Powdered Wigs and Screaming

Some student work that really excites me :) earthenware basket sculpture made to look like welded rebar… The artist said she chose to painstakingly recreate rebar out of clay (using moldmaking) because she is an inexperienced metal worker but still wanted the look. She even developed a special glaze to perfectly mimic rust! Even if you inspect the piece extremely close you cannot tell that it isn’t actually just rusted steel!! When people asked her why she chose to make this she said she’s just inspired by things on the street and still doesn’t understand her subconscious, but really wanted to make it. Incredible and so genius!! Love love love this work with all my heart

Conceptually interesting, technically astounding.

that’s a fucking GLAZE? and the student made it? WTF.

monica......

One thing that helps me calm down about intra-left-wing sniping and the reality that the big center-left coalition inevitably includes a lot of ridiculous nonsense, is to remember how ubiquitous seances were to progressive politics in the 19th century.  Like, e.g., Frederick Douglas had to go to so many seances. Many, many political strategy sessions around the country had to include feedback from the ghost of Moses who spoke to us via morse code.  

Was thinking again today about Frederick Douglas, intellectual giant, having to sit through so many seances without complaint because he believed in coalition building.

#this seance could have been an email (@marnz)

#ah spiritualism #the crypto of the victorian age (@areyougonnabe)

In all seriousness, a lot of people on the left need to cultivate the patience to sit through bullshit and work with people who have different priorities.

Because, yes, environmentalism/reproductive rights/labor rights/disability access are all THE MOST IMPORTANT THING… to you. But there aren’t enough people who hold that one thing as top priority to get it done. And insisting everyone else prioritize your one thing before you’ll engage (and then buggering off if you get your win) means nothing gets done.

We also honestly need to be able to distinguish between harmless and harmful bullshit. Because sitting in a dimly-lit room with a few dozen people staring at a copper cone is definitely bullshit, but it’s not hurting anyone. Whereas “I want to preserve the environment and also there are only men and women and we all need to have traditional gender roles to be true to ourselves” is hurting people. So one can be tolerated, and the other… not so much.

We need bullshit. We need room for bullshit. We need to understand what bullshit we can and cannot handle.

Unfortunately, a lot of people on the left have no problem saying “Because my thing isn’t the most important thing to you, fuck you.” And then they refuse to work with anyone else (and sometimes just quit).

It seems to me the narrative that “nothing can be done” often plays into that. The majority of activists are, well, extremists. We don’t have enough people who can be normal and chill about their cause, who can and will show up for someone else even if it’s not their One Cause. But then, they don’t want to because they can’t reasonably expect reciprocation. So you just get extremists sitting alone seething that no one else wants to work with them while they are unable to work with anyone else.

And that all ties into Frederick Douglas sitting and staring at a copper cone. Because he knew that by showing up, he could get other people to show up for the things he cared about. And an hour sitting with people staring at a copper cone is a small price to pay to get a few dozen people to actually come to a protest.

Miss Congeniality (2000) dir. Donald Petrie

They'd really find each other in every lifetime

Mike Farrell cap stolen from @captainhunnicutt

#80s alan alda amrev movie real???????

It's called Sweet Liberty! The best way to describe it is a fake documentary about the making of The Patriot...a decade before The Patriot was even conceived

Museum pet peeve of the day: asking random trivia questions. Either on a tour on on social media. "Who knows what year was X built?" "What does this contraption do?"

It's fine if you're framing it as a "are you a fan of this thing, test your knowledge with a quiz" (one of my favorites did this today) but so often it's just following the letter of the "be interactive" law without following the spirit.

Either you know the answer, and feel superior, or you don't, and feel like an idiot because you think you should have known.

If you're going to actually engage with your audience, you need to give them the opportunity for actual feedback and discussion, dangit. Ask them their opinion about something. Ask them how they feel about a scenario. Ask them if they have any experiences that mirror what you're talking about. Ask them something that will encourage them to do something besides reciting some factoid they remember from elementary school.

Oh, sweet christ, yes. I have gone through A Lot of training in Audience-Centered Experiences, and the main thing that got drilled into my head was ORACLE—to ask questions where the Only Right Answers Comes from Lived Experience. So not yes/no questions, no trivia questions, just open-ended questions that can be answered by anyone from Granny down to the kindergartener.

Ooh I've never heard that acronym but I love it, thanks!

Spencer, early 19th century | IMATEX

my favorite scene in LotR as a kid was when Sam started miserably freestyling in the tower of Cirith Ungol and the only reason he ever found Frodo was because he deliriously tried to join in

…i did read some of the novels, but i couldn’t get through them entirely…

…and so i genuinely have no idea whether or not this is serious. coz i mean, obviously, it could be a joke. but it could also have legitimately happened. people who have only seen the films underestimate the amount of random things that happen in the books that could come off as utterly silly and ridiculous if removed from their context.

Haha, well, it is pretty much what happens. Sam is looking for Frodo in the tower of Cirith Ungol and is despairing that he will ever find him. He sits down and does what any self-respecting Tolkien character does during their moments of hopelessness and bursts into song.

It’s a really good song (ten year old Ship had it memorized) and as he begins the refrain a second time, he hears Frodo’s voice answering weakly from above. Frodo is poisoned and despairing and beaten but he is still a Hobbit and cannot resist a singalong even while on the brink of death.

I just have to reblog because it makes me laugh EVERY TIME