#secondary empress on tour

[theempressesofchinablog]

Empress Nara of the Qing Dynasty (1750-1766)

Qianlong’s second, and final, empress is known only as Empress Nara. She was ever given a posthumous title to honor her, nor was she given an empress’s funeral after her death. In fact, we know very little about her as it is widely believed almost all her records and portraits were destroyed after greatly offending the Qianlong Emperor. 

Unfortunately we are not entirely sure of her birthdate, though some believe she was born in March of 1718, and we aren’t entirely certain which Nara clan she belonged to as she has been listed belonging to both the Ula Nara and Hoifa Nara clans. 

We do know she married the Qianlong Emperor when he was still Prince Hongli and became his secondary consort. We do know that he favored her during this point and after he ascended the throne he named her Consort Xian in January of 1738. A few years later she was promoted to Noble Consort Xian after winning the favor of Empress Dowager Chongqing. 

After the death of Empress Xiaoxianchun in 1748, Noble Consort Xian was promoted to Imperial Noble Consort and assumed control of the harem. After the end of the mourning period for the previous empress, she was then promoted to the Empress Consort in September of 1750. 

Empress Nara would accompany the emperor on several of his trips to hunting grounds and ancestral worship sites. She would give birth to three children during her tenure as empress: Yongji, an unnamed daughter, and Yongjing. Both her daughter and Yongjing would die as infants. 

In 1765, Empress Nara would experience her downfall. She was accompanying the emperor on a tour of Southern China when Empress Nara would cut her hair. This was considered a grave offense as the Manchurian people were only allowed to cut their hair when they were in mourning. Her cutting her hair was seen as cursing both the emperor and his mother, the empress dowager. 

Empress Nara then returned to the capital before the rest of the entourage. When the emperor returned to Beijing he had the empress’s four imperial edicts, all her gifts, and her imperial seal confiscated. He also reduced her maid’s to just two, which was the same amount of maids a second class attendant would have. While she was still empress in name, Empress Nara had fallen out of favor and she would remain as such til her death. 

Empress Nara would die in August of 1766 but the exact date is unknown. We know that she was already ill in July of that year, but the Qianlong Emperor would still leave for his hunting trip at the Mulan Hunting Grounds and refused to return to the capitol when he heard of her death. Instead he ordered her son Yongji to return and handle the funeral. 

Despite being empress, her funeral was supposed to be treated as that of an Imperial Noble Consort but was even scaled down from that. No princesses, nobles, or high ranking officials were required to attend the funeral nor were the imperial cabinet meetings canceled. She was not buried next to the emperor's future resting place as an empress should be and her coffin was of lower quality then supposed to be for her station. 

Empress Nara would die alone and in relative obscurity for commiting a crime we will never know the reasoning behind. 

Titles:

Lady Nara (from 1718)

Secondary Consort (from Dec 1734)

Consort Xian (from Jan 1738)

Noble Consort Xian (from Dec 1745)

Imperial Noble Consort (from May 1749)

Empress (from Sept 1750)

[askthechronoverse]

Part one of a visual tour of the Unicapital

Unikingdom castle and Hawkodile's treehouse. The tree house is deep inside the tree, so you're not able to see the entirety of it. It's also in a cherry tree. The Castle fountain can be turned off so the slide from it's appearance in the second movie can be used.

This is a full view of Sage Green Street. Let's take a look at each of these buildings individually:

The building on the furthest left is the Unikingdom Grand Hotel. It's one of the more popular places to stay in the capital, as the staff and current owners pride themselves on quality service and making each person stay exactly what they need it to be. It said that the staff knows almost instinctively what is needed by a traveler before they even come to the front desk. There have been stories told of people who have found money inside the minibar when they're down on their luck, a lost toy to be found in the hotel restaurant, even at least two instances of people meeting their true love in the lobby. The hotel restaurant, a decently priced place called The Phoenix Wing, is well known for a secret hot wing sauce recipe that has won quite a few awards and milkshakes that could send you to another planet.

Across the street from that is Mystakè Tea House. This isn't the exact same one that is out in Ninjago, but it is said that the proprietor has learned under the owner of that tea house. Similar rumors have popped up about this tea house as well regarding tea and its magical properties. It's unclear how much of these rumors are true or if it's all just clever advertising.

Once magic became a little more prominent in the kingdom, Fortuna Risus seemed to just appear out of nowhere. No one has seen the owner, but most dealings are done through the owner's black owlbear, a kindly creature named Empress. You could buy most magical focuses from here, as well as various things to make potions and increase your luck to increase your magical abilities.

The minidoll owners of the next building, Starla and Luna, have been in the baking business since long before the unification. Their cake recipe was the one that was used by the queen in her redo wedding and they have been known to provide cakes and pies to other leaders and royals. This could be why they called the bakery The Crowned Cake.

The Unikingdom Post Office's main branch is here. They do have a secondary Branch closer to the edge of the city, but this is the one where most people will drop off their mail and packages. This is the only place for a stamp collector to collect special stamps that are only given out on specific times of the year. The postmaster has been known to provide children with freshly baked cookies and candy if they come to visit on a slower day.

Feebee's Flowers is a Unikingdom establishment. The owner is still Feebee, who is still incredibly overly protective of her flowers. She doesn't take kindly to people who disrespect her plants and has been known to ban people from her store if they so much as look at her flowers the wrong way. But if you manage to show her the respect she believes her flowers deserve, her floral arrangements are absolutely worth it.

Honestly? This would be like that place in Bob's Burgers that constantly changes to a different kind of store every so often. This could potentially be because of Feebee, who has scared people off in the past. Not many people could handle her level of flower stanning.

[theghostpinesmusic]

Last week, I watched the only two Goose shows from 2023 I hadn't already seen: 11/19 and 11/20 from the Electric Ballroom in London. Watching "new" shows was a little bittersweet knowing that Ben has since left the band, but I wanted to see all of the Euro tour, especially after watching the amazing year-ending Goosemas shows earlier in December (I'll write up a song or two from those shows here eventually).

I'm glad circled back: night one in London was just as good as, if not better than, the top-tier Euro shows like Amsterdam and Manchester, and night two had maybe the best second set of the whole tour. More on night two later, though: right now I want to talk about the "Hot Tea" from night one.

I'll be honest before getting into it: this is probably my third or fourth favorite jam from 11/19, but none of the others have pro-shot video on YouTube for easy reference. If you're keeping score at home, this show has an all-around great setlist, including a monster show-opening "Arrow," yet another amazing Euro version of "Red Bird," one of my favorite versions of "Arcadia" from what's been a banner year for the song, and a wild "Empress" -> "Shama Lama Ding Dong" -> "Empress" sandwich to end the show (in my show notes, I just wrote "God DAMN IT" next to this).

The "Hot Tea" ends set one, and is in my opinion perfect for that role. I usually try to pick out jams to write about that have a lot of interesting changes and spaces happening, but this one sort of doesn't have those things. Instead, it's just a freight train of groove, a sledgehammer of funk that serves as the exclamation point for a set full of high-energy rock and roll.

I already wrote up a sort-of intro for "Hot Tea" as a song in my post about the Luxor version, so let's just get right into it!

Typically, the band drops into the vocals of "Hot Tea" pretty much right off the bat. In this version, though, Peter takes a neat, brief organ solo before Rick starts up the first verse. It's not a huge deal, but puts me in the mind of the Brussels "Animal": the band sounds extra loose, and like they're having fun with the tune.

Also, I don't comment a ton on Jeff, partly because he's kind-of the "secondary" percussionist in the band and also he's often just hard to hear in the mix...but he kills it on this version of the song and also gets more camera time than usual. Watch him go!

Also also, Peter rips his in-song solo so hard that at 5:10 Rick just stops playing for a minute to watch, which cracked me up the first time I saw it.

After a bit of fun vocal scatting from most of the band, we drop out of the song and into the jam at 8:40. Now, "Hot Tea" has been a big jam vehicle for the band for a long time, but they'll typically spend a few minutes rocking out over the outro chords before launching for deep space. What I love about this version is how they go for the throat pretty much immediately: Rick barely gets a solo underway before the whole band drops into a deep funk groove in unison at 9:10. Peter's jump over to the clav is especially great.

At 9:25, Rick adds to the groove by riffing low on the neck (instead of up high, where he usually sits when soloing), and I feel like you can actually hear Trevor (obligatory Euro mix complaint) thumping along as well. The band sits in this groove for while, though Pete switches over to the organ from the clav around 10:15. The interplay between him and Rick afterward is pretty fantastic.

There's a smooth change of keys at 11:38 that moves the jam a bit away from the chunky funk sound and toward something a little more melodic, but the rhythm section continues holding in an amazing groove. They finally lay back a bit starting at 12:40, and Rick jumps out in front for a solo. This section of the jam is a bit more typical for "Hot Tea": extremely rock forward and Rick-centric. That's not a bad thing, the energy here is amazing, but if you listen to the band regularly this isn't necessarily going to blow your mind, fun though it is.

At 16:05, the band switches back into the "Hot Tea" key (I should really learn what keys these songs are in some day), and Rick takes us home with a bit more shredding, with a tension-y section thrown in at 16:55 for good measure.

As I said earlier, there are certainly weirder "Hot Tea"s out there, but I love this one for its monster groove and its great placement in a great setlist from a great show.

Next time I'll round out my write-ups from the Euro tour by covering the "Hungersite" from 11/20!

[josefavomjaaga]

Marie Louise on the road (11)

We’re quickly approaching the end of Marie Louise’s diary, I fear. This is probably the pre-to-last installment.

Thursday, May 10th

I did not wake up on the 10th until noon, and the Emperor pleasantly surprised us by saying that he wanted to take us out at 2 o'clock to see the ocean. [He gave us an appointment at the Haag fort at three o'clock]. The Queen of Westphalia kept me waiting for more than an hour, which caused me to be at least as impatient as she was. I was so angry thinking of the anger the Emperor would have against me if I did not arrive, that I was in a bad mood all day.

This reminds me of an unusually harsh letter Duroc wrote a couple of weeks earlier to somebody about how a particular task needed to be accomplished faster, because if it didn’t »this will put His Majesty in a bad mood, and he will take it out on me again.« - It seems Marie Louise had already joined all the other people trembling before the imperial master and his whims. (Lannes, you’re missed!)

I am usually a good person, perhaps too weak, [...]

Perhaps.

[...] but when I get angry (as I very rarely do), I am perhaps much meaner than other women. [...]

We arrived at four o'clock at the Fort of Haag, behind which are the dunes. These are sand hills of various shapes. In spite of that, we could see the little points of the masts which told us that the sea was not far away. As I was very impatient at not being able to see it at once, whilst we waited, we had some cream given to us, which is excellent in this country, and which is kept in green bottles of a singular composition.

So, what do you do to distract the kids if they don’t stop asking »Are we there yet?« Give them a treat. Apparently in Marie Louise’s case, it worked.

The Emperor wanted to show us the ocean at once, but the dunes were impassable at that place, and we were obliged to mortify our impatience by taking another two-hour drive to find a place where we could climb. At last we found it and I was very surprised to find my leg buried halfway in the sand. Each step cost us so much effort, but it was nothing for such intrepid travellers as we were, so we were well rewarded by the beautiful view we discovered when we reached the top of the hills.

We saw the ocean, which appeared as a huge surface of water bounded only by the horizon. The sun was setting, colouring the sea like a rainbow. In the distance we saw a few fishing boats returning from their journey, protected by a sloop. They are obliged to send one with them, for the English permit themselves to abuse the poor when they take their fish and do not pay them. The sea was very calm, except on the shore where it broke with quite some force against the rocks.

I’ve quoted this paragraphie in its entirety because I think Marie Louise’s excitement at seeing the sea really comes across here. You can really tell how enchanted she is. And you have to admit that, for once, Napoleon has been very considerate towards the ladies in taking them on such a delightful pleasure tri...

The Emperor had maps brought to him and conferred with the engineers.

Oh. Okay then.

The Queen of Westphalia and I amused ourselves by collecting the shells that covered the shores of the sea. There were some charming ones, but it is said that those of the Mediterranean and the Indies are infinitely more beautiful. The shells, together with the unhealthy air, caused me, thanks to the King's malice, three attacks of fever.

I’m not sure what she’s referring to here. »Le Roi«, the King, could only mean Jérôme. But I’m unsure what he has to do with it, unless Marie Louise means that it had been him who had prevented Catherine from showing up on time, thus causing her to be in a bad mood and all out of breath all day.

But Jérôme is not the only one to play tricks on unsuspecting empresses:

In the midst of our amusement, I saw that the Viceroy and the Duke of Istria [Eugène and Bessières] looked at us in a very peculiar manner, and laughed at us a lot. I did not have time to ask them why when the sea came in with such force, faster than we could flee, and drenched us to our knees. Fortunately it returned as quickly as it had come. They explained to us that this was the ordinary effect of the tide, but the gentlemen might well have been gallant enough to warn us in advance.

Can anybody else picture those two overgrown schoolboys standing on the dune, looking down on the beach, grinning from ear to ear and waiting for the first large wave to come in (»Three - two - one - YES!«), before dutifully hurrying to the ladies' rescue once those were properly drenched? (»Gotta wait until the damsel is truely in distress before showing up as her knight in shining armour, that's how it works.«)

We abandoned our search and went to ask the Emperor for permission to change. The answer was »stay, ladies, this bath will do you good«, and he made us wait until eight o'clock. [...]

And here we go again. The master has spoken.

[sluttyshakespeare]

Three Great Details About Apeshit By Beyonce & Jay-Z

“I can’t believe we made it,” sings Beyoncé in “Apeshit,” the first single from her surprise joint album with Jay-Z, Everything Is Love. And to prove that she and her husband have made it, in the song’s accompanying video, Beyoncé delivers this line from the Louvre. As the New York Times has pointed out, it is not actually that expensive to shoot a video in the Louvre (about $17,500 for a full day’s shoot). But music videos aren’t about numbers; they’re about how things feel — and there’s no place on earth that feels as lavish, as rich with accumulated cultural power and wealth and colonialism, as the Louvre. If you want to show that you have made it, that you are rich and powerful and one of the greatest artists of your generation, you go to the Louvre. And as an artistic choice, the Louvre is par for Beyoncé’s course. For the past few years, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has increasingly cribbed from the iconography of classical Western art in her own image-making. Her pregnancy announcement photo shoot and her birth announcement photo shoot both referenced Botticelli’s Venus and the Renaissance trope of the Madonna and child, and her 2017 Grammys performance drew on goddess imagery from multiple artistic traditions. So when Beyoncé shoots at the Louvre — taking on by turns the poses of Venus de Milo and Victory — she’s continuing an artistic project of recontextualizing classical Western art, of making herself the aesthetic object on which so much wealth and cultural capital has been spent. And coming from a black woman, that’s a radical statement. “In a way, Beyoncé is exploiting/marketing her blackness as creativity — as a kind of weapon — within and against the very Eurocentric system of culture and consumption from which she has benefited,” says James Smalls, a professor of art history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. That’s an especially radical statement to make in the context of the Louvre, where little of the art features people of color in positions of strength and power. “From the Middle Ages up to the 19th century, works of art that showed black people usually represented them as servants or secondary figures,” explains Smalls. “They were not deemed worthy subjects of paintings, sculptures, or other kinds of cultural works.” One of the few exceptions to that trend is Marie Benoist’s “Portrait d’une négresse,” also displayed at the Louvre. “That painting is an anomaly because it presents a black person as the sole aestheticized subject and object of a work of art,” Smalls says. And it’s the painting that appears at the end of the “Apeshit - Beyonce & Jay-Z” video, after shot after shot of portraits of white people.

