#New-Yorker

[mysharona1987]

[phlebasthebroenician]

My favorite rejected New Yorker submission

[vagabondageautourdesoi]

Ailleurs, chez moi - D. Kennedy

Récit autobiographique et essai de Douglas Kennedy dans Ailleurs, chez moi, un voyage autobiographique à la recherche de ce que c'est qu'être Américain.

Un voyage autobiographique à la recherche de ce que c’est qu’être Américain À partir de sa propre histoire, Douglas Kennedy essaye de répondre à cette question en apparence simple : Qu’est-ce qu’être américain ? Depuis, plusieurs romans, l’écrivain décrit des instants historiques de la vie américaine qui dénonce les travers d’une société malade de ses rêves, devenus fantômes. Dans son dernier,���

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[beingharsh]

"John Waters Is Ready for His Hollywood Closeup", The New Yorker

[tragedyposting]

*Please only answer this poll if you’re American, if for some reason you have a burning curiosity to know where the results are at I can send an update, I don’t want the results to be too skewed.

Feel free to tag/reply your state and which you identify with more strongly

[imaswellkid]

Cartoon by David Ostow (X)

He made it to The New Yorker cartoons. I’m so damn proud of him 🥹

[commiepinkofag]

LGBTQ Muslims Call for Permanent Ceasefire in Front of Stonewall

One-hundred LGBTQ Muslims gathered for a jummah prayer for Palestine in front of the Stonewall National Monument on Friday to demonstrate that there is “no pride in genocide.” “Queer Muslim New Yorkers are rising up in solidarity with Palestinians, and through a queer Muslim-led interfaith prayer, they will stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people who are facing genocide, starvation, and ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Israeli government backed by the United States,” organizers said in a statement. “Queer communities face historical discrimination, prejudice, violence, criminalization, lack of proper healthcare and/or gender affirming care, and more — and here in the U.S. queer activists have been rising up against increased LGBTQ+ attacks, yet their struggles are being exploited in a dangerous narrative war to suggest that there would be no place for queer people in Palestine,”

[ 📷 Stonewall Park, NYC, Dec 15, 2023. © Graham MacIndoe ]

[fayegonnaslay]

Central Park West, New York, 1975-78 by Helmut Newton.

[kafkasapartment]

Flying Saucer, Saturday Evening Post Cover, 1966. Paul Calle. Acrylic on board.

[grrlmusic]

Clairo

[rootin-tootin-n-kind]

I wish we had a supernatural episode in nyc. Two kansas silly guys getting lost on the subway while trying to hunt down a vampire or demon. Dean complaining about no parking anywhere. Sam carrying a comically large map around.

[allthehiddlethings]

Tom, in a perfect New York accent:

"Hey, Loki! Put your dog on a leash—it's after 9!" 👮 🛑

[retropopcult]

Eclipse watchers squint through protective filters as they view an eclipse of the sun from the top deck of New York City's Empire State Building, 1932.

(source: San Diego Tribune)

[warandpeas]

I Need This More Than You

[hometoursandotherstuff]

I've actually seen this statistic before and I believe it.