. Our history in the world is thousands of years old; we did not just stumble out of India a thousand years ago by some tragic accident as you might have been told. Things have happened to us, but we have always carried within and between ourselves our truth of humanity, non-violence and independence from systems that harm others. It is the vulnerable position of being alive that is missing in these man-stories, and is summoned in Victor Frankl’s timeless Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). But even his choice to choose attitude gives us back that hope that we’ll get it right. We can get the band back together, fix the machine or get back to the arms of those we have outgrown or lost. Our minds are terribly clever. But returning to the Hermit, what I notice in the face of the old bearded man is his youthfulness. His hooded head cast down shows us a softness, a gentleness we tend to only associate with the young, naive and hopeful. It is his submission to death of his ego, ambitions and, one day, his life that softens his face into agelessness. In old age, perhaps, it is not hope that we need from our elders. It’s surrender. It is knowledge that things did not, in fact, work out. It is the willingness to return to what has been unknown and the liberation that all things one day go away. The Hermit is not just losing himself in the world, he does what so many men of forgotten mystery schools have done. He vanishes into the real frontier—time itself. He reveals to us not nihilism or black-pill defeat-ism, but the truth we are all hungry for. I’m almost 43, so I cannot speak for young men, although soon I hope to share a prayer I wrote to myself as a young man. I can speak as a person looking ahead at what I was told would be my era to lead and shape the world for the better. The only leadership, right now, I seem to be able to offer, is a responsible form of retreat. To do less. To touch the world lightly. To be grateful to be fed and safe. To let yourself be received by that which is being rejected by almost everyone who wants to offer you certainty, especially when monsters are lurking everywhere. Unfortunately, I have no powers of organized or violent resistance to give you, but I pass no judgement upon it. There is sobriety in his journey. There is wisdom. De-occupy masculinity from modern demands. Maybe try letting go of what you’re expecting out of manhood and maybe, just try enjoying it for once. Notice when others actually truly enjoy it, and what that reveals about you. All of these men telling us what it is to be a man all seem to have one thing in common; despite having it all, they’re profoundly unhappy. So stop and rest. I’m not saying men, especially the powerful who are living in the wealth of other people’s labor, should shirk their responsibilities. If that’s you, you have a responsibility to recognize the world has always been able to exist without you and will continue to. It is you who need it. Also, that the foundation of human civilization has always been women and children, and if we study history, it seems as though it’s almost always been men terrorizing that civilization. But I know none of these men are reading this or have read this far into this piece. I am speaking, I suppose, to those men who have had their hopes and futures taken from them by a system that tells them they are not enough and ensures they have even less than that. Men who have been told that baller lifestyles are what they need to provide. That being lustful and lusted after is accomplishment. That being defensive or attacking innocents when you’re hurt and scared is bravery. I know more and more of you are alone. You don’t have people to care for or children of your own, and what to do now is a big, scary question easily buried by distractions. I don’t know if there is an answer or framework for what men are and what masculinity should be, whether divine, ordinary or dangerous. I do know looking at the Hermit that perhaps we are also looking at a young person who must bear a burden and a wisdom far beyond their years. But to quote one brave wizard who went into the wild of his own imagination amidst the slaughter of the trenches of the First World War while colonial genocides spread around the world: All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. — “Gandalf” in The Lord of the Rings I think in Gandalf, JRR Tolkien gave us the wise man and leader who had braved hi

