#the vast majority of these kinds of artists are white

[iamnotyourbabe]

god i am soo soooooo weary of art by cishet men that's just "sexy (often nude) lady"

tired. uninspired. no subtext besides 'makes my peepee hard.' the stench of objectification dulls any impact it could have.

this post is not for terfs.

[auckie]

I think the things that offend me most nowadays in like, smaller interpersonal interactions rather than grand, sweeping trends in culture, are when people chose to not partake in a wide set of things. Like musical close mindedness, or refusal to try different foods from different cultures. Not watching an entire subset of films bc they’re ‘french’. Avoiding reading bc you say you have adhd and it’s too hard. Like dude I get it, I’m busy. I can be picky. Everyone can. But the willful ignorance of closing yourself off to those VAST portions of the human experience, and not having curiosity and a lust to learn and explore art that was made by someone worlds apart from you either in terms of their culture, era, whatever. I dunno man it just pisses me off so bad. I think it’s arrogant. Like oh you’re comfortable in your safe little bubble huh? And you’re enforcing its barriers with the excuse that you’re autistic and have sensory issues. With music made by black people?? lol okay. It is pretty presumptuous for me to assume malicious intent but I think those prejudices are borne from either the comfort of being someone who’s wealthy and probably white not feeling the need to learn past what they think is enough, or it’s a reflection of a society that’s taught you to prioritize what it shills— popular, current (white, depending where you live ig) artists who are making streamlined, easy to digest content. Often when I meet people with these issues they’ll have one particular ‘niche’, and it tends to be like. 70s music. Victorian literature. Anime and Japanese games. But they’re still not really investing beyond the media presented. Like there’s so much more to Japanese culture than liking some cartoons put out between 2010-2020. You don’t gotta become some sorta Einstein who learns the background of every little freak in FGO yeah. But don’t you wanna aim higher? Aren’t you interested in any of the historical figures? And nothings wrong with hopping onto a trend. You read Dracula bc of that Dracula daily thing. Cool! Read more. Some people will say they’re chronically ill or disabled and can’t get outside. That’s okay. The internet is full of things you can read other than fanfiction, YouTube has a shit ton of free music. There’s Wikipedia and free articles online if you have questions about things. Yeah nobody is spending four hours a day looking at the national archives website and studying art history but it’s imbued in the things around you, and youll absorb it ambiently as you go along. you dont have to be a jack of all trades and cover every major genre of every major medium, but it never hurts to try! I really love seeing ppl ask too. Bc it can be kind of humiliating to admit to what seems like some jackass hipster that you’ve never delved into, idk, Serbian films (lol not that one). And hopefully if whoever you’re asking will give you honest good recommendations and not berate you. I’m kind of berate a straw man rn I guess. The hostile tone def doesn’t lend to an atmosphere of sharing but I cannot tell you how many times I’ve rbed anything involving specifically jazz only to see someone rb and add the stupidest comment on the post, or in the tags, or go into my inbox to be like waaah I don’t like jazz bc it’s boring and old and for pretentious hypocrites who hate neurodivergent people! Like what are you TALKING about. Fine if you don’t like it but don’t try and rationalize that as a moral standing you shit lark. And just as they’re allowed to dislike jazz I’m allowed to not really enjoy people who don’t like jazz. Or country. Nautical knots. Knit wear. Watching urbex YouTubers get their shit rocked by squatters. Korean food. Pachuco fashion and stupid ugly low riders. Bollywood films. and they don’t want to try any of those things either yknow? The next thing I’m getting into is circuit bending.

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #38 – Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

Didion is one of those canonical authors I always feel like I should already have read at some point (isn’t that what high school English class was supposed to be for). Of course this was a very vague feeling, and not attached to a single scrap of actual information about her and her work beyond the general time period and cultural milieu – so I grabbed this from the library and started it entirely blind (partially my own fault for skipping the introduction by a different and much worse author tbf). Fascinating book, artistically successful and emotionally affective, but not one I’m able to say I really found enjoyable, or even necessarily beautiful (it’s no Giovanni’s Room, to compare another bit of canonical latter-20th century high literature).

The book follows Maria Wyeth, an (increasingly former) actress in 1960s Hollywood, through her slow decline from up and coming starlet and wife of a prestigious young director to an enforced retirement as an isolated upscale sanitarium/hospital resort. Which is hardly a spoiler – the book starts at the end and jumps through the timeline freely, and in any case the whole thing feels telegraphed to the point of inevitability. Maria’s life in LA is contrasted with how she grew up in a tiny desert town in Nevada, so small it at some point stopped existing, and in the process more or less gives you the narrative of her life.

Which is as close to a plot as the book has, really. Maria and her internal monologue are the near-sole focus, and her view of the outside world and what’s happening around her basically always says more about her than the world. Watching Maria’s life falls apart really is watching a car crash in slow motion – you’re never really surprised at any point, but the shearing metal and flesh are hard to look away from.

The book’s very much capital-l Literature, here meaning that the style and prose is at least half the reason to read the book. The story’s told through short vignettes (I’m not sure a singe chapter was more than ten pages, whereas the vast majority were two or three) and the deliberate, generous use of white space, both figurative and literal. Maria is pretty relentless in her self-deception and lack of self-awareness, and in any case is quiet elusive and vague with descriptions of people and events – reading between the lines is quite necessary. This overall really does work for me - the imagery is vivid and memorable, and Maria’s head is a compelling and believable place to be.

It’s also just intolerable. I have no particular issue with deeply unsympathetic, tragically unselfaware, or wince-inducingly self-destructive characters, but Maria sure is all three of those to a degree I rarely see. More than that, she is just profoundly passive. It is, for me at least, far easier to be invested in operatic delusion and hubris leading to ruination than a just resolutely thoughtless and pettily cruel person letting her life rot around her. Which is a failure of literary empathy on my part, probably, but did make this a somewhat frustrating book to read. You’re left want to scream at Maria to just do something (anything!) that she isn’t led to by people around her like an ornery goat to water.

This is probably exacerbated by the supporting cast. Who are all very much portrayed as hopeless, clueless gamblers and unprincipled, hypocritical Hollywood decadents,, absolutely – but despite that, keep trying to reach out and offer her lifelines or support. Which is mostly surprising because she might literally not say a single kind word to another human being in the entire book, is relentlessly caustic in her internal monologue, and sure isn’t doing favours or advancing the career of anybody. The real tension of the book ends up not being whether or not she’ll destroy her life and more how long before everyone around her just lets her.

It’s a blisteringly cynical novel overall, really – both in its portrayal of individual characters and of society as a whole. I joked while reading it that it felt like American Psycho without a Patrick Bateman, and while that’s a bit too far – everyone’s still very recognizably human, most of whom do care about at least a few things besides status symbols and dick measuring contests – but the portrayals of Hollywood and Wall Street certainly feel like they rhyme.

