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Butawhiteboy Cantbekhan
i’m crying
(via slipstreamborne)
(via slipstreamborne)
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The Body in Nature: Unusually Beautiful Photographs
Photographing the nude is just about as old as the camera itself… from cheesy pinups to surreal body landscapes, the form has been explored in just about every way imaginable. That’s why, when I ran across the work of Arno Rafael Minkkinen I was truly blown away. His work is filled with almost magical abstract forms created using just creatively positioned figures in the landscape and his well placed lens… nothing more. Each photograph is a revelation, something to decipher for its mysterious form and appreciate for its lyrical beauty.
Making these images even more astounding, most of them are self-portraits. Minkkinen says he does this because of the often underestimated danger in creating such images (which sometimes involve hanging off cliffs or staying under frozen snow for long periods). He also uses no assistant to position himself in the shots, so he must click the shutter button and accurately dance himself into position in just 9 seconds before the shutter fires. For more difficult shots he has sometimes employed a long cable release which he throws out of the scene before the image is taken.
Perhaps this is the element that makes Minkkinen’s images so incredible: he whole heartedly embraces reality. He has been working since long before photoshop and uses the image as it was taken by the camera with no manipulation of the image. He explains his thinking:
“If you are going to be under the snow, be under the snow. ‘Out of limitations new forms emerge,’ Georges Braque said. My translation: know what you will not do. For me this means embracing reality as a collaborator in the invention of the image, not overlaying multiple images to create such impressions. In the end, my negatives will never give away how I made any one of my photographs. They will always print with the same information as found in them the day the negatives were made.”
(via(via pampoovey)
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flower language has always been an intense source of disappointment for me
like, they all mean really generic things like “love” or “forever” or “i’m sorry”
i thought you could combine flowers
like you could just send someone a bouquet and from the combination of hibiscus and posies and tulips they’d understand “the rebel leader is dead, rendezvous at the docks at 8, bring the dog, you will need lighter fluid and a large tomato”
#k-kenan? #KENAN! #AWW HERE IT GOES (via still-sophistory)
(via still-sophistory)
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High ResolutionThe Vision after the Sermon (Jacob wrestling with the Angel) by Paul Gauguin ca. 1888
This painting depicts the scene from the Bible in which Jacob wrestles an angel. As if in a modern-day wrestling arena, French women watch the wrestling match from afar. This painting was created during Gaugin’s stay in Pont-Avon, France, which is where he created his other masterpieces, The Yellow Christ and The Green Christ. This painting also incorporates elements from his Christ series, which also place Breton French women alongside a Biblical scene, placing them as observers in the story. In his typical style, flat areas of color are outlined by thick black lines, and the figures are void of any shading or depth of color.
(via mattachinereview)
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I’m going to work on the story I’m co-writing with Knives this afternoon and I couldn’t decide which picture of Ben Still and Owen Wilson I wanted to post to announce this fact so I’m going to post them both.
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(via droil
(Source: the-platonic-blow, via droil)
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Oh hi Thor. I did not hit Earth, I did not! So anyway, how’s your sex life?
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High ResolutionDescription, from the Wisconsin Historical Society: “View from behind of a young woman wearing a t-shirt with the title Dungeon Mistress printed on the back while she plays an adventure game on a computer. In the background is a blackboard.”
Via @auntiepixelante.
(via slipstreamborne)
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"I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.
Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.
Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: “Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?”
Indulgently, I lifted my right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, “Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them.” Then he said smugly, “I’ve been trying that on all my customers today.” “Did you catch many?” I asked. “Quite a few,” he said, “but I knew for sure I’d catch you.” “Why is that?” I asked. “Because you’re so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart."-Isaac Asimov (via skinnybaras)
Anyone who takes the meaning of IQ tests with anything but a shipping tanker sized pile of salt should at the very least read Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (preferably the revised edition so you can get his complete decimation of the racist, sexist tripe that is The Bell Curve). As one example for the kind of bias that tends to be built into these tests, the IQ tests used by the US army in the early 20th century (whose results were later used by others to argue that immigrants and people of color where innately less intelligent than their native-born white counterparts) included a “complete-a-picture” section were:
early items might be defended as sufficiently universal: adding a mouth to a face or an ear to a rabbit. But later items required a rivet in a pocket knife, a filmamet in a light bulb, a horn on a phonograph, a net on a tennis court, and a ball in a bowler’s hand (marked wrong… if an examinee drew the ball in the alley, for you can tell from the bowler’s posture that he has not released the ball). Franz Boas, an early critic, told the tale of a Sicilian recruit who added a crucifix where it always appeared in his native land to a house without a chimney. He was marked wrong.