  7. Jul 14

    Looking for the Disappeared in the Dance of Fetters

    In the annals of agony, most fall silently. As we finished the last of the white wine after Sinead’s friend up from Kerry went to bed, it happened again. The moon touched houses lightly and lay across recently cut fields while I sunk again to the place of forgetting, and Sinead remembered everything. When understanding man-made misery, it helps to be there. I knew this from years working in US American tech publishing, where the loss of Twitter and the wholesale billionaire buy of the press spelled the invisible death of investigative journalism—and with it, all its promise of public demands for answers. We were not sending people to be there anymore before they tell us what happened. Increasingly, the stories of some are never told. Sinead knew there-ness from being a human rights attorney. At the moment we were passing through Stormont, home of the Government of Northern Ireland in the ‘90s. Bodies are still missing from the Troubles. We had just left the collapsing buildings of Gay and Christopher Streets in New York City—a place where, for seven years, I navigated a hostile system of institutional neglect, housing corruption and the exhausting, everyday erasure that Romani people face when trying to protect their community’s intellectual history. In that silence, you remember what it means to be told that what is happening to you is not happening. Now all over the city people who have fled horrors for refuge disappear off the street. Sinead’s father’s doctor was taken too. Pol Pot and his fear of people with glasses came next. We trade notes on humanity’s collective suffering, tracing time threads for the secret that would stop the weaving of cruelty. As twenty people today are crushed in Gaza as they seek food and the US military supports genocide, I see fantasy. I have continually been an activist, but this approach falters. Was capitalism really welcoming us in, or just giving us a late start in a race already won? Yet, there is survival in rhythm. I was carried across the dance floor in the sway and shuffle of my father’s waltzing steps. My mother taught me to rise and grind across the kitchen floor. This knowledge carried my family through a deeply segregated America, where dark and brown-skinned family members have traveled our roads with hyper-vigilance in order to survive. It pulled us up through the sharp edges of anti-Gypsyism, gave me the courage to outrun homophobic violence and ultimately fueled my escape from a system that never cared about my safety—only what it could extract from me. I can rise, and if I stomp loud enough, I can be heard. This macabre speech continues through the night and follows me through herb-walk chats, across my whiskey rocks in an Irish trad session in Ennistymon and now across computer screen of precious metals most likely harvested with forced labor. We trade notes on dangers never far away. What would happen if we all stopped just to listen? Maria screams with the sea. Artists have long represented exile and transportation; dancers simply hear it. When the empires of the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries ran the Transatlantic slave trade, the archives show that prisoners cramped in the hold—sometimes for months—were forced onto the deck to dance. The profound cruelty was that this movement was never intended for their well-being, but to keep captives fit enough to maintain their value in slave markets such as the one found at the end of Wall Street on the East River in Manhattan. The empire repeated this choreography on another voyage of bondage. As the British state sought to colonize Australia, it weaponized starvation at home in Ireland and Britain, forcing fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers to steal just to survive. Once arrested for these “petty crimes,” their punishment was transportation halfway around the world to serve as convict labor for aristocrats and merchants. On these transport ships—which carried white, Romani and Traveller captives alike—the baseline technology of the deck remained the same: prisoners were held in fetters, and ship surgeons suggested they dance to preserve their health. There is so much we do not know about what was lost on those waves, but we know the dance was coerced. The long history of colonial enforcement with its perpetual systems of racism, patriarchy and bodily coercion for profit points to a forsaken lineage: the presence of punishment inside the dance. This was the violent taming of the many-headed hydra of commoners, sailors and the enslaved in revolt. This is how the state disappears a soul. Back at the conference with Annette, a senior scholar laughed as he dismissed my work: “What does all this really mean? Can’t we just have fun dancing?” I recall an almost endearing theatrical woodcut of a man dancing a hornpipe in fetters after his arrest, and I see the scholar’s question for what it really is: a refusal to see how the empire turns the suffering of others into a commodity. This experience of oppression, felt so acutely and chronically by the marginalized, remains entirely invisible to those privileged by colonialism. They see a spectacle; they do not see how the chains have changed our shared reality. They would have looked at Master Juba the same way. When Charles Dickens visited New York City and recorded his American Notes, he watched William Henry Lane—the founder of American Tap Dance: Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs—all sorts of legs and no legs—what is this to him? And in what walk of life, or dance of life, does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound! — American Notes for General Circulation. Charles Dickens, 1842. Most scholars and practitioners alike delight in this whimsical, racist representation of a genius who broke through brutal systems designed to suppress him. He went on to bring his performance to Britain and Ireland, where his last presence was recorded in 1851. Since I first read this text in 2014, it has struck me as grotesque: at best the writings of someone trying to cash in on what he did not understand. To Dickens, Lane’s dance was whirling, dazzling nonsense. For those who carry lineages of impact—of violence—we know what we are listening to, and what we are moving beyond. And while Dickens would live on in comfort and dominate the archive, Lane simply disappeared from the public written record. But the dance record, if you listen carefully enough, is different. When I first wrote this piece a year ago, I had known for years in my bones that fetters dancing was important. I did not know why, but I could feel history rhyme in what we call tradition. To dance with impact is an invitation to autonomy of time, space and energy—of what it is to be you, right now, regardless of the bondages imposed upon you. As I tap upon my body, tables and the world as I navigate my own displacement and precarity, these familial rhythms prepared me to re-orient to here. But where did they come from? In my ongoing work to recover the fullness of my culture and understand kumpanija, I began a renewed search into fetters dancing and found the work of contemporary Australian researchers looking into the colonial history of convict dancing. Their work felt like I had found a gigantic piece of the puzzle, but I was not prepared for what came next. As I have gotten to know the work of Frances Roberts Reilly on Substack, she shared with me a piece of her family’s past recently recovered: William Wood the Younger... was described as a fiddler and coachman... standing 5’6” with a kauli mortsi—swarthy complexion, black hair and hazel eyes. In his bloodline, he carried our family’s Gypsy music talents. Australian contemporary Colonial Dance researchers have found that ‘on route to the colony, the surgeons in charge of convicts often encouraged dancing as a healthy activity and this is documented in their medical journals.’ So it’s likely that William took with him our Romany Gypsy hornpipe and jig music... Here’s an account from Rom Moses Heron describing how wrenching it was for sweethearts and families to be separated. Moses took out his knife and cut his diklo—handkerchief from his neck and threw it overboard for them to take the knot back to his sweetheart. He had cut the diklo from under his ear so that the knot was undisturbed but remained just as he had tied it. — Frances Roberts Reilly Here, right before me, was proof that the dance was telling me more about Romani history than what could be found in any academic book. It’s not just the feeling of confirming they were there and what they went through that brings a meaning like no other to do the dance, its the reality that our intuition—our powers to understand the many occupations of the world and how to resist them—is perhaps them looking for us, just as much as our own memory looking for the truth. Our ancestors are trying to find us. Maybe in our batters, shuffles and rallies we keep the sounds going. Maybe the rattles never stopped. Maybe as we lose more loved ones to an abyss created by the greed of the few and the complicity of the many, we can keep their memory going in motion for all to hear. This requires a deep state of listening to the state’s cold annals of agony while performing the living repertoire of the risen. We will undoubtedly keep trying to speak and write for the fallen, just as w