Though the implicit politics of that cynicism do feel do feel very different here. Very possibly because the back cover called it something like ‘a blistering satire of the excesses of the ‘60s’ (paraphrasing from memory), but the book definitely ended up feeling very (socially) conservative, full of worries about broken families and marriages of convenience and just generally decadence. The whole plot where Maria gets a motel-room abortion to deal with the consequences of her affair which almost kills her, sends her spiralling into months of total, life-ruining depression, and destroys her relationship with both her husband and her paramour feels like something you’d only see coming out today in explicit pro-life propaganda, for example; certainly it’s a trope I’ve seen complained about more than (until now) I’ve ever actually seen done. The fact that Maria’s foremost redeeming feature is always her love for and desire to be with her (disabled and permanently hospitalized for vague reasons), and that the climax of the book is a suicide directly caused by infidelity, also. None of which should exactly be surprising, really – a book almost as old as my parents has dated opinions on social issues! - but for some reason I always expect canonical authors to have been free-wheeling libertines and bohemians.

Speaking of being written nearly sixty years ago – the time capsule quality of this book is positively fascinating. Which I say whenever I read something from before the millennium, but still – the ‘60s are still so profoundly mythologized I do love the chance to see anything written about them at the time, if only for ‘the past as a foreign country’ tourism reasons. The Hollywood of exploration, drug abuse, meaningless sex, vicious gossip and every combination of the above feels like it could almost be written about today, right up until the point where an easy divorce means finding an amenable judge and finding a witness to corroborate the husband’s admission of wanton emotional abuse (which becomes a stark reminder of how horrifying even a historical five minutes ago was when you consider what happens if you can’t meet any of those conditions). The illegal abortions, the utterly casual homophobia, the auteur theory being a hot new thing, the cult of the open road. It all adds up to an interesting effect.

Speaking of the cult of the open road – Maria’s only real sense of peace, happiness and self-control in the entire book is when she’s spending all day cruising the highway at dangerous speeds just for the sake of it, without itinerary or destination. No real coherent point to make, just that there’s something truly and incredibly American about that? The descriptions of the Nevada desert and highways, too.

But yeah, an expertly written novel that’s positively lovely in places (the opening monologue is near-sublime, for example), but not one that really awed or oved me the way some other literature has.

[goodluckclove]

Hi! Have you ever felt ashamed of yourself because something made you feel like your taste in books/film/music wasn't diverse enough? I'm here to tell you that having that be the case does not necessarily mean that you're a bigot that hates minorities!

I mean, if you only read books by cishet white men specifically because you think they're the only good kinds of books - yes, that is sort of indicative of a problem in your perspective.

But most people don't pick books because of the author's background. Most people don't even know the author's background. Sometimes you just read books you think are good, and it isn't until you look back and notice the lack of a certain voice and think "huh, that's weird that I haven't looked into that".

That's okay! There are many brilliant minority authors that you might not have a way to know about unless you search the right term or have someone tell you. This is not a moral failure on your behalf, but an opportunity to see just how vast your favorite genre is.

Consider science fiction, or speculative fiction as a whole. Philip K. Dick has a deeply specific type of science fiction influenced by his gender, the era he was born in, and his rampant and intense schizophrenia (look up The Exegesis, it's wild). Kurt Vonengut has an entirely different take on the same genre that was heavily, heavily shaped by being a literal prisoner of war and being in the Dresden Bombings of World War Two. He was, I believe, also rumored to be on the schizophrenic specturm.

But let's widen the scope! I have only read a few books of Octavia Butler and wasn't as impacted by them as other books I've read, but I definitely noticed a major shift in atmosphere in a narrative world formed by a black woman. The air tasted different. It was a truly remarkable way to expand my vision of what the genre can do.

There's also Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police. I have a complicated relationship with this book. I read the first chapter, loved the environment of an Influenced sci-fi dystopia, but then immediately realized this premise would destroy me and stopped reading. I still have it. I'm going to read it, it's just a tough subject for me.

If you want to widen your scope of art consumption you can do it as easily as taking a book or movie you like and seeing what art influenced it or what art was influenced by it. Websites like Tastedive are great for that. You can also look for lists of minority authors that have written in your genre of choice and see what sounds appealing.

You also shouldn't do it all at once. I don't think a minority artist would appreciate that you rushed through their work solely because someone on the Internet told you you're a bad person unless you experienced every oppressed perspective immediately. You have time.

A while back I did research and made an effort to read more female fiction. I looked at my bookshelf and saw that a majority of the women I read were either nonfiction writers or retro lesbians. So I bought a few short story collections by women writers that I found online, because I was also inexperienced with that. It was great. I really enjoyed it. My next goal is to gather more perspectives on experimental fiction, my favorite genre. I've read mostly Western, czech, Italian, Spanish and French. Some women, mostly men. I would like to see what else is out there.

Also if anyone has a suggestion for a book on black existentialism other than Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, I sure am hungry for it. Invisible Man is one of the most painful and beautiful books I've ever read.

I'm rambling. Art is exciting, is what I mean to say. If you feel the way you take in art is missing something, instead of scolding yourself for that it's actually a lot more effective to do a lil' bit of internet searching, get a new book or movie, and see what it makes you feel and think. I'm pretty confident that's the ideal viewing experience in the eyes of the minority creators who made these pivotal works.

Consider race, sexuality, era, disability, gender identity - all of that and more changes the way a person makes art and it's truly enlightening to explore!

[cipheramnesia]

Appendage is part of a good movie, but not completely one. Early on, the lead character, Hannah, is accused of being unoriginal in her fashion design. In a movie which treads the territory of the evil doppelganger / monstrous manifestation of negative emotions, I hoped this was an understated way of acknowledging movies like Malignant, Us, The Dark Half, Brain Damage, Basket Case, The Brood, and so on. Demonstrating an awareness of the genre and promising to do more than put a nice new button on someone else's earlier and better work.

It has a fair interesting promise about it too, using self-loathing as the foundation for the doppelganger. It makes for an interesting reflection of the social experiences of depression, anxiety, and self harm. Particularly notable examples is how Hannah's mentor / fashion mogul using unpaid interns encourages her after seeing the work she produces in response to her doppelganger. At one point the creature overwhelms her psychically with "you are unlovable" which is a very familiar situation for severe depression, and features other scenarios such as toxic social relationships with people encouraging self hate, and lashing out at those who care about you as a result of high levels of depression. This is all good, solid material to use as a foundation.

Where it falls down on the job is more to do with the contrast of Hannah against the conflict of her doppelganger. I'd like to contrast this with Us, because it's probably the most illustrative of the problem. In both instances, the protagonist(s) are fairly well to do - the kind of upper middle class people who very nearly no longer exist. There is a separate discussion to be had about why so many movies build their plots around people whose financial security is wildly out of touch with the vast majority of actual lived experiences - fantasy is one thing, but it's gotten more to the point of deliberate fabrication. The point here is that the protagonist in Appendage comes off as a poor little rich girl, and the Wilsons, in Us, do not come off as spoiled wealthy.