Benoist painted “Portrait” in 1800, during a brief period in which France had abolished colonial slavery. (In 1794, the French emancipation proclamation liberated the colonies; in 1802, Napoleon reinstated slavery.) In that six-year span, portraits of heroic black people became popular in France, and that created an opportunity for an image of a black woman who is not tending to or subordinate to a white person, who is instead considered worthy of being at the center of her own portrait. As Smalls has pointed out, in its full context, “Portrait” is not a wildly politically subversive image. It’s most likely that the unknown and unnamed subject was a servant with few legal rights who had little choice about how she posed or whether she was okay with her breast being exposed to the world for the next 200 years. Benoist the painter has much more agency here than the black woman at the center of the picture. But in the context of “Apeshit,” with its montages of painting after painting of white faces and white statues, “Portrait” feels both shocking and subversive. It’s a black face in the center of the frame, apparently in control of her domain. And it’s one of the only figures in the Louvre that we don’t see get reinterpreted by either the Carters or their dancers: The only figure in the Louvre that can withstand the unstoppable force that is Beyoncé, that does not need to be remade and reexamined. Part of Beyoncé’s project over the past few years has been to treat art as a form of power: It is a form of focused aesthetic attention, of social capital, and of wealth given solid form. Taking over the Louvre means taking all that power for herself and for the black bodies she brings in with her — except for the “Portrait.” In “Apeshit,” it can stand on its own. What do Beyoncé, The Smurfs 2, and you have in common? All three have the theoretical ability to rent out the Louvre. Though there was widespread awe that the Carters’ video for “Apeshit” took place inside the most famous museum in the world, turns out, it’s actually not all that uncommon. According to the New York Times, about 500 shoots take place at the Louvre each year, which have included films on opposite ends of the “is this a good movie” spectrum, from last year’s Wonder Woman to 2013’s The Smurfs 2, which even the Louvre couldn’t save from its 13 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating. Though the museum only allows photography in the galleries for private use, it makes exceptions for professionals through written authorization. As of 2015, the Louvre’s policy states that to shoot a short film or music video, the cost for both interior and exterior shots would be just €4,500, or about $5,200. It’s possible that if the Carters had a crew of more than 50 people, that number would have been closer to €18,000, but as the Times notes, “there are hotel rooms here that cost more than that.” Hosting private events, however, will cost you a bit more. A tour for under 50 guests will set you back €10,000, while renting out the reception hall beneath I.M. Pei’s pyramid will cost, at the very least, €28,000. Though, to reiterate, that isn’t an amount at which anyone would gasp, “Mon dieu!” Lorde, I have an idea for you about where to film your video for “The Louvre.” Call me! In the video for Beyoncé and Shawn Carter‘s “Apeshit,” the first visual from the pair’s surprise joint album Everything Is Love, the two stars romp through the Louvre in Paris, seizing center stage in a high-culture palace that – like most Western art museums – historically made little room for non-white artists. Some of their mission involves the strategic highlighting of non-white images already in the Louvre. Beyoncé and Jay-Z rap in front of an Egyptian sphinx, and in galleries filled mostly with neo-classical French paintings – white artists, white subjects – the camera singles out black faces. (The video is directed by Ricky Saiz, who also helmed the “Yonce” video from Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s eponymous 2013 album.) Viewers catch brief glimpses of a pair of black figures in Paolo Veronese’s painting “The Wedding at Cana,” where Jesus turned water into wine, as well as a quick look at Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait d’une Négresse,” a depiction of a black woman staring guilelessly back at the viewer. But the Where’s Waldo? moments highlighting black figures are fleeting – the possibilities for this in the Louvre, or any major Western art museum, are limited from the start. So Beyoncé and Jay-Z set about interjecting blackness into a space that has never placed much value on it, claiming one of the centerpieces of European culture with gleeful defiance. They frequently film themselves moving in opposition to the frozen stillness of paintings by Jacques-Louis David, a French neoclassical artist whose work – like “The Oath of the Horatii” and “Madame Récamier” – invokes the Greco-Roman tradition. Much of the potency of the “Apeshit” video comes from the contrasts drawn between the “white” art on the walls and the black women on the gallery floors. In front of David’s “The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine,” a court scene of relentless white extravagance, Beyoncé and eight black dancers hold hands and begin to dance. It takes just a few synchronized sashays to upstage David’s massive painting, replacing an ornate symbol of white authority with a celebration of black bodies in motion. The Louvre’s stature depends on people believing that “The Coronation of Empress Joséphine” is the art, but the eye tells a different story – hanging behind Beyoncé and her dancers, the painting is reduced to wallpaper. Throughout the “Apeshit - The Carters” video, Beyoncé and Jay-Z repeatedly upstage some of Western classical art’s most famous images in one of its central sacred spaces. Beyoncé holds a series of chopping micro-poses with her hands before Saiz cuts quickly to an image of a distressed character, hands held up to shield her head, taken from another David painting, “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” The placement of the hands connects the two frames, but Beyoncé’s is virile, aggressive and in charge, while David’s figure seems merely fearful.

Radical gestures roll in on a mightily slippery sliding scale these days, don’t they? We’re far past any cultural division between high and low or pop and art at this point, and artists on the charts are also sniffing out their next inspiration, album cycle, or comparison to their own personal affairs in the grander schemes of culture and history. You’d be hard pressed to find a more hallowed repository of the West than the Louvre, so of course that’s where Beyoncé and Jay-Z have rolled up to set their new music video for the track “Apeshit” from the fresh album they dropped like an anvil right on top of your weekend. Of course this isn’t the first time they’ve been there, nor the first time some Pop-ish upstarts made a Major Statement at the French museum, but it would seem to be a major escalation in the Carters x Louvre relationship, to say nothing of the pride re: their own marital ties that the album and video are so keen to showcase. When worlds (and genres) collide is still a strong trend across multiple spheres of art and culture—turning meaning and message into something of a competitive game of Russian nesting dolls or an arms race of spectacle-based oneupmanship—but what might we make of this night at the museum if considered in light of the 1960s Marxist avant-garde French Situationist International? Founded in 1957 by Guy “Barrel of Laughs” Debord and Asger “Beware the Palette Knife” Jorn, the Situationists were guys and gals, but mostly guys, who wanted to, as the name would indicate, create some situations and elevate to the level of philosophy the notion of taking a freaking walk outside. But they also had a strategy! And key among their techniques, to which you can probably attribute the rise of “culture jamming” and just whatever Banksy thinks he’s doing, was the détournement. Discussed in chapter 8 of Debord’s 1967 tract The Society of the Spectacle, the technique calls for taking advantage of existing cultural objects or canonized art, rerouting their message, and even advocates for theft: “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one.” You would not have wanted this guy for your editor, but if you were looking to smash the state (of meaning), Debord was your man.

So, if “détournement serves as a reminder that theory is nothing in itself, that it can realize itself only through historical action and through the historical correction that is its true allegiance,” then is the spectacle of “Apeshit” a glam, historical correction of the Western assumption that houses of European culture contain the highest achievements of man- and womynkind? Beyoncé and Jay-Z have more clout and pull at this point than a merely rich person or garden-variety aristocrat putzing around the Cotswolds or Monaco, and they built that for themselves. When they pull off a stunt like this, it feels like another chime in the prosperity gospel that Doreen St. Félix examined in the arc of Rihanna’s career, as well as further evidence that the ability to make a compelling spectacle of oneself, to write a personal narrative as large as that of the progress of a civilization, is success. The false idea here is white supremacy, and perhaps the correction then is that European colonialists may not have had the time or the means to make their masterpieces if it weren’t for the economic boon of slavery and historical pillaging of resources from southern and eastern continents for the benefit of countries like France. The Situationists didn’t really like spectacle much (“The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living”) but they recognized that it was inescapable in modern society (“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images”). Given this circumstance, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, god bless them, would appear to be doing their best to create a spectacle that people who look like them can see themselves in too, as opposed to the near uninterrupted stream of black death spectacle the media and world is awash in on a day to day basis. Look forward to hearing this jam blasting out of car speakers this summer—it’ll be a real situation. The surprise release of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Jay-Z’s new album, Everything Is Love, (credited as “The Carters” on the album to recognize they’re performing as a united duo, not as individuals) on Saturday, June 16 has left the music world reeling. Already, what fans have been carefully dissecting – and what we’re interested in unpacking, too – is the imagery from the music video for the album’s lead single, “APESHIT”. The six-minute video is likely going to be considered one of the best of 2018, with The Carters and a troupe of dancers taking over the Louvre. In case you couldn’t already tell, the fact that Bey and Jay Z even got unfettered access to the Louvre for their own use is a stunning power move – adding a glorious power to the “APESHIT” lyric “I can’t believe we made it/ This is why we’re thankful”. Let’s start with the primary location in “Apeshit”: the Louvre. Historically, it’s a predominately white space that primarily features white, male-created works of art. It’s a microcosm of history, which itself is mostly white, male, and heterosexual. Tradition and the Louvre go hand-in-hand, too, which means that Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s presence is a total disruption from the beginning. For modern audiences and fans of The Carters, the disruption is surely welcome. Not only can we expect to see (and do see) The Carters standing next to some of the most famous works of art, including the Mona Lisa and Winged Victory of Samothrace, but we see that they are aligning themselves with it right out of the gate. Their presence in a place that preserves what history has deemed the most important artworks, standing next to said art while themselves looking like art and using their body language to engage with this art, already implies they are as worthy of being there as the older work. It’s a middle finger to convention, a dare aimed at squarely at the gatekeepers of history and artistic tradition: You know we deserve to be here. The Carters begin positioning themselves as iconography from the moment we first see them, standing in front of the “Mona Lisa”. Sure, it’s a callback to the first time they took a photo with arguably the most famous painting in history back in 2014, but something is different this time around. Like the “Mona Lisa”, Beyoncé and Jay-Z are dressed simply, but powerfully. Suits for both, in bright colours and styles specific to their tastes and representative of the times they live in; again, just like the “Mona Lisa”. But even more of an echo of the painting is their expressions: a strong stare straight ahead, lips pressed together, shoulders back. They are telegraphing to us that they are as iconic as the “Mona Lisa”, without even saying a word. By donning expressions very much in the same vein as the iconic painting, they’re telling the viewer that they’re basically in the presence of a peer. But even more than that, they’re commenting on the beguiling and enticing space they occupy in our own culture. Much like the “Mona Lisa”, they are telling us that they know we think about them in a way we don’t think about other music artists. They know that we’ll spend hours analysing them and their work, attempting to find meaning in their movements and lyrics, trying to work out the symbols and icons they’ve put forth, and hoping to crack the impenetrable fortress they’ve built around them (from which they only emerge to become vulnerable when they want to). Humans have spent centuries trying to unpack the enigma of the “Mona Lisa” and still continue to do so to this day; do you really think you can figure out The Carters in a day? Another immensely important moment from “APESHIT” comes in the repeated glimpses of Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait of a Black Woman (Negress)” from 1800. One of the few works of art painted by a woman in the Louvre, the painting is deeply important both as a feature in the Louvre and its place in art history, because it is the only painting of its time to depict a black woman who is not a slave or similarly subjugated person, but rather simply presented in all her glory.

The painting affirms that black women are worthy of being in artistic spaces, and in enduring imagery. The painting is shown a few times, and it’s the second to last painting we see before the video closes on Bey and Jay turning around to regard the “Mona Lisa” – further confirmation that Benoist’s painting and its subject deserve recognition. It’s also no accident that the “Winged Victory of Samothrace” statue is frequently seen in “APESHIT”. Implying triumph and power, the statue has endured over centuries, and The Carters imply just as much by once again standing in front of it, in perhaps a nod to their own triumph and the power they’ve achieved. According to the Louvre website for the piece, the statue depicts Nike, and was likely created to commemorate a naval victory by the Rhodians (who hail from Rhodes, part of the Dodecanese island group in Greece). The towering relic from the Hellenistic period is, as the Louvre’s description notes, intensely dramatic and glorifies the female body in connection with something traditionally masculine (victory in war). That endowment of power to a female body is then emulated in the female bodies that stand before it in present day, through Beyoncé and her troupe of female dancers. All of these women come together and move as one being, with Beyoncé presiding over them all. She is the modern image of victory over the warfare placed on her body, career, intellect, personal life; having succeeded, she can now dress like “Winged Victory” and, in a sense, pass along her victories to the women who dance on the steps in front of her. Twitter user Queen Curly Fry’s in-depth Twitter thread breaking down the art seen in “Apeshit” is thorough, and her comments on the incorporation of the “Venus de Milo” into the video is so neatly articulated that we couldn’t have said it better if we tried: “Here, Beyoncé once again models herself as a Greek statue, this time the Venus de Milo. However, in this shot she wears a nude bodysuit with wrapped hair, reframing both goddesses of beauty and victory as a black woman. This dismantles white-centric ideals of beauty.” Similarly, Twitter account Tabloid Art History nails why it’s so important and iconic for Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and her dancers to be dancing in front of “The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine” by Jacques Louis David from 1804: “What I especially like about this part of the video is that the painting itself depicts a disruption, Napoleon taking the Pope’s role from him and crowning Josephine himself. Beyoncé further disrupts this by taking on Josephine’s role as the one being crowned.” If we consider Napoleon’s role as a major coloniser in the early 19th century, particularly in Northern Africa, then Beyoncé’s placement in the shot is extra symbolic. Beyoncé standing underneath the place where Napoleon is seen crowning his wife in the painting is a symbolic retrieval of stolen power. One of the other paintings we see in “APESHIT” is another Jacques-Louis David painting, “The Intervention of the Sabine Women.” Interestingly, we only see portions of the painting, never the entire artwork. This could be a sly comment on the dissection and appropriation of black bodies by white culture for their own aesthetic uses – or it could just be a deft use of quick cuts for dramatic effect for the video. Or maybe it’s both.   Twitter user Queen Curly Fry notes here that the painting, for the puposes of “APESHIT”, depicts “(white) female fear evoked by (white) male violence is juxtaposed w/ (black) female empowerment (‘get off my dick’).” The painting’s use of white female tears –long criticised as a way for white women to shift any blame they deserve for racist behaviour, or to turn a blind eye to racial injustice – is in direct contrast with Beyoncé and her dancers’ freedom, calm, and enlightenment. In the end, “APESHIT” is a triumph because it is a statement that only The Carters could successfully make. The visual tells the powers that be to fuck off with their tradition, their preciously guarded history that has sought to erase non-white people from the history books, and their preconceived notions about how black bodies can be ornamental. They’ve used art to push back, to demand honour for the work they’ve contributed. “APESHIT” is a force to be reckoned with, and The Carters’ use of art to make a statement is an announcement to the world that they’ve shaped culture as much as anything hanging on a gallery wall.

