#an american life

[burtlancster]

pot, kettle

[doghowto]

Man unintentionally teaches his Corgi sign language! 😊 Follow me for more smart puppers!

[foreverrryourssss]

✊🏾Black American Culture

[huariqueje]

Cold snap - Steve Smulka

American, b. 1949 -

Oil on linen , 36 x 48 cm.

[inthedarktrees]

Ballerinas standing on window sill in rehearsal room at George Balanchine's School of American Ballet

Alfred Eisenstaedt, Life, 1936

[bitchfitch]

Hey I just realized I don't think I know any American irl who doesn't have an immigrant ancestor within living memory and want to see if that's a me thing or just an average situation

[hymnsofheresy]

everytime i tell europeans my favorite cuisine is texmex & sonoran they are like “American bastardized Mexican food?” and i feel like im going insane. its not bastardized. its their fucking cuisine.

[saydesole]

African Waist Beads 

[ed13d1]

let it happen

illustration by sarah morgan

[techmomma]

Just in case anyone needs a history lesson:

The nazi salute IS the roman salute. Because. They specifically chose to use... the roman salute. To invoke the grandiose and history of the roman empire. Like. That was a specific choice they made when they were creating their empire. They didn't call it a nazi salute. THE NAZIS CALLED IT A ROMAN SALUTE.

They did not happen to create a salute that looks identical. They said "we like the roman salute because the romans created the idea of fascism, so we are going to use it." Fascism, if you didn't know, is derived from the ROMAN word for a symbol called the Fasces. It represents the ultimate power of a single leader over their subjects! I wonder why that would be really appealing for them as a symbol!

They were ALSO taking a little inspiration from us, Americans, because we were also using it in the early part of the 1900s!

Because Americans ALSO liked the whole "connection to the roman empire" part! If you think white people NOW have a boner for the roman empire, you should have seen them a century ago!

Americans, understandably, stopped using it, because we got in a war with the only other people who were using it more than we were and were creating some real fucked-up associations with it: THE NAZIS.

[drawnfamiliarfaces]

action ready

[burtlancster]

In one scene, much of which was eventually cut into a collage, the Doolin gang play baseball with bats and balls they have stolen off the train and Plummer had to throw the first pitch. “I had to run to get the ball,” she recalled, “and pick it up and face the camera and throw it. Burt demonstrated it and…He did a Burt Lancaster thing for me. It was beautiful. He just went down for that ball and then his bum rises and then his back follows and it's turning in to go away from the camera and then surprises the camera with a forward movement towards it because you think he's going to go the other way. And then he throws it and it's just to keep the audience entranced. It was extraordinary. He understood time on film, movement and space on film. How to move and how to work in harmony with the camera so that it wasn't actor-y. He was a mover, he could do anything with his body—therefore he understood music! A lot of film actors are cut off from the head down and their bodies just repeat themselves. He made it so the camera can capture the slightest movement. He knew how to do that. This blows your mind because you work with him in front of the camera and then you see it on film and you go, “Whoa! This is a master!” All his films—Birdman—have been impeccably blocked by him.”

— Amanda Plummer on working with Burt Lancaster, excerpt from An American Life by Kate Buford.

[egophiliac]

ENG PLAYERS I BESEECH YOU

I have been informed that you guys are getting part 4 of episode 7 tomorrow, which means we are FINALLY going to get the official romanization of Revaan's name, somebody please tell me because I need to know what it is.

like, yes, it's probably just Revan/Levan, but look, I'm sitting here with my finger over the button of all these Laverne and Shirley jokes and just waiting for the opportunity to deploy them --

[huariqueje]

Orange shampoo, Hillsdale  - Dmitri Cavender , 2019.

American, b. 1957 -

Oil on canvas , 24 x 18 in.

[floodleaf]

west virginia

[creature-wizard]

If you are so terrified of being Bad and Unredeemable that you can't make a decision that actually has a good chance of making things better and/or stopping things from becoming severely worse when there is some amount of moral ambiguity attached to said decision, that is a problem. A serious problem. What you have isn't "morality." It's anxiety/trauma so severe that it is actually preventing you from being a fully autonomous person.

Choosing inaction or the action that looks morally pure but actually has a nil chance of changing the outcome might make you feel like a good person, but it doesn't actually make you one. That's just not how it works. I won't say it makes you a bad person, but it does mean that your ability to behave autonomously and make meaningful choices is severely hindered.