  8. Jul 7

    How to Colonize a Field in 2026: A Case Study in Academic Extraction

    This piece exposes the ongoing exploitation, extraction and erasure of Roma and Sinti people in the Americas. It is a direct response to the publication of The Romani Atlantic by Cambridge University Press—a project that appropriates gadje (non-Roma) narratives and frameworks to re-colonize our culture, our scholarship and our lives. For generations, the gadje world has accused the Roma of kidnapping children, pickpocketing wealth, stealing culture. But as the anti-fascist maxim states: every accusation is a confession. My name is Russell Patrick Brown. I am a Bashaldo Gypsy whose family’s history reaches through the roads of America for generations. My thesis for my master’s degree at NYU focused on dance in 18th-century Atlantic history (2013-2015), and I recently had my PhD at the University of Limerick accepted without corrections. In it, I discovered the hidden, traumatic history of impact-driven dance in the Atlantic world—more commonly known as percussive dance. I have published on early modern maritime dance and the history of harm in wooden shoes. Yet, I am writing to you from exile. I have lost my home of 15 years, I had to flee my life and career as a software engineering manager for America’s largest publisher due to the corruption I am confronting in this case, I do not know when I will see my family again, and I have been pushed out of the very academic territory I helped map. While I was fighting a brutal housing crisis in court to save my West Village apartment—a historic hub of Romani memory once home to Romany Marie’s cafe at 20 Christopher Street—institutional colleagues were finalizing a “field-defining” book. Look closely at the cover of The Romani Atlantic, and then look at the map hanging on the wall of my apartment (since 2014) in this viral Gothamist feature about my pending eviction from my rent-stabilized apartment as the last legal tenant in 14-18 Gay Street in the Greenwich Village of New York City. Whether intentional or symbolic, the extraction is complete. The institution took the map from my wall, the archival labor from my hands, and left the living Romani scholar in exile. They write about the “Atlantic world” as an abstract playground of text, while active colonization displaces the physical, living bodies of the people they study. Ironically, it is my own Atlantic world of allies—and fellow Roma and non-Roma across Europe, Africa and South America—offering literal and intellectual refuge to me in this crisis. I met and got to know these researchers with the belief that we would work together. I believed that I had the knowledge, they had the power, and this would be shared. Now, they have some knowledge, I still have no power and they no longer think they need me. A war came to my door, stole my home and then the wolves came. I had expected that I was collaborating with a project to reclaim Romani and Sinti history and culture for Romani and Sinti people. I had not expected that it would climax into our literal erasure and for the timetakers, as I call them, prestige for the next thirty years. Your support at this critical moment will make the difference between me being able to continue this work and fight colonization in one of its most enduring and hidden forms, or allowing academia to cement new strategies for stealing culture, scholarship and lives for decades to come. Right now, I stand alone. The Real Vampires and Bohemian Groves Dear Traveler, Come sit with me by the fire while we talk of monsters and other perils on the road ahead. It starts with children going missing, then entire peoples are murdered and then memories are altered overnight. What evil could do such a thing? There has been a lot of talk through towns, trains and way stations of vampires—those half-dead, half-alive who feast upon the blood of helpless victims. They may be well-mannered, of fair complexion and smile, but at night they are beasts of incredible force, mind manipulation and seduction that feasts upon the innocent. And innocent here does not just refer to the sexually inexperienced. It’s those whose hearts remain unsullied by greed and hate, braving to bear their souls in a cruel world. They are a vampire’s delight. They are a meal to be sucked dry and discarded before the next victim is sacrificed to a hunger with no end. Irish gothic writer Sheridan Le Fanu gave us the vampire Carmilla in 1872 and Bram Stoker gave us the famous Dracula in 1897, but before that, the Roma had our own lore that helped us at our own fires understand the perils of a world where it is not safe to be human. We know genocides, ethnocides and other horrors await us as well as others who cherish the precious ancient arts of music, dance, craft and story, and are unwilling to be ruled by insatiable greed without honor. In our languages, yes, we have many words for people who harm others for their own gain. We know beasts are at large and many are