First and foremost, Appendage initially sets up Hannah as someone with effectively a safety net - a really bad one, but nevertheless, an option to fall back, and puts her in a place that would require an enormous amount of wealth for most people (internship in a city, living in a large apartment, doing fashion design with no other income to support her). The very first dress the viewer sees is not dismissed out of hand by the mentor - it's obvious and underlined as trite and essentially a rip-off of someone else's old work (a wrap dress that uses a different closure). There's... nothing in Hannah to latch onto as a empathetic or relatable character. The Wilsons are a family of four with several immediate demonstrations both that they are not necessary the same ilk of old money wealth as Hannah - that in fact there is a degree of constant worry over being seen as less successful than their peers which lurks under the middle class veneer. Hannah is not only confident of her talent, she receives constant assurance from a support network.

This is not to say depression is picky about someone having greater or lesser wealth, but the contrast between the protagonist of the tale versus the amount of conflict is an important element of a story. Not everything needs to be earth shattering, but Hannah being a mediocre artist with great friends and truckloads of financial support from otherwise emotionally abusive parents versus a single mean doppelganger feels like a weak conflict. Which is bringing me to the reason I picked Us out of the other doppelganger options.

How to say this. It's 2023. We have been having the conversation about race and race in film for long enough that a director this young probably saw it her whole life. I have to wonder how she let the most white-bread, privileged character like Hannah turn to a woman of color and say "you don't get pain." What I was hoping was, because the groundwork for the portrayal of depression was solid, we'd get to a place where that line was a lynchpin of where Hannah starts to see how self-directed and myopic her view has become. That would have been amazing. It doesn't get there. Instead her friend, Esther, an Indian woman, saves Hannah from her depression and helps her save her own relationship, and stand up to her abusive mother - because they are besties and just... do you SEE what you are doing, I want to shout at the screen? And she saves her boyfriend, a black man, while her own manifest depression is draining away his life and there's no awareness at all of this?

Contrast with Us, with a black family, whose friends and support are a white family - work friends of Gabe Wilson. Racism is not the whole point of Us, but awareness of it makes the movie stronger. His friend Josh is show constantly chipping away at Gabe's confidence. Dahlia (Josh's wife) tries to undermine the Wilson familial bond. We are reminded of racialized violence on their way to the idyllic beach. Us is a movie about a lot more than doppelgangers, about a very different kind of metaphor, and honestly kind of a cheat as a comparison seeing as Jordan Peele's work is just like "is it a Jordan Peele or anything else" level of art.

However, I'm sticking with it because the point is the level of awareness. Appendage is shows a thoughtful and intriguing understanding of mental illness, but seems completely unaware of any context pertaining to its characters. It's very possible to make exciting, interesting, and thoughtful movies even when the protagonists are in positions of extreme privilege, but making a thoughtful movie requires being self-aware, which Appendage sadly is not.

[hyenabeanz]

My in depth reactions to the names and logos. First overall is: I don't hate any of the names. They're all okay. 🎉

Minnesota Frost: The name is fine to good. It's going to make a killer arena chant. "let's go frost" is three syllables so will avoid the sing song of four, and ending on a hard consonant? That's gonna sound goooooood in the X. It'll be like the "we want the cup" chant since we swallowed the third "the" syllable mostly anyway and damn it was a kick. @hsavinien also pointed out "killer frost, killer frost" which mmmm tasty. The logo is.... Okay. My main problem with it from an artistic standpoint is they gave it a long tail which is clearly making it a bitch to put on merch and stuff. It looks off center on a lot of things. They need to smush it up a little. But I'm not super worried about logos because those are more easily changed than names. I require a yeti mascot

New York Sirens: Sirens is neat for the ability for it to play on city noise, goal siren, and ferocious sea monsters. I know some people are cringing because of that last one because siren can be a little gross applied to women on a mythological level but uh, I'm here for owning the powerful man eating sea creatures. The logo is not awful. I think New York's text logo is the best one, that echo effect on it is cool. I'm less into the NY but idk it's growing on me. If their mascot isn't a rat mermaid they're wrong

Ottawa Charge: my other favorite team. Oh babies, what have they done to you. The name is fine. The logo is not. It evokes the Flames. It's kind of just awkward and abstract looking. It looks like a logo for a group home. I really liked their black and red, it did not need yellow. Uffda.

Boston Fleet: eh it's ok. I truly think Wicked and leaning into witches would've been cooler. Fleet is a generically interesting name I guess. The logo makes sense. to me it's safe, kind of boring, but inoffensive. Which is fine, and the vast majority of sports logos. I am glad I don't have to be tempted to get a Boston jersey like I would've if it was witches lol 😏

Montreal Victoire: RIP the pronunciation outside of Canada. Cool name though. Logo is a little busy for me but is evocative of a but of heraldry which is always neat and fitting (no one's jerseys are cooler than the German national team, for example.)

Toronto Scepters: the name is ... Fine. It is no longer problematic to women so that's good, but I feel like they went with a slightly more colonial than necessary team name. Scepters aren't unique to European culture, but combined with the logo and styling it does evoke that particular type. It is unique though. And Reign would've stung, because I know Minnesota will want to still casually use purple reign. I don't like the logo. I loved Toronto's clean blue and white, and that yellow is not it. I in general don't like that text logo style even though its classic. It also is just the St. Thomas logo with a holy hand grenade on the top instead of a shield, in worse colors. And as a Katie, mortal enemy of the Tommies, there's just a natural visceral dislike there. 😏 But it's not the torch. So. Win. 🎉

So, my Minnesotan based review: could be worse.

[pwlanier]

Salvador Dalí, Lobster Telephone, 1938

This iconic sculpture is one of the most instantly recognisable masterpieces of Surrealism, the art movement that emerged in Paris in the 1920s, which explored the world of dreams and the subconscious mind. It consists of an ordinary, working telephone, upon which rests a plaster lobster, specially made to fit directly over the receiver.

The Surrealists loved the idea of unrelated objects coming together to create a new kind of reality, which subverted the rational and tapped into the subconscious. The bizarre combination of a phone and a lobster is at once absurd, repellent, fascinating and menacing, yet it is nevertheless a fully functioning phone.

Lobster Telephone was made in 1938 for Edward James (1907-1984), Dalí’s main patron in the 1930s. Eleven of the plaster lobster receivers were made to fit to telephones at James’s house in Wimpole Street, central London and at his country house, Monkton, in West Sussex. Four of the lobsters were painted red, and seven were painted white. The Lobster Telephones are now almost all in museum collections around the world: the Tate in London has a red version on a black telephone.

