starry night

pure giggles!!

Image Study IV: Alight in the shadows

The Drinkers
Honore Daumier - 1861
Painting- Oil on wood

Mother and Child
Elizabeth Catlett - 1944
 Lithograph

Portrait of a Marriage
John Gutmann -1935
Photo- Gelatin silver print

Saint Anthony the Abbot in the Wilderness
Osservanza Master - 1435
Painting- Tempera and Gold on wood

The Penitent Magdalen
Georges de La Tour - 1640
Painting- Oil on canvas

Ranking Roger (w/ The Clash)- Rock the Casbah

Zeroh- I was sad

thank gawd for d'angelo

Merry Christmas

Shout outs to the Ohio dude who set up this zombie nativity scene:

painting attempt

sculpture and honesty

Camille Claudel
Bronze Waltz- 1893

Auguste Rodin
Triton and Nereid- 1886-1893

early christmas gift

I wasn't planning on blogging today, but when the internet gives you gold, you should share it and anyway-- 'tis the season right?

And so I give you this (well- the beautiful website "Africa is a country" is the real gift-giver here):

"Remember Invisible Children?"

I like that the bulk of this article is composed of lots of soundbyte- type analysis notes (cause, really, the StopKony campaign doesn't deserve a concentrated effort and yet there is so much hilarious bullshit there it's almost criminal to limit one's focus or take the time to construct fully developed ideas.. to this format, I say "YES! Gimme all the gold!") and videos that give one an accurate depiction of these pesky white kids and their successful manipulation of pop culture and social media. To top it off-- brilliant British humour!

ALSO: OMG these kids still exist!!

Image Study III

So, once again I haven't picked a theme (I'm still having too much fun exploring the collection) but I do think that either next week or the following, I will select one.

Hope you enjoy!

Bride With Fan
Marc Chagall - 1911
Painting- Oil on canvas

Learning is Wealth- Wilson, Charley, Rebecca, and Rosa, Slaves from New Orleans
Charles Paxson - 1863-64
Photo- Albumen silver print from glass negative

The Triumph of Fame Over Death
1500-1530 (South Netherlands)
Tapestry- Wool warp, wool and silk wefts

Seville
Henri Cartier-Bresson - 1933
Photo- Gelatin silver print

I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas
Richard Hamilton - 1971
Mixed medium- Screenprint on collotype, with pasted paper sticker
image source (info can be found on MET site)

might as well show it from another angle

goddamnn

nature through different lenses

Geena Davis was the coolest

proof that PR agencies are the worst

source

excellent business name

De La Soul- Rock Co. Kane Flow

..let's cookie cut the shit and get the gingerbread, man


 

one size fits all

anyone looking to spend $300 on me? get this! i'd probably spend the entire 3 month winter in it...

Datura

...that said, please don't..there's no way that mohair + very basic tailoring = $300 .. :(

Off again!

Expert Guise artist: Tilda Swinton

Inspiration for the day- Ava DuVernay

"There is something in our culture that says your dream or the thing you're pursuing has to happen immediately and all at once, and that is destructive to the creative spirit. I just embraced the idea that this was going to be a gradual exploration of the thing I was interested in--making films--and gave myself the permission to go slowly. I didn't beat myself up for the fact that I had a day job. I considered how I could strengthen myself through my day job so that one was feeding the other."

article

Stephania Dapolla
http://stephaniadapolla.tumblr.com/

"disrupting business as usual"- the badass activists of Oakland

article

racial, racist profiling - business as usual

@parrythehoot over a 3 year period, the police collected more cards for young black men than there ARE young black men in T.O. #TPSB

— Desmond Cole (@DesmondCole) December 15, 2014

Image study II

Apologies for the lateness-- without further adieu:
(these and more, found here)

The Blackboard, Poland
David "Chim" Seymour- 1948
Photo- Gelatin silver print

Woods Twilight
Edward J. Steichen- 1899
Photo- Platinum Print

West Indies, From the Types of All Nations series (N24) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes
George S. Harris & Sons- 1889
Commercial color lithograph

Diana And Endymion
Frank Short (based on painting by George Frederic Watts, 1869)- 1891
Etching and Mezzotint

La Poupee
Hans Bellmer- 1934
Photo- Gelatin Silver Print

Impressive protesting in London

Protesting sexist new laws regulating pornography in the UK, participants chanted: "What do we want? Face-sitting! When do we want it? Now!" Um-- I can't believe these types of morality regulations are still being implemented. Article

Anna Karina can even make buses beautiful ...

Angel Olsen- Stars

I'd like to once again profess my love for Angel Olsen's "new" album (Feb. 2014). The latest song I'm falling all over my self for is "Stars". I was going to simply attach an album version of the song, but YouTube offered up this gold:



One of the things that I like about this track is Olsen's stream of consciousness/fearless lyrics.

