ana's blog

[tapireye-deactivated20220708]

Fiona Apple for Elle 📸 Zelda Hallman

[therealcarlyraejepsen]

I Did Think, Let’s Go About This Slowly Mary Oliver

I did think, let’s go about this slowly. This is important. This should take some really deep thought. We should take small thoughtful steps.

But, bless us, we didn’t.

[therealcarlyraejepsen]

To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian Ross Gay

Tumbling through the city in my mind without once looking up the racket in the lugwork probably rehearsing some stupid thing I said or did some crime or other the city they say is a lonely place until yes the sound of sweeping and a woman yes with a broom beneath which you are now too the canopy of a fig its arms pulling the September sun to it and she has a hose too and so works hard rinsing and scrubbing the walk lest some poor sod slip on the silk of a fig and break his hip and not probably reach over to gobble up the perpetrator the light catches the veins in her hands when I ask about the tree they flutter in the air and she says take as much as you can help me so I load my pockets and mouth and she points to the step-ladder against the wall to mean more but I was without a sack so my meager plunder would have to suffice and an old woman whom gravity was pulling into the earth loosed one from a low slung branch and its eye wept like hers which she dabbed with a kerchief as she cleaved the fig with what remained of her teeth and soon there were eight or nine people gathered beneath the tree looking into it like a constellation pointing do you see it and I am tall and so good for these things and a bald man even told me so when I grabbed three or four for him reaching into the giddy throngs of wasps sugar stoned which he only pointed to smiling and rubbing his stomach I mean he was really rubbing his stomach it was hot his head shone while he offered recipes to the group using words which I couldn’t understand and besides I was a little tipsy on the dance of the velvety heart rolling in my mouth pulling me down and down into the oldest countries of my body where I ate my first fig from the hand of a man who escaped his country by swimming through the night and maybe never said more than five words to me at once but gave me figs and a man on his way to work hops twice to reach at last his fig which he smiles at and calls baby, c’mere baby, he says and blows a kiss to the tree which everyone knows cannot grow this far north being Mediterranean and favoring the rocky, sun-baked soils of Jordan and Sicily but no one told the fig tree or the immigrants there is a way the fig tree grows in groves it wants, it seems, to hold us, yes I am anthropomorphizing goddammit I have twice in the last thirty seconds rubbed my sweaty forearm into someone else’s sweaty shoulder gleeful eating out of each other’s hands on Christian St. in Philadelphia a city like most which has murdered its own people this is true we are feeding each other from a tree at the corner of Christian and 9th strangers maybe never again.

[therealcarlyraejepsen]

In Blackwater Woods Mary Oliver

Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

[meghli]

One of the most iconic photographs taken during the first intifada:

Micheline Awwad holding her bright yellow high heel shoes as she threw stones at israeli forces in Beit Sahour

Micheline, 30 years later, recalling what happened the day the photo was taken:

“I was wearing a black shirt and top, a yellow scarf and yellow heels. There was a special mass at the church, otherwise I wouldn’t have worn that outfit for a protest,” recalled Micheline Awwad, a mother of two who now works in a hotel. The context, she explained, was Palestine’s 1987 intifada, or “uprising,” a conflict that lasted until 1993 and saw an estimated 14,000 Palestinians and 271 Israelis killed.

“We didn’t expect any demonstrations. When I saw the Israeli army approaching and young men were confronting them, I followed the young men. When I started running, I couldn’t run with those shoes. I took them off and carried them. Then I bent down and picked up a stone. I didn’t know someone was taking a picture,” she told BBC News. “It was an uprising from the heart. Young men and women passionately took to the streets.”

[peniswakt-deactivated20210717]

[apricops]

It’s quite likely no coincidence that that most ‘mismanaged’ and least profitable social media site is also the one that turned out to be most amenable to the formation of actual communities

[apricops]

To clarify, Tumblr is indeed horribly mismanaged, but notably, it’s mismanaged both in ways that harm us (e.g. doing little about pornbots, nazis, etc.) and ways that have greatly benefited us – not asking for real names, hiding our follower counts, a chronologically-sorted dashboard, etc. are big draws, but in the eyes of other social media monarchs, they look like unforgivable mistakes. If I don’t have to give my real name, that’s that much less information to sell to advertisers. If posts are listed chronologically, Tumblr can’t shove the posts of ‘influencers’ in front of me willy-nilly. Tumblr was a ‘success’ because it was too poorly managed to sufficiently atomize us, and so we actually had conversations and communities instead of being the best products for advertisers.

[slashandburn]

[bienenkiste]

Preen S/S 2018

[fuckinglovebrit]

Britney Spears by Ernie Paniccioli

1998

[thecolorblockcurator]

Flight, 1963, Betye Saar 

[timonegingi]

Faka (Fela Gucci & Desire Marea) for Telfar. 

Photo by Ivan Grianti.

[jphcrk-deactivated20251128]

Petra Collins wants what Russian cellphone cameras have

[women-loving-art]

“As a matter of fact I think all art, not excluding religious art, has come into being because of sensuality: a sensuality so great that it overflows the boundaries of the mere physical. How can one feel the beauty of a form, the intensity or the subtlety of a colour, the quality of a line, unless one is a sensualist of the eyes?“

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) Photographed by Victor Egan, 1933.

[meghanmclovin]

You know what’s really hot? Not having to guess someone’s feelings or intentions

[1dietcokeinacan]

IF WE WANT THE REWARDS OF BEING LOVED WE MUST SUBMIT TO THE MORTIFYING ORDEAL OF BEING KNOWN!!!!

[sneakyfeets]

[whartonian]

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another…. One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

— John Berger, Ways of Seeing