This white version remained with the Edward James Foundation, in West Sussex. It was recently sold at auction and would have left Britain, but in view of its artistic and historical importance, it was subject to an export license deferral. Issued on behalf of the Secretary of State, this allows UK museums the chance to match the auction price. Thanks to the Henry and Sula Walton Fund, which was established to help the National Galleries acquire major works of modern art, and a grant from Art Fund, the work was saved and goes on show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh for the first time today.

Edward James was born in 1907 at his family’s summer house, Greywalls, in Gullane, near North Berwick in East Lothian. His family was immensely wealthy, owning a vast estate at West Dean, near Chichester in West Sussex. Edward came into his inheritance in his twenties and used much of it to support the arts: he is best known as the patron of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte in the 1930s. He met Dalí in 1934 and the two became close friends. Dalí visited James in London on several occasions and James bought many of the artist’s greatest work, straight off the easel, hanging them at his houses in London and West Sussex.

From the mid-1930s, James had both residences redesigned and given Surrealist makeovers. Dalí designed furnishings including the celebrated Mae West Lips sofas, which were shaped in the form of the Hollywood actress’s lips, tall lampstands in the form of stacked champagne glasses, and the famous Lobster Telephones.

The idea for the Lobster Telephone dates back to a drawing Dalí made in 1935. The plaster lobsters were commissioned by James from the London design firm Green & Abbott (which also fabricated the Mae West sofas) in the summer of 1938. Dalí and James visited Sigmund Freud in Hampstead in July and this may have given them the idea of actually making the objects. Cast in plaster, hollowed out underneath, and with a hole in the tail to take the telephone flex, they fit perfectly over the standard receivers of the period. The Surrealists’ love of the irrational was instantly and brilliantly embodied in a household object in daily use.

The Lobster Telephone is the most iconic of all Surrealist ‘Object Sculptures’: these became a craze in the 1930s, with Man Ray, Miró, Magritte, Giacometti and Roland Penrose among the many who made them. Instead of making a traditional sculpture by modelling with clay or carving in marble, the Surrealist artists took pre-existing objects, put them together, or changed them slightly, and then exhibited them. It was like 3D collage. From a practical point of view, it allowed artists with no training in sculpture to produce sculptural objects. From an artistic point of view, it enabled artists to produce bizarre objects which instantly challenged conventional notions of reality and normality.

The National Galleries of Scotland has one of the world’s greatest collections of Surrealist art, including major paintings by René Magritte, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Toyen, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and others, and sculptures by Alberto Giacometti. However, until now there has been no major Object Sculpture in the collection: they were quickly assembled for exhibition at the time, and were often simply discarded - so they are rare.

Although Edward James amassed an unrivalled collection of Surrealist art, much of it was sold off in the 1970s and 1980s. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s summer exhibition of 2016, Surreal Encounters, was partly based on Edward James’s collection.

Courtesy Alain Truong

[inimitablereel]

For the Ask a Vidder meme, 5, 1, 16!

5. Hardest vid to edit?

Hm depends on how you define hardest...

I think the biggest technical challenge I've had, which was entirely self-inflicted, was trying to get rid of all the zillions of stupid hallmark channel logos on my hallmark hanukkah vid with absternr, which was very fussy and also unsuccessful and something I volunteered to do while absternr was away from a computer because I like fiddly technical things for the first hour of them... BeatriceEagle's cleancredits program was really great for getting rid of the simple hallmark logo! It was surprisingly easy to get rid of just a white circle with an H in the middle. But they also stuck this big countdown to Christmas thing on the bottom of some of the movies that had a mistletoe border and was kinda faded in and I tried a bunch of different mask options and all of them looked awful... Anyways this has been an unnecessary rant about something I did 100% for fun.

From more of an artistic perspective I think a little wicked was the hardest vid to edit, partially because looking back on it I have pretty mixed feelings about it. I had some pretty specific things I wanted to say about the character but also the way she was being treated in the shows at a meta level and I was trying to make one unified statement about who the character is like and how she's treated in these shows across 3 shows and a movie where she has different amounts of screentime and is treated differently by the narrative.Like I opened with a shot of a badass moment and a moment of her unnecessarily falling on her face from each show but in the one movie, she actually only loses when it's appropriate (e.g. fights with superpowered oponents) and I was sorta faking it with a shot of her falling down in a fight that she eventually won, and in one of the shows I had to work really hard to find those shots of her being badass. (Which is why I wanted to make the vid in the first place - if you have a female character who dresses cool and is verbally said to be badass and in charge but you only ever have her falling over and getting undermined on screen that says something!)

What program do you use?

Davinci resolve! I guess if we're being comprehensive I've also used avidemux a bit for clipping as well as as using ffmpeg/someone's python script to run ffmpeg for multiple clips from a spreadsheet. (Resolve freaked out on my old computer with more than a handful of whole episodes of a show and tomb shows are too many episodes not to clip regardless.)

16. Favorite thumbnail for one of your vids?

I've gotta admit I've always gone with one of the default youtube provided options (though I try to choose whatever one of those is not actively misleading?) Pulling them up, my vimeo thumbnails are way better because vimeo just lets you choose a shot from the video (which is to say they're still just whatever still looked good). I have not uploaded all that many of my vids on vimeo. But maybe I should! For example this is the youtube thumbnail for Emerald City

It looks okay! It's a shot of a car on the infinity train, which is the VAST majority of what's in this vid so you'd think that it'd be very easy to get, but going in to edit the video the other automated options for thumbnails are more focused on characters and it's hard to see what's going on with the train car, which was the focus of the vid. I get why youtube's algorithm thinks that people should be in a thumbnail, it's just wrong with this one.

In contrast this is the vimeo one which I'm pretty sure is just the beginning of the vid. It's still not great! I could have actually made a title screen! But it is a focus on scenery and I think it's fun to have the thumbnail for something titled "emerald city" as a shot of a green room.

Anyways this didn't really answer the question... This one from love is an open door is pretty good - the thumbnail is kind of the ship manifesto for this one (which is real character Wu Xie, who has in other shows in this universe been played by Zhu Yilong, serious actor/the random side characters made up for him to have someone to do exposition with in this 10 episode show) - look at them! they have weirdly a lot of chemistry for how little there is in the character of the guy on the right! (sometimes a "good thumbnail" can be me going I still think this ship and my vid is funny)

[abyssal-debonair]

so here’s what’s been going on:

a couple days ago on July 2nd, TGC, again, retweeted fanart featuring whitewashed characters, this time white skykids. now, I’m not on Twitter much anymore, but I was that day. I was among others who commented how offensive it was for TGC to be promoting artwork that utilized this racist practice. 

at first came the usual opposition, I gave my piece, then the convo died down. thought that was the end of it. by the next day, it picked up again with an incredibly mean-spirited tone — insults, bad faith takes, attempts to shame my friends and I. it was pretty disgusting.

eventually another Twitter user reached out to me and shared a Reddit link. someone had reposted a few of our tweets without censoring our usernames to r/skychildrenoflight (an unofficial subreddit not affiliated with TGC) with full intent to mock and deride us. that post currently sits on the subreddit with over 250 upvotes and over 200 comments, the vast majority of which are so stupid, asinine, and unsurprisingly racist. it explains how the discussion picked up again — the thread had been brigaded, my friends and I were being harassed.