in charge corrupting the truth, such as Stoker’s version of Dracula and its many re-tellings: our own lore is used against us as we are portrayed not as brown people vulnerable to pale-faced monsters, but as Dracula’s servants. We see a similar manipulation of the truth—that it is us Roma who are stealing children and not the other way around—in Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep (2013). There, Gypsy aesthetics and traditions are used to create “The True Knot,” a nomadic group of psychic vampires whose immortality comes from devouring the torturous pain of children with paranormal abilities. In the wake of the partial release of the Epstein Files by the US FBI and all of its purported horrors including child sacrifice, their accusations look like projection. This perverse dynamic expands far beyond pop culture; it anchors the architecture of elite gadje power itself. Look no further than the infamous Bohemian Grove, where the world’s most powerful politicians, billionaires and imperial architects retreat into the California redwoods. They call themselves “Bohemians,” mimicking a stolen caricature of Romani freedom, camping under a giant stone owl to perform theatrical rituals and broker backroom deals that govern global empires. It is the ultimate manifestation of the colonizer playing dress-up. They drape themselves in the aesthetic of the free-spirited traveler to obscure the greed and destruction they leave in their wake. The colonization of Roma and Sinti culture has always depended upon blaming us for what the empire was doing. In the case of child kidnapping, scholar Noémie Ndiaye calls this a “perverse inversion of the historical realities of early modern human trafficking” (2022). Vampires, egregores, secret networks, colonizers, narcissists, racists….whatever they are….they either lack humanity, or are not human at all. I will leave it up to brilliant psychologists and essayists to make those claims. As a Bashaldo Gypsy working with Roma and Sinti from around the world, I have confirmed that our culture is not about the exotic stereotypes so often imposed upon us by the gadje. It is about preserving who we are, remembering our humanity and protecting ourselves from those who have lost it. 500 Years of Silent Survival For us Roma in the Americas, our history here began with Christopher Columbus’s third voyage in 1498, when Spanish Roma were transported to the colonies as forced laborers. This marked the beginning of a 500-year history in the Americas, which was defined by its own distinct perils and hardships that often mirrored, or even worsened, the systemic persecution left behind in Europe. There is so much that can be said about our history, but I am asking you to notice one thing about this that is the subject, the object and the curse of not only this piece, and of the broader field of Romani studies in the Americas, but of my life: we, American Gypsies, have not been allowed to study it or tell it. We have had gadje scholars and artists make enormous fortunes and careers at our expense. We have had Roma scholars from Europe come and tell our story. We have had first-generation Romani US Americans publish their stories, which is an absolute wonder that even happened. But those of us who have been here, who have survived generations of horrors, we remain silenced. In the American case, the empire has always depended upon appropriating not just our culture, but our ways of creating culture amidst survival as a means of propagating the colonial project. Simply put, colonization loves to play dress-up as us. It drapes itself in the hardship and joys of travel, our ingenuity, our aesthetic, our music and our spiritual knowledge as a means to hide what is really happening: colonization. And few notice when it is pretending to be us. It is a choreography of occupation, and it spreads fast among gadje in its every permutation. Let me be clear: if you claim to represent the Roma and Sinti in the Atlantic world and you are not advocating for our rights in the USA—which controls the hemisphere—you are not our friend. The Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights did an unprecedented study on Roma in the US, and we even saw the passing of a house bill for the preservation of culture, but where did the rest of the institutional momentum and funding go? * Why are we not legally recognized and protected within the USA? * Why are there no departments led by Romani people where other Romani Americans and Roma from around the world can go to study and find sanctuary? * Why are Sinti Americans always erased, including by Romani scholars? * Why are “gypsy laws” on the books all over the country, and why are funded, comfortable scholars who profited and still profit from our suffering not doing anything to strike them down? We survived a system that was not built for us, but built upon us. They have studied our every move, our every lesson since we arrived as slaves. They do not let us tell of our roa