[ashleysitalianlitblog]

5 Interesting Italian Nonfiction Books

Duccio to Leonardo : Italian Painting 1250-1500 by Simona Di NepiLa Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind

Join the bestselling author of Ciao, America! on a lively tour of modern Italy that takes you behind the seductive face it puts on for visitors—la bella figura—and highlights its maddening, paradoxical true self

You won’t need luggage for this hypothetical and hilarious trip into the hearts and minds of Beppe Severgnini’s fellow Italians. In fact, Beppe would prefer if you left behind the baggage his crafty and elegant countrymen have smuggled into your subconscious. To get to his Italia, you’ll need to forget about your idealized notions of Italy. Although La Bella Figura will take you to legendary cities and scenic regions, your real destinations are the places where Italians are at their best, worst, and most authentic

Lucia

In his youth, di Robilant (correspondent, La Stampa; A Venetian Affair) heard brief tales of his great-great-great-great grandmother, Lucia Mocenigo (1770-1854), but her life story began fully to unfold for him when he researched his ancestry for A Venetian Affair. Di Robilant has taken period correspondence and secondary sources and woven them into Lucia's absorbing tale. A well-connected patrician, she enjoyed the privileges of wealth and status, rubbing elbows with the great historical figures of her time, including Empress Josephine, and serving as a palazzo landlady to Lord Byron during his infamous days in Venice. However, as di Robilant learned through Lucia's personal correspondence, her life, as exciting as it may have been, was not an easy one. Against the backdrop of the fall of the Venetian Republic, we learn the touching story of a young woman struggling to cope with a distant husband and the loss of a child, as control of her homeland passed back and forth between France and Austria.

Only in Naples

Full of lighthearted humor, sumptuous food, the wisdom of an Italian mother-in-law, and all the atmosphere of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, this warm and witty memoir follows American-born Katherine Wilson on her adventures abroad. Thanks to a surprising romance--and a spirited woman who teaches her to laugh, to seize joy, and to love--a three-month rite of passage in Naples turns into a permanent embrace of this boisterous city on the Mediterranean.

Duccio to Leonardo : Italian Painting 1250-1500 by Simona Di Nepi

This generously illustrated book presents highlights from the National Gallery’s display of Italian Renaissance painting, one of the richest collections of its kind in the world. Duccio to Leonardo focuses on Italian masterpieces made between 1250 and 1500, including highlights such as Duccio’s Annunciation, Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, and Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist. It begins with a short introduction on the formation of the collection, before discussing each of the chosen works.

A History of Contemporary Italy 1943–80, by Paul Ginsborg

This is an excellent history of modern Italy from Allied liberation to the postwar economic miracle, from the tumult of the 1960s and ’70s to the malaise of the 1980s. Ferrante’s novels navigate this time, and you could chart their progress alongside this history, from the ruins of the allied occupation to the transformation of Italian society into a modern neoliberal state. This books lays out in each section, the weight of historical circumstances — culture, economics, politics — that come to bear on the characters of the Neapolitan novels.

[enterdavao-blog]

An Enchanting Holiday in Mumbai

An Enchanting Holiday in Mumbai – – If you want to spend a secondary with a place that produces you’re feeling just like you are in heaven then Rarotonga resorts work best destination to be – Rarotonga Cook Islands are similar to paradise on Earth so you would like to remain in the advantage of the place – You can book your own personal holiday homes Rarotonga or you can also go for a hotel Rarotonga and revel in your blissful stay amidst the nature When we mention famous tour destination in India, Agra is amongst the most popular destination. Visited by millions of people throughout the whole year, this wonder city is famous for the historic Taj Mahal. The epitome of love, built by Emperor Shah Jahan is basically a mausoleum. The whole structure is created with pure white marble. The intricate designs made on it with various precious and semi-precious gemstones are extremely eye-catching. It has every quality to deserve a position on the list of the Seven Wonders with the World. Standing majestically on the banks with the river Yamuna, this heritage site displays architecture at its best. A bird’s view through the huge Agra Fort mesmerizes the visitors. This white mausoleum houses the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal through which memory the structure was built. Later, the tomb of Shah Jahan was laid about the side in the Empress’ tomb. – Maha Shivaratri – One of the very most sought-after and religiously celebrated Bhubaneswar festivals is the festival of Maha Shivaratri It is held during the months of February and March – Maha Shivaratri falls for the 14th evening of Phalgun when Lord Shiva is assumed to get tied the knot with Goddess Parvati – This auspicious day is observed by devotees coming from all over the Indian subcontinent and staunch Hindu believers keep fast and perform Puja when asleep to seek blessings with their revered deity Durga Puja – Another popular festival of Bhubaneswar may be the festival of Durga Puja. As the name suggests, Durga puja celebrates and worships Goddess Durga with great excitement and enthusiasm all over hawaii. It comes about through the months of September and October once the celebrations are performed for 9 full days. The significance of Durga Puja is based on the belief that it represents the victory of excellent over evil. Durga puja is as well as Lakshmi Puja which, too, occurs inside months of September and October. This festival is also observed with great devotion in Bhubaneswar. Read Also – Features of Different High-class Hotels enterdavao.com – Your Himachal Tour itinerary can never get complete without a stop by at the famous hill station of Dalhousie. One of the most visited places in Himachal Pradesh, Dalhousie is loved by tourists, solo travelers, honeymooners due to the unsurpassed tranquility and serenity. For the ease of travelers, the Hotels in Dalhousie cater to every single accommodation necessity of travelers and present them a house like lavishness away from home.

#EnterDavao, #HotelLodging

[nobleconsort]

So since Legend of Ruyi is coming out soon, I wanna make a post on one of my favorite figures and that’s Ulanara, the Step Empress. I personally, use a mix of Legend of Zhen Huan canon and history in how she fits into Huan’s story. But she really is one of my favorites and I feel the need to talk about her.

So in show canon, Lady Ulanara Ruyi is the niece of the current Empress, Ulanara Yixiu. She was going to marry the 3rd Prince, Hongshi, but Hongshi didn’t want her. So because the Empress is a bitch, she gives Ruyi to the 4th Prince to insult his adopted mother by saying her son is only good enough for ‘leftovers’. Hongli suddenly gets two wives now, with his primary consort being Fucha Langhua, and Ruyi being assigned as his secondary consort. Well joke’s on the Empress because Hongli’s Emperor now.

Anyway, time for historical fun facts. Lady Ulanara DID enter the forbidden city to become the secondary consort of the 4th Prince,  then Prince Bao. When Yongzheng died and Prince Bao became Qianlong, he made Lady Ulanara  Consort Xian and then later he promoted her to Noble Consort.

When Empress Fucha died in 1748, Qianlong’s mother, Empress Dowager Xiaoshengxian urged him to create Lady Ulanara Empress in her place. He delayed the promotion until the mourning period for Empress Fucha was over because he felt like it was disrespectful to her memory to replace her so soon. { Qianlong is said to have loved Empress Fucha a GREAT deal, and continued to mourn her for the rest of his life. which was long. } After the mourning period was over, she was installed as Empress and shortly after gave birth to Qianlong’s 12th son and 5th daughter.

In 1765, Lady Ulanara accompanied Qianlong on a tour of southern china, and things with smoothly. However, on February 28th, Qianlong instructed his servants to deliver food to the empress, however only three consorts were seen dining with the Emperor later on, and that was the last day Lady Ulanara was seen in public. He gradually reduced her servants and took away monuments given to her at her promotion ceremonies and a year later, she died at the age of 48. The Emperor was out hunting in the Mulan hunting grounds at the time but he didn’t return to Beijing when he heard the news. Instead, he sent Lady Ulanara’s son to take care of things. The Emperor ordered her funeral to be scaled down to that of an Imperial Noble Consort, but even that was a sham. By law, the funeral for an Imperial Noble Consort is to be attended by Princesses, nobles and high ranking court officials, and none of those aspects were present. She wasn’t even given a gravestone or her own mausoleum, like consorts of her status. Instead she was buried next to Imperial Noble Consort Chunhui in the Eastern Qing Tombs , much like how a servant is buried next to their master. Her death wasn’t recorded in official histories, and she wasn’t given a posthumous name either. When officials tried to speak up for Lady Ulanara, they were punished. One was exiled and another was even executed.

The reason for this HUGE shift in her and Hongli’s relationship is unknown and is still a mystery. Reports say that it was because she cut her hair. Manchu custom dictated  that she was only allowed to cut her hair when the Emperor or Empress Dowager died, but because the emperor and his mother were still a live, her cutting her hair was seen as wishing death upon the two. But Lady Ulanara was a Manchurian Noblewoman, so she knew all the customs. Some speculate she cut her hair as a protest to the tour, as she believed he was using it to choose new concubines, but this hasn’t been proven.

[samuelmmarcus]

Beautiful Homes of Instagram: Charlotte, NC

  Hello, my dear friends. How are you today? I have to take a minute to tell you all how grateful I am for your presence here on Home Bunch. I took a few days off last week and I have to tell you that I feel so Blessed for taking this little break and be able to be back to this space that is ours. This short break allowed me to analyze my gratitude for all of the important things in my life and this is a big part of it. Thank you for coming here, for reading the blog and for your loyalty. I certainly hope that you always find inspiration and knowledge here, and also feel a little lighter and happier every time you come to the blog.

Talking about feeling happy, this is exactly how I feel every time I feature this talented builder (previously featured here & here) and it’s truly great to have them on our “Beautiful Homes of Instagram” today. Here, the builder shares some incredible details – not to mention, all sources – with us. Read on:

  “Pike Properties builds in the urban and close to town neighborhoods in Charlotte, NC. Typically lots range from 50 feet to 60 feet in width, with an occasional needle in a haystack lot that is wider. This homesite was a needle in a haystack. Located on a quiet cul-de-sac and measuring 114 feet at the setback, and 224 feet at the rear property line, this homesite allowed Pike Properties to spread their wings and fly. What that meant was that they were able to build an expansive property without constraints and along with it, make it truly amazing both inside and out. The resale value was maximized thanks to the property, so splurging on interior finishes was a must. What is in store for you in this home tour is something you definitely don’t want to skip over! Let’s take a closer look.”

  Feel free to pin, save and share this beautiful home.

  Beautiful Homes of Instagram: Charlotte, NC

From the conceptual rendering of this home’s exterior, something very special was born. Pike Properties actually pre-sold this home before breaking ground after a couple saw it online and barged into their office essentially begging for them to allow them to purchase so early on. Normally, Pike will pre-sell but that usually isn’t until after framing. Change orders aren’t allowed, FYI. This home spoke volumes and was so hard to find that interest was shown so early on. Pike agreed to pre-sale and this home was under contract before the first dirt was moved and footings poured.

You will notice that this home is broken into two sections, divided by a “cat walk” and lower breezeway which connects the garage and mudroom on the main floor, and upstairs living spaces with a bonus room/flex space up. By designing it this way, it doesn’t overwhelm and seem too large. The presence remains humble.

Of course Pike had to paint the home WHITE. White houses are just oh so popular, and with a large front facade, they didn’t want to risk another darker color, or even a tan. Plus, the white paint really allows the cedar accents to pop. Benjamin Moore Olympic Mountains was selected for the paint color, with cedar accents, garage door, and fir front door stained in Benjamin Moore Hidden Valley. To blend, the roof chose is CertainTeed Sunrise Cedar. Dark Bronze metal roof accents and gutters contrast ever so slightly.

Genuine Hardie Siding was used on the exterior, for low-maintenance and quality purposes, and you just can’t beat their warranty!

Garage Coach Light- St. James Lighting Montrose.

Curb Appeal

It’s hard to decide if this home looks better during the day or at dusk! One thing is for sure though, when the sun sets over this residence, lights come on inside, and dinner is prepared, there is no place better to call HOME.

Kitchen

There are a handful of different directions you can go with kitchen design these days, and here Pike Properties decided to use neutral, crisp, and clean elements that blend seamlessly but also have some visual interest. Stark white was a no go, but instead the custom, locally crafted cabinetry is painted in “Benjamin Moore 1472 Silver Chain” which has a calming gray tone. The Schaub and Company Menlo Park Satin Brass hardware contrasts nicely with the cabinet color and the brass is actually toned down a bit by the gray versus a white.

Guests are sure to be impressed by the 60″ professional grade Frigidaire refrigerator and food storage isn’t an issue here. The fact of the matter is, that for the price, this makes a bigger statement than you’ll find with any other fridge on the market.

Refrigerator, Freezer & Trim Kit.

Backsplash & Countertop

Pike Properties views the range wall of a kitchen as a piece or artwork or the centerpiece of the space. Typically, there is no wall space to hang art in a kitchen, so the result is needing to use practical aspects of the space and turn them into artwork. That is what you see here with the picture frame accent tile over the 48″ range. This tile is by no means cheap, but when using such a small quantity is relatively affordable and makes a statement that is unlike anything else. The tile is Soho Studio Empress Helena, and it is truly artwork. In person, the small cubes sparkle and brass banding shines bright. It is a sight to see.

Pike stuck with a simple range hood design so as to not distract from the backsplash masterpiece.

The countertop surfaces are covered in striking Cosmos Mont Blanc marble which offers white, gray, and charcoal tones.

Luxurious Backsplash Tiles: Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here & Here.

Main Backsplash Tile- Jeffrey Court Wall Street White 3×9 – Other Marble Tiles: here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Range- Jenn-Air 48″ Pro-Style.

Pot Filler- Delta Contemporary in Matte Black.

Cabinet Hardware: Schaub and co Menlo Park.

Sconces- Savoy House Morland in Warm Brass – similar here & here.

Kitchen Pendants

Kitchen Pendant Lights- Hinkley Fletcher in Aged Zinc. Other Lighting on Sale: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Hardwood Flooring

The open concept kitchen and dining room is ever so slightly broken up by the large cased opening. The floors you see here span throughout 90% of the home (minus tiled areas) and are 4″ #1 White Oak in Rubio Monocoat Mud Light finish. Rubio Monocoat products offer many benefits including durability, eco-friendly ingredients, and single layer application.

Similar Hardwood Flooring: here & here.

Kitchen Faucet- Brizo Litze in Matte Black and Brillance Luxe Gold.

Kitchen Sink: Blanco Profina.

