#subject object

[mappingthemoon]

Sun Yitian: Virgin Mary in the Mirror, 2024, acrylic on canvas

[mappingthemoon]

kind of just realized i must be getting a bit of a thrill by pete's inherent indecision (gemini rising btw) vs. my impulsive dumbassery, case in point: i forwarded him the tour dates and asked if he wanted to go to another tmbg show (involving travel to another city Up North); he said he'd think about it; every moment of every day i'm like :eyeball emoji: DID YOU THINK ABOUT IT YET and like yeah actually this feels extremely rooted in me as a child asking my mom for something i desperately wanted but was unlikely to receive (say, permission to sleep over a friend's house) and her "I'll think about it" could last for days... me hanging in anxious suspense, trying to read her for clues, trying to behave more virtuously in order to subtly influence her towards the elusive yes. prepared to cut left or right immediately depending on the collapse of the waveform: will he or won't he!

[mappingthemoon]

Ralph Morse (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images): Boy Watching TV for the First Time in an Appliance Store Window, 1948

[bdarfler]

Part 1: How To Be An Adult— Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development

Ever wondered what it means to be an adult?

I recently dove back into Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development, and I can’t help, but I see it everywhere now. We don’t stop developing when we are old enough to drink. We can keep building skills that let us hold more of our experience at arms length and gain a better perspective on it.

[mappingthemoon]

it’s wild how my niece (4) and nephew (2) are aware of (the immediacy of) phone cameras/recording. lately some of the videos my sister shares end with them stopping whatever they were doing that warranted attention and running up to her/the camera, “Can I see it? Can I see it?”

[mappingthemoon]

in an interview with cbs, photojournalist lynsey addario said, “I try to keep the camera to my eye so I don’t think too much.” i feel like it would be irresponsible for me to post that quote without comment but i really have none. i just can’t stop thinking about it. it’s certainly not a new concept and she probably is not the first war photographer to articulate the idea so bluntly. it’s what you have to do to do your job. the camera creates distance and a kind of protection for the viewer; the photograph objectifies, simplifies, and equalizes. everything collapses into the same meaningless stream of images.

[mappingthemoon]

"Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory...but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.... The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so).

--Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

[spilledreality]

Kushner, Flamethrowers

I had always admired people who had a palpable sense of their own future, who constructed plans and then followed them. That was how Sandro was. He had ambitions and a series of steps he would take to achieve them. The future, for Sandro, was a place, and one that he was capable of guiding himself to. Ronnie Fontaine was like that, too. Ronnie’s goals were more perverse and secretive than Sandro’s, but there was a sense that nothing was left to chance, that everything Ronnie did was calculated. I was not like either Sandro or Ronnie. Chance, to me, had a kind of absolute logic to it. I revered it more than I did actual logic, the kind that was built from solid materials, from reason and from fact. Anything could be reasoned into being, or reasoned away, with words, desires, rationales. Chance shaped things in a way that words, desires, rationales could not. Chance came blowing in, like a gust of wind.

This is archetypal stuff guys. The history of the West is in this paragraph.