Stephen Nytas - A-Frame House (from the Playsets series)
I saw a few of his works at Columbia College Chicago's Glass Curtain Gallery the other day, and was really, really into them. Seen as large prints they are even more effective.
This series brings to mind the first chapter of Dodie Bellamy’s Pink Steam, which is itself a response to David Levinthal’s Barbie works. You should probably check out all those things if you are into creepy doll feelings.
No Struggles: how to fall in love
Find a complete stranger.
Reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour.
Then, stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for four minutes.
York psychologist, Professor Arthur Arun, has been studying why people fall in love.
He asked his subjects to carry out the above 3 steps and found that many of his couples felt deeply attracted after the 34 minute experiment. Two of his subjects later got married.
Almost more interesting to me is this bit from the BBC article:
“Another experiment showed that if people experience fear on a date they often misinterpret that feeling as love.”
also:
“In fact, people who both like the same level of thrills and excitement are more likely to be compatible.”
Hello, I’m Sid Branca, and I like to kiss girls who are into thrills. I like men who misinterpret fear as love. I don’t know how to talk to another human being, and I’m afraid of dying alone.
When We Refuse to Suffer (Album Version) - Jonathan Richman (Because Her Beauty Is Raw & Wild)
I’ve been pretty intensely battling with my bipolar disorder lately. I am, I suppose, undergoing a period of substantial growth. I’m learning a great deal, be it technical or intellectual or artistic or emotional. I am finally moving beyond my first stumbling steps toward some kind of adulthood, without dropping what makes me feel sometimes like a child staring with glee and terror and leaping into the arms of the world. I do, I do know that my life is good. I know that I am busy with many things that are important to me, and know that my loneliness is productive, my fear is productive. These things are useful to a point. I must finally, now, learn to be a woman alone and whole and truly in the world, and I do not regret the choices that led me here. But sometimes it is hard to live inside my head. My chest aches, my collarbone cracks open, my ribs are a gate swinging wide and all the dust the street kicks up gets in. I’m in love with everybody all the time, except when I’m not. I am falling apart at the seams, but I have arranged my disintegration well. I watch a stranger emerging from a building, eyes full of tears, and I have to grab a hold of something. A mailbox, a bike rack. If I touch anyone they will turn to dust, or worst, forget me, or even worse, remember. I barely know my own name. I wait for a bus. I imagine myself in a small pool of light at the bottom of the lake. I can’t stop seeing every color in the room, watching each movement of a body, hearing each sound as the shift of a symphony. I no longer know how to process life differently from something that is presented to me as art. My hands shake, I smoke too many cigarettes, I adore unavailable men, I draw a circle over and over and over again until it tears the page. I put my headphones in. I pretend to let the random chance of lyric state my mood. This song comes on.
This outfit belonged to the late fashion icon and magazine editor Isabella Blow, who committed suicide in 2007. Isabella was a huge influence on Gaga, and Gaga has been a major supporter of the Isabella Blow foundation, which provides funding both to arts scholarships and depression research. Isabella was a huge part of the British fashion scene, and Gaga considered wearing this to London Fashion Week a tribute to her memory. That doesn’t depoliticize it, of course, but is another layer of context for the intention behind the choice. And that you should probably all be getting somewhat less pissed at Gaga and more pissed at the British woman who discovered McQueen and poisoned herself after getting ovarian cancer. (Blow was also working on a book project about “beauty in the Arab world” not long before her death, although I don’t know what became of the project.)
Obviously I get why someone who has undergone persecution for wearing a burqa as a part of their religious practice could be offended, and I’m not attempting to delegitimize that. However, think of the thousands of bullshit Western teenagers who didn’t know what a burqa is earlier this year. Perhaps a few of them were curious, and did some googling. They now know slightly more than they did, and perhaps are slightly more tolerant. Yes, it’s tacky and ugly and insensitive, but I’ll take that over cultural isolationism and ignorant youth any day.
And of course, to reiterate what K said below, “people have no right to tell anyone what they can and can’t wear."
Backstage at London Fashion Week.
i just searched the lady gaga tag to see if tumblr savior is working ,and then i see this . she angers me so much
seriously what the fuck are you doing
you get my gif too
if you can wear it, why can’t she?
Because she’s not Muslim, because she’s not from the middle east, because she can’t fucking wear shit that has religious and cultural significance for the name of fashion while my sisters, myself and milllions of other muslim women still get shitted on by western society and are called oppressed for just wearing a hijab, let alone a full veil and face covering while this woman can wear a cheap ugly tacky piece of shit and call it a burqa.
Ya made a wrong turn on this one, Gaga.
Wrong.
Where did she call it a burqa? Sure it looks like one, and that’s how women wear one (except the color… and translucent veil over the face), but if she called it one then that’s what matters. Gaga’s also worn meat and came to an award ceremony in a giant fucking egg. She does weird shit. Let it roll.