Counterstools: Gabby Furniture – Other Great Counterstools: here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Dining Room

Removed just enough, but still open to the kitchen is the sole dining space in the home. The formal dining room, the breakfast room, the kids homework table (well actually there’s a built-in space for that…. stay tuned!), and whatever else you use the dining table for, this is the spot in this home. That said, it was important to go formal enough, but still keep it casual when selected design elements, trim detail, etc. It even started with the layout. When working with their award-wining architects, Frusterio Design, Pike Properties made sure to have the French door set leading out to the rear covered porch from the dining room to keep it a bit casual and allow for easy indoor/outdoor flow.

Two elements of trim detail liven up the space and a hint of elegance. Simple Shiplap wainscoting standing 48″ off the floor dresses up the wall space and lessens the need for large and expensive artwork, which is especially nice considering that most of the wall space is taken up by windows and doors. The ceiling trim detail is comprised of two elements and is a favorite detail to add to a dining space at Pike Properties. It is called an X-beam ceiling formed by 2 flush beams (framed in wood and wrapped in drywall). The inlaid V-groove trim makes everything stand out and adds definition to what could end up being hard to notice.

Beautiful Dining Tables: here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Chairs on Sale: here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Similar Rugs: here & here.

Chandelier

Chandelier- Visual Comfort Choros 28 Inch.

Covered Rear Porch

This home maintains complete privacy at the rear, so bring on the outdoor living and plenty of evenings spent by the fireplace! With a vaulted ceiling soaring 24′ high and covered in stained V-groove, the grandeur doesn’t end inside. Pike ensured this space was large enough to accommodate two separate seating areas, one for lounging by the gas fireplace and the other for dining al-fresco.

Living Room

The main living space in this home is right here, located in the heart of the home between the kitchen area and owner’s retreat. Of course, immediately you notice the 15′ set of Panoramic Doors leading outside. WOW! These doors are manufactured custom to order and are made out of Aluminum in a bronze finish. Five individual panels fold on top of each other to create a fully opening wall of glass. See the next photo for a fully opened view.

Paint Color

Paint colors remain neutral and calming throughout the home. Pike has standard colors they always use to keep their homes consistent and that go best with their style and vibe. For main living spaces, hallways, secondary bedrooms and utility areas Pike uses Benjamin Moore Dove Wing. All inside trim tends to be Benjamin Moore White Dove. For the Owner’s Retreat spaces, Benjamin Moore Halo is utilized to create a soothing and warm toned space without going away from the neutral theme. Secondary bathrooms are all painted Benjamin Moore Moonshine.

Great Quality Rugs: here, here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Cat Walk

Remember on the front exterior when the “catwalk” was mentioned? Well here it is on the inside! Essentially a fancy hallway, this area connects the main upstairs living area with a bonus/flex space over the garage. Windows on both sides looking out makes you feel like you are walking on a catwalk, or over a bridge.

This is a good time to mention that all the interiors doors in this home are painted in Sherwin Williams Iron Ore.

Master Bedroom

Ensuring the highest probability of sweet dreams is at the top of Pike Properties priority list. A bedroom should always be calming, relaxing, and serene. The Crate and Barrel Finley drum pendant softens the spaces, and texture and visual interest is evoked with the diagonal shiplap bed wall. For just a tad extra in trim, doing a diagonal shiplap bed wall is a perfect way to take your bedroom to new heights.

Lighting: Crate & Barrel – Other Chandeliers: here, here, here & here.

Beautiful Nightstands: here, here, here, here & here.

Recommended Bedding: here & here.

Master Bathroom

Everything is not all sunshine and butterflies in home building, that is for sure. One story about this space demonstrates just a hint at that. Mirrors were completed left out of selections as an accidental oversight. It was three days before the professional photo shoot and mirrors were being hung when that was realized. A quick online search and scramble ensued and these were the result. Pretty fitting and amazingly blended for a last minute selection!

The rustic warmth the Restoration Hardware Printmakers vanity (similar here) brings in to the space is much needed to keep it from being all gray and white tones. Pike also loves incorporating rustic styling into their builds.

How often do you accidentally splash a little water onto your drywall behind the sink when brushing teeth or washing your hair? This likely has happened to you a time or two, or 100. Not only is the tile accent wall stylish, it is also functional. Splashing water on tile is much less noticeable and definitely not as likely to prompt you to grab a towel to dry it up.

Wall Tile- Merola tile Kite Dark Gray – similar here.

Other Bathroom Vanities: here, here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Mirrors- Rejuvenation Rounded Rectangular Metal Framed.

Vanity Top- Cosmos Mont Blanc (Same as in kitchen).

Faucets- Delta Trinsic 8″ Widespread in Matte Black.

Pendants- Hinkley Academy.

Spa-like

Whether you are a bath or shower person, you are in for a treat in this spa-like setting. The walk-in shower is of a very unique design and also is lacking any sort of door or glass. The actual shower with dual heads is out of view inside the section to the right. The area where you first step into from the bathroom floor is actually known as a dry area and is where the towel racks are located. It is meant to be a spot for drying off but without having to worry about a floor mat or getting water all over the bathroom floor. Very practical and stylish!

Tub- Signature Hardware Nina Acrylic 70″ Freestanding Tub.

Tub Faucet- Delta Trinsic in matte Black.

Shower Floor Tile- MSI Surfaces Telaio 2″ Hexagon Honed.

Shower Wall Tile- Jeffrey Court 3×12 Starry White Beveled.

Chandelier- Visual Comfort Venetian – Others: here, here, here, here, here, here, here & here.

Guest Bathroom

This is the downstairs guest bath which could very well be used as an in-law suite. Pike Properties wanted to keep it a little more formal and elegant by bringing in the brushed brass fixtures and picking a furniture vanity with more traditional lines and trim. Plus, just wait until you see the shower! Paint color is Benjamin Moore Moonshine.

Vanity- Allen and Roth Perrella 37 inch – Similar: here & here.

Mirror- Allen and Roth – similar here.

Faucet- Delta Dryden 8″ in Champagne Bronze.

Light- Park Harbor Mooretown.

Shower

In addition to the beauty of it, there are a handful of benefits to a zero-entry or curbless shower.

– They are functional. Anyone and everyone can get in and out of a zero entry shower and the risk or falling is minimal. No curb to trip over.

-They are easier to clean. Not as many tight areas and a seamless flow with your bathroom floor is a breeze to clean.

-You are left with clear visibility of the shower floor, so that pretty tile that was splurged on can actually be seen.

A curbless shower with hinged glass enclosure is a win-win and aesthetically pleasing and clean.

Wall Tile- Florida Tile Dorian Streamline 3×6 – similar here – Other Tiles: here, here, here, here, here & here.

Floor Tile- Jeffrey Court Carrara Bianco Mosaic  similar here & here – Others: here & here.

Second Upstairs Guest Bath

Clean and simple, perfect for a kids bathroom! The classic floor tiles are timeless.

Floor Tile- Soho Studio Denim 1″ Vanilla Circles – similar here.

Vanity- Allen and Roth Presnell 37 inch in White – Others: here, here, here, here & here.

Mirrors: White Beveled Wall Mirror.

Faucet- Delta Dryden Widespread in Chrome.

Light- Kichler Braelyn.

Upstairs Guest Bath

The best part about this bathroom can be seen in the mirror. The dark navy subway tiled walk-in shower contrasts so well with the white around it and makes the shower a focal point of the room. Accenting a shower with dark tile is something more people should do!

Vanity- Allen and Roth Presnell 37 inch in White.

Faucet- Delta Dryden Widespread in Chrome.

Shower Tile- Hampton Steele Blue 4×24 – Others: here & here.

Floor Tile- Florida Tile Mosaic Art Epic 1×1 Hexagon White – similar here.

Light- Kichler Braelyn.

Laundry Room

Cabinet Paint Color- Benjamin Moore White Dove.

Laundry is typically not fun, but at least by adding some exciting and funky tile it can become just a bit more enjoyable. Storage is not a problem thanks to the full-height built in cabinet unit.

Floor Tile- Jeffrey Court – similar here.

Homework Nook

Tired of the kids homework cluttering the kitchen counter, dining table, or coffee table in the living room? A great solution is a dedicated spot for homework, and there is just about no better way to create that than what you see here. A custom built-in desk with spots for two chairs and plenty of storage is topped with Aspen CQ Quartz making for the fanciest and most perfect spot to get homework done. This is also a wonderful spot for crafting. Library sconces provide great lighting, so no need for desk lamps. Lastly, no one wants to stare at a blank wall when thinking about a algebra problem, so the wallpaper accent is just what the teacher ordered!

Cabinet Paint Color- Benjamin Moore Gray Owl.

Wallpaper- Graham and Brown Innocence Gray.

Sconces- Savoy House Morland in Matte Black – similar here & here.

Chandelier

This chandelier by Kichler is located in the upstairs loft area.

Mudroom Drop Zone

Drop Zone Paint Color- Benjamin Moore Hale Navy.

Pike Properties believes that a drop zone can become a focal point and not just a spot to throw shoes, coats, and keys. The same custom cabinet maker that crafted the kitchen cabinets also made this piece. One of the first things you notice is the rich Walnut wood bench and live edge coat hook backing. The coat hook fixture puts a fun twist on a typical row of coat hooks in a drop zone. Cabinet and cubby space is abundant, as you’d expect.

Don’t miss the built-in dog bowls down in the lower corner with custom cut out dog done openings! The comfortable livability of dogs even went into the design and building of this residence.

  Many thanks to the builder (& McKay!

) for sharing all of the details above!

Builder: Pike Properties (Instagram)

Architecture: Frusterio Design, Inc.

Photography: Joe Purvis.

3D walkthrough tour.

  Best Sales of the Month:

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[fyeahbroadway]

Anastasia at the Broadhurst | Review

Maybe this season’s most overlooked show. Which is odd because it’s been two decades in the making.

Anastasia is not a perfect show. It’s not political enough (especially for this particular historical moment) and the stakes are a bit low and the direction is just serviceable but I’ll be damned if it isn’t one of my favourite new scores of the season with five fabulous performances at its centre.

I am an Ahrens and Flaherty fangirl, but I think it’s fair to say their mostly new score keeps pace with the classic ‘Journey to the Past’ and 'Once Upon A December’ and they have chosen exactly the right moments to musicalise. 'Journey to the Past’ becomes the Act One closer which is the right place for it to not overshadow the rest of the show, and Christy Altomare nails it to the back wall of the intimate Broadhurst. Every solo she gets is a revelation; she plays an Anya who may be suffering from PTSD, quick to lash out, quick to panic, but always tender, always headstrong, a princess before even she realises it. The show wisely ages Anya up to a more sensible, world-weary, mid-twenties and the show benefits from a less naive Anya than the film.

Derek Klena is perfect prince material as Dmitry, his 'My Petersburg’ is driving and 'Everything to Win’ is such a wonderful choice, to focus on Dmitry’s mental state as the scene that the whole plot hinges on occurs offstage. John Bolton and Caroline O'Connor sparkle as the secondary couple and they wring every ounce of available comedy out of their fairly standard numbers. Bolton is especially tender is his relationship with Altomare’s Anya. The trio numbers, 'Learn to Do It’ and 'We’ll Go From There’ are some of the show’s most intoxicating moments. Mary Beth Peil is a beautifully dignified Dowager Empress until she isn’t, and the transformation is heartbreaking.

Now the missing link. The show’s new villain (mercifully replacing the film’s out of left field Rasputin) Gleb, played by a tortured Ramin Karimloo, has improved slightly since the Hartford run but not enough to bring up the overall quality of the show. Throughout, the stakes are too low, does anyone really ever think he’s going to kill Anya? The show suffers mightily from its unwillingness to confront Gleb’s politics in juxtaposition to that of the Dowager Empress’; a street urchin like Anya would almost certainly be slightly better off under a socialist system than the old imperial system and yet she never questions why someone like the Dowager should have so much while she has so little. The communists in the play are McCarthy-era cartoons, not fleshed out people who think their system is flawed but better. If we saw a Gleb who tried to win over Anya on that account and perhaps their having a more fleshed out flirtation, I think that could fix the show’s central problems.

The other main issue is the only serviceable direction and the sometimes ugly sets. There’s nothing innovative here, and with the Russian Great Comet dominating this season, it’s easy to see how lush without being naturalistic works wonderfully but this just ends up looking cheap. Maybe there is a classy way to do projections, I just don’t really think this is it. The staging does suffer from the static set. On the other hand, the costumes are worth the price of admission.

It must be noted that I’m always happy to see female-led musicals but the casting of this could have used some more diversity. It’s not as white as Bandstand, but that’s a very low bar. All in all, it’s worth seeing for a killer new Broadway score and some killer, unrewarded performances. I’m sure it’ll have a long life on Broadway, touring, and eventually in communities that I feel will be able to innovate on this almost-gem of a show.

[gothrapxxx]

6 Hip Details About Apeshit By Beyonce & Jay-Z

“I can’t believe we made it,” sings Beyoncé in “APES**T,” the first single from her surprise joint album with Jay-Z, Everything Is Love. And to prove that she and her husband have made it, in the song’s accompanying video, Beyoncé delivers this line from the Louvre. As the New York Times has pointed out, it is not actually that expensive to shoot a video in the Louvre (about $17,500 for a full day’s shoot). But music videos aren’t about numbers; they’re about how things feel — and there’s no place on earth that feels as lavish, as rich with accumulated cultural power and wealth and colonialism, as the Louvre. If you want to show that you have made it, that you are rich and powerful and one of the greatest artists of your generation, you go to the Louvre. And as an artistic choice, the Louvre is par for Beyoncé’s course. For the past few years, Beyoncé has increasingly cribbed from the iconography of classical Western art in her own image-making. Her pregnancy announcement photo shoot and her birth announcement photo shoot both referenced Botticelli’s Venus and the Renaissance trope of the Madonna and child, and her 2017 Grammys performance drew on goddess imagery from multiple artistic traditions. So when Beyoncé shoots at the Louvre — taking on by turns the poses of Venus de Milo and Victory — she’s continuing an artistic project of recontextualizing classical Western art, of making herself the aesthetic object on which so much wealth and cultural capital has been spent. And coming from a black woman, that’s a radical statement. “In a way, Beyoncé is exploiting/marketing her blackness as creativity — as a kind of weapon — within and against the very Eurocentric system of culture and consumption from which she has benefited,” says James Smalls, a professor of art history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. That’s an especially radical statement to make in the context of the Louvre, where little of the art features people of color in positions of strength and power. “From the Middle Ages up to the 19th century, works of art that showed black people usually represented them as servants or secondary figures,” explains Smalls. “They were not deemed worthy subjects of paintings, sculptures, or other kinds of cultural works.” One of the few exceptions to that trend is Marie Benoist’s “Portrait d’une négresse,” also displayed at the Louvre. “That painting is an anomaly because it presents a black person as the sole aestheticized subject and object of a work of art,” Smalls says. And it’s the painting that appears at the end of the “Apeshit” video, after shot after shot of portraits of white people.

