Jo: artist, friend.

Also a veteran of psych wards, doomed love affairs, an open heart. Take me with a grain (or a few) of garlic salt.

[bibliomancyoracle]

You love your past and its stench. You think you are making a cheese. For a moment. Of yourself for the world. What will it taste like. You wonder.

*

from “December Songs” by MRB Chelko

[ampervadasz]

Unmute !

[allstrangenature]

I can barely contain myself right now

holy shit

HOLY SHIT

[27dragons]

holy CRAP.

Artists, creators, students, and researchers of all types, take note:

Digitized photos and text. 2D and 3D object renders. Music and other sound files. Videos. Research datasets. Collections metadata.

On a Creative Commons Zero license: Take what you want. Use it. No permission or attribution required. Yes, even for commercial use.

There is a lot wrong with the world at the moment, but the Smithsonian… the Smithsonian is right.

[sartorialadventure]

The archive includes fashion images!

[whitealbum]

kyle maclachlan for heaven by marc jacobs

[heavenlyyshecomes]

hi my reader friends lithub has a new syllabi section that has some great (u guessed it!) syllabi from much beloved writers like ocean vuong and ross gay here's the full list that i have already added half of to my tbr:

ekphrastic poetry with victoria chang (featuring works of john ashbery, joy harjo, paul tran)

the literature of obsession with julia may jonas (obsession as transformation, destruction, catharsis and form)

place, space and landscape with alexandra kleeman (featuring didion, okorafor and hernan diaz)

lyric research with ross gay (books that combine research with an "I" like nelson's bluets or christle's the crying book)

hybrid poetry with ocean vuong (traditions, innovations and possibilities featuring bhanu kapil, rimbaud, clifton)

multigenre experiments in form with paul lisicky (for writing that explores connections between genres)

reading about writers with peter ho davies (books that teach the craft and give writing advice, think 'the outline' trilogy)

speculative women with lina maria ferreira cabeza-vanegas (a look at speculative works by women writers like jemisin, butler, k le guin)

writers and the world with viet thanh nguyen (rankine, baldwin, and coates)

sports and contemporary writing with sam lipsyte (exactly what it says on the tin)

[havingrevelations-deactivated20]

the new counterculture needs to be anything that involves zero makeup and curation. the revolution will not be ‘content creator’-able.

[havingrevelations-deactivated20]

im 100% serious. aliexpress fishnets and tiktok tutorial eyeliner is not punk. wearing a tshirt from 5 years ago with a simple, functional hairstyle is punk. in the age of aestheticisation rebellion cannot have an appearance because every ‘look’ is infected by capitalism. wear what you have. women, ask yourselves ‘would a man do this to their appearance in the same circumstances’ and if not, don’t do it. concealer exists to cause you mental anguish. ‘-core’ exists to cause your wallets to empty. refuse culture of perfection and accept the messiness and asymmetry of a human body. if your first thought is “but i will look ugly” ask yourself why you think an unmodified human body is ugly. secondly ask yourself why you are so afraid of that. reject the veneer, reject the facade. become un-commodifiable. the revolution will not be marketed

[terminusantequem]

Maik Wolf (German, b. 1964), Cluster 14 Monolith 3 Nacht 2, 2012. Oil on canvas, 200 x 280 cm

[3liza]

[lesbiessence]

This is true btw.

Google Is Quietly Providing AI Technology for Drone Strike Targeting Project

Google is providing assistance to the Defense Department’s new algorithmic warfare initiative to apply artificial intelligence solutions to

[3liza]

The Dark Side of CAPTCHA, Google's Annoying, Ineffective Security Tool

If they’re so easy to crack, then why do CAPTCHAs still exist? It’s not just to infuriate us

[grundoonmgnx]

TM Davy, Like-a-record, n.d.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[an-alarming-number-of-bees]

They’re more deserving of the uniform than most generals.

[mens-rights-activia]

Heroes

[memewhore]

Society couldn’t function without them.

[kaijutegu]

Society really couldn’t function without them. Anthropologist Robin Nagel did this fabulous ethnography of NYC sanitation workers called Picking Up where she actually became a sanitation worker herself. In NYC alone, there’s fewer than 10,000 sanitation workers dealing with a daily load of about 11,000 tons of garbage and 2,000 tons of recycling. It’s a more dangerous profession than firefighting or police work (cops and fire aren’t even in the top ten most dangerous jobs in the US), and if the sanitation workers aren’t able to do their jobs, cities become unlivable overnight.

(Also you should read that Robin Nagel book, it’s really fascinating. Even if you don’t live in a city, it’s a great read.)

[pics-that-make-you-go-hmm]

[buddhabrot]

sweet dreams my pink friend

[preposterousness]

this is the only picture i want to look at for the rest of my life

[visual-christianity]

Annunciation — Ivanka Demchuk

[tusseninbovenop]

Xu Zhen - Hello 

[grubarchived]

i think it is important to note that she moves to face you. here is a video

[gallusrostromegalus]

A FRIEND!!!

[everythingfox]

A lot of cats

(via)

[prokopetz]

I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.

[prokopetz]

Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” - there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.

[sandovers]

no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era -

it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.

we think the answer is polar bears.

no, seriously!  in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’  it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.

of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they?  so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless?  well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences.  and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear?  what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity? 

and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.

[scientia-rex]

you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR

every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken

[wenamedthedogkylo]

Not just an actual bear. A polar bear cub.

Imagine a fully grown man running offstage to be “killed” by a baby polar bear.

[ghostcat3000]

exit, pursued by bear. i.e. THE BEST STAGE DIRECTION OF ALL FUCKING TIME

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

[Image description: an animated GIF of a tiny baby polar bear and their human keeper. The human places the bear cub on the floor and it waddles, very unsteadily toward the camera. Description ends]

This post has lived in my head since it was first posted almost 5 years ago.

The thing is: for modern audiences and theater producers The Winter’s Tale is something of a mess. Because most of the action immediately after “Exit, Pursued by bear” is a harvest/shepherd’s feast, with the guests breaking into random songs, and then stopping to watch a troupe of dancers perform, rinse and repeat, for a full half hour or so, and doesn’t seem to do much to move the story forward at all.

But Shakespeare wasn’t writing the play for us. He was writing for an audience with a whole bunch of people who didn’t usually go to hear a play, and only showed up to catch a glimpse of this bear everyone’s been talking about. That moment happens in the middle of the story. So how do you keep a whole chunk of the audience from leaving, after the cute white fluff ball has waddled his way across the stage?

You give them a musical concert and acrobat show – get them singing along to favorite songs they already know, get them to feel like they’re actually guests at a real feast, instead of just watching one. And then, at the height of the fun, when everyone’s laughing and having a grand ol’ time, you bring the plot back, and threaten the young heroine and her family with death by hanging.

Brilliant audience wrangling, if you ask me.

If I were going to do a revival/retelling, I might make it a Space Opera, and instead of a polar bear, promise a spectacle of a Jim Henson Workshop monster. And turn the shepherd’s feast scene into a rock concert with wild dancing and songs. I don’t know enough about current music to know who I’d try to get as Autolycus (pickpocket and song-leader at the party) though.

[averyterrible]

I had been looking for that book again because i remembered it had a great tiger in it, and I remembered correctly:

there’s still another tiger picture i’m trying to find again. similar style, but i believe it’s a woodcut and the tiger’s head is even more spherical.

[zukriuchen]

is it this one

 Fierce Tiger Drawn from Life | Utagawa Kunimaro (1860)

[averyterrible]

it isn’t but that fucking rules

[nobrashfestivity]

Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930

Nan Wood and BH McKeeby , The models.