I wish I had the voice of everything.
I wish I had the voice of everything.
To scream the animals, to scream the earth.
To screams the stars out of our universe.

Olsen's guttural, twangy, searching vocals climb and fall and make you believe her unbelievable words. These words are expressions of things that we can't usually express- they sound like colours a painter would use, unleashed when nothing else seems to make sense or satisfy. And this video is great because Olsen delivers all this pain and frustration and exhilaration with a stoic stare. Just look at her eyes.

cell phone photography + android photoshop

Apartment corridor

South Philly pizza

Self-portrait (by apartment window)

Angel Olsen- Forgiven/Forgotten

Music and the politics of place- Broken Deer and Theesatisfaction

Alright-- so these two seemingly very different albums- Polaraura, by Broken Deer and Sandra Bollocks Black Baby, by Theesatisfaction- share an interesting thematic connection. The songs "My Heart's in the Highlands" and "Born Identity" both discuss, in very different words, references and sounds the way we understand our identities, our destinies, our histories, our dreams and visions as connected with our respective space. Both vocalists are women and through their lyrics we glean that their being women bears some importance. My Heart's in the Highlands is the title of an 18th Century Robert Burns poem about attachments and longing for the highlands of the "North", but the song in question (which was recorded in and drew influence from Whitehorse, Yukon- a "forgotten wilderness- within themselves") contains different lyrics- ones that reflect a more mysterious and feminine relationship between the land and the artist. The sounds Broken Deer generate are absolutely beautiful and searching and expansive and solitary.
The second track is from Theesatisfaction (for the life of me, I could not get the html link to embed in this post--

 %$#%$#a.ekt ahbvl.ea vr$%^$*

.... i'm over it though.. so I've attached a link to the webpage where you can play the track).

"Born Identity" is similar to "My Heart's in the Highlands" insofar as it makes great use of minimalist sound composition and it is explicitly dealing with the topic of identity as it is formed through one's space and place. Stas, however, does not paint a picture of solitude with her words. Her space is that into which she is born and takes claim of, not through some seemingly deep historical, mystical or natural connection, but through articulating her familiarity with the city she inhabits by way of chance and with which she continues to identify, by choice. Her world is loud and crowded, while Broken Deer's is absolutely silent, save the violent sounds of nature.

It's hard for me to not think about how the history of race is present in these songs. -- but since I know far too little about the politics of the former artist I will abstain. Both songs (and BD's video) are nonetheless stunning.

 

**Apologies if this post is jumbly.. I wasn't planning on writing tonight update:

Q-Tip - Let's Ride

Common - The Light

Bang Bang (my baby shot me down) - Dance and Death

I'm a not-so-closet fan of So You Think You Can Dance because of dances like the one posted here. Yes, Nigel Lythgoe is a creepy sexist asshole, yes the screams and cries from teens at the tapings are annoying and of course, yes, the whole premise of the competition often leads to aggravating popularity politics determining who gets to continue to dance and who leaves. But I don't really care in the end, because sometimes you'll get to see people like Eliana Girard and Alex Wong completely embody a song in beautiful movement. Dancing to Nancy Sinatra cold, slow rendition of a ballad about love lost and the violence that is felt through rejection, Girard and Wong (as per their choreographer - Stacey Tookey's- intructions) create bent, gnarled shapes with their bodies through and alongside beautiful, dynamic movement to tell a story of lust and death. Sometimes dance tells such stories better than any other medium. As one movement leads into the next, as lust guides us toward death and death kickstarts lust, you can understand and really feel how the two impulses are connected.

Fall cooking

Harissa and Maple Roasted Carrots
recipe

Pork Chops with Sauteed Apples
recipe

Mulled Wine
recipe

                                       

Robin D. G. Kelley- A great academic

In response to the question of how he incorporates his text Race Rebels into his teaching, he humbly responds:
"I may have taught Race Rebels twice in my career. Still, there are some themes that come up in my teaching that relate directly back to Race Rebels, as well as to all of my books during that period. My objective has long been to unearth movements that had been driven underground or erased from popular historical narratives, and to recover their ideas. Race Rebels, more than my other books, is about unearthing what is sedimented below the surface. In the classroom, I’m not necessarily trying to construct a new master narrative but encourage students to figure out what people thought, felt, and how their ideas and visions of what is possible changed over time—irrespective of how big or influential the movement. I resist dividing Black movements into categories like “integrationist/separatist; resistance/accommodation; nationalist/socialist, etc., but instead try to get beyond the public performance of consent and push students to understand that motives for human behavior are not reducible to material conditions or ideology. I hope that students come away from my History classes recognizing that evidence for these kinds of movements is always fugitive, ephemeral, flashes rather than full-blown illumination. It’s like writing history by strobe light."

* rest of article