@speleothem - Tumblr Blog

clara-scintilla

Fishery

lemuseum

chantssecrets

Seated Man (Meditation), 1925, by Jacques Lipchitz, American, born Lithuania

#art #sculpture

20thcenturystarlet

New York City ballet production of Midsummer Nights Dream

thepeelingrenoir

The fact this isn't a painting is a testament to one of the greatest feats of set design and production I've ever seen.

thepeelingrenoir

My god just look at this! The lighting, set design, photography... I've just never seen anything like it.

sisaloofafump

This is from 1966 and you can see over a hundred photos on the NYPL digital collections website. It is absolutely gorgeous. These are just a few of my favourites.

Plus Puck's face here:

british-animals

A swan, as you have never seen photographed before by Gerald Robinson

#photography #animals

jeroenapers

Een voormalig slachthuis in Shanghai, de 1933 Old Millfun, is recent omgebouwd tot een soort broedplaats voor creatieve bedrijven, inclusief cafés en winkels. De vreemde doorgangen, trappetjes en bruggen geven het betonnen complex een eigen karakter die nieuwbouw nooit zou kunnen geven.

#architecture

facelessoldgargoyle

Jenny Holzer, Living, 1980-82

#art #jenny holzer

max1461

There is a standard media depiction of a "healed" person. Someone who has Gone To Therapy. I've noticed this in a few works recently. We often see them at the end of a story, maybe in a "ten years later" epilogue. They speak in a soft, serene voice. They have Accepted what they cannot change. They have let go of a lot, including most of what we see them actually care about in the story itself. They are Happy, At Peace, in some non-descript way. They bare little resemble to the person we were actually shown. They bare little resemblance to any person. We were shown, as we usually are in stories, an agent, a desirer, someone becoming. Now they have Become. And they look back on all that silly becoming as something childish that they have moved past. Fire, you know, fire is for children who don't know any better. To be Healed is to have your fire rightly extinguished; to not even miss it.

despairtwins

"DSM-5 seems to have no definition of happiness other than the absence of suffering. The normal individual in this book is tranquilized and bovine-eyed, mutely accepting everything in a sometimes painful world without ever feeling much in the way of anything about it." — Sam Kriss's review of the DSM-5 as a piece of surrealist literature

annadelveys

One of the most chilling relics to emerge from [Isaac] Babel’s KGB dossier was the pair of mug shots taken upon his arrest in 1939. Photographed in profile, Babel gazes into the distance, chin raised, with an expression of pained resoluteness. Photographed face-on, however, he seems to be looking at something quite close to him. He seems to be looking at someone who he knows to be on the verge of commiting a terrible action. Of these images, a German historian once observed: “Both show the writer without his glasses and with one black eye, medically speaking a monocle haematoma, evidence of the violence used against him.”

I felt sorry for the German historian. I understood that it was the inadequacy of “without glasses and with one black eye” that drove him to use a phrase so absurd as “medically speaking a monocle haematoma”. The absence of glasses is unspeakably violent. You need long words, Latin words, to describe it. Babel was never photographed without his glasses. He never wrote without them either.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

miamaimania

“Cut the Rug (Cake)” ☀ Alana Jones-Mann ◇ Sponge cake with a 400-thread count

#art

darnyill

Serena Williams at the first round of the 1998 Wimbledon Championships, ph. Alex Livesey

#photography

blueboyluca

“When I first heard it, from a dog trainer who knew her behavioral science, it was a stunning moment. I remember where I was standing, what block of Brooklyn’s streets. It was like holding a piece of polished obsidian in the hand, feeling its weight and irreducibility. And its fathomless blackness. Punishment is reinforcing to the punisher. Of course. It fit the science, and it also fit the hidden memories stored in a deeply buried, rusty lockbox inside me. The people who walked down the street arbitrarily compressing their dogs’ tracheas, to which the poor beasts could only submit in uncomprehending misery; the parents who slapped their crying toddlers for the crime of being tired or hungry: These were not aberrantly malevolent villains. They were not doing what they did because they thought it was right, or even because it worked very well. They were simply caught in the same feedback loop in which all behavior is made. Their spasms of delivering small torments relieved their frustration and gave the impression of momentum toward a solution. Most potently, it immediately stopped the behavior. No matter that the effect probably won’t last: the reinforcer—the silence or the cessation of the annoyance—was exquisitely timed. Now. Boy does that feel good.”

— Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Secret History of Kindness (2015)