I’m not here to talk about why this is an instance of whitewashing and why it is bad — I have already done that, though it’s overdue for me to make a more comprehensive, eloquent write-up.

Sky is a wonderful game. I love Sky, I love the world, I have invested so much creative energy into it. I love playing music on the game. I have multiple fics in the works. I used to engage with lorechat in Skycord on the regular, enjoying sharing my thoughts and discussing theories with others there. I am always fascinated by the artwork the community produces, even started trying to draw myself. the fanart TGC retweeted the other day isn’t even that bad compositionally — the artist is incredibly talented — the problem is the whitewashing that is all too common here.

I have never been in a fandom where a disgustingly racist practice, among others, was so accepted. I have never been in a fandom that harbored bigots who were so hateful towards the kinds of people Sky normalized, that they were playing as and interacted with. this community frequently proclaims itself as welcoming, diverse, and wholesome, but those words are hollow when many perpetuate bigotry then attack those who call it out, saying “it doesn’t exist here” and “you’re making shit up to get mad at” and “your ancestors would be ashamed of you.”

on that last one, I should mention that the commentary got disgustingly personal. I stated that I was Black in the Twitter thread, which many latched on to. they said I was entitled, never faced real racism, was a child, was pulling the race card, was “the real racist,” was why Black people are not taken seriously in discourse.

I shouldn’t have to mention that I have faced racism irl, including violence, including followed by a police officer on campus in the dark that could have ended poorly. I shouldn’t have to mention the racist harassment I have faced both online and offline. I play Sky and engage with its community because the game gave me the idea that I could escape the world that hated me for one where I felt seen and welcomed. if someone was being hateful, adding more to pile of bigotry I have to fucking live with, I thought I would have the backing of the community to support me when I fought back. I was wrong.

what happened over the last couple of days exposed me to some of the worst the Sky community has to offer and it didn’t even surprise me.

it is well documented how people of color like myself are mistreated in white-dominated spaces. our discomfort is viciously denied as false or exaggerated. we are told to suck it up because fandom is supposed to be enjoyed, an escape, “don’t bring politics in here.” except fandom perpetuates the same problems we are trying to escape from. we are not given a damn break.

[johannestevans]

Update - 27/02/2023

Good evening, good evening, good evening!

I've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes this week - I'm about halfway into a new Norse mythology-based novella that I'm very excited about, as well as a few other short stories and essays; I've also been getting some of the planning done for this year's Monstrous May! The prompts will be out some time around mid-March, which will give people a bit more than a month to prep and plan if you prefer to plan out your fills in advance.

If you haven't taken part before, the Monstrous May Challenge is a prompt challenge that I run every year, and this is going to be the third year going - I set up a prompt for every day of the month of May, all themed around different monsters!

If you're interested in seeing the last few year's prompts, these were 2021's, and these were 2022's.

I don't have a wide variety by way of media recommendations this week, but I did enjoy a double bill with the boys that I think is worth recommending:

Calendar Girls (2003, dir. Nigel Cole) - This is about a Women's Institute chapter (the WI is a kind of British club for women to do hobbies, charity work, and community activities together) who want to raise money for a leukaemia charity after the death of one of their husbands, so they do a nude calendar. Because they're all older women from Yorkshire, it becomes a huge media sensation. Helen Mirren and Julie Walters star, but every woman on this cast is fucking class, and it's such a fun, silly movie.

The Full Monty (1997, dir. Peter Cattaneo) - This is about a group of unemployed ex-steelworkers in Sheffield, suffering the after-effects of Thatcher's Britain - after the Chippendales (a male strip group) come to town, they decide to learn to dance and put on their own strip show where they, unlike the Chippendales, will give their audience "the full monty" - they'll be completely naked.

These two films came out half a decade from each other, and while both are set in the Yorkshire, they offer starkly and drastically different windows into life in the two counties (North and South) that are largely divided by class and gender. Both are explicitly about mainly cis heterosexual people (there is a canonical gay couple in the main cast in the Full Monty who get together during the course of their stripping, and they're adorable) navigating work that is adjacent to sex work, and a lot of the shame that that comes with.

Calendar Girls is about middle and upper class white women, many of whom are retired or running their own businesses, in a small country village - these are quite affluent women, and their difficulty in fundraising is depicted far more as coming from the boring nature of WI offerings rather than as a shortage of money in the community.

Throughout the film, they go, "No, no, we won't be naked, we'll be nude," and there's continuous repetition of the idea of the calendar as "art", and therefore far more elevated over mere pornography, even though the idea for doing the nude calendar is inspired by Helen Mirren's character paging through her teenage son's titty mags and then seeing a sexy nude calendar at her local mechanic's.

While there's of course a lot of nudity in the film, it's largely not extremely sexualised and is artistically posed - most of the women don't really discuss or seem to have active sex lives, again because these are affluent women for whom such things would be largely considered very gauche, even having posed nude for this calendar.

The Full Monty is wholly different.

This is not a film about affluent or well-off men - the vast majority of them are working class lads who were basically left without options after all the factories closed, all of whom are hunting for jobs that aren't there between picking up their dole every week: the most well-off member was previously the foreman at the factory, and he's in the same boat as the men he used to manage. Of the rest of the crew, the majority of them are white with one of them Black (played by Paul Barber, my beloved), and two of the lads, as I've said, are queer.

There's far less pretense in here about their strip show being about elevated high art - the lads quite rightly note that the women who'll want to see stripshows want to because they think men are hot, and that it's a good laugh seeing strippers. There's a moment where they're discussing a woman in a magazine, discussing the size of her breasts and then saying, "Oh, I wasn't criticising her personality, just her tits," and they then talk about how when they're dancing on stage, the women in the audience are going to be discussing them in the same objectifying manner.

This is a film that's broadly about masculinities and the shame of not being able to support their households financially with the pittance they're given on the dole, and how disposable they feel, especially because Robert Carlyle's character primarily wants to pay his arrears in child support to his ex-wife, and is very hostile to her new boyfriend because of how insecure he makes him feel while already feeling awful about his position.