Benoist painted “Portrait” in 1800, during a brief period in which France had abolished colonial slavery. (In 1794, the French emancipation proclamation liberated the colonies; in 1802, Napoleon reinstated slavery.) In that six-year span, portraits of heroic black people became popular in France, and that created an opportunity for an image of a black woman who is not tending to or subordinate to a white person, who is instead considered worthy of being at the center of her own portrait. As Smalls has pointed out, in its full context, “Portrait” is not a wildly politically subversive image. It’s most likely that the unknown and unnamed subject was a servant with few legal rights who had little choice about how she posed or whether she was okay with her breast being exposed to the world for the next 200 years. Benoist the painter has much more agency here than the black woman at the center of the picture. But in the context of “Apeshit,” with its montages of painting after painting of white faces and white statues, “Portrait” feels both shocking and subversive. It’s a black face in the center of the frame, apparently in control of her domain. And it’s one of the only figures in the Louvre that we don’t see get reinterpreted by either the Carters or their dancers: The only figure in the Louvre that can withstand the unstoppable force that is Beyoncé, that does not need to be remade and reexamined. Part of Beyoncé’s project over the past few years has been to treat art as a form of power: It is a form of focused aesthetic attention, of social capital, and of wealth given solid form. Taking over the Louvre means taking all that power for herself and for the black bodies she brings in with her — except for the “Portrait.” In “Apeshit,” it can stand on its own. What do Beyoncé, The Smurfs 2, and you have in common? All three have the theoretical ability to rent out the Louvre. Though there was widespread awe that the Carters’ video for “Apeshit” took place inside the most famous museum in the world, turns out, it’s actually not all that uncommon. According to the New York Times, about 500 shoots take place at the Louvre each year, which have included films on opposite ends of the “is this a good movie” spectrum, from last year’s Wonder Woman to 2013’s The Smurfs 2, which even the Louvre couldn’t save from its 13 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating. Though the museum only allows photography in the galleries for private use, it makes exceptions for professionals through written authorization. As of 2015, the Louvre’s policy states that to shoot a short film or music video, the cost for both interior and exterior shots would be just €4,500, or about $5,200. It’s possible that if the Carters had a crew of more than 50 people, that number would have been closer to €18,000, but as the Times notes, “there are hotel rooms here that cost more than that.” Hosting private events, however, will cost you a bit more. A tour for under 50 guests will set you back €10,000, while renting out the reception hall beneath I.M. Pei’s pyramid will cost, at the very least, €28,000. Though, to reiterate, that isn’t an amount at which anyone would gasp, “Mon dieu!” Lorde, I have an idea for you about where to film your video for “The Louvre.” Call me! In the video for Beyoncé and JayZ‘s “Apeshit,” the first visual from the pair’s surprise joint album Everything Is Love, the two stars romp through the Louvre in Paris, seizing center stage in a high-culture palace that – like most Western art museums – historically made little room for non-white artists. Some of their mission involves the strategic highlighting of non-white images already in the Louvre. Beyoncé and Jay-Z rap in front of an Egyptian sphinx, and in galleries filled mostly with neo-classical French paintings – white artists, white subjects – the camera singles out black faces. (The video is directed by Ricky Saiz, who also helmed the “Yonce” video from Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s eponymous 2013 album.) Viewers catch brief glimpses of a pair of black figures in Paolo Veronese’s painting “The Wedding at Cana,” where Jesus turned water into wine, as well as a quick look at Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait d’une Négresse,” a depiction of a black woman staring guilelessly back at the viewer. But the Where’s Waldo? moments highlighting black figures are fleeting – the possibilities for this in the Louvre, or any major Western art museum, are limited from the start. So Beyoncé and JayZ set about interjecting blackness into a space that has never placed much value on it, claiming one of the centerpieces of European culture with gleeful defiance. They frequently film themselves moving in opposition to the frozen stillness of paintings by Jacques-Louis David, a French neoclassical artist whose work – like “The Oath of the Horatii” and “Madame Récamier” – invokes the Greco-Roman tradition. Much of the potency of the “Apeshit” video comes from the contrasts drawn between the “white” art on the walls and the black women on the gallery floors. In front of David’s “The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine,” a court scene of relentless white extravagance, Beyoncé and eight black dancers hold hands and begin to dance. It takes just a few synchronized sashays to upstage David’s massive painting, replacing an ornate symbol of white authority with a celebration of black bodies in motion. The Louvre’s stature depends on people believing that “The Coronation of Empress Joséphine” is the art, but the eye tells a different story – hanging behind Beyoncé and her dancers, the painting is reduced to wallpaper. Throughout the “APES**T” video, Beyoncé and Jay-Z repeatedly upstage some of Western classical art’s most famous images in one of its central sacred spaces. Beyoncé holds a series of chopping micro-poses with her hands before Saiz cuts quickly to an image of a distressed character, hands held up to shield her head, taken from another David painting, “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” The placement of the hands connects the two frames, but Beyoncé’s is virile, aggressive and in charge, while David’s figure seems merely fearful.

Radical gestures roll in on a mightily slippery sliding scale these days, don’t they? We’re far past any cultural division between high and low or pop and art at this point, and artists on the charts are also sniffing out their next inspiration, album cycle, or comparison to their own personal affairs in the grander schemes of culture and history. You’d be hard pressed to find a more hallowed repository of the West than the Louvre, so of course that’s where Beyoncé and Jay-Z have rolled up to set their new music video for the track “Apeshit” from the fresh album they dropped like an anvil right on top of your weekend. Of course this isn’t the first time they’ve been there, nor the first time some Pop-ish upstarts made a Major Statement at the French museum, but it would seem to be a major escalation in the Carters x Louvre relationship, to say nothing of the pride re: their own marital ties that the album and video are so keen to showcase. When worlds (and genres) collide is still a strong trend across multiple spheres of art and culture—turning meaning and message into something of a competitive game of Russian nesting dolls or an arms race of spectacle-based oneupmanship—but what might we make of this night at the museum if considered in light of the 1960s Marxist avant-garde French Situationist International? Founded in 1957 by Guy “Barrel of Laughs” Debord and Asger “Beware the Palette Knife” Jorn, the Situationists were guys and gals, but mostly guys, who wanted to, as the name would indicate, create some situations and elevate to the level of philosophy the notion of taking a freaking walk outside. But they also had a strategy! And key among their techniques, to which you can probably attribute the rise of “culture jamming” and just whatever Banksy thinks he’s doing, was the détournement. Discussed in chapter 8 of Debord’s 1967 tract The Society of the Spectacle, the technique calls for taking advantage of existing cultural objects or canonized art, rerouting their message, and even advocates for theft: “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one.” You would not have wanted this guy for your editor, but if you were looking to smash the state (of meaning), Debord was your man.

So, if “détournement serves as a reminder that theory is nothing in itself, that it can realize itself only through historical action and through the historical correction that is its true allegiance,” then is the spectacle of “Apeshit” a glam, historical correction of the Western assumption that houses of European culture contain the highest achievements of man- and womynkind? Beyoncé and Jay-Z have more clout and pull at this point than a merely rich person or garden-variety aristocrat putzing around the Cotswolds or Monaco, and they built that for themselves. When they pull off a stunt like this, it feels like another chime in the prosperity gospel that Doreen St. Félix examined in the arc of Rihanna’s career, as well as further evidence that the ability to make a compelling spectacle of oneself, to write a personal narrative as large as that of the progress of a civilization, is success. The false idea here is white supremacy, and perhaps the correction then is that European colonialists may not have had the time or the means to make their masterpieces if it weren’t for the economic boon of slavery and historical pillaging of resources from southern and eastern continents for the benefit of countries like France. The Situationists didn’t really like spectacle much (“The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living”) but they recognized that it was inescapable in modern society (“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images”). Given this circumstance, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, god bless them, would appear to be doing their best to create a spectacle that people who look like them can see themselves in too, as opposed to the near uninterrupted stream of black death spectacle the media and world is awash in on a day to day basis. Look forward to hearing this jam blasting out of car speakers this summer—it’ll be a real situation. The surprise release of Beyonce and Jay-Z’s new album, Everything Is Love, (credited as “The Carters” on the album to recognize they’re performing as a united duo, not as individuals) on Saturday, June 16 has left the music world reeling. Already, what fans have been carefully dissecting – and what we’re interested in unpacking, too – is the imagery from the music video for the album’s lead single, “APESHIT”. The six-minute video is likely going to be considered one of the best of 2018, with The Carters and a troupe of dancers taking over the Louvre. In case you couldn’t already tell, the fact that Bey and Jay-Z even got unfettered access to the Louvre for their own use is a stunning power move – adding a glorious power to the “APESHIT” lyric “I can’t believe we made it/ This is why we’re thankful”. Let’s start with the primary location in “Apeshit - Beyonce & Jay-Z”: the Louvre. Historically, it’s a predominately white space that primarily features white, male-created works of art. It’s a microcosm of history, which itself is mostly white, male, and heterosexual. Tradition and the Louvre go hand-in-hand, too, which means that Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s presence is a total disruption from the beginning. For modern audiences and fans of The Carters, the disruption is surely welcome. Not only can we expect to see (and do see) The Carters standing next to some of the most famous works of art, including the Mona Lisa and Winged Victory of Samothrace, but we see that they are aligning themselves with it right out of the gate. Their presence in a place that preserves what history has deemed the most important artworks, standing next to said art while themselves looking like art and using their body language to engage with this art, already implies they are as worthy of being there as the older work. It’s a middle finger to convention, a dare aimed at squarely at the gatekeepers of history and artistic tradition: You know we deserve to be here. The Carters begin positioning themselves as iconography from the moment we first see them, standing in front of the “Mona Lisa”. Sure, it’s a callback to the first time they took a photo with arguably the most famous painting in history back in 2014, but something is different this time around. Like the “Mona Lisa”, Beyoncé and Jay-Z are dressed simply, but powerfully. Suits for both, in bright colours and styles specific to their tastes and representative of the times they live in; again, just like the “Mona Lisa”. But even more of an echo of the painting is their expressions: a strong stare straight ahead, lips pressed together, shoulders back. They are telegraphing to us that they are as iconic as the “Mona Lisa”, without even saying a word. By donning expressions very much in the same vein as the iconic painting, they’re telling the viewer that they’re basically in the presence of a peer. But even more than that, they’re commenting on the beguiling and enticing space they occupy in our own culture. Much like the “Mona Lisa”, they are telling us that they know we think about them in a way we don’t think about other music artists. They know that we’ll spend hours analysing them and their work, attempting to find meaning in their movements and lyrics, trying to work out the symbols and icons they’ve put forth, and hoping to crack the impenetrable fortress they’ve built around them (from which they only emerge to become vulnerable when they want to). Humans have spent centuries trying to unpack the enigma of the “Mona Lisa” and still continue to do so to this day; do you really think you can figure out The Carters in a day? Another immensely important moment from “APESHIT” comes in the repeated glimpses of Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait of a Black Woman (Negress)” from 1800. One of the few works of art painted by a woman in the Louvre, the painting is deeply important both as a feature in the Louvre and its place in art history, because it is the only painting of its time to depict a black woman who is not a slave or similarly subjugated person, but rather simply presented in all her glory.

The painting affirms that black women are worthy of being in artistic spaces, and in enduring imagery. The painting is shown a few times, and it’s the second to last painting we see before the video closes on Bey and Jay turning around to regard the “Mona Lisa” – further confirmation that Benoist’s painting and its subject deserve recognition. It’s also no accident that the “Winged Victory of Samothrace” statue is frequently seen in “APESHIT”. Implying triumph and power, the statue has endured over centuries, and The Carters imply just as much by once again standing in front of it, in perhaps a nod to their own triumph and the power they’ve achieved. According to the Louvre website for the piece, the statue depicts Nike, and was likely created to commemorate a naval victory by the Rhodians (who hail from Rhodes, part of the Dodecanese island group in Greece). The towering relic from the Hellenistic period is, as the Louvre’s description notes, intensely dramatic and glorifies the female body in connection with something traditionally masculine (victory in war). That endowment of power to a female body is then emulated in the female bodies that stand before it in present day, through Beyoncé and her troupe of female dancers. All of these women come together and move as one being, with Beyoncé presiding over them all. She is the modern image of victory over the warfare placed on her body, career, intellect, personal life; having succeeded, she can now dress like “Winged Victory” and, in a sense, pass along her victories to the women who dance on the steps in front of her. Twitter user Queen Curly Fry’s in-depth Twitter thread breaking down the art seen in “Apeshit” is thorough, and her comments on the incorporation of the “Venus de Milo” into the video is so neatly articulated that we couldn’t have said it better if we tried: “Here, Beyoncé once again models herself as a Greek statue, this time the Venus de Milo. However, in this shot she wears a nude bodysuit with wrapped hair, reframing both goddesses of beauty and victory as a black woman. This dismantles white-centric ideals of beauty.” Similarly, Twitter account Tabloid Art History nails why it’s so important and iconic for Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and her dancers to be dancing in front of “The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine” by Jacques Louis David from 1804: “What I especially like about this part of the video is that the painting itself depicts a disruption, Napoleon taking the Pope’s role from him and crowning Josephine himself. Beyoncé further disrupts this by taking on Josephine’s role as the one being crowned.” If we consider Napoleon’s role as a major coloniser in the early 19th century, particularly in Northern Africa, then Beyoncé’s placement in the shot is extra symbolic. Beyoncé standing underneath the place where Napoleon is seen crowning his wife in the painting is a symbolic retrieval of stolen power. One of the other paintings we see in “APESHIT” is another Jacques-Louis David painting, “The Intervention of the Sabine Women.” Interestingly, we only see portions of the painting, never the entire artwork. This could be a sly comment on the dissection and appropriation of black bodies by white culture for their own aesthetic uses – or it could just be a deft use of quick cuts for dramatic effect for the video. Or maybe it’s both.   Twitter user Queen Curly Fry notes here that the painting, for the puposes of “APESHIT”, depicts “(white) female fear evoked by (white) male violence is juxtaposed w/ (black) female empowerment (‘get off my dick’).” The painting’s use of white female tears –long criticised as a way for white women to shift any blame they deserve for racist behaviour, or to turn a blind eye to racial injustice – is in direct contrast with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and her dancers’ freedom, calm, and enlightenment. In the end, “APESHIT” is a triumph because it is a statement that only The Carters could successfully make. The visual tells the powers that be to fuck off with their tradition, their preciously guarded history that has sought to erase non-white people from the history books, and their preconceived notions about how black bodies can be ornamental. They’ve used art to push back, to demand honour for the work they’ve contributed. “APESHIT” is a force to be reckoned with, and The Carters’ use of art to make a statement is an announcement to the world that they’ve shaped culture as much as anything hanging on a gallery wall.