  9. Jun 16

    From Corsets to Six-Pack Abs: The Empire Is Still Shaping Your Body

    Dear Traveler, Tell me of the roads you have taken. Sing for me the songs that you heard over fields along the way. Dance before the fire the journey that on ly you can take. Then we shall dream about where we will go next. When I was born in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, off Lake Erie, my parents took me home to a house they had built almost entirely by hand, with the help of our family of course. The reasoning wasn’t just the American dream of owning land, something essential to survive in this settler state—especially if you are a traveler. My mother did not want to live or raise children in a house full of ghosts. In our family we didn’t necessarily have any problems with spirits hanging around, its just that it’s less work if you don’t have to clean up after them or tell them what to do all the time. Our town of Independence was one of the original five by five mile townships created by the Western Reserve after the Treaty of Fort Industry forced native peoples from the land in 1805. On the 4th of July we celebrated the birth of our nation in the city’s public park, but in the forest that connected to our backyard, I listened to what the land had to say. Through waterfalls, pine groves, forest spirits and rusty abandoned farm tools, my sister and I received another history that told of the violence that really happened. I would come to understand more about how our bodies hold the maps of the land better than any land survey when my mother and father would take us on the road. I would come to know the excitement of the old river towns of the Ohio Valley before we would go on to see the blue grasses of Kentucky, the smoky mountains of Tennessee and the red hills of Georgia. I learned to appreciate the culture of the local people, and to respect and learn from the native people where it was welcome. It was an extraordinary education that taught me that people may have borders, names and identities, but that’s not who they really are. To understand that, you need to watch how they move. When the Romans set about to conquer their known world, they needed a way to understand the land that was less messy and more efficient for their goals than how humans normally understand it. They didn’t want to know much about who lived there, how they felt about the oldest tree in town or why funerals went this way and not that way through the village. They needed a cadastral map: a measured layout of the terrain that assessed all the valuable things within it. It wasn’t just Roman engineering and their military that created occupation within the Celts and other native peoples of Europe, North Africa and Southwest Asia, it was a calculated, unnatural understanding of the world that made it all possible. It was an evolution in our de-evolution as a species. After the fall of the Empire in Rome, this expansive method of conquest would slumber for a thousand years, and re-emerge in new force in 1503 with the founding of the Casa de Contratación in Seville. This was a state-monopoly on New World map-making, and it was essential to the success of their colonization projects. How could they conquer lands if they couldn’t find them? This knowledge was the source of the Spanish Empire’s power, and to leak it was punishable by death. After a century of war and plunder in the Americas, the French Empire expanded this tactic. They knew that while invasion and looting were lucrative, it was not as profitable as keeping power in order to create new extractive economies. To do this, Louis XIV of France and his court needed new tactics. One of them was to control culture and how people moved. In 1661, Louis founded by royal decree the Parisian Académie Royale de Danse. France already had a guild that controlled music, dance and who was allowed to teach it, but in the Académie the ideal French courtly dancing, musical body could be under his control. This power was disseminated through traveling dancing masters—and not the “rogue” ones like those of my people—and their state-approved dance manuals. These were literal maps of how bodies should and shouldn’t move. They would evangelize to the world his new elite, “absolutist” aesthetic that often dressed itself in the feathers, dyes and fabrics looted from the empire. His dancing masters would invent nonsensical patterns of movement that imitated and were designed to supplant more ancient systems of dance the empire was in regular contact with. They created something truly unnatural: a literal cadastral map of how bodies should move. Today, we simply refer to this system as ballet. Its power wasn’t just in an aesthetic designed for absolute control, it was that it was made irresistible by its proximity to wealth and power. We find evidence of this influence all the way from Nova Scotia to Congo Square in New Orleans, from the crossroads of County Clare to the ports of Australia. And once something