yours eternally

noelle // lesbian, 21. literature & theatre enthusiast.

[firstfullmoon]

Megan Fernandes, “May to December,” in I Do Everything I’m Told

[heavenlyyshecomes]

Whenever the tears threaten to brim over, the barefoot girl breaks into a run; she knows her way about the steep slopes. Faster, faster. Something in the girl’s body echoes like the howl of an animal among the mountains. It sweeps down to the vineyards as a gust of wind. The girl races on and on. When she has run till her body is empty, she stops abruptly and lets her gaze return again to the distant, delicately sparkling world below. Rivers trace silver lines. The sea is in sight. As her eyes follow the coastline, drifting ice appears and expands into a world of white. There’s something running freely over that white expanse, its heartbeat reverberating.

—Yūko Tsushima, Woman Running in The Mountains, tr. Geraldine Harcourt

[fearlastyear]

—Stephen Adly Guirgis, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot

[answeringemails]

“When I started making clothes for my line Y’s in 1977, all I wanted was for women to wear men’s clothes. I jumped on the idea of designing coats for women. It meant something to me – the idea of a coat guarding and hiding a woman’s body. I wanted to protect the woman’s body from something – maybe from men’s eyes or a cold wind.”

— Yohji Yamamoto

[darlingbosie]

Maxine Peake as Hamlet and Katie West as Ophelia, Royal Exchange, Manchester

[covvboytears]

the bluest eye, toni morrison

[tepot]

Of course, museums do not produce art; neither do they distribute art. They sacralize it. It’s important to underline the connection between property and the sacred. To sacralize is to exclude; it’s to set something apart from the world, whether because it is sacred to an individual (“private property”) or sacred to something more abstract (“art” “God,” “humanity,” “the nation”). Any revolutionary regime changes existing forms of property, and the organization or reorganization of museums plays a crucial role in this process, since the forms of property that exist within museums represent the summit of the pyramid. They are the ultimate wealth that police protect, and that the industrious poor can only see on weekends.

Virtually all museums today operate in a way that produces and maintains hierarchy. By archiving, cataloging, and reorganizing the museum’s space, they draw a line between “museum” quality and “non-museum” quality objects. But there is no ultimate contradiction between commoditized art and art considered inalienable and not to be sold, because they are simply two variations of the sacred as radical exclusion. The fact that these objects are surrounded by armed security and high-tech surveillance simply serves to underline to any visitor how much their own creative acts (songs, jokes, hobbies, diary entries, care for loved ones, and precious mementos) are of no particular significance, and therefore, that visitor will need to return to their non-museum life and continue to carry on their “non-inessential” job producing and maintaining the structure of relations that makes museums possible. Much like the cathedrals they were meant to replace, museums are there to teach one one’s place.

In the same way, the art world—as the apparatus for the production of objects, performances, or ideas that might someday merit being sacralized— is based on the artificial creation of scarcity. In the way that police guarantee material poverty, the existence of the art world—in its current form—could be said to guarantee spiritual poverty. What, then, would an abolitionist project directed at the art world actually look like?

David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky, "Another Art World, Part 3: Policing and Symbolic Order" (2020)

[prometheanreach]

Leonard Cohen

[cithaerons]

Fixed for the rest of his days on why, the question that asks itself of everything: the empty hemisphere of bed, the dreams in which she doesn’t yet know of her death, the odes he composes that still use the present tense. There must be some reason. If he stares long enough at his last image of her, already disintegrating at her edges, he will glimpse a material truth. For example: did some complicated equation describe her dance behind him, inaudible music dictating each step and rest? At the end of the song, was it written in the score that she must disappear? He strains to remember, over and over, to pick out a pattern from the chaos, and always, when he thinks he might finally have it, just as he turns toward it, it slips like a hand from his grasp.

Mirabella Mitchell, The “Hidden Variable” Theory of Orpheus and Eurydice

[marzipandildo]

Sul concetto di volto nel figlio di Dio [Romeo Castellucci -  Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio]

[weltenwellen]

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, from “And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When The Rapture Comes”

[discourseoflove]

“The role of the artist is exactly the same role, I think, as the role of the lover. If you love somebody, you honor at least two necessities at once. One of them is to recognize something very dangerous, or very difficult. Many people cannot recognize it at all, that you may also be loved; love is like a mirror. In any case, if you do love somebody, you honor the necessity endlessly, and being at the mercy of that love, you try to correct the person whom you love. Now, that’s a two-way street. You’ve also got to be corrected. As I said, the people produce the artist, and it’s true. The artist also produces the people. And that’s a very violent and terrifying act of love. The role of the artist and the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. Insofar as that is true, in that effort, I become conscious of the things that I don’t see. And I will not see without you, and vice versa, you will not see without me. No one wants to see more than he sees. You have to be driven to see what you see. The only way you can get through it is to accept that two-way street which I call love. You can call it a poem, you can call it whatever you like. That’s how people grow up. An artist is here not to give you answers but to ask you questions.”

— James Baldwin, “The Black Scholar Interviews James Baldwin,” Conversations with James Baldwin (edited by Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt)

[cithaerons]

Rosanna Warren, Tide Pickers

[exhaustedscreen-deactivated2019]

‘Films by ‘slow’ directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, and Lisandro Alonso… scrutinise the mundanity of the everyday while creating an immersive experience for the spectator through long takes and a sound design that produces a dense auditory field. Shifts in pitch and timbre draw in the spectator more deeply, submerging us into the diegetic world of the film that is at times populated by the heavy drone of insect life, the violent sway of leaves in the trees or the reverberation of traffic noise. At other times, however, the films grant a sense of intimacy (sometimes uncomfortably so) through very localised sounds that appear too near or strangely audible considering their point of origin within the visual field. Often recalling the use of sound in structural-materialist films, in slow cinema ambient sound can become noise; detached from signification, the auditory dimension loses ‘meaning’ and becomes ‘feeling’, experienced on and through the body of the spectator, at the same time as it is experienced by characters onscreen.’

- Philippa Lovatt, 'Slow Sounds: Duration, Audition and the Intimacy of the Everyday in Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide and Oxhide II’, in Tiago de Luca and Nuno Jorge (eds), Slow Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming.

[swanlake1998]

ivy chung, conny mok, and nicolina campbell photographed performing as juliet’s bridesmaids in bengt jörgen’s romeo and juliet by siu wang-ngai

[garadinervi]

From: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Between the Teeth, Curated by Robert Milne, Manifold Books, Amsterdam, November 28, 2021 – January 22, 2022 [Courtesy of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA. © Theresa Hak Kyung Cha]

[representimental]

FEMALE by Patti Smith (1967) female. feel male. Ever since I felt the need to choose I'd choose male. I felt boy rythums when I was in knee pants. So I stayed in pants. I sobbed when I had to use the public ladies room. My undergarments made me blush. Every feminine gesture I affected from my mother humiliated me. I ran around with a pack of wolves. I puked on every pinafore. Growing breasts was a nightmare. In agner I cut off my hair and knelt glassy eyed before god. I begged him to place me in my own barbaric race. The male race. The race of my choice. In answer he injected me with all the characteristics of my gender. sultry. languid. wanton. dip into summer skirts. go down with a narrow hipped boy behind a bowling alley. bleed. come. fill my womb. the misfit massacres the mustang pony just to feel the soft rise of marilyn monroe against his chest. bloated. pregnant. I crawl thru the sand. like a lame dog. like a crab. pull my fat baby belly to the sea. pure edge. pull my hair out by the roots. roll and drag and claw like a bitch. like a bitch. like a bitch.