[fck-dis-shit-im-out]

Seven Spectacular Details About Apeshit By Beyonce & Jay-Z

“I can’t believe we made it,” sings Beyoncé in “Apeshit - The Carters,” the first single from her surprise joint album with Jay-Z, Everything Is Love. And to prove that she and her husband have made it, in the song’s accompanying video, Beyoncé delivers this line from the Louvre. As the New York Times has pointed out, it is not actually that expensive to shoot a video in the Louvre (about $17,500 for a full day’s shoot). But music videos aren’t about numbers; they’re about how things feel — and there’s no place on earth that feels as lavish, as rich with accumulated cultural power and wealth and colonialism, as the Louvre. If you want to show that you have made it, that you are rich and powerful and one of the greatest artists of your generation, you go to the Louvre. And as an artistic choice, the Louvre is par for Beyoncé’s course. For the past few years, Beyoncé has increasingly cribbed from the iconography of classical Western art in her own image-making. Her pregnancy announcement photo shoot and her birth announcement photo shoot both referenced Botticelli’s Venus and the Renaissance trope of the Madonna and child, and her 2017 Grammys performance drew on goddess imagery from multiple artistic traditions. So when Beyoncé shoots at the Louvre — taking on by turns the poses of Venus de Milo and Victory — she’s continuing an artistic project of recontextualizing classical Western art, of making herself the aesthetic object on which so much wealth and cultural capital has been spent. And coming from a black woman, that’s a radical statement. “In a way, Beyoncé is exploiting/marketing her blackness as creativity — as a kind of weapon — within and against the very Eurocentric system of culture and consumption from which she has benefited,” says James Smalls, a professor of art history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. That’s an especially radical statement to make in the context of the Louvre, where little of the art features people of color in positions of strength and power. “From the Middle Ages up to the 19th century, works of art that showed black people usually represented them as servants or secondary figures,” explains Smalls. “They were not deemed worthy subjects of paintings, sculptures, or other kinds of cultural works.” One of the few exceptions to that trend is Marie Benoist’s “Portrait d’une négresse,” also displayed at the Louvre. “That painting is an anomaly because it presents a black person as the sole aestheticized subject and object of a work of art,” Smalls says. And it’s the painting that appears at the end of the “Apeshit” video, after shot after shot of portraits of white people.

Benoist painted “Portrait” in 1800, during a brief period in which France had abolished colonial slavery. (In 1794, the French emancipation proclamation liberated the colonies; in 1802, Napoleon reinstated slavery.) In that six-year span, portraits of heroic black people became popular in France, and that created an opportunity for an image of a black woman who is not tending to or subordinate to a white person, who is instead considered worthy of being at the center of her own portrait. As Smalls has pointed out, in its full context, “Portrait” is not a wildly politically subversive image. It’s most likely that the unknown and unnamed subject was a servant with few legal rights who had little choice about how she posed or whether she was okay with her breast being exposed to the world for the next 200 years. Benoist the painter has much more agency here than the black woman at the center of the picture. But in the context of “Apeshit,” with its montages of painting after painting of white faces and white statues, “Portrait” feels both shocking and subversive. It’s a black face in the center of the frame, apparently in control of her domain. And it’s one of the only figures in the Louvre that we don’t see get reinterpreted by either the Carters or their dancers: The only figure in the Louvre that can withstand the unstoppable force that is Beyoncé, that does not need to be remade and reexamined. Part of Beyoncé’s project over the past few years has been to treat art as a form of power: It is a form of focused aesthetic attention, of social capital, and of wealth given solid form. Taking over the Louvre means taking all that power for herself and for the black bodies she brings in with her — except for the “Portrait.” In “Apeshit,” it can stand on its own. What do Beyoncé, The Smurfs 2, and you have in common? All three have the theoretical ability to rent out the Louvre. Though there was widespread awe that the Carters’ video for “Apeshit” took place inside the most famous museum in the world, turns out, it’s actually not all that uncommon. According to the New York Times, about 500 shoots take place at the Louvre each year, which have included films on opposite ends of the “is this a good movie” spectrum, from last year’s Wonder Woman to 2013’s The Smurfs 2, which even the Louvre couldn’t save from its 13 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating. Though the museum only allows photography in the galleries for private use, it makes exceptions for professionals through written authorization. As of 2015, the Louvre’s policy states that to shoot a short film or music video, the cost for both interior and exterior shots would be just €4,500, or about $5,200. It’s possible that if the Carters had a crew of more than 50 people, that number would have been closer to €18,000, but as the Times notes, “there are hotel rooms here that cost more than that.” Hosting private events, however, will cost you a bit more. A tour for under 50 guests will set you back €10,000, while renting out the reception hall beneath I.M. Pei’s pyramid will cost, at the very least, €28,000. Though, to reiterate, that isn’t an amount at which anyone would gasp, “Mon dieu!” Lorde, I have an idea for you about where to film your video for “The Louvre.” Call me! In the video for Beyoncé and JayZ‘s “Apeshit,” the first visual from the pair’s surprise joint album Everything Is Love, the two stars romp through the Louvre in Paris, seizing center stage in a high-culture palace that – like most Western art museums – historically made little room for non-white artists. Some of their mission involves the strategic highlighting of non-white images already in the Louvre. Beyoncé and Jay-Z rap in front of an Egyptian sphinx, and in galleries filled mostly with neo-classical French paintings – white artists, white subjects – the camera singles out black faces. (The video is directed by Ricky Saiz, who also helmed the “Yonce” video from Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s eponymous 2013 album.) Viewers catch brief glimpses of a pair of black figures in Paolo Veronese’s painting “The Wedding at Cana,” where Jesus turned water into wine, as well as a quick look at Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait d’une Négresse,” a depiction of a black woman staring guilelessly back at the viewer. But the Where’s Waldo? moments highlighting black figures are fleeting – the possibilities for this in the Louvre, or any major Western art museum, are limited from the start. So Beyoncé and JayZ set about interjecting blackness into a space that has never placed much value on it, claiming one of the centerpieces of European culture with gleeful defiance. They frequently film themselves moving in opposition to the frozen stillness of paintings by Jacques-Louis David, a French neoclassical artist whose work – like “The Oath of the Horatii” and “Madame Récamier” – invokes the Greco-Roman tradition. Much of the potency of the “Apeshit” video comes from the contrasts drawn between the “white” art on the walls and the black women on the gallery floors. In front of David’s “The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine,” a court scene of relentless white extravagance, Beyoncé and eight black dancers hold hands and begin to dance. It takes just a few synchronized sashays to upstage David’s massive painting, replacing an ornate symbol of white authority with a celebration of black bodies in motion. The Louvre’s stature depends on people believing that “The Coronation of Empress Joséphine” is the art, but the eye tells a different story – hanging behind Beyoncé and her dancers, the painting is reduced to wallpaper. Throughout the “Apeshit - The Carters” video, Beyoncé and Jay-Z repeatedly upstage some of Western classical art’s most famous images in one of its central sacred spaces. Beyoncé holds a series of chopping micro-poses with her hands before Saiz cuts quickly to an image of a distressed character, hands held up to shield her head, taken from another David painting, “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” The placement of the hands connects the two frames, but Beyoncé’s is virile, aggressive and in charge, while David’s figure seems merely fearful.

Radical gestures roll in on a mightily slippery sliding scale these days, don’t they? We’re far past any cultural division between high and low or pop and art at this point, and artists on the charts are also sniffing out their next inspiration, album cycle, or comparison to their own personal affairs in the grander schemes of culture and history. You’d be hard pressed to find a more hallowed repository of the West than the Louvre, so of course that’s where Beyoncé and Jay-Z have rolled up to set their new music video for the track “Apeshit” from the fresh album they dropped like an anvil right on top of your weekend. Of course this isn’t the first time they’ve been there, nor the first time some Pop-ish upstarts made a Major Statement at the French museum, but it would seem to be a major escalation in the Carters x Louvre relationship, to say nothing of the pride re: their own marital ties that the album and video are so keen to showcase. When worlds (and genres) collide is still a strong trend across multiple spheres of art and culture—turning meaning and message into something of a competitive game of Russian nesting dolls or an arms race of spectacle-based oneupmanship—but what might we make of this night at the museum if considered in light of the 1960s Marxist avant-garde French Situationist International? Founded in 1957 by Guy “Barrel of Laughs” Debord and Asger “Beware the Palette Knife” Jorn, the Situationists were guys and gals, but mostly guys, who wanted to, as the name would indicate, create some situations and elevate to the level of philosophy the notion of taking a freaking walk outside. But they also had a strategy! And key among their techniques, to which you can probably attribute the rise of “culture jamming” and just whatever Banksy thinks he’s doing, was the détournement. Discussed in chapter 8 of Debord’s 1967 tract The Society of the Spectacle, the technique calls for taking advantage of existing cultural objects or canonized art, rerouting their message, and even advocates for theft: “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one.” You would not have wanted this guy for your editor, but if you were looking to smash the state (of meaning), Debord was your man.

So, if “détournement serves as a reminder that theory is nothing in itself, that it can realize itself only through historical action and through the historical correction that is its true allegiance,” then is the spectacle of “Apeshit” a glam, historical correction of the Western assumption that houses of European culture contain the highest achievements of man- and womynkind? Beyoncé and Jay-Z have more clout and pull at this point than a merely rich person or garden-variety aristocrat putzing around the Cotswolds or Monaco, and they built that for themselves. When they pull off a stunt like this, it feels like another chime in the prosperity gospel that Doreen St. Félix examined in the arc of Rihanna’s career, as well as further evidence that the ability to make a compelling spectacle of oneself, to write a personal narrative as large as that of the progress of a civilization, is success. The false idea here is white supremacy, and perhaps the correction then is that European colonialists may not have had the time or the means to make their masterpieces if it weren’t for the economic boon of slavery and historical pillaging of resources from southern and eastern continents for the benefit of countries like France. The Situationists didn’t really like spectacle much (“The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living”) but they recognized that it was inescapable in modern society (“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images”). Given this circumstance, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, god bless them, would appear to be doing their best to create a spectacle that people who look like them can see themselves in too, as opposed to the near uninterrupted stream of black death spectacle the media and world is awash in on a day to day basis. Look forward to hearing this jam blasting out of car speakers this summer—it’ll be a real situation. The surprise release of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Jay-Z’s new album, Everything Is Love, (credited as “The Carters” on the album to recognize they’re performing as a united duo, not as individuals) on Saturday, June 16 has left the music world reeling. Already, what fans have been carefully dissecting – and what we’re interested in unpacking, too – is the imagery from the music video for the album’s lead single, “APESHIT”. The six-minute video is likely going to be considered one of the best of 2018, with The Carters and a troupe of dancers taking over the Louvre. In case you couldn’t already tell, the fact that Bey and Jay Z even got unfettered access to the Louvre for their own use is a stunning power move – adding a glorious power to the “APESHIT” lyric “I can’t believe we made it/ This is why we’re thankful”. Let’s start with the primary location in “Apeshit”: the Louvre. Historically, it’s a predominately white space that primarily features white, male-created works of art. It’s a microcosm of history, which itself is mostly white, male, and heterosexual. Tradition and the Louvre go hand-in-hand, too, which means that Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s presence is a total disruption from the beginning. For modern audiences and fans of The Carters, the disruption is surely welcome. Not only can we expect to see (and do see) The Carters standing next to some of the most famous works of art, including the Mona Lisa and Winged Victory of Samothrace, but we see that they are aligning themselves with it right out of the gate. Their presence in a place that preserves what history has deemed the most important artworks, standing next to said art while themselves looking like art and using their body language to engage with this art, already implies they are as worthy of being there as the older work. It’s a middle finger to convention, a dare aimed at squarely at the gatekeepers of history and artistic tradition: You know we deserve to be here. The Carters begin positioning themselves as iconography from the moment we first see them, standing in front of the “Mona Lisa”. Sure, it’s a callback to the first time they took a photo with arguably the most famous painting in history back in 2014, but something is different this time around. Like the “Mona Lisa”, Beyoncé and Jay-Z are dressed simply, but powerfully. Suits for both, in bright colours and styles specific to their tastes and representative of the times they live in; again, just like the “Mona Lisa”. But even more of an echo of the painting is their expressions: a strong stare straight ahead, lips pressed together, shoulders back. They are telegraphing to us that they are as iconic as the “Mona Lisa”, without even saying a word. By donning expressions very much in the same vein as the iconic painting, they’re telling the viewer that they’re basically in the presence of a peer. But even more than that, they’re commenting on the beguiling and enticing space they occupy in our own culture. Much like the “Mona Lisa”, they are telling us that they know we think about them in a way we don’t think about other music artists. They know that we’ll spend hours analysing them and their work, attempting to find meaning in their movements and lyrics, trying to work out the symbols and icons they’ve put forth, and hoping to crack the impenetrable fortress they’ve built around them (from which they only emerge to become vulnerable when they want to). Humans have spent centuries trying to unpack the enigma of the “Mona Lisa” and still continue to do so to this day; do you really think you can figure out The Carters in a day? Another immensely important moment from “APESHIT” comes in the repeated glimpses of Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait of a Black Woman (Negress)” from 1800. One of the few works of art painted by a woman in the Louvre, the painting is deeply important both as a feature in the Louvre and its place in art history, because it is the only painting of its time to depict a black woman who is not a slave or similarly subjugated person, but rather simply presented in all her glory.

