The beauty of it all

I'm a writer. Novels. Poetry. Plays. All kinds of interactive storytelling. I'm married, gay, Dutch, overweight and allergic to lots of things. This blog is an outlet and wayward for my sparse ventures in English. And, of course, a lot of random photos and reblogs.

[franknorbertrieter]

De zwerftochten van Tante Magna door Frank Norbert Rieter

De crowdfundingcampagne De zwerftochten van Tante Magna staat op voordekunst.nl. Doneer nu en maak dit project van Frank Norbert Rieter moge

[byjove]

The masculine urge to become a mountain man. Only come off the mountain twice a year to get supplies. Farm and harvest and hunt and build everything else. Talk to myself constantly. Stop coming into town for a few years after the age of 76. The sheriff finally comes up to check on me and finds the door to my shack wide open and my skeletonized body lying in bed, tucked up under the covers. They all forgot my name so they just put ‘Mountain Man’ on my tombstone. Shack left to decay but I’m not quite done having fun. My ghost lures lost hikers in and makes them keep me company. They come off the mountain rambling about the crazy old man in the hand hewn log cabin with fire in his eyes and leaves on the floor. I was alone in life but I don’t want to be lonely in death.

[byjove]

Whew guys sorry about that! Had a funny turn for a moment. Back to normal now.

[byjove]

You’re partially correct. This needs a gay subplot.

I was in love with another mountain man who lived on the other side of the mountain. We both liked being alone but sometimes it was alright to be alone together. His arthritis got bad and he couldn’t chop wood for himself anymore. Eventually his niece came to take him to the big city and put him in a nursing home. He didn’t want to go. I never saw him again. That’s why I died alone in my bed and not his.

[byjove]

If you asked Todd, he would know my name. 93 years old, blind as a bat with arthritis so bad he can’t move his fingers, rotting away in that horrible place his niece put him. He’d know. A smile would come to his dry lips to think of me, his fellow mountain man. He can no longer see but in his mind he sees me the way I was, in overalls with my rifle over my shoulder hunting squirrels. He knows my name but he dares not speak it. The words on my grave a more worthy epitaph. I wait for him on the mountain. None of the hikers that stumble in are ever him. He’ll return shortly, I’m sure. I’ll make him coffee on the wood stove one day. We’ll share some venison. He’ll come back from the holler. I know he will.

[byjove]

[s4mm4n]

God I miss the days when you could show up to a stranger’s farm and he’d say “What’s your name, boy?” and you’d take off your hat and hold it to your chest to better let him see your face and reply “Why I ain’t got none, sir, on account of my mammy passed on before she could give me one” and he’d tell you he’s real damn sorry to hear that and ask what he can do you for and you’d tell him that you can’t read nor even write neither but you’re mighty good with horses and can mend them fallen fence posts what you saw on your way in and won’t ask for nothing much more than a hot meal and a warm barn to sleep in and he’d keep his wife and daughters inside but send his boy who ain’t got married yet even though his mama tells him he needs a woman out with a lantern and some stew at night and the two of you’d get to talkin and he’d throw you his flask to take a swig from and watch you drinkin from it while he leant against the door frame and when he finally got called back on up to the house again he’d take a sip from it too real slow-like like it weren’t the whiskey what he were tryna savour

[argumate]

you see you don’t get posts like this on twitter

[lastweekseyeliner]

every day at least once while on a walk i think to myself “it weren’t the whiskey what he were tryna savour” and sometimes if i am alone i say it out loud

[byjove]

I think about The Man of the Hole so often. 27 years alone. 27 years with no one to speak to but strangers to wave to. Survived a genocide, a massacre that killed everyone he had ever known and later, an assassination attempt. He still tried to warn researches about the traps he built. He was only about 60 when he died in 2022. The people who tormented him in life later desecrated his grave.

[thesobsister]

Pat Steir, I Don't Know (1976)

Pat Steir died on March 25 of this year, age 87. Painter, teacher, a founding member of Printed Matter, Inc. ("the world’s leading non-profit organization dedicated to the dissemination, understanding and appreciation of artists’ books") and of the feminist journal Heresies, and a member of Semiotext(e)'s editorial board.

Her style, over her long career, changed and shifted, with the "Waterfalls" series of drip paintings coming to be considered as emblematic of her work, which it was not.

