Podцvet

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[umnica]

Baku, summer 2012, 6 am.

[umnica]

literal and metaphorical unfollow spree in preparation for Novruz. 

[umnica]

"Long shot dediğin", an epic poem by Oktay Kaynarca Aleksandr Sokurov.

[umnica]

I image searched "ecstatic pokemon"

when I first saw jeffrey tambor on the good wife

[umnica]

Ursula K. Le Guin accepts the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 65th National Book Awards on November 19, 2014.

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art... We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

[unforgettable-winter]

Victoria Vitalyevna Samsonova.

[archivings]

[emmagleason]

Prada by Helmut Newton, 1986

[umnica]

The America that drew my family was a journey of seven thousand miles, and although mountain roads and voyages in steerage were treacherous, the hardest were those first miles away from home, away from faces that would no longer be familiar. By the time we arrived in New York, or Texas, or Oklahoma, or wherever, much was lost. “Your first discovery when you travel,” wrote Elizabeth Hardwick, “ is that you do not exist.” In other words, it is not just the others who have been left behind; it is all of you that is known. Gone is the power or punishment of your family name, the hard-earned reputations of forebears, no longer familiar to anyone, not in this new place. Gone are those who understand how you become yourself. Gone are the reasons lurking in the past that might excuse your mistakes. Gone is everything beyond your name on the day of your arrival, and even that may ultimately be surrendered. So much had to be jettisoned for the sake of survival. Emotions were not acknowledged when so many others had suffered more. There was only survival for these travelers and faces to recall until the pictures they carried frayed or no longer held together. Though none of us could summon its image, Isber Samara’s house remained, saying his name and ours. It was a place to look back to, the anchor, all that was left there. To my family, separated or united, Isber’s house makes a statement: Remember the past. Remember Marjayoun. Remember who you are.

House of Stone, Anthony Shadid (Shadid, who was a Lebanese-American journalist, died in 2012 in Syria while covering the war there for the New York Times)

[umnica]

hard news

I was listening to this mix, Anna German's Nadezhda to be exact, when I saw this article, the news of Yuri Yakovlev passing away. And I told my dad, and he stared at the screen and then gave me the anticipated sigh of "eeekh!", and I promptly started crying. 

[umnica]

Cousin's amazing baby is amazing. 

[thesoviette]

A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries

A global survey tracks peoples’ willingness to live alongside neighbors of a different race.

[umnica]

I call bullshit on this map and this kind of "social science." Mainly because there is no way Russia gets to score that high on tolerance. Also check out Armenia and Azerbaijan hanging out in there like the beacons of tolerance that they are. 

[umnica]

running list of things other people can't ruin with their stupidity

sex

food

[umnica]

I mean there are slayonnaye piroshki and then there are slayonnaye piroshki.

My mother, on the piroshki she had at Literaturuli Cafe in Batumi.

[umnica]

All colors suit me.

My grandma.

[alioutfit]

Yesterday was the 1st of May public holiday. People in Berlin celebrate it either by rioting, or having a picnic in the park. Ali discovered that I was planning on doing the latter with my good friend and colleague Tania, who Ali knows and has a bit of a soft spot for. So he asked if he could join us, and arrived bearing fruit and Turkish pastries. And wearing this suitably jaunty suit.

[umnica]

This makes me even happier to be going to Berlin.

[umnica]

note to self

don't look at people's photos from their transsiberian railway journeys in one sitting. 

[umnica]

Critique of Postcolonial Reason

me: Victory Day is big in the Caucasus, so there are a lot of good pictures coming in today, if you are interested.

the editor: you mean Russia?

me: no, the Caucasus.

the editor: whose Victory Day are we talking about?

me: the Soviet Union's.