If you wanna play devil’s advocate you could try to say that her wearing it is showing how it can be used as a fashion statement, meaning that there’s nothing wrong with it, meaning that people should get used to the image of it and therefore stop shitting on the burqa and hijab when women wear it for religious purposes.
I wear scarves on my head but not in the same style as Muslim women. Think about the 50s style of women tying scarves around their head to keep hair back, or just to travel. I don’t do it for any other reason but I feel more comfortable doing so. I have crucifix designs on jewelry and, sometimes, on t-shirts. I’m not Christian and I don’t see anything wrong with it (unless the image is being used in an offensive way). I have images of the Buddha in my home, and while I’m no Buddhist I do tend to pray/make wishes towards said statue.
You can come after me all you want and spout out stuff like PRIVILEGE and IGNORANCE etc. etc. but you know what? I don’t care. I don’t. I think it’d be better to be more concerned about the people who treat these religious objects as something to be ashamed of instead of realizing that 1: they have a value that can’t be ignored and 2: people have no right to tell anyone what they can and can’t wear. This goes both ways. I think you would be better off going after the people who attack you for wearing something crucial to your religion and something you take great pride in. If you disagree, go right ahead and keep fighting that fight against… what, again?
For all we know, crazy lady’s doing this as a very poor attempt at solidarity. You can judge her for it but it’s important to think of the other side of this, however much you don’t like it.
I’m not a Gaga apologist, and while I’m a fan of hers I’m definitely not worshipping all the shit she does, but she’s got her heart in the right place. That doesn’t excuse when she steps over the line, though I think that’s just as important as the times she falls short of the mark and ruffles some jimmies, like in this case.
I’d also just like to add that this is LADY FUCKING GAGA. Everything she does is to keep your eye on her so congratulations, you just did exactly what she wanted you to do.
9th grade history class, the news radio on, the nervous laughter. I don’t even believe in God but I remember praying. The halls of this public school are howling. I have long said I hate New York but I love New Yorkers and oh god Mike and Joe work on that block. The shine of the hallway floor because how can you look at anyone. 75 miles out and the phones don’t work. We walk the halls. I don’t remember getting home.
Standing in my childhood bedroom at the window. The light is slanting through curtains, blue, striped. My uncle’s voice is on the phone and I have never heard him so quiet. We don’t talk about it much, mostly I just need the telephone as proof that he has not turned into broken cinderblocks, ash, smoking shards of steel. We hang up.
In my memory there is a keening sound, a shrieking absence, a teenaged sobbing. Oh god what a child I was and oh god how time passes. So much of it. But still the wound aches. I smoked a joint by the river near the rubble that is no longer rubble with an anarchist named Myke with a y, slept on a blanket on the ground in his arms in its sight. I can never seem to remember where it is. Time goes on. Today is a Tuesday, the start of my second week of grad school, the day an album comes out, a day I don’t have rehearsal, a day I will try not to text someone I like a little too much, a day I will think about mopping the floors but probably won’t. But this day and that hang in the air, always and already and complete, humming at their certain frequency forever. Our lives like light, passing through the prism of the time before.
I didn’t mean to write about this today, but I woke up bolt upright before 5am this morning in a panic. I don’t know why. Perhaps memory didn’t want me to sleep.
I have pissed in your wine. I have broken your boards. I have burned down your house. A Balkan brass band is playing at your funeral. O Earth, I am a clumsy seductress. This brie is melting down my chin and my cunt is in the ocean, at the bottom of the sea. The names of bright-eyed men, and lord, the women too, are the shimmering rocks.
I want to burn you in my memory, give you the keys to my house of fear. My tongue in your mouth is a catechism, and I would let you baptize me in spit and tar. Let’s climb all the trees in the city. Let’s climb the stairs from the gravel to your room. Let’s, let’s.
I came across this while looking up the lyrics to “The Living Room”, which I was listening to on repeat: a blog post by Amanda Palmer, written in 2006 about the death of her friend Ben.
It made me weep kind of hysterically. Thinking about all the beautiful and anxious young men that I have shared strange connections with, only to get too busy and distracted to call. Every single one of them one day will die, and some of them I will not see again. Everything’s enough to make your heart break.
a visual explanation by Franklin Veaux of the distinctions between certain kinds of non-monogamous relationship structures and behaviors.
not necessarily the most accessible to people with no prior knowledge on the topic, and certainly a little tongue in cheek (see: unicorns), and I’m sure there are plenty of relationships that would prove this inaccurate, but I think it does a pretty good job of giving a clear visual description on a topic that is often confusing and semantically sloppy.
of course, it’s those expanses of unlabeled color that are often most difficult. navigating where exactly you and your partners’ needs lie on a vast and complex spectrum can be a challenge, duh.
The Ladies of VAGINA!
Photo by ishootrockstars
check it outttttttt. bad ass bitches. I’m the one on the far right (I had just been hanging upside-down).