Ask yourself: if you grew up in a rural region without access to electricity, how the fuck are you supposed to look at a drawing of a clear eggplant shaped object with a bit of metal on the narrow end and know you’re supposed to draw a curly piece of wire in the middle of it? And how the fuck is this supposed to accurately reflect on your abilities to process and apply a range of different types of information?
(via slipstreamborne)
(via slipstreamborne)
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X-men: Legacy has really grown on me.
What I love most about that last line is that—off the top of my head—I can think of at least five Watchmen characters it could apply to in varying degrees.
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#i actually want the meta about this #i know it’s all a silly joke but i am into it
GOD YOU ARE NOT ALONE IN THIS, you are so not alone in this at all, holy fuck. because, okay: this thing about the kenneth-is-immortal shit is that any way you slice it, it’s fascinating? like, silly joke or not, the least interesting interpretation of this is a character that has delusions of being an immortal/superhuman being, possibly an angel, whose most pressing interest is television???? WHICH IS, IN AND OF ITSELF, FASCINATING. you could do a whole thing about how and why it came to be that this person, despite believing himself to be ageless and timeless and possessed of powers without end, chooses to devote himself pretty much exclusively to tv. i would totes watch that show. i would totes read that book.
but that is the least interesting interpretation, and that’s because any other interpretation of this is an immortal/superhuman being whose most pressing interest is television. like. LIKE. i mean, seriously, think of the possibilities: kenneth is an angel trapped on earth, obsessed with television because it’s the closest he can come to observing humanity as a whole, the way he once could! kenneth is an immortal who can’t tell anyone his secret but desperately wants to be discovered, so he hangs around television sets dropping hints because he thinks it’s the most likely place for people to buy into the unbelievable! kenneth is an angel tasked with the divine duty of tracking and influencing human entertainment (and the subsequent breakdown of the bureaucracy of angels in media, and the angel who they report to, and the purpose of their presence)! kenneth is THE SPIRIT OF TELEVISION ITSELF, born when television was and forever working to keep it — and himself — alive!
but, okay, here’s my favorite one: kenneth is an immortal being who feeds on human belief. call him an angel or a god or a scavenger, because really he’s all three — he doesn’t need people to believe in him, specifically. he just needs people to believe in something, because the energy they release when they do is his lifeblood. he’s been alive since the dawn of human existence (“who said i’ve been alive forever”) and he spent centuries starving, developing a dark, hungry edge that’s never quite left him. religion sated him, but never for long; too often he found that people believed less than they said they did, and, anyway, the gods those people prayed to ate most of their energy, leaving him with almost nothing.
and then, one beautiful, brilliant day, he found television. television, created by humans who had no interest in or ability to absorb the belief thrown back at their work; television, constantly updating with new stories, new characters, new ideas for people to become completely absorbed in all the time. he works at NBC because his coworkers genuinely believe in what they do, and because they are, every day, bringing in studio audiences to fall into different storylines, different setups. he’s gone from starvation to gluttony, because now there is nothing but food all the time (but he keeps going to church, because there’s nothing with quite the same flavor as fervent religious belief). and that’s why he’s cheerful all the time, and happy to help, and completely committed to being there for tv, no matter what his position is: because at all times inside 30 rockefeller plaza, somebody is feeding him.
I don’t watch this show but I love this photoset for exactly the above reasons.
