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charlie/blue • animation major+bio minor • 24 • white • they/he • icon by @xamag-ve

[bakwaaas]

despite everything …. I’m grateful I got a chance to be alive… to experience love and good food and sunsets. isn’t that the point of it all really

[roach-works]

listen. aging into your thirties rocks. yes your joints get a little creaky. yes you can’t sleep in a pretzel on the floor anymore after a concert or a convention. and you lose some friends. but the thing is that you sort out who your real friends are and you sort out who you really are. and you get to see your friends settling into careers they like, and adopt new dogs and cats, and you find a job you can stand, and get really good at arts and crafts, and maybe that book you loved as a kid gets a movie deal and it doesn’t suck, and you learn to like new food and bake your own bread, and you realize that the great portfolio of self harm scars you all used to curate are going white with age and not updated, and half your friends are a different gender now and so much happier and maybe you are too, and you know who you are, and that it’s a journey and not a revelation. it’s a direction you’re headed, and you’re enjoying the trip.

reaching your 30′s rocks. and i’m hearing good things about what comes next, too.

[roach-works]

i am looking into your eyes, i am holding your hand. i absolutely promise.

if you can just live long enough, your soul will build your body into a home. you will live there and you will find a way to be at peace. it’s worth the time and it’s worth the work. i promise.

[hubblegleeflower]

Your soul will build your body into a home.

[sevenminuteshadpassed]

[dovesndecay]

Look man it’s taken me almost 30 years to figure out a fraction of who I am and maybe that’s an indicator of how slowly I learn or maybe that’s just how long it takes for us to rid ourselves of the toxic sludge adults filled our cups with as children but I will fill my own damn cup from here on out

[dovesndecay]

Don’t let anyone make you feel like time is running out. You’ve got so much time to learn and change and grow and wither and rebirth reparent and repair yourself from all the wounds you survived and learn how to thrive for the first time

[nepofledgling]

can’t wait to be a 40 year old woman who’s healed from her trauma and loves going grocery shopping and lives with lifelong but manageable mental illness. and gives people nice presents on their birthdays. and I’m looking forward to being 75 and sitting on the porch in the summer when the sun is shining.

[mlarayoukai-archive]

You show a cat something and they're like sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff ooooh I understand now. Don't care

[butchniqabi]

i looked at queeringthemap today and had a good cry but these especially touched me

[g1asseyes]

[december-rains]

yeah.

[beelur]

[bigskycastle]

my little wol paintings so far

[calocera]

>album does not sound like how the album art looks

>

[mousidy]

*doing your tarot reading*

oh. two of worms. it means worms are coming to your house.. interpret that how you will..

[lestatbf]

he's the worst man alive he's the love of my life he's covered in blood he's weird about god and he's a lot, he's not perfect, but most importantly he's bisexual

[akeussel]

[thunderstruck9]

Gustaf Fjaestad (Swedish, 1868-1948), Winter Landscape, 1925. Oil on canvas, 94 x 103 cm.

[polkadotmotmot]

Sachiho Ikeda - The Things Look Like Moving, 2020

[nickyandmikey]

when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?😳

[nickyandmikey]

THIS IS NOT ABOUT ONE DIRECTION I DON’T KNOW WHO THIS “HARRY” PERSON IS GO WATCH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND CLARENCE CLEMONS KISS ON STAGE RIGHT NOW

[irrelevantlyvalid]

op is the only valid person i’ve ever met. everyone else needs to come to the light

[chokolattejedi]

Okay, but this is really important: Bruce Springsteen occupied this really weird place in music history. His songs were all from this pessimistic, nihilistic view of an America that had let him down:

Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.

Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.

It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.

Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.

So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.

Passages from American Popular Music by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman

[executeness]

I used to think that Bruce and Clarence kissing onstage was exuberance, showmanship, and telling racist homophobes to fuck off. Like, they picked up a certain kind of audience and went “Racist homophobes? Not in our house!” And started the kissing then but then I actually looked it up and

https://www.gq.com/story/this-fucked-me-up-bruce-springsteen-singing-about-clarence-clemons

It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen

It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage

It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own

Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”

I’m having some emotions about it!

“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”

Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!

We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!

God I’m not okay about it

[ramshacklefey]

Now I’m mad that this is not among any of the things I was ever told about this artist.

[jbbartram-illu]

I knew about this in general (& via all those fabulous photos), but this just adds even more beautiful context <3

[eregyrn-falls]

Just to add to the pile: this was the cover of Springsteen’s break-through album Born to Run, in 1975:

I mean, will you LOOK at this:

This was the pic chosen for the album cover from an extensive photoshoot, too. A few others:

There’s a lot more online if you search. They’re all pretty amazing. But the photographer is right, the one chosen for the album cover just pops.

[ehlihr]

gone world // enviro class assignment