Poor Things (2023) dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

[Image ID: The poem “One Source of Bad Information”, by Robert Bly.  There’s a boy in you about three years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty Thousand Years. Sometime it’s a girl.  The child had to make up its mind How to save you from death. He said things like:  “Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”  You live with this child, but you don’t know it.  You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy  At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy  You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.  Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you. 

/end id]

girlhood never stops we just evolve…

it's funny how most men have associated rationality with being 'superior' because they believe that logic is incompatible with silly things like feelings and emotion. and then you have bella baxter in poor things who approaches the world, and discovers her own mind, with the same logical mindset she saw in godwin, but whose rational conclusions never lead astray from her core beliefs in empathy and compassion... you know.almost like they're trying to tell us something there

Mire Lee (b. 1988 in Seoul; lives and works between Amsterdam and Seoul)

Untitled (My Pittsburgh Sculpture), 2022

metal, silicone oil, resin, dosing pumps, steel wire ropes, barbed wire, and other mixed media

Commissioned by Carnegie Museum of Art for the 58th Carnegie International

Mire Lee employs more robust sculptural materials such as metal, plaster, and concrete alongside glycerin, silicone, and various types of resin, which are often animated by electric motors and pumps. The artist's works sometimes recall the internal systems of the human body — its organ functions, convulsions, failures, fluids, and excretions as a way of probing the depths and outer limits of human behavior and the psyche.

The centerpiece of Lee's new sculpture is a steel and glass decagonal form that contains flexible, kinetic components turning in a viscous fluid. Here, soft internal elements become entangled with each other and come into contact with hard, unforgiving materials. An extension of the artist's exploration of pain, this commission connects with the machinations set in motion in Lee's prior works that mine a vocabulary of the ugly, neglected, strained, vulnerable, and leaky. In this dark sublime, the artist seeks generative and redemptive lessons. She observes: "I've always seen heart-wrenching things as beautiful…. I do not believe we can eliminate violence or toxicity in its entirety from the world, but we can develop responses other than disgust or withdrawal." Taking one step further, Lee asks how we might come to understand and make something of pain, violence, or injustice that is compounded, knotted up, and which has no single source or cause.

"Cynicism is not a neutral position — and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.

I know this because much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. I lacked the knowledge, the foresight, the self-awareness. I just didn’t know. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, to understand that it was crying out for help. ...

Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so."

Nick Cave, from his "Red Hand Files" newsletter, which you should sign up for right away

Wild horses crossing a river in Iran Photo: Eydi Heydari

The Eternal City -- Peter Blume

The Eternal City, 1937 by Peter Blume (1906–1992)

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joanna valentines

“To The Night & The Cloud” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

1914

Artist : Jessie Bayes (1876-1970)

Source : pbagalleries.com

𝗠𝗼𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱

I decided to make a little collage of the paintings I've done so far. There being 12 moonscorched (excluding Pavel and August here), I've already made ⅓ of the complete cast of contestants. Looking foward to the other 8!!

Cathleen Clarke - End of Innocence, 2023

Artist I Like Series 

Andrey Remnev 1962 - ???? a Russian painter who’s work is heavily inspired by the Russian artistic movements of the 15th, 17th and 18th Centuries as well as Medieval icon painting.

I went to a bookshop and I got dizzy at the amount of books on stuff like “astrological feminism” “reclaiming womanhood through numerology” and all that shit…… One was called “cosmic fanny” or for my french speakers out there, “foufoune cosmique”. I think the fight against patriarchy is going really well

The meadowlark OR the chimchooree OR the sparrow, you gotta CHOOSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i got rickrolled today but it didn't work because i have adblocker installed, so youtube just told me i violated the terms of service. yesterday i was trying to edit a picture as a joke for my girlfriend, and google made me check a box to prove i'm human because i wasn't "searching normally".

it isn't just that capitalism is killing fun and whimsy, it is that any element of entertainment or joy is being fed upon by this mosquito body, one that will suck you dry at any vulnerability.