stays popular, when the promise of a life of beauty and pleasures is enticing long enough, it becomes its own gilded cage. We forget how we used to move, and then the only dream anyone has is the one a king in France had in a gigantic palace hundreds of years ago. In time corsets have become six-pack abs. Ostentatious dresses that were the spectacle of the court (often costing women their lives when their numerous skirts brushed up against the candles on the floor and they burned alive) have become extreme, luxurious influencer diets that are just as perilous. Men have traded high heels and fashions of the court for “manosphere” luxury items they can show off online. The tastes may change, but the pattern of movement reveals the same person with the same desires. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing so you have access not just to these Gypsy Fires, but to the Timedancing Lab. There I teach how to break free from occupation in your body and establish your own movement sovereignty in community. As I move between the forest, the road and the courts of power today like so many Roma before me, I do my best not to be too bothered about the tastes of the gadje (non-Roma). For me and people like me who remember movement that’s older than any empire, the problem for us emerges when all movement is controlled. Now here you might expect me to talk about how war, slavery and systems of power create new methods to control how people move. And I do write about that often. Tonight, as we sit by the fire, that’s not my main concern. The greatest danger for me, and for any moving person, isn’t that we all move the same. It’s when people forget to move at all. There’s a basic principle here: to control land, build a cage like the Roman and Spanish empires did. To control people and get their consent to do it, create an irresistible aesthetic culture intimately intertwined with brutality and absolutism. To control thoughts and ideas, create a world where people no longer want to change their minds. For the empires of today, weapons, cages and consumer cultures aren’t the only weapons of war. It’s making people forget there was ever anything other than the prison they have been raised within. Make sure they cannot venture forth from their towns to meet people different from them, and make them afraid of the neighbor next door. Make sure they cannot move their bodies in ways that might disturb other people from their paralysis. Make sure their hearts can no longer feel the threads of time pulsing through the land. Take the burden of creativity, thought and emotions away entirely. Indigenous countermapping refers to the practice of mapping real human relations to the land, to the natural world, to landmarks and to each other. These can be in the form of actual maps, but this can also take the shape of storytelling, music and, yes, even dance. When we learn to read the hidden history of the land and what happened there in our own bodies, we find a real map that can help us find our way home. We can discover as I did in the Fashion Institute of Technology Library in NYC that wooden shoes, slavery and forced labor were all connected and would change the way we walked and related to the land. We can discover as my friend Maria showed me that we don’t always have to learn tradition from a teacher—sometimes the teacher is in our DNA waiting for us to listen to it. It is the bear-hug from my grandmother that she learned because someone in our family before her learned that holding someone tight was survival. At this Gypsy Fire, we read hidden histories in the body so that we might shape the world we want to live in by consciously being the people we want to be within it. This Gypsy’s dream is a simple one. I wish to help you shatter through the cages of nothingness that are enclosing us as we speak, trapping us in empty-headed greed. I want to hear you sing to your newborns again through kitchen windows as I pass on by, welcoming them into a world of human play, sound and love. As I drive through fields I want to hear your people sing to the corn again, and when I return I’ll help fix a few things around town while we enjoy the harvest. May your dreams tonight roam far beyond any map, and when you wake trust that your body will know how to take the next step to get there. I’m here to help you listen. Lacho drom, Russell If you’d like to learn how to read the hidden histories the body carries and find your choreo-destiny, join us in the Timedancing Lab. The first course, Choreonavigating Crisis, begins June 21. Six lessons in movement for creativity in times of collapse, drawn from my family’s Bashaldo tradition and my doctoral research. Paid subscribers receive every lesson; founding members join the live sessions. Come move with us. If you’d just like to sign up for the class (3 months of Substack included), here is the link: https://luma.com/choreonavigating. If you have enjoyed sitting by the fire with me, please consider inv