The painting affirms that black women are worthy of being in artistic spaces, and in enduring imagery. The painting is shown a few times, and it’s the second to last painting we see before the video closes on Bey and Jay turning around to regard the “Mona Lisa” – further confirmation that Benoist’s painting and its subject deserve recognition. It’s also no accident that the “Winged Victory of Samothrace” statue is frequently seen in “APESHIT”. Implying triumph and power, the statue has endured over centuries, and The Carters imply just as much by once again standing in front of it, in perhaps a nod to their own triumph and the power they’ve achieved. According to the Louvre website for the piece, the statue depicts Nike, and was likely created to commemorate a naval victory by the Rhodians (who hail from Rhodes, part of the Dodecanese island group in Greece). The towering relic from the Hellenistic period is, as the Louvre’s description notes, intensely dramatic and glorifies the female body in connection with something traditionally masculine (victory in war). That endowment of power to a female body is then emulated in the female bodies that stand before it in present day, through Beyoncé and her troupe of female dancers. All of these women come together and move as one being, with Beyoncé presiding over them all. She is the modern image of victory over the warfare placed on her body, career, intellect, personal life; having succeeded, she can now dress like “Winged Victory” and, in a sense, pass along her victories to the women who dance on the steps in front of her. Twitter user Queen Curly Fry’s in-depth Twitter thread breaking down the art seen in “Apeshit” is thorough, and her comments on the incorporation of the “Venus de Milo” into the video is so neatly articulated that we couldn’t have said it better if we tried: “Here, Beyoncé once again models herself as a Greek statue, this time the Venus de Milo. However, in this shot she wears a nude bodysuit with wrapped hair, reframing both goddesses of beauty and victory as a black woman. This dismantles white-centric ideals of beauty.” Similarly, Twitter account Tabloid Art History nails why it’s so important and iconic for Beyoncé and her dancers to be dancing in front of “The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine” by Jacques Louis David from 1804: “What I especially like about this part of the video is that the painting itself depicts a disruption, Napoleon taking the Pope’s role from him and crowning Josephine himself. Beyoncé further disrupts this by taking on Josephine’s role as the one being crowned.” If we consider Napoleon’s role as a major coloniser in the early 19th century, particularly in Northern Africa, then Beyoncé’s placement in the shot is extra symbolic. Beyoncé standing underneath the place where Napoleon is seen crowning his wife in the painting is a symbolic retrieval of stolen power. One of the other paintings we see in “APESHIT” is another Jacques-Louis David painting, “The Intervention of the Sabine Women.” Interestingly, we only see portions of the painting, never the entire artwork. This could be a sly comment on the dissection and appropriation of black bodies by white culture for their own aesthetic uses – or it could just be a deft use of quick cuts for dramatic effect for the video. Or maybe it’s both.   Twitter user Queen Curly Fry notes here that the painting, for the puposes of “APESHIT”, depicts “(white) female fear evoked by (white) male violence is juxtaposed w/ (black) female empowerment (‘get off my dick’).” The painting’s use of white female tears –long criticised as a way for white women to shift any blame they deserve for racist behaviour, or to turn a blind eye to racial injustice – is in direct contrast with Beyoncé and her dancers’ freedom, calm, and enlightenment. In the end, “APESHIT” is a triumph because it is a statement that only The Carters could successfully make. The visual tells the powers that be to fuck off with their tradition, their preciously guarded history that has sought to erase non-white people from the history books, and their preconceived notions about how black bodies can be ornamental. They’ve used art to push back, to demand honour for the work they’ve contributed. “APESHIT” is a force to be reckoned with, and The Carters’ use of art to make a statement is an announcement to the world that they’ve shaped culture as much as anything hanging on a gallery wall.

[thenamelessscribe42-blog]

9 Spectacular Details About Apeshit - The Carters

“I can’t believe we made it,” sings Beyoncé in “Apeshit - Beyonce & Jay-Z,” the first single from her surprise joint album with Jay-Z, Everything Is Love. And to prove that she and her husband have made it, in the song’s accompanying video, Beyoncé delivers this line from the Louvre. As the New York Times has pointed out, it is not actually that expensive to shoot a video in the Louvre (about $17,500 for a full day’s shoot). But music videos aren’t about numbers; they’re about how things feel — and there’s no place on earth that feels as lavish, as rich with accumulated cultural power and wealth and colonialism, as the Louvre. If you want to show that you have made it, that you are rich and powerful and one of the greatest artists of your generation, you go to the Louvre. And as an artistic choice, the Louvre is par for Beyoncé’s course. For the past few years, Beyoncé has increasingly cribbed from the iconography of classical Western art in her own image-making. Her pregnancy announcement photo shoot and her birth announcement photo shoot both referenced Botticelli’s Venus and the Renaissance trope of the Madonna and child, and her 2017 Grammys performance drew on goddess imagery from multiple artistic traditions. So when Beyoncé shoots at the Louvre — taking on by turns the poses of Venus de Milo and Victory — she’s continuing an artistic project of recontextualizing classical Western art, of making herself the aesthetic object on which so much wealth and cultural capital has been spent. And coming from a black woman, that’s a radical statement. “In a way, Beyoncé is exploiting/marketing her blackness as creativity — as a kind of weapon — within and against the very Eurocentric system of culture and consumption from which she has benefited,” says James Smalls, a professor of art history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. That’s an especially radical statement to make in the context of the Louvre, where little of the art features people of color in positions of strength and power. “From the Middle Ages up to the 19th century, works of art that showed black people usually represented them as servants or secondary figures,” explains Smalls. “They were not deemed worthy subjects of paintings, sculptures, or other kinds of cultural works.” One of the few exceptions to that trend is Marie Benoist’s “Portrait d’une négresse,” also displayed at the Louvre. “That painting is an anomaly because it presents a black person as the sole aestheticized subject and object of a work of art,” Smalls says. And it’s the painting that appears at the end of the “Apeshit - The Carters” video, after shot after shot of portraits of white people.

Benoist painted “Portrait” in 1800, during a brief period in which France had abolished colonial slavery. (In 1794, the French emancipation proclamation liberated the colonies; in 1802, Napoleon reinstated slavery.) In that six-year span, portraits of heroic black people became popular in France, and that created an opportunity for an image of a black woman who is not tending to or subordinate to a white person, who is instead considered worthy of being at the center of her own portrait. As Smalls has pointed out, in its full context, “Portrait” is not a wildly politically subversive image. It’s most likely that the unknown and unnamed subject was a servant with few legal rights who had little choice about how she posed or whether she was okay with her breast being exposed to the world for the next 200 years. Benoist the painter has much more agency here than the black woman at the center of the picture. But in the context of “Apeshit,” with its montages of painting after painting of white faces and white statues, “Portrait” feels both shocking and subversive. It’s a black face in the center of the frame, apparently in control of her domain. And it’s one of the only figures in the Louvre that we don’t see get reinterpreted by either the Carters or their dancers: The only figure in the Louvre that can withstand the unstoppable force that is Beyoncé, that does not need to be remade and reexamined. Part of Beyoncé’s project over the past few years has been to treat art as a form of power: It is a form of focused aesthetic attention, of social capital, and of wealth given solid form. Taking over the Louvre means taking all that power for herself and for the black bodies she brings in with her — except for the “Portrait.” In “Apeshit,” it can stand on its own. What do Beyoncé, The Smurfs 2, and you have in common? All three have the theoretical ability to rent out the Louvre. Though there was widespread awe that the Carters’ video for “Apeshit” took place inside the most famous museum in the world, turns out, it’s actually not all that uncommon. According to the New York Times, about 500 shoots take place at the Louvre each year, which have included films on opposite ends of the “is this a good movie” spectrum, from last year’s Wonder Woman to 2013’s The Smurfs 2, which even the Louvre couldn’t save from its 13 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating. Though the museum only allows photography in the galleries for private use, it makes exceptions for professionals through written authorization. As of 2015, the Louvre’s policy states that to shoot a short film or music video, the cost for both interior and exterior shots would be just €4,500, or about $5,200. It’s possible that if the Carters had a crew of more than 50 people, that number would have been closer to €18,000, but as the Times notes, “there are hotel rooms here that cost more than that.” Hosting private events, however, will cost you a bit more. A tour for under 50 guests will set you back €10,000, while renting out the reception hall beneath I.M. Pei’s pyramid will cost, at the very least, €28,000. Though, to reiterate, that isn’t an amount at which anyone would gasp, “Mon dieu!” Lorde, I have an idea for you about where to film your video for “The Louvre.” Call me! In the video for Beyoncé and Shawn Carter‘s “Apeshit,” the first visual from the pair’s surprise joint album Everything Is Love, the two stars romp through the Louvre in Paris, seizing center stage in a high-culture palace that – like most Western art museums – historically made little room for non-white artists. Some of their mission involves the strategic highlighting of non-white images already in the Louvre. Beyoncé and Jay-Z rap in front of an Egyptian sphinx, and in galleries filled mostly with neo-classical French paintings – white artists, white subjects – the camera singles out black faces. (The video is directed by Ricky Saiz, who also helmed the “Yonce” video from Beyoncé’s eponymous 2013 album.) Viewers catch brief glimpses of a pair of black figures in Paolo Veronese’s painting “The Wedding at Cana,” where Jesus turned water into wine, as well as a quick look at Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait d’une Négresse,” a depiction of a black woman staring guilelessly back at the viewer. But the Where’s Waldo? moments highlighting black figures are fleeting – the possibilities for this in the Louvre, or any major Western art museum, are limited from the start. So Beyoncé and Jay-Z set about interjecting blackness into a space that has never placed much value on it, claiming one of the centerpieces of European culture with gleeful defiance. They frequently film themselves moving in opposition to the frozen stillness of paintings by Jacques-Louis David, a French neoclassical artist whose work – like “The Oath of the Horatii” and “Madame Récamier” – invokes the Greco-Roman tradition. Much of the potency of the “Apeshit” video comes from the contrasts drawn between the “white” art on the walls and the black women on the gallery floors. In front of David’s “The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine,” a court scene of relentless white extravagance, Beyoncé and eight black dancers hold hands and begin to dance. It takes just a few synchronized sashays to upstage David’s massive painting, replacing an ornate symbol of white authority with a celebration of black bodies in motion. The Louvre’s stature depends on people believing that “The Coronation of Empress Joséphine” is the art, but the eye tells a different story – hanging behind Beyoncé and her dancers, the painting is reduced to wallpaper. Throughout the “Apeshit” video, Beyoncé and Jay-Z repeatedly upstage some of Western classical art’s most famous images in one of its central sacred spaces. Beyoncé holds a series of chopping micro-poses with her hands before Saiz cuts quickly to an image of a distressed character, hands held up to shield her head, taken from another David painting, “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” The placement of the hands connects the two frames, but Beyoncé’s is virile, aggressive and in charge, while David’s figure seems merely fearful.

Radical gestures roll in on a mightily slippery sliding scale these days, don’t they? We’re far past any cultural division between high and low or pop and art at this point, and artists on the charts are also sniffing out their next inspiration, album cycle, or comparison to their own personal affairs in the grander schemes of culture and history. You’d be hard pressed to find a more hallowed repository of the West than the Louvre, so of course that’s where Beyoncé and Jay-Z have rolled up to set their new music video for the track “Apeshit” from the fresh album they dropped like an anvil right on top of your weekend. Of course this isn’t the first time they’ve been there, nor the first time some Pop-ish upstarts made a Major Statement at the French museum, but it would seem to be a major escalation in the Carters x Louvre relationship, to say nothing of the pride re: their own marital ties that the album and video are so keen to showcase. When worlds (and genres) collide is still a strong trend across multiple spheres of art and culture—turning meaning and message into something of a competitive game of Russian nesting dolls or an arms race of spectacle-based oneupmanship—but what might we make of this night at the museum if considered in light of the 1960s Marxist avant-garde French Situationist International? Founded in 1957 by Guy “Barrel of Laughs” Debord and Asger “Beware the Palette Knife” Jorn, the Situationists were guys and gals, but mostly guys, who wanted to, as the name would indicate, create some situations and elevate to the level of philosophy the notion of taking a freaking walk outside. But they also had a strategy! And key among their techniques, to which you can probably attribute the rise of “culture jamming” and just whatever Banksy thinks he’s doing, was the détournement. Discussed in chapter 8 of Debord’s 1967 tract The Society of the Spectacle, the technique calls for taking advantage of existing cultural objects or canonized art, rerouting their message, and even advocates for theft: “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one.” You would not have wanted this guy for your editor, but if you were looking to smash the state (of meaning), Debord was your man.

So, if “détournement serves as a reminder that theory is nothing in itself, that it can realize itself only through historical action and through the historical correction that is its true allegiance,” then is the spectacle of “Apeshit” a glam, historical correction of the Western assumption that houses of European culture contain the highest achievements of man- and womynkind? Beyoncé and Jay-Z have more clout and pull at this point than a merely rich person or garden-variety aristocrat putzing around the Cotswolds or Monaco, and they built that for themselves. When they pull off a stunt like this, it feels like another chime in the prosperity gospel that Doreen St. Félix examined in the arc of Rihanna’s career, as well as further evidence that the ability to make a compelling spectacle of oneself, to write a personal narrative as large as that of the progress of a civilization, is success. The false idea here is white supremacy, and perhaps the correction then is that European colonialists may not have had the time or the means to make their masterpieces if it weren’t for the economic boon of slavery and historical pillaging of resources from southern and eastern continents for the benefit of countries like France. The Situationists didn’t really like spectacle much (“The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living”) but they recognized that it was inescapable in modern society (“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images”). Given this circumstance, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, god bless them, would appear to be doing their best to create a spectacle that people who look like them can see themselves in too, as opposed to the near uninterrupted stream of black death spectacle the media and world is awash in on a day to day basis. Look forward to hearing this jam blasting out of car speakers this summer—it’ll be a real situation. The surprise release of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s new album, Everything Is Love, (credited as “The Carters” on the album to recognize they’re performing as a united duo, not as individuals) on Saturday, June 16 has left the music world reeling. Already, what fans have been carefully dissecting – and what we’re interested in unpacking, too – is the imagery from the music video for the album’s lead single, “APESHIT”. The six-minute video is likely going to be considered one of the best of 2018, with The Carters and a troupe of dancers taking over the Louvre. In case you couldn’t already tell, the fact that Bey and Shawn Carter even got unfettered access to the Louvre for their own use is a stunning power move – adding a glorious power to the “APESHIT” lyric “I can’t believe we made it/ This is why we’re thankful”. Let’s start with the primary location in “APES**T”: the Louvre. Historically, it’s a predominately white space that primarily features white, male-created works of art. It’s a microcosm of history, which itself is mostly white, male, and heterosexual. Tradition and the Louvre go hand-in-hand, too, which means that Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s presence is a total disruption from the beginning. For modern audiences and fans of The Carters, the disruption is surely welcome. Not only can we expect to see (and do see) The Carters standing next to some of the most famous works of art, including the Mona Lisa and Winged Victory of Samothrace, but we see that they are aligning themselves with it right out of the gate. Their presence in a place that preserves what history has deemed the most important artworks, standing next to said art while themselves looking like art and using their body language to engage with this art, already implies they are as worthy of being there as the older work. It’s a middle finger to convention, a dare aimed at squarely at the gatekeepers of history and artistic tradition: You know we deserve to be here. The Carters begin positioning themselves as iconography from the moment we first see them, standing in front of the “Mona Lisa”. Sure, it’s a callback to the first time they took a photo with arguably the most famous painting in history back in 2014, but something is different this time around. Like the “Mona Lisa”, Beyoncé and Jay-Z are dressed simply, but powerfully. Suits for both, in bright colours and styles specific to their tastes and representative of the times they live in; again, just like the “Mona Lisa”. But even more of an echo of the painting is their expressions: a strong stare straight ahead, lips pressed together, shoulders back. They are telegraphing to us that they are as iconic as the “Mona Lisa”, without even saying a word. By donning expressions very much in the same vein as the iconic painting, they’re telling the viewer that they’re basically in the presence of a peer. But even more than that, they’re commenting on the beguiling and enticing space they occupy in our own culture. Much like the “Mona Lisa”, they are telling us that they know we think about them in a way we don’t think about other music artists. They know that we’ll spend hours analysing them and their work, attempting to find meaning in their movements and lyrics, trying to work out the symbols and icons they’ve put forth, and hoping to crack the impenetrable fortress they’ve built around them (from which they only emerge to become vulnerable when they want to). Humans have spent centuries trying to unpack the enigma of the “Mona Lisa” and still continue to do so to this day; do you really think you can figure out The Carters in a day? Another immensely important moment from “APESHIT” comes in the repeated glimpses of Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait of a Black Woman (Negress)” from 1800. One of the few works of art painted by a woman in the Louvre, the painting is deeply important both as a feature in the Louvre and its place in art history, because it is the only painting of its time to depict a black woman who is not a slave or similarly subjugated person, but rather simply presented in all her glory.