do you want to meet new friends in your city? download this app, visit our website, sign up for our email list. pay for this class on making a terrarium, on candlemaking, on cooking. it will be 90 dollars a session. you can go to group fitness, but only under our specific gym membership. solve the puzzle, sign up for our puzzle-of-the-month-club. what is a club if not just a paid opportunity - you are all paying for the same thing, which makes you a community.

but you're like me, i know it - you're careful, you try the library meetings and the stuff at the local school and all of that. the problem is that you kind of want really specific opportunities that used to exist. you are so grateful for libraries and the publicly-funded things: they are, however, an exception - and everything they have, they've fought tooth-and-nail to protect. you read a headline about how in many other states, libraries have virtually nothing left.

do you want to meet up with your friends afterwards? gift your friends the discord app. you can choose to go to a cafe (buy a coffee, at least), a bar (money, alcohol) or you can all stay in and catch a movie (streaming) or you can all stay in bed (rent. don't get me started) and scream (noise complaint. ticket at least).

you want to read a new book, but the book has to have 124 buzzwords from tiktok readers that are, like, weirdly horny. you can purchase this audiobook on audible! your podcast isn't on spotify, it's on its own server, pay for a different site. fuck, at least you're supporting artists you like. the art museum just raised their ticket price. once, they had a temporary exhibit that acknowledged that ~85% of their permanent art galleries were from cis white men, and that they had thousands of works by women (even famous women, like frida! georgia o'keefe!) just rotting in their basement. that exhibit lasted for 3 months and then they put everything away again.

walmart proudly supports this strip of land by the street! here are some flowers with wilting leaves. its employees have to pay out-of-pocket for their uniforms. my friend once got fined by the city because she organized a community pick-up of the riverfront, which was technically private property.

no, you cannot afford to take that dance class, neither can i. by the way - i'm a teacher. i'm absolutely not saying "educators shouldn't be paid fairly." i'm saying that when i taught classes, renting a studio went from 20 bucks an hour to 180 in the span of 6 months. no significant changes to the studio were made, except they now list the place as updated and friendly. the heat still doesn't work in the building. i have literally never seen the landlord who ignores my emails. recently they've been renting it out at night as an "unusual nightclub; a once-in-a-lifetime close-knit party." they spent some of those 180 dollars on LEDs and called it renovating. the high heels they invite in have been ruining the marley.

do you want to experience the old internet? do you want to play flash games or get back the temporary joy of club penguin? you can, you just need to pay for it. i have a weird, neurodivergent obsession with occasionally checking in to watch the downfall and NFT-ification of neopets. if i'm honest with you all - i never got into webkins, my family didn't have the money to buy me a pointless elephant. people forget that "being poor" can mean literally "if i buy you that toy, i can't afford rent."

you and i don't have time to make good food, and we don't have the budget for it. we are not gonna be able to host dinner parties, we're not made of money, kid. do you want some kind of 3rd space? a space that isn't home or work or school? you could try being online, but - what places actually exist for you? tiktok counts as social media because you see other people on it, not because they actually talk to you.

there was a local winter tradition of sledding down the hill at my school. kids would use pizza boxes and jackets and whatever worked, howling and laughing. back in september, they made a big announcement that this time, rules were changing, and everyone must pay 10 dollars to participate. when im not scared shitless, i kind of appreciate the environmental irony - it hasn't gone below 40. so much for snow & joyriding.

i saw a bulletin for a local dogwalking group and, nervous about making a good first impression, showed up early. the first guy there grimaced at me. "sorry," he said. "there's a 30-dollar buy-in fee." i thought he was joking. wait. for what? the group doesn't offer anything except friendship and people with whom to walk around the city.

he didn't know the answer. just shrugged at me. "you know," he said. "these days, everything costs money."

“The life in front of you is far more important than the life behind you.”

— Joel Osteen