  10. Jun 9

    There Is Only One Field Ready for an AI Age

    Welcome back to Gypsy Fires. This letter is about dance and why it knows more about AI than Stanford or MIT. Dear Traveler, Meet me tonight under the Blue Whale. There we will turn in to rest after we danced around the world—spinning through the seas, swaying over ice with the Arctic muskox, flying through the African Savannah and exploding through the cosmos. We will build machines to keep our ideas moving, and maybe you’ll join my kumpania as we train our own robots to predict the storms of Jupiter. We will sleep under a sea monster and dream together of a future where technology does not help extract from nature, but helps us understand it and live as part of it. The year is 2019, and we are joining data scientists, software engineers, product designers and NASA scientists organized into teams for a weekend in the American Natural History Museum in New York City. Outside we can all feel the fabric of the world as we know it being steadily pulled apart, but together we are stitching creative ambition together so that we can better understand our solar system—our tribe of planets hovering around a star. On my team, we’re using the patient power of statistics to train a machine on how to read NASA’s pictures of the storms of Jupiter so that we might be able to ask how they form and why. By the morning and after many bags of potato chips, cups of coffee and cavorting through the empty halls of the museum alone, our baby “AI” is able to make small predictions on what a Jovian tempest will do next. Through open source technology—the unpaid backbone of computer technology and internet crafted and cared for by gentle, brilliant souls—and collaborations with space scientists and the patented algorithms of other highly intelligent hardworking people, we worked together alongside other teams to show how computers can do more than make people money. They can solve a few of the most ancient questions we’ve been able to find as a species. Now it is 2026, and this egalitarian vision of Machine Learning, what people are now calling Artificial Intelligence, has gone missing. Someone took it away in the middle of night while we were sleeping around our fires, and we are now awaking to a forest that has disappeared. An ocean turned to acid. Our young mothers and fathers told to go home because there is no work today, and they are told there never will be work or payment for it again. Some do not even make it home, and in an increasing number of cases we don’t know what happened to them. In the distance we see a massive building spewing smoke into the air and hear the steady roar of machines set to work on tasks that no one seems able to make any sense of. The world watches afraid. I watch, afraid. What is happening on the roads that hold the world together? On the roads of my birth home, Turtle Island? Are people fleeing? Enjoying a luxury vacation? Will we meet animals on the road, or are they gone too? The world is awake to what Artificial Intelligence might be and awash in interpretations of what it means for us. As I pass by conversations on my route, I notice most people can’t even agree on what intelligence even is and whether it can ever be artificial. If human intelligence can in fact be manufactured, do we want that? If it is only somewhat able to be reproduced robotically, is that useful? At what cost? A constellation of problems erupts that is not failure of the computer, but the failure of our global (especially US American) leadership to understand how the machine of the world runs at all. If we turn to the university, where I decided to try my chances in hopes of finding like-minded people beyond my verda, there is only one department that’s always already been prepared to face the existential questions of a potential age of AI. It’s probably near to if not the least funded. It’s not easy to find, it’s rarely required and is certainly the least respected. It’s dance. Gypsy Fires is a completely reader-supported publication. Your support keeps the fire going. Thank you. Yes I am saying that there is a department in the university that has vastly more experience than Stanford or MIT’s AI labs in asking existential questions about us, and that’s because it’s the only discipline where you can’t pretend to take people out of it. While we keep pumping billions into elaborately asking what a universe would be like without us, dance has always kept us in research, in practice, in theory, in the archives, in the classroom, in the world and in life. We have Diana Taylor who has been telling us for over two decades that what we record doesn’t always align well with what we remembered to keep doing. We have Thomas DeFrantz telling us that we can refuse the call to do work we shouldn’t be asked to do in the first place, but we don’t have to be lost either. We can dance right now, together. We have Jacqueline Shea Murphy telling us that we need to listen to indigenous people, not just because it’s the right thing to do but because there is so much wisdom there asking us to stop fighting it. We have Lynn Brooks, Julie Malnig and Linda Tomko who have shown us that dance has always been a science of aspiring to our best selves, and continuing to play anyway when it doesn’t work out. We have Judith Butler’s gender as a performance, which if we return to Vogue/Ballroom House we learn that we were meant to have fun with gender too. We have Sarah Whatley asking what are the choreographies of laws, and how do those of us who don’t fit within those laws move at all? We have André Lepecki asking how we can understand the political and police as choreographers of liberation and control, and how they propagate in themselves a dance. We have Nadine George-Graves asking why we have a history of consuming Black bodies, and how do people of color move through such a landscape with such terrors hidden within it? Báyò Akómoláfé asks us to embody what it means to build a society today from our traditions. We have Breandán de Gallaí asking what does it mean to move with your native language, especially when so few around you speak it. And there is my friend and colleague in Romani Dance Studies, Rosamaria Kostic Cisneros, asking so courageously within communities: what is it to be hero for your own people? There are thousands of people who devoted their lives to helping you not just ask who you are, but excited for you to move through the question and discover the answer in motion. You now also have me, your neighborhood internet Gypsy, inviting you to query what is intelligence itself? If we listen to the physicists, those dance scholars of the forces of the earth, sea and sky, we can consider that we’re all made up of space, time and energy—and that these three things are inseparable. They are understood together. And notice, they didn’t say space, time and shareholder value. They didn’t say space, energy and laws or religions. Just these three simple things. With this information let’s rewind our clock further back—and then much further back again—and try asking again what is intelligence. The building blocks of awareness—the consciousness that gives rise to intelligence—is motion itself. We don’t understand anything until we have changed position. Or we discovered after venturing forth or within. Collapsed and then got up again. What foundation of intelligence is crafted from the orbit of a star—a faithful returning? Did the first lifeforms come to be because they just are, or was it because they went looking for something? We can understand an American Bison because we can see it in a museum or dissected in a lab. But, as has been confirmed this year, Bison have meaning because of their knowledge: their massive herd migrations nourish their families and the landscape. We only need to let them roam again. I stay on my road not just because I am stubborn. I stay not just because I know at the end of many gadje roads for some reason they keep putting meat grinders, as gilded and as comfortable as they may be. I stay on the road because it leads to more paths. The more I keep moving the more I understand why others moved before, and I can fortune-tell where people might go in the future. I know intimately that the magic in machines isn’t in how we make them look and feel like us, but in how they move and “think” in their own right. And that’s what allowed me to climb up into tech management in rare speed. I knew how to get there. That night I slept under the whale, I made a decision to stay on the road of collaborative scientists, computer technologists and creatives working to solve the world’s problems. In the years that followed, COVID, aggressive tech monopolies and personal brands pulled people away from this modest, kind, exciting road and onto superhighways and private jets. Many were simply pushed off the road and into ditches. At seven years out, I know as a Gypsy and a dance scholar that now is about the time where people start forgetting that the other more open source, egalitarian possibilities for our technological future were ever there at all. Tonight, camp under the whale with me. We have hopes to engineer together. Lacho drom, Russell Thanks for reading Gypsy Fires! This letter is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsletter.gypsyfires.com/subscribe