Calendar Girls is a film about quite affluent women who are doing "artistic" nudity to raise additional money for a charitable cause - The Full Monty is effectively about a group of working class men who are doing one of the more acceptable forms of sex work for survival. The fictional town of Knapley for Calendar Girls is based on Rylstone - that's only an hour and a half away from Sheffield by car, but they live very, very different lives. Even just the panning shots are starkly different, Calendar Girls filled with beautiful sweeping shots of the Yorkshire moors, swelling green hills and blue skies, and Sheffield continuously showing shots of a dilapidated and neglected town, a car submerged in the canal, the towers from a factory no longer belching out steam, buildings half falling down and left empty.

There's just one more point of comparison I'd like to make, and one of my favourite aspects of The Full Monty - so, throughout Calendar Girls, a lot of these women are quite anxious about ageing and the way that their bodies look now that they're in middle age, fearing that they're no longer attractive or as desirable as they were. They talk about wrinkles, breast size, sagging, et cetera.

In The Full Monty there is a little insecurity from the lads as a whole, especially from the foreman and Horse both about being older men, and from the wee ginger lad about having "pigeon tits" (they're very cute) - but my favourite subplot is actually about Mark Addy's character, Dave. Dave is fat, and his friends make a lot of jokes about his being fat and therefore undesirable, and a lot of his insecurity about actually doing the stripping is anxiety around his weight and a lot of fear and anxiety about being undesirable. we see him a few times being intimate with his girlfriend and panicking that she's not attracted to him, and ultimately ending up feeling very empowered by doing the stripping.

Both movies obviously have those themes of boosting esteem and feeling somewhat more empowered through being viewed and presenting themselves in these desirable contexts, but the plotline with Dave is far more developed and considered than any of those in Calendar Girls, and is super impactful.

Mark Addy is also hot as fuck in this role, but that's my typical slutty commentary on most films.

Anyway, I've seen both of these films a bunch of times, and despite their numerous respective flaws, I absolutely think they're both work checking out and watching, especially The Full Monty. The latter is honestly one of those films that is just watchable again and again, and I love it to fucking bits. The soundtrack alone makes it a triumph.

Anyway!

New Works Published

Fiction Short: Without Mercy

2.6k, rated M, M/M. A retired mercenary seeks out another Spartan — the man, in fact, responsible for the deaths of his family. Featuring massage, guilt, banter, back-and-forth.

On Medium / / On Patreon

Blog Post: Advice on Being A Slut

Anonymous asked:

Possibly an odd question, but……do you have advice on how to be a slut? I’m recently out as a gay trans man, in my 30’s, only ever been with straight cisgender men, and I have no idea where to start. Being on testosterone has helped with the dysphoria, but I can’t seem to let go of old habits from when I was a girl having sex with guys. You can ignore this if you don’t feel comfortable answering, I just thought given the nature of your blog you might have some really good insights

This is a really big post digging into some of the differences between M/F casual dating culture and M/M cruising culture, how it feels to go between the two as a trans man, and also some more practical slutty tips!

On Tumblr.

This is another post from the same asker, following up a bit more on navigating trauma responses from disrespectful and coercive partners, and also on communicating in the bedroom. Also on Tumblr.

I've been answering more asks of recent, which I'm loving by the way!

Apart from advice stuff, I absolutely love getting asks about character or analysis topics, I really feel like I'm easing into a period of writing a lot more non-fiction, and I'm super excited about it!

Writing non-fiction alongside my fiction always comes super naturally to me, I just rarely publish as much of the non-fiction very formally, so I'm really into the idea of going a bit more of it going forward.

Oh, and if you have any particular requests or hopes for Monstrous May this year, feel free to hop into my asks and let me know!

[justinefrischmanngf]

despite the horrors the other day when i tried to make this post i do really think it’s interesting how kind of beautiful it can be to interact with other people of colour and have that immediate understanding . because regardless of the fact that that author turned out to be white, the cashier saw me and knew that she could talk about how sweet it was to see more fantasy authors of colour, we will never see each other again but she knew and i knew and i know we both had the widest smiles on our faces talking about it. and when i met that director/dj we were at an event where the vast majority of us were not-white and she was talking to this other woman and she was trying to point out someone and she was like “this is what happens when you actually have multiple brown women in a space! normally we are so easy to spot!” and the three of us were able to have that interaction and know that like yeah, we live in a place where if you’re a person of colour you stick out, but here we didn’t! and it was a relief! and one of my managers had such an immensely sweet conversation with me about being uncertain in your ethnicity and identity when you’re not really From a place and he knew i knew and i knew he knew and we could hold that, and it was really casual because we were at work, but the other manager was on the phone so it was just us talking and we got to have that moment and it was such a moment of understanding. and this girl in my film class and i had a 3-4 hour lunch together the other week and we were speaking about how it feels to grow up wanting to be white, about how we both feel so much more grounded in ourselves now even if it’s still contentious, we were able to sit and speak about the ways in which we move through the world and it was kind of sad, but it was also about that understanding that we could have. and i met this man at a gig the other week who was talking about how he was always looking for artists who “look like us” i.e. asian and it was just in that “us” that collective pronoun that was so incredibly moving because it was this immediate understanding. i could go on. i won’t but i could and there’s something very beautiful about the fact that i could

[bisluthq]

i’m sorry but i cannot take joe stans seriously atp. saying he’s a better songwriter than TAYLOR SWIFT (praised by actual songwriting legends, has won awards in every category for music, is considered one of the best by the vast majority of people, over 100 million records sold, multiple no1 hits, most streamed artist ever, highest grossing tour of all time etc) is just bonkers.

i’m supposed to believe that he’s some kind of musical genius because a khia teacher said he could write when he himself said that he has no musical bone in his body, cannot sing and can barely play instruments? ohm

i know they love mediocre white man but damn this is a new low…

I think again a lot of things are being conflated here tho? His teacher called him a poetic soul, which has fuck all to do with whether or not he can write music. It’s a description of a creative, artsy type. Also, in terms of what he himself said, some of that is self-deprecation. We know he CAN sing, because he had it listed as a CV skill - that doesn’t mean he’s the best singer of all time, but he CAN do it. He also can play piano (clearly) because Taylor had him play on evermore in studio and she wouldn’t have done that if he couldn’t do it? He went to a school that required music as a compulsory subject so like obviously he CAN do it. Doesn’t make him Elton John or anything but come on. The National also credited him for notes on the album and that’s not Taylor, like obviously he is at least somewhat helpful when giving feedback and such. Justin Vernon seems to dig him and they worked together on exile idk so 🤷🏻‍♀️ Alex (Jemima’s ex) credited him on his album and they jammed together. He’s genuinely not like completely useless.

There is a HUGE LEAP - like Pacific Ocean sized - between saying “Joe has good ideas and is a creative guy and can play piano and a bit of guitar and sings a bit and enjoys doing that stuff for fun because he likes music” and saying he’s better at songwriting than Taylor (or Matty fwiw). Like we don’t need to completely shit on him or take what WERE clearly self-deprecating comments at face value to acknowledge that he’s not as good at songwriting/from what we’ve seen writing in general as people who have chosen it as a profession and especially than Taylor Swift (who as you rightly point out is a legend).

