by: dunduke

Marissa Textor, graphite on paper

A statue consisting of 50 steel columns, commemorates 50 years since Mandela was arrested and charged for treason was unveiled on 4 August 2012 by President Jacob Zuma.

Mandela was arrested a few kilometres outside Howick on the R103, the old main road to Johannesburg, on 5 August 1962.

Mandela had been on a clandestine visit to African National Congress (ANC) President Chief Albert Luthuli’s in Groutville to report back to him on his African odyssey and ask for support for the armed struggle against apartheid. At the time of his arrest, Mandela was driving an Austin Westminster from Groutville with his friend and comrade, Cecil Williams. They were stopped by police and Mandela insisted he was David Motsamayi but a policeman recognised and arrested him after he had been living on the run for seventeen months. He was only released 27 years later.

photo by Lukas Koscelniak

Italy 

i lowe it

Leonor Fini, Untitled Visage, c. 1949

Leonor Fini, Mineral Symposium, 1960

I want to cry because i want to be her so much.

What is it with me and ladies and horses these days! I need some lady and/or horse riding action.

-Bob Carlos Clarke

Dude.

I would love to be her right now

Suicide is just a moment. This is how she described it to me. For just a moment, it doesn’t matter that you’ve got people who love you and the sun is shining and there’s a movie coming out this weekend that you’ve been dying to see. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself. You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it. I could just do it. And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below - what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you’re going to make them see? And the moment’s over. You think about how sad it would’ve been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would’ve taken care of her if you had gone. And you go back to normal. But you keep it there in your mind. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same. The day was hers to choose, and perhaps in that treetop moment when she looked down and saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong. Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air.

Carolyn Parkhurst, The Dogs of Babel. (via hcdragon)

“It was not that big of a deal. But it was as parents say to their children: “It’s the fact you lied.” So, Hugh was furious. But it had an upside because, it was a letter when I got back saying, and it said because, ”It’s as if you don’t realize how much I love you,’”

I had to have this on my blog