  11. Jun 2

    Welcome to Gypsy Fires

    Dear Traveler, Come rest. The fire has been waiting for you. I’m Russell Patrick Brown, an American Bashaldo Gypsy—we have many names, don’t worry about it. I grew up on the same roads my family has traveled for generations between the Great Lakes into the Appalachian Mountains and down into Georgia. We’ve carried those who have come before through music, dance, ingenuity, survival and “knowing” the threads of human life through time. For the last twenty years I’ve carried my tradition to Los Angeles on film, on the New York stage and on to Ireland for my PhD and now Spain, where I am getting to know the Gitanos, or Spanish Gypsies, better. I am in exile from my home at 18 Gay Street at the corner of Christopher Street in New York City—where I had the same landlord whose parents had rented a small cafe over a century ago at 20 Christopher to Romany Marie, who would become The Queen of the Greenwich Village Bohemians, and a tiny basement apartment at 14 Gay to Ruth McKenney, whose 1930s New Yorker sketches about her sister Eileen would eventually become Leonard Bernstein’s 1953 musical, Wonderful Town. Gypsy Fires arrived after all my roads converged on one impossible conclusion: I am a Gypsy. I have resisted this label my entire life in every way I could manage: escape, shame, self-erasure, refusal, assimilation, fantasy, appropriation, lust, denial and abstraction (the Substack I opened last year). In mid-life, I am grateful to join the throngs of the mature, who are in fact tired of fighting what is true. I surrender. The most well-known book on American Gypsies, Gypsy Fires in America: A narrative of life among the Romanies of the United States and Canada, was written about families like mine passing through Southern Ohio. It is a complicated book full of real people portrayed as having the minds of children. Men were portrayed as con artists and women as lusty muses. It was published three years after the photograph of my family’s Prohibition-era verda was taken in 1921—and one year after the Greenwich Village Bohemian movement collapsed as fascism rose in Europe. It is strange to think Irving Brown, the author of the book, might have met my great grandmother, who taught my mother, danced with my father and yelled at me until I was ten years old for putting my feet on the davenport. She left her playing cards out on the kitchen table for when someone would come through the back door for a reading. I am opening this fire to you, stranger who I hope may become my friend, because you are the one who heard the call to sit by my side. I am the last of my family to carry this practice fully, and last year I had to go into exile from my home country (the USA) as well as my adopted country for almost twenty years, Ireland. In the arts and academia, our suppression and erasure grows fiercer by the day, despite the modest gains from fellow Roma. Global public health reports for the Roma and Sinti worsen by the year. There is talk of death camps returning. From the gadje (non-Roma) perspective, things look bad. From my perspective as a Gypsy, I do not wait or depend upon anyone saving me, even when help comes. I know that life is not led by self-actualization, liberation, trauma or manifesting what we want, but by impact. It is in our myriad collisions that we face disruption and—if we can—find discovery. It is the countless great and small impacts of our lives that we come to know ourselves, each other and the world around us better—in this time and all times. My road may have ended somewhere I did not expect, but I know that I have only just begun a deeper dance with time itself. Here you’ll find guidance to help you re-approach what you know, what you didn’t know and what you didn’t know you already knew about Gypsy life, which has inspired the world for centuries. As the very old war on life slithers, mutates, bombs and engulfs more and more of what we love and what we need to survive, I hope that you find rest, repair and inspiration for the road ahead. I also hope that your own memory is awakened; we must remember every road through human history that we can. Your truth is needed. I’ve structured this newsletter into three parts. Road Reports are short, free dispatches on what the week has brought down the road and into the verda of the soul. All are open to everyone. I only ask that you comment and share what has happened on your travels, and what you have seen as you passed by. Teachings are lessons drawn from Gypsy life defined not as stereotype, ethnographic study, or human rights crisis, but as a way of life that has inspired the world for centuries. Some Teachings are free; most are for paid readers because the deeper rooms of a culture have always been kept for those who choose to stay. Gifts from the Fire are monthly practices held for paid subscribers: guided harp meditations, Timedancing exercise guides, embodied transformation eGuides, audio mini-workshops, heritage reclamations, and written fortunes. They are yours to keep, return to, and use in your own work. Some of what I’ve written before will return here in revised form, alongside new work. Some will live in books I’m preparing and am excited to tell you more about soon. There is also a private space, the Verda, held free for Romani and Sinti readers, by introduction. The fire is a meeting place and meeting places must be open; the verda is the home, and homes are kept private. If you are Romani or Sinti and would like to be welcomed in, please write to me. I’ll finish today with our message as a people, as recorded by Nico Rost in Paris, May 1963, when he interviewed the President of the World Roma Organization, Ionel Rotaru, His Highness Vaida Voevod III. My new friend Vicente Lehnsherr translated and shared it me: “We are the symbols of a world without borders, a free world, where weapons will be banned, where everyone can move freely from the steppes of Central Asia to the Atlantic coast, from the plateaus of southern Africa to the forests of Finland.” Stay. Please introduce yourself. Share a song. Remember what it is to be human. Through snaps, claps, taps, slaps and stomps, we’ll continue. Lacho drom, Russell This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsletter.gypsyfires.com/subscribe

  • 11 Episodes

About

Short audio transmissions from an American Gypsy. Insights from the road and the teachings my family has carried for centuries crafted through decades of research. Lacho drom. newsletter.gypsyfires.com

Information

  • Creator
    Russell Patrick Brown, PhD
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    11
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Russell Patrick Brown
  • Show Website
    Gypsy Fires