The painting affirms that black women are worthy of being in artistic spaces, and in enduring imagery. The painting is shown a few times, and it’s the second to last painting we see before the video closes on Bey and Jay turning around to regard the “Mona Lisa” – further confirmation that Benoist’s painting and its subject deserve recognition. It’s also no accident that the “Winged Victory of Samothrace” statue is frequently seen in “APESHIT”. Implying triumph and power, the statue has endured over centuries, and The Carters imply just as much by once again standing in front of it, in perhaps a nod to their own triumph and the power they’ve achieved. According to the Louvre website for the piece, the statue depicts Nike, and was likely created to commemorate a naval victory by the Rhodians (who hail from Rhodes, part of the Dodecanese island group in Greece). The towering relic from the Hellenistic period is, as the Louvre’s description notes, intensely dramatic and glorifies the female body in connection with something traditionally masculine (victory in war). That endowment of power to a female body is then emulated in the female bodies that stand before it in present day, through Beyoncé and her troupe of female dancers. All of these women come together and move as one being, with Beyoncé presiding over them all. She is the modern image of victory over the warfare placed on her body, career, intellect, personal life; having succeeded, she can now dress like “Winged Victory” and, in a sense, pass along her victories to the women who dance on the steps in front of her. Twitter user Queen Curly Fry’s in-depth Twitter thread breaking down the art seen in “Apeshit” is thorough, and her comments on the incorporation of the “Venus de Milo” into the video is so neatly articulated that we couldn’t have said it better if we tried: “Here, Beyoncé once again models herself as a Greek statue, this time the Venus de Milo. However, in this shot she wears a nude bodysuit with wrapped hair, reframing both goddesses of beauty and victory as a black woman. This dismantles white-centric ideals of beauty.” Similarly, Twitter account Tabloid Art History nails why it’s so important and iconic for Beyonce and her dancers to be dancing in front of “The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine” by Jacques Louis David from 1804: “What I especially like about this part of the video is that the painting itself depicts a disruption, Napoleon taking the Pope’s role from him and crowning Josephine himself. Beyoncé further disrupts this by taking on Josephine’s role as the one being crowned.” If we consider Napoleon’s role as a major coloniser in the early 19th century, particularly in Northern Africa, then Beyoncé’s placement in the shot is extra symbolic. Beyoncé standing underneath the place where Napoleon is seen crowning his wife in the painting is a symbolic retrieval of stolen power. One of the other paintings we see in “APESHIT” is another Jacques-Louis David painting, “The Intervention of the Sabine Women.” Interestingly, we only see portions of the painting, never the entire artwork. This could be a sly comment on the dissection and appropriation of black bodies by white culture for their own aesthetic uses – or it could just be a deft use of quick cuts for dramatic effect for the video. Or maybe it’s both.   Twitter user Queen Curly Fry notes here that the painting, for the puposes of “APESHIT”, depicts “(white) female fear evoked by (white) male violence is juxtaposed w/ (black) female empowerment (‘get off my dick’).” The painting’s use of white female tears –long criticised as a way for white women to shift any blame they deserve for racist behaviour, or to turn a blind eye to racial injustice – is in direct contrast with Beyoncé and her dancers’ freedom, calm, and enlightenment. In the end, “APESHIT” is a triumph because it is a statement that only The Carters could successfully make. The visual tells the powers that be to fuck off with their tradition, their preciously guarded history that has sought to erase non-white people from the history books, and their preconceived notions about how black bodies can be ornamental. They’ve used art to push back, to demand honour for the work they’ve contributed. “APESHIT” is a force to be reckoned with, and The Carters’ use of art to make a statement is an announcement to the world that they’ve shaped culture as much as anything hanging on a gallery wall.

[josefavomjaaga]

Marie Louise on the road (5)

Continuing with Marie Louise’s journal entries from her honeymoon trip in May 1810. We last left our imperial newlyweds on Sunday, May 6, four o’clock in the afternoon at Breda, where Marie Louise finally was allowed to get something to eat that day. Apparently the mood improved only slightly.

After the Emperor had received all the authorities, we set off again [...].

The road was as monotonous as ever and the weather was awful. The wind was blowing horribly and the rain was so heavy that we were flooded with it, for the Emperor, contrary to his custom, found that it was stifling, and opened all the windows for the sake of annoying me. At 8 o'clock, the Marshal Duke of Reggio arrived with several generals at our carriage and assured us that we were only an hour away from the [palace of] Bois. Despite this we did not arrive until midnight.

The palace of Bois-le-Duc had, as a footnote states, been restored and refurnished by Louis Bonaparte. But as it was situated on the territories that had recently been annexed by Napoleon, it now was part of the latter’s civil liste. And the Duke of Reggio, that’s Oudinot. Which reminds me … had Napoleon not decided to travel lightly and with only a couple of people? We’ll see what that factually meant. Marie Louise continues:

Fortunately I found one of my chambermaids there.

Well, yes. Of course the chambermaids are also travelling along. Those don’t count.

I was so sick and tired that I went to bed without eating. I had terrible stomach cramps, and a fever to go with it. There was such a commotion in the courtyard that I couldn't sleep. I sent for Monsieur Bourdier, […]

Hold a second. Who? Oh, one of the imperial doctors. Apparently also still with the imperial travel group.

[…] and they brought me the consoling news that he had been forgotten at Breda, where he had got out of the coach for a moment.

Left on the road while he went to pee. A classic. Things never change.

At last I heard my door open at one o'clock (for it had no locks or keys) and I heard someone enter very quietly. It was the Prince of Neufchatel who thought he was at the Emperor's apartment and who, when he saw me, was quite embarrassed.

Yes, that I will believe! Somebody please turn all this into a movie!

Finally, at 2 o'clock, Monsieur Jouan arrived, […]

who would be another doctor from the imperial health service apparently still trudging along (and who in turn surely had his own servant and valet in tow)

[…] Monsieur Jouan arrived, half dead, covered from head to toe in clay, for he had fallen into a hole. I asked him to give me some ether. He went to look for the small pharmacy and found all the bottles broken so I had to resign myself to waiting for me to recover without a remedy.

Spoiler alert: She only died in 1847, so it seems she made it.

At three o'clock the Duchess of Montebello arrived. Her carriage had remained in the sand for four hours despite all the efforts of Monsieur de Saint-Aignan […]

Check. He was supposed to be of the party.

[…]  and Prince Aldobrandini.

He was not. That’s the brother-in-law of Pauline Bonaparte, by the way.

As these gentlemen saw that they could not pull the carriage out of the sand, they unhitched the horses, used as a saddle a sack of oats and went to seek help at the Bois-le-Duc, while the Monsieur de Beauharnais, instead of helping them, remained calmly in the carriage, grumbling that no progress was being made.

No, that’s not Eugène (he would be called »the Viceroy«) but one of his relatives, the father of Stéphanie de Beauharnais, grand-duchess of Baden. Claude de Beauharnais was first equerry to the empress (and officially part of the travel group).

The Duke of Bassano […]

Maret. No, he was not listed either.

[…], impatient because his coachman did not want to go forward, got out of the carriage with very bad intentions for the poor man, but heaven punished him, he fell into a pond up to his neck and became very polite with the peasant. The latter did not want to pull him out and he was obliged to stay there until another carriage came to his rescue.

It was really quite a laugh when the next day everyone told each other about their adventures, but the Duchess of Montebello had a much finer one still in store for her.

Well, at least they had some fun afterwards. And with this wonderful cliffhanger we’ll leave the adventures in Bois-le-Duc for another post.

[josefavomjaaga]

Marie Louise on the road (12)

We left the imperial tourists in Middelburg after a delightful (if a bit wet, thanks to Eugène and Bessières) afternoon at the ocean. Marie Louise continues:

Friday 11th May

On the 11th, the weather was dreadful all day. That did not prevent the Emperor from going a second time to see Flushing. I remained in bed with a good fever.

Now look at what you’ve done, Eugène and Bessie!

I don't know what happened to my iron health, it's all gone.

Beg your pardon, Madame, you’ve been talking about nothing but your precious health failing ever since you left Vienna in March!

I'm sure I owe it to the doctors who did nothing but drug me during the whole trip. [...]

Bessières and Eugène: Absolutely. We’re sure it was them!

Doctors: It was either drugging her or listening to her wailing...

Samedi 12 mai

On the morning of the 12th the Emperor held council. It is really not our fault that we heard everything, because the salon was near my room and the Emperor was of an awful intensity.

And the fact we pressed our ears to the door had nothing to do with it at all!

According to Catherine of Württemberg, Napoleon at this meeting once more dreamt of an expedition to England. His bad mood and subsequent shouting may also be explained by bad news from Holland: smuggling still going on and secret peace negotiations behind his back through Fouché and Ouvrard.

I was still feverish all night, and as I was very tired and the weather was terrible, I did not leave until two o'clock to take a carriage ride around the town [Middelbourg]. [...] On my way home I found the Queen of Westphalia in a very bad mood because I had not taken her with me, but she annoys me. She keeps asking me "Do you still love the Duchess of Montebello?" I have known her for two months and I have become quite attached to her. I couldn't help answering the Queen: "Sister, I don't change my friends like my underwear". What she told me there was a Queen's words. It is said that we don't know how to be really attached, but I am willing to show that there are exceptions in our ranks.

Apparently, this unexpectedly close friendship of a Habsburg princess and the cold and reserved daughter of some obscure gentry family did already raise some eyebrows this early on. But of course Catherine had her own reasons why she could not understand how Marie Louise would be this close to any of her ladies:

It is also true that the poor Queen is very unhappy with her friends. No sooner does she have one than the King makes her his mistress, and that is hardly the way to stay attached to them.

Which also explaines Catherine’s attitude towards the countess Liverstein two days earlier, as the countess apparently had just replaced another of Jérôme’s mistresses who had been sent home to Cassel. Apparently Jérôme mistook the household of his wife for his personal harem.

In the evening, the Viceroy led the Duchess of Montebello to engage in some contraband [...]

Eugène?!

Napoleon: Tu quoque, fili?

[...] and see the bell tower of the cathedral church which is said to be very old.

I love the combination. Apparently, buying smuggled goods was something you could easily do while on a sightseeing tour through town. And I assume the duchess was sure that the viceroy of Italy at least would not visit any »maisons closes«. He could invite the ladies to his place.

It was decided that we would leave the next day regardless of the weather. I am very happy because although the island is certainly very attractive, I did not feel very comfortable to be obliged to stay four days in the same clothes.

In the evening we received the authorities, who are not very numerous and most of whom do not know French.

And this is where Marie Louise ended her diary, despite the fact that the journey continued for two more weeks. Maybe she did not have the time to resume it, or it was left behind in one of the many accidents that seem to have been a natural part of Napoleon’s travels. The imperial couple went via the chateau de Laeken on to Bruxelles next, and in the following two weeks (among other towns) to Ostende, Lille, Calais, Boulogne, Dieppe, Le Havre, Rouen and finally returned to Saint-Cloud on June 1st.

Despite her many complaints, she seems to have won a mostly positive first impression of the country, according to Savary. And she had probably also learned what to expect of her impetous husband, and that it would be a good idea to always have some fresh undergarments with her when travelling in his company.

An abridged and edited version of Marie Louise’s diaries was first published by Frédéric Masson. An English translation can be found here: The private diaries of empress Marie Louise. The first complete edition, with many additional footnotes, was published by Charles-Éloi Vial and is, as far as I know, only available in French: L’adieu à l’empereur.

These volumes actually contain some more travel journals, from 1813 (to Cherbourg) and from Rambouillet to Vienna after the fall of the empire in spring 1814. But while probably more interesting for the historian, they’re far less entertaining. Despite the duchess’s valiant efforts Marie Louise by that time seems to have picked up enough Parisian court etiquette to not write down things all too inappropriate.

[josefavomjaaga]

Marie Louise on the road (9)

We last left the imperial travel group on Tuesday, May 8, in a charming gondola on the Scheldt, with Napoleon, Bessières and Eugène somewhat green-faced after having had breakfast on board. Marie Louise continues:

This determined them to disembark at 10 o'clock on the island of Zuid-Beveland, without knowing whether there would be any carriages to take us to the opposite shore.

The Duke of Istria [Bessières], after much searching, finally found two or three peasants' vehicles which were neither carts nor carriages, and which were harnessed to two horses, and were so high that a ladder would have been needed to climb them, and so narrow that two people could hardly fit in them. They had no springs, and were very hard, and to make matters worse, they had many small and inconvenient inhabitants.

Of course. We did already have mud, rain, people falling into ditches and having all sorts of digestive accidents … but lice and fleas were still missing.

The Duke of Istria got on horseback to act as our courier in order to prepare boats for us on the other side of the island. [...]

Riiight. Nice excuse, Bessie! Admit it, you just wanted to get away from that bunch of weirdos and their vermin-infested vehicles.

Bessières (mounting his horse): Phew! Never been so happy to be a cavalryman. Eugène: Pssst. Any chance you need the help of an old friend and former subordinate for this? Got another horse? B.: Sorry, chap, you're a prince now. Get onto that thing and try not to catch any fleas. E.: I hate my life.

The carriage in which the Duchess of Montebello, the Countess of Liverstein and the Viceroy were sitting overturned and broke into a thousand pieces. The latter landed on his feet. The Duchess got away with a tumble, but the Countess of Liverstein was dragged by the horses and hurt her elbow badly.

Another missed chance to kill off the duchess, I guess.😁

In a small town named Nisse, the whole party can get into better carriages in order to continue their journey.

[...] After passing through the town of Zeebourg, which is quite pretty, we arrived at the other end of the island, at Hoop Fort. There we embarked in a passenger boat and sailed down the Scheldt again.

We saw many porpoises. This is a very peculiar fish. It has the head of a pig and its body is round. It rolls on its back on the surface of the water and moves a great deal in this way in a very short time.

Your guess is as good as mine as to what they really saw. Vial thinks it may have been seals. But Marie Louise’s excitement about the sea – completely new to her – is often palpable in her diary.

We disembarked at 4 o'clock at the Rammekens fort, where the most beautiful carriages of the city of Middelbourg were waiting for us. I am not exaggerating when I say that they must have been built at least 150 years ago.

We were so hungry that we ate two large army provision loaves that soldiers brought us.

Well, at least their stomaches were okay again, it seems.