Whetstone

interesting, beautiful, and mysterious things

[ohnoitstbskyen]

People who object to trans people being in fantasy are wild. As though some silly-hatted alchemist wouldn't simply invent Almazar's Gender Fluid in an afternoon and distribute it to every dungeon chest in the land. It's Common on the loot table and half the goblins drop it. You can brew it yourself with three mushrooms and eight snail shells. It sells for 1 copper at the merchant because the supply is so abundant. You fool. You melon. You absolute buffoon. The limits of what you are willing to imagine are an epitaph you wrote for your own freedom.

[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.

[creating-a-mess]

100 year old Galapagos tortoise with a few weeks old Galapagos baby posing for a new family photo, and its own baby photo from 100 years ago.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

love that for 100 years people have looked at these beasts and thought “heehee what if the big one wore the little one like a hat”

[kyloren]

details of Queen Sansa’s coronation outfit

[medievalpoc]

Matteo de Milano; Master of the Graduals-Choirbook for Monastery of San Sisto in Piacenza [MS pf Med. 97]

1 of 26 Initials containing Portraits of the Monks at San Sisto

Italy (1495)

Boston Public Library

[lesstalkmoreillustration]

[darksilenceinsuburbia]

Virginia Mori

you can also find me @mary_bu__

[& & &]

[femaleshits]

[emilywhetstone]

Tsuguharu Foujita’s astonishing painting of a cat fight, created in 1940, is held by the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.

[emilywhetstone]

Gabriel Dawe's Plexus A1 installation at the Smithsonian is constructed from 60 miles of embroidery thread.                                                                                                                                                                        

[emilywhetstone]

German Photographer Mario Gerth spent 7 years in Africa making these stunning portraits of different peoples in their traditional clothes.

[emilywhetstone]

Pablo Carlos Budassi created this gigantic logarithmic map of the universe. I love how you can imagine it as an ongoing explosion, with all that Big Bang plasma crackling on the edge.

[emilywhetstone]

Alexey Kljatov takes beautiful, somber photographs of individual snowflakes.

[staceythinx]

Embroidery by Ana Teresa Barboza

[likeafieldmouse-deactivated2015]

Cai Guo-Qiang - Falling Back to Earth (2013)

[emilywhetstone]

Detail of a sculpture by Tom Eckert, who creates mind-bogglingly detailed wooden sculptures. No, that is not cloth, not cards, and not a pear.

[emilywhetstone]

Photographer Niki Feijen takes haunting photographs of abandoned buildings.