[mintdecor]

The Role of Textiles in Bedroom Interior Design Kerala

Do you know that textiles can change the vibe of your bedroom? If not, this blog is exclusively for you! The interior textiles like curtains, cushion covers, bed covers, pillow covers and so forth can turn your Bedroom Interior Design Kerala from a normal one to an extraordinary sanctuary. In addition, you can bring Kerala’s cultural heritage and authenticity into your bedroom with these fabrics. In other words, this would help us create a unique and inviting bedroom design in Kerala by Mint Decor to secure ultimate relaxation in an elegant style. 

Add the Touch of Tradition with Textiles to Bedroom Interior Design Kerala

Earlier, we said,  we could bring culture and heritage as the bed room design Kerala style with textiles. When elaborating, we can use Kerala’s traditional handloom fabrics like Kasavu, which is popular for its elegant and rich golden borders on off-white cotton, for bedspreads, pillow covers, and curtains to evoke the richness of Kerala room design. This kind of fabric frees us down to the history and craftsmanship of Kerala by spicing up with a touch of elegance and heritage to the Bedroom Interior Design Kerala decor by Mint Decor. The intricate patterns and motifs in the textile narrate the artistic excellence and craftsmanship of Kerala. This makes each corner of the bedroom unique and a cultural artefact. 

Design of Comfort and Ambiance

Though the aesthetic beauty of the Bedroom Interior Design Kerala by Mint Decor provides richness to your bedroom, the textiles you choose for your bedroom must provide you with the comfort and ambience you always wish for. The tropical climate of Kerala always compels you to select fabrics like cotton and linen, to create a soothing effect inside the bedroom. The major reason why people in Kerala always prefer these fabrics for bedroom interior Kerala is because they provide comfort, especially during humid nights without losing the sense of coolness and relaxation. When pairing it with lightweight throws or blankers with adds vibrant hues of warmth and texture to the bedroom, making it a welcoming retreat. 

Give a Modern Twist to Your Bedroom with Mint Decor

Though there are immense options for Interior design bedroom Kerala, contemporary style might be the favourite choice for every person. To create an ambience that complements the style of Contemporary bedroom interior design Kerala designed by Mint Decor, there are vast choices in fabrics. Such textiles would not only add depth and texture to the bedroom but also inject modernity into the ordinary bedroom. 

Elegance with Functionality for Bedroom Interior Design Kerala

The people in Kerala give importance to functionality when they design the bedroom interior Kerala for their residences. In this sense, textiles serve multiple purposes beyond adornment. The curtains that fall under the category of light cotton or sheer cotton, not only frame the windows but also allow natural light and airflow into the bedroom. This practical approach to the Modern bedroom interior design Kerala by Mint Decor is not only for curtains but extends to rugs and carpets. They add warmth to underfoot by improving acoustics in spacious Kerala homes. In other words, these textiles provide a delicate balance between aesthetics and functionality, that ensures every element contributes to a harmonious living space. 

Textiles make the Interior design bedroom Kerala by Mint Decor intertwin with tradition, comfort and functionality seamlessly. From the timeless beauty of Kerala to the contemporary charm, the interior designers at Mint Decor, help you in choosing textiles that reflect Kerala’s cultural tapestry and the ever-changing taste of the residents. On the other hand, recently the residents in Kerala preferred the blending of the elements of modern and traditional in the Bedroom Interior Design Kerala of their home. In alternative words, textiles become the thread that binds past and present together in every corner of your bedroom. 

By including textiles tactically into your bed space, the interior designer at Mint Decor for the bedroom design in Kerala and homeowners can together create a space that not only showcases their personal style but also reflects the essence of Kerala’s vibrant aesthetic beauty and cultural legacy. 

[bedlessbug]

Steven Baris Diagrams and Art

an important (although not necessary) feature common to diagrammatic-based art practices that distinguishes them from more “self-referential” artworks in the contemporary world—namely, these artists are often motivated to create more than mere objects or beautiful optical displays that point to nothing outside of themselves. Artists working in a diagrammatic vein are less likely to subscribe to Frank Stella’s famous statement, “What you see is what you see.” Certainly such a view would have been incomprehensible to most artists and artisans working in pre-modern eras, as there was little to no daylight between what we would call “artworks” and the cultural and religious structures of meaning underwriting them.

The vast majority of frescos, sculptures, paintings, drawings, reliefs, stain glass windows, manuscripts, mosaics, tapestries, and so on were meant to reflect or illustrate “higher order” religious, mythological, philosophical, or royal ideals. Contemporary diagrammatic-based art practices may or may not seek to reflect these kinds of ideals, but their makers generally “intend” for their artworks to point to something extrinsic to the actual artwork even if that something is difficult to pin down precisely.

I will even go out on a limb and suggest that in many instances, this “something extrinsic,” this “more than what you see” is indeed meaning itself

But even though meaning in contemporary art is often highly personalized and idiosyncratic, more than a few artists are compelled to articulate the inarticulable in their work through abstract, non-pictorial means; and I am suggesting that diagrammatic-based practices offers an especially viable platform for this to happen.

______________________________________________________________

by lending more or less equal significance to all the parts of the image, the viewers’ attention would be distributed in such a way as to encourage more correlative interactions among the various parts.

Grid-like visual grammars are stridently spatial, and as such, they eschew sequential/narrative modes of representation in favor of a spatial, simultaneous reception of information. This features prominently in many diagrams; ironically, even those attempting to “map” temporal features onto graphic displays (e.g. graphs, charts, time tables).

Krauss also makes an interesting argument when she states: “In the increasingly de-sacralized space of the 19th century, art had become the refuge for religious emotion; it became, as it has remained, a secular form of belief.” In this context she says the grid allowed artists to “magically resolve the para-logical contradiction between a materialist secularism and a spiritualism [metaphysics] in a sustained suspension.”

Pablo Picasso: Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper

For example, a glancing analysis of Picasso’s Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper (see Figure 6), reveals the telltale presence of “white space” and how it functions to subvert traditional hierarchical composition and instead, prompts the viewer to “correlate diverse packets of information,” (e.g. text, hints of pictorial shading, geometric shapes, lines and notations).

Marcel Duchamp: Network of Stoppages

Francis Picabia

“in Dada, the diagrammatic served as one of three visual tactics—montage and the readymade being the other two—for embracing and representing this epistemological crisis.” Joselit traces several artists’ experiments with combining images and text where, among other aspects of their work, he hones in on their diagrammatic drawings, paintings and designs. Here he states that “such combinations of word and picture [“mimetic units”] are precisely what characterizes more ‘canonical’ Dada diagrams by artists like Picabia. In such works, image and text circulate within a single plane of signification.”