(Source: cassiejuly, via droil)
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qiow:
this performance deserves to be experienced in whole (rather than gifs)
So basically, you’re accusing Harry Potter of Racism. Even though the whole series is from beginning to end a giant metaphor against racism? You remember that part in EVERY SINGLE BOOK, where they said it’s not who you were born to be, it’s who you choose to be? Did they not drill that point deep enough?
And here’s the thing. Some of the things you describe about Cho are true. (And some, like her not having a complex range of emotions, are not). She’s not a hero. And yeah, I suppose some of those things are also associated with an asian stereotype. But you cannot, CANNOT, draw a giant parallel from just one character. You know why? Because Cho’s not a symbol, she’s a person. She just happened to be that way. Nobody said she was representative of the entire asian ethnic group.
(In fact, rarely was anyone’s ethnicity ever pointed out in the book. They were all characters, not poster boys of demographic groups.)
okay look
sure the series is a metaphor against racism, but it can be that and be racist at the same time. honestly i dont remember every detail in the books because it’s been a while since i’ve read them, but intent doesn’t matter. it’s possible to have the best intentions at heart and still do racist things. nobody and nothing is perfect and flawless.
and no, cho is not a person. SHE’S A CREATION. SHE’S NOT REAL. SHE IS A STORYBOOK CHARACTER THAT A REAL LIVE HUMAN BEING CREATED, WHO LIVES IN WESTERN SOCIETY AND HAS BEEN EXPOSED TO ASIAN STEREOTYPES. all of cho’s traits (and lack thereof) were imagined by the author, and if you stop pretending that the series exists in a vacuum or in a real universe and see it as a product and a mirror of our society (because thats what media is), you’ll see that cho, as created by jkr, is pretty obviously influenced by how asian people are stereotyped in media (or at least youll see how poorly researched or thought out her character is)
it matters how she’s characterized in the books because those books are extremely popular and widespread, and without a realistic or fully developed character, one that’s not flat or used as a prop or a tool for the main character to learn a life-lesson and then never expanded upon again, it is not helping. it’s just another harmful representation of asian people in popular fiction. she didnt just “”“happen”“” to be the way she is. she was MADE that way.
and okay, fine, maybe jkr did intend for her to have the personality she has. but why? why not a cho chang who is in hufflepuff? gryffindor? slytherin, even? why not a cho chang with an actually chinese name?? why not a cho chang who isnt just a prop for harry to react to and angst over? a cho chang with motivations and emotions and dreams?
why not a cho chang who is a hero?
ALSO, just because we want more POC characters doesnt mean we want them to represent an entire ethnic group??? it just means we fucking want MORE. because in a world where fictional characters are a white majority and the only POC characters are one-dimensional or token characters, it gets really fucking tiring.
and not mentioning the races of various characters isn’t a ‘not racist’ thing, IT’S ERASURE.
and by the way, pointing all this out isnt the same thing as saying the entire harry potter series is awful and no one should like it. pointing it out is just that, to make people stop and actually THINK about how minority characters are portrayed, whether or not its problematic within the context of western society given how every single asian character in every other work of fiction is portrayed, and if it is, WHY.
nothing is perfect and everything is problematic, and just because you like something doesnt mean you cant think critically about it
(via mandyskankovitch)
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a new wave gospel sharp: cigarette-haikus: The Cannibal’s Canción It is our custom to consume...
The Cannibal’s Canción
It is our custom
to consume
the person we love.
Taboo flesh: swollen
genitalia nipples
the scrotum the vulva
the soles of the feet
the palms of the hand
heart and liver taste best.
Cannibalism is blessed.I’ll wear your jawbone
round my neck
listen to your vertebrae
bone rapping bone in my wrists
I’ll string your fingers round my waist—
what a rigorous embrace.
Over my heart I’ll wear
a brooch with a lock of your hair.
Nights I’ll sleep cradling
your skull sharpening
my teeth on your toothless grin.Sundays there’s Mass and communion
and I’ll put your relics to rest.— Gloria Anzaldúa
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This will probably be uncomfortable for all of us.
I'd like to offer moral support, but I have questionable morals.
