There’s a lot to unpack here.
+the flexibility to get in that pose
+the balance to stay on the skateboard
+the strength to pull back a bowstring with your toes
+the dexterity to hit a target while moving
+the coordination… not hand-eye, but foot-eye
…I don’t know what to do with these things now that I’ve unpacked them…
I work with a lot of Brazilians since I handle international corporate insurance. I’ve had two of them break down in tears on me, and the third requested a job transfer to a different country because she’s black and terrified for her kids. She doesn’t even care about a potential pay cut–she just wants out.
I have a co-worker in my office who is a Brazilian immigrant who is in a perpetual state of terror because her brother and his partner of 20+ years can’t get out.
I have had two requests from businesses I insure to write trip travel policies that arrange ‘business trips’ to other countries for extensive amounts of time for their Brazilian employees. Like, year-long trips. One of my clients literally said, “It worked for us in the 40s.”
Do you understand how fucked up this is?
This is a WW2 tactic used to save the lives of Nazi targets.
History is literally repeating itself, and no one cares yet because the targets are minorities.
It’s time to start paying close attention to what’s going on, because once shit like this gets established, it only ramps up into a full-blown horrorshow.
Get your asses out and vote, because the people who support this for damn sure are, and the system is rigged in their favor. We’re primed to fall headfirst into this territory ourselves.
Not only do you vote, keep attentive, keep your heart open, and be ready to help however you can, not just here in America, but abroad. The world is not so large that you can ignore a crisis like this wherever it occurs, and one day it could very well be us in this position.
We’re halfway there; what did you think the synagogue attack and grocery store shooting were about? Complacency will undo us all in the rise of facism and racism and hatred. There is already a will, and our guns are legal and easily obtained.
Complacency kills. Apathy lets it occur again, and with impunity.
I hate when men smirk and gloat and say shit like “Women are attracted to powerful men,” like that negates any feminist impulse, like they think that at the heart of all women is this little, mincing girl that wants to be dominated.
I just roll my eyes because, dude. If you ever read the second half of any fucking harlequin novel ever, and saw how the hero always ends up blubbering on his knees and saying shit like “I can’t live without you! You unman me!” you’d realize that being attracted to powerful men is just the first part of a two-step plan.
The second step is to completely fucking annihilate him.
Apparently this is the most important thing I’ll ever say.
*clears throat* Allow me to quote Jayne Ann Krentz:
“In the romance novels … the woman always wins. With courage, intelligence, and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on earth, the human male, to his knees. More than that, she forces him to acknowledge her power as a woman.” (“Introduction” from Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of Romance.)
The romance hero may start as a total alphahole, but by the end of the novel, as stated above, HE HAS TO CHANGE. He needs to become respectful and treat the heroine as an equal partner, otherwise it won’t work. This is why Elizabeth Bennet refuses Mr Darcy the first time but accepts him later. This is what so many people miss. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for this post.
So somebody on my Facebook posted this. And I’ve seen sooooo many memes like it. Images of a canvas with nothing but a slash cut into it, or a giant blurry square of color, or a black circle on a white canvas. There are always hundreds of comments about how anyone could do that and it isn’t really art, or stories of the time someone dropped a glove on the floor of a museum and people started discussing the meaning of the piece, assuming it was an abstract found-objects type of sculpture.
The painting on the left is a bay or lake or harbor with mountains in the background and some people going about their day in the foreground. It’s very pretty and it is skillfully painted. It’s a nice piece of art. It’s also just a landscape. I don’t recognize a signature style, the subject matter is far too common to narrow it down. I have no idea who painted that image.
The painting on the right I recognized immediately. When I was studying abstraction and non-representational art, I didn’t study this painter in depth, but I remember the day we learned about him and specifically about this series of paintings. His name was Ad Reinhart, and this is one painting from a series he called the ultimate paintings. (Not ultimate as in the best, but ultimate as in last.)
The day that my art history teacher showed us Ad Reinhart’s paintings, one guy in the class scoffed and made a comment that it was a scam, that Reinhart had slapped some black paint on the canvas and pretentious people who wanted to look smart gave him money for it. My teacher shut him down immediately. She told him that this is not a canvas that someone just painted black. It isn’t easy to tell from this photo, but there are groups of color, usually squares of very very very dark blue or red or green or brown. They are so dark that, if you saw them on their own, you would call each of them black. But when they are side by side their differences are apparent. Initially you stare at the piece thinking that THAT corner of the canvas is TRUE black. Then you begin to wonder if it is a deep green that only appears black because the area next to it is a deep, deep red. Or perhaps the “blue” is the true black and that red is actually brown. Or perhaps the blue is violet and the color next to it is the true black. The piece challenges the viewer’s perception. By the time you move on to the next painting, you’re left to wonder if maybe there have been other instances in which you believe something to be true but your perception is warped by some outside factor. And then you wonder if ANY of the colors were truly black. How can anything be cut and dry, black and white, when even black itself isn’t as absolute as you thought it was?
People need to understand that not all art is about portraying a realistic image, and that technical skills (like the ability to paint a scene that looks as though it may have been photographed) are not the only kind of artistic skills. Some art is meant to be pretty or look like something. Other art is meant to carry a message or an idea, to provoke thought.
Reinhart’s art is utterly genius.
“But anyone could have done that! It doesn’t take any special skill! I could have done that!”
Ok. Maybe you could have. But you didn’t.
Give abstract art some respect. It’s more important than you realize.
DustAndFundamentalists 