For example, her 1984 The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style), in the words of Artforum:

"…is a complex piece of painting related to the mode of combining images that Sergei Eisenstein called 'intellectual montage.' Its image complex begins with a quotation of a 16th-century Netherlandish painting, Jan Brueghel’s Flowers in a Blue Vase, 1599. The piece is often reproduced—Steir copied her version of it from a museum poster [and she] divides the Brueghel painting twice, first into 16 and then into 64 equal-sized rectangles, and reproduces every rectangle on its own canvas. The 16-panel version is painted in a green brown monochrome, the 64-panel one in full color; all the panels are the same size, about 26 by 21 inches, and each is painted in a specifically allusive style, such as that of van Gogh, Matisse, Cezanne, Mark Rothko, or Jackson Pollock. When assembled on the wall as in this installation the canvases form two paintings, the larger nearly 20 feet high, through which flow a multitude of stylistic currents. The Brueghel vase now reveals a history of oil painting."

aav.

Pat Steir, Painter of Luminous ‘Waterfalls,’ Dies at 87

[thememedaddy]

[chucktaylorupset]

(via hornedchick)

Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.

[art-damaged]

Wim T Schippers "Peanut Butter Platform" / museum visitors

In 2011, an iteration of this 1969 floor-bound installation was damaged on several occasions while on view at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

The work itself is true to its name: 1,100 liters of creamy peanut butter spread over a 14x4m expanse on the ground. Unfortunately, this iteration of the piece was installed without guardrails, which led to four separate visitors accidentally stepping onto the artwork.

In the wake of these events, museum officials refused to cordon off the piece, explaining that such an intervention would not be aesthetically pleasing. They did, however, send each of the museum visitors a bill for the restoration of the piece, which involved museum staff applying new layers of peanut butter to even out the surface.

[jimhenson-themuppetmaster]

" I know it's easier to portray a world filled with cynicism and anger, where problems are solved with violence...It's an easy out. What's a whole lot tougher is to offer alternatives, to present other ways conflicts can be resolved, and to show you can have a positive impact on your world. To do that, you have to put yourself out on a limb, take chances, and run the risk of being called a do-gooder." Jim Henson

[gastonlagaffe]

Spirou and Fantasio - The toothbrush

Spirou #4511

Translated by @slugabedx3 and myself!

[plaguedocboi]

I remember when I was younger, anytime I watched a movie where the characters have to kill a scary monster/alien, I always thought the act of killing it was intended to be part of the horror. Like there’s this amazing creature that we’ve never seen before, and maybe under different circumstances we could’ve coexisted with it, but it’s trying to attack you and you have to defend yourself, but by destroying it you also destroy the ability to ever understand it and that’s sad and is supposed to make you feel conflicted.

It was not until well into my adulthood that I realized most people do not have complicated feelings about movies where people have to kill a scary alien monster, nor is that necessarily meant to be part of the narrative (unless it very obviously is). They just want the scary thing to die because it’s scary. I don’t have a real conclusion to this I just started thinking about it for some reason.

[plaguedocboi]

1. This reply is two words and they managed to misspell both of then

2. Yeah. Duh.

[pannndora]

A good life for the 99% isn’t a pipe dream: it can be done. Here’s how

Our plan is radical – but by transforming how we live on a finite planet, nearly everyone gains, says Thomas Piketty and researchers from th

A habitable, equal and prosperous 21st century is materially possible. The carbon budget allows it and history offers precedents at comparable scales: universal suffrage, the universalisation of healthcare and education, the halving of working hours and the sharp compression of inequality over the 20th century. Technical impossibility is not what is standing in the way, but rather the absence of a shared vision of social progress, at once concrete and radical. What it will take instead is political choice, and the hard work of coalition-building behind it.

I was despairing last night but Raye was right - my joy comes in the morning! This is the future I want to live in. And it is possible.

[askinnyblackman]

hell yeah brother

[churrotowns]

since it’s pride month, throwback to this beautiful cover and this wholesome interaction between two icons

[rini-descartes]

Persepolis (2007)

[elierlick]

In 1953, 16-year-old Farhaad Najafi became one of the first trans men to undergo surgery in Iran. His case was celebrated as a medical breakthrough in newspapers across the world. He told reporters, "I thank God for becoming a man."

[maudit]

[profeminist]

RIP Marjane Satrapi, author of the amazing graphic novels Persepolis about living during the fundamentalist revolution in Iran in the 70’s and 80’s. She also created the animated movie based on the graphic novels, which is where these gifs come from.

Gifset source

[missbliss12]

Reblogging in honor of Marjane Satrapi, one of THE great graphic novelists. Her comic Persepolis was a crucial text for shaping my belief that comics can deeply explore identity, culture, politics, and history.

[macrolit]

Marilyn Monroe’s apartment was full of books

[macrolit]

Happy 100th birthday to Marilyn Monroe.