In full diagrammatic fashion, these works suppress mimetic picturing in favor of explaining, albeit in a highly idiosyncratic and enigmatic manner.

“The diagram reconnects the disconnected fragments of representation invented by cubism. This act of reconnection does not function as a return to coherence, but rather as a free play of polymorphous linkages, which, to this day, remain a central motif of modern (and postmodern) art.”

The viewer is enjoined to take an active role of cross-referencing and decoding.

As with so many conventional diagrams, what takes place in The Large Glass is a transfer of predominantly temporal relations (i.e. processes) into spatial/graphical relations—thus transforming a predominantly sequential order of “events” into a graphic display of simultaneous interrelationships.(3)

“…a relatively neutral blank ground in and around the images, words, symbols or notations. It is the strategic presence of the white space that prompts the viewer to focus less on the individual components, but instead to extract meaning by actively correlating one “packet of information” with another so as to conjure new and unexpected relationships.”

[shadowsandstarlight]

Gonna be honest at the risk of my own crucifixion, I cannot stand Taylor Swift. Initially it was just indifference like I feel towards a vast majority of pop musicians, but in the last… two-ish years? She’s become so fucking inescapable and her music has actively gotten worse and it annoys me so much. She’s held as some kind of unique, edgy queer icon when she’s none of those things. She’s the most generic, plain white bread possible. Literally the most mainstream artist imaginable. Her lyrics fucking suck lately, by the way. She can literally throw together any bullshit sequence of words together that she wants and y’all will act like it’s some kind of genius new masterpiece. Her songs are repetitive, unimaginative, half of them sound identical to me, she’s dull, she’s bland, I have no idea what the fuck makes her appeal to anyone other than her overall genericness and manufactured ‘relatability.’ Y’all are the type of people who think salt is too spicy and your fiery passion for plain unbuttered Wonder Bread is not a goddamn personality.

[marissapaul]

12/21 day 6: Orisha/Orixa

when doing today's readings i thought of far cry 6 which is a video game that came out last year. the game is set on an island that is called yara, but it is clearly meant to be an analogue for cuba. i thought of the game because as i was playing through there were a couple side quests and collectibles that i thought i remembered being spiritual and so i did a little internet digging and the spirituality displayed in the game is actually based on santeria, you can see that the link above is actually from r/santeria or the reddit forum about santeria. they changed the names of everything in the game but reding through this thread, written by practitioners of santeria, they seem happy with the representation though some mentioned wishing that they had kept the real names of the orishas. i think it would be cool to know who at ubisoft pushed that particular aspect of the game and what kind of research and development went into implementing it? was it created by emic or etic artists? i would love to see a report on this. the soundtrack of the game was also heavily influenced/created by cuban rappers so the two songs we got to hear today sounded familiar. in fact, major lazer is credited on the soundtrack of the game. we love to see representation that affirms those who are being represented.

i was also thinking about how candomble and santeria are here-and-now belief systems. when you look at what they stand for it is a lot of stuff like mutual aid, preventative medicine, and fostering community. this is is all super similar to current day leftist praxis and so it makes clear sense to me why colonizers would feel so threatened by these religions. their core tenets were incompatible with capitalism. i also think back to our earlier discussions about the shift from feudalism to capitalism and how that shift required turning the body into a machine i.e. the human body being the first technological development of capitalism. this is much the same. the enslaved persons that were being brought over were not blind to what was happening to them, they knew their situation intimately and for the ones that came from africa, they were able to pull from a vast number of belief systems that they then adapted to their current reality. and if we're getting super technical, these religions and their tenets of community and mutual aid were incongruent with the desired outcome of the middle passage: social death. so of course they were targeted by colonial authorities. for much in the same way that multi-racial coalitions terrify capitalists, the belief systems and strength of spiritual systems like candomble and santeria were similarly terrifying. my friend actually talked about this in her thesis which was about haiti and she talks about just how on edge white people were leading up to the haitian revolution. they knew their position was untenable because of the kinds of thoughts and practices coming from enslaved persons, maroon communities, and free Black people. those who have the ability to imagine the otherwise terrify those who wish to maintain the status quo.

it was also interesting to learn how practitioners appropriated the different catholic saints so that they might practice in safety. again, this is a tangible example of just how acutely aware the subaltern are of their realities. i love the recent shift in scholarship that writes about the subaltern and diaspora in the ways in which they created and loved in spite of their situation. and i don't mean this in the toxic way that puts the onus of earning freedom on the marginalized, i mean it in the way that freedom means different things for everyone. enslaved people in the atlantic might not have been thinking about john locke and white thinkers who justified the american revolution as a revolution for just white people, but they were certainly aware of their reality and they had their own thoughts, beliefs, and spiritual systems from which they drew strength. and so we have an outpouring of scholarship that examines resistance and freedom in a new light. historians have moved from looking at big moments like the haitian revolution, to looking at the very important and intimate histories that led to a world in which the haitian revolution could take place. and through this we are able to write people into a history of liberation that is less concerned with whether or not a movement was an explicit success or failure, for life is rarely - if ever - that black and white.

lastly i want to spend a little time with candomble medicine. for it too is a much better example of how to do medicine than our current system. the united states lauds itself as a leader in medicine yet for all of its medical advancements, those advancements remain inaccessible to large swaths of americans. not only that, but doctors are often treating symptoms rather than the root cause of things. shoutout to doctors of osteopathic medicine. regardless of whether or not you believe in a spirit world, the preventative practices of candomble just seem like a more authentic way to handle the body. listen to the body and react to what it is telling you. of course, part of the american healthcare system is taking away agency from people who are coming into doctors offices trying to explain the way they feel and they get brushed off because they're women or trans or Black or poor or disabled so not only are doctors not helping people towards holistic treatment that takes their spirit and mental health into account, but they often aren't even treating the symptoms. in much the same way that i can understand why white people were so afraid of those who imagine other ways of living and organizing society and community, indigenous medicine must be scary to big pharma and the medical industrial complex writ large. because if you look at the history of many popular medicines today, they are derived from plants that indigenous people have been using for centuries. white supremacy has optimized medicinal herbs and tinctures to the detriment of appreciating holistic treatment and the beauty of how life on this planet is able to nurture and take care of other life. how awesome is it that there are plants that can ease headaches and stop the spread of infection and numb physical pain. life takes care of life, but modern medicine neglects that aspect of healing. i greatly appreciate today's readings and the past readings that have showed us just how important healers (and curadoras as Dra. Sotomayor uses the term) are in the process of holistic healing of the mind, body, and soul. and not just how important they are, but we get a view of tangible ways that we might implement these systems in our own lives.

this post is a little shorter than usual. i honestly don't have much more that jumped out to me. this is a new topic to me so i don't have as many cultural touchstones so i am interested to see what my classmates have taken away from today's readings.