Michael forever.

"Divinity in motion."

I've been watching this video since I was a little girl and I still get goosebumps and butterflies.

Florence Welch is unearthly

Man Ray

And nothing is but what is not. - Macbeth

Newest obsession

http://whatshouldwecallme.tumblr.com/post/20466461852/entertaining-the-kids-youre-babysitting

http://whatshouldwecallme.tumblr.com/post/20828691695/when-someone-asks-if-im-hungry

http://whatshouldwecallme.tumblr.com/post/21304315805/when-my-boyfriend-gets-mad-at-another-guy-for-flirting

― Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse

“It was like discovering that your innermost fires and terrors, the things you believed no one else could fathom, were in fact the basis of a recognized philosophy. Some part of you felt intimately invaded, threatened; some other part fell to its knees and sobbed in gratitude that it was no longer alone.” 

Pan

Bon Iver

WIld Horses

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsHkuxIBY_Uhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsHkuxIBY_U

Henry M.

“All the men she's been with and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you.”

Springtime

"...God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humbles mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise....it [is] the the intimacy with which his eye rests upon the scene. It [is] his Paris. A man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen, to feel this way about Paris. Paris is filled with poor people - the proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth... And yet they give the illusion of being at home. It is that which distinguishes the Parisian from all other metropolitan souls."

-Miller

Shame

I can't say enough about this powerhouse of a film. Director Steve McQueen's directing, of course, is brilliant-- but it is Fassbender's harrowing eyes, pallor and excruciating sexual obsession that constitutes the genius of the movie. Fassbender's intensity and desperation is so palpable I forgot to breathe more than once. Examining the underbelly of sexual compulsion so often masked by glamour, "Shame" is a visceral journey into the heart (an libido) of a truly tragic man.

 

 

http://www.hulu.com/watch/298968/shame---clip---sidewalk-conversation

“The cancer of time is eating us away” ― Henry Miller

“I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If a am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.”

I've got really into Henry Miller lately.  He is vile and I hate him-- yet I see through his machismo, as so many readers have, and have glimpsed his breaking, excruciatingly beautiful heart.  And it is one of a kind.

There are gems among the coal.

Shakespeare's Sister

To ignore the difficulty in the arts inherent to women of all but a very recent age is silly. But other than that general oversight regarding the female condition, this article is great:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/arts/design/shakespeares-sisters-at-the-folger-shakespeare-library.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&hpw

Portraits in suffrage

Self portrait at The Met

New Wuthering Heights

Not for those unfamiliar with the story of Heathcliff and Cathy, this thoroughly modern and abstract take on my beloved Emily's classic story of love and despair removes the dialogue and replaces it with arresting visuals and melancholic atmosphere. I would frame any given moment of this film and hang it on my wall. It is beautiful, strange, violent and disturbing -- everything Bronte's novel was intended to be.

Florence and the Machine

"And I did cartwheels in your honor, dancing on tiptoes--
My own secret ceremonials, before the service began,
In the graveyard, doing handstands."

"They kill me with a living death."

Jezebel.com Avowed homosexual boy scout den mother kicked out for gaying all over impressionable children

http://jezebel.com/5903112/avowed-homosexual-boy-scout-den-mother-kicked-out-for-gaying-all-over-impressionable-children

My mom is a fox

(on the left)

Florence

And I had a dream
About my old school
And she was there all pink and gold and glittering
I threw my arms around her legs
Came to weeping, Came to weeping

Then I heard your voice as clear as day,
And you told me I should concentrate,
It was all so strange,
And so surreal,
That a ghost should be so practical.

Only if for a night
And the only solution was to stand and fight,
And my body was bruised and
I was set alight,
But you came over me like some holy rite,
And although I was burning,
You're the only light
Only if for a night

The grass was so green against my new clothes,
And I did cartwheels in your honor, dancing on tiptoes
My own secret ceremonials before the service began,
In the graveyard, doing handstands.

And I heard your voice as clear as day,
And you told me I should concentrate,
It was all so strange,
And so surreal,
That a ghost should be so practical.
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/f/florence_and_the_machine/only_if_for_the_night.html ]
Only if for a night.
And the only solution was to stand and fight,
And my body was bruised and
I was set alight,
But you came over me like some holy rite,

And although I was burning,
You're the only light.
Only if for a night.


My doe, my dear, my darling,
Tell me what all this sighing's about,
Tell me what all this sighing's about.

And I heard your voice as clear as day,
And you told me I should concentrate,
It was all so strange,
And so surreal,
That a ghost should be so practical.

Only if for a night.

"Pan, who and what art thou?" [Hook] cried huskily. "I’m youth, I’m joy," Peter answered, "I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg."

I cannot fathom that it has been 6 years. Happy birthday, Shai Emerson. You are the most beautiful bird in my sky.

S.M.

“Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.”

Macbeth and his Lady. Sir McKellan and Dame Dench.

Somerset

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.” -Maugham

Garber

“We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature's most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation--the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered--is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.”

Prospero

“There is some soul of goodness in things evil, Would men observingly distill it out.”

“How yet resolves the governor of the town?
This is the latest parle we will admit;
Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves;
Or like to men proud of destruction
Defy us to our worst: for, as I am a soldier,
A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,
If I begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.
What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
Enlink'd to waste and desolation?
What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd? ”
-Henry V

Second star to the right

Please, can we be friends?

Babylove

Palace of Ice

"I wanted so badly to study ballet, but it was really all about wearing the tutu."

Chanel

Tolkien

"I have looked last upon that which was fairest. But I would not have come, had I known the danger of light and joy. Now I have taken my worst wound in this parting, even if I were to go this night straight to the Dark Lord." Gimli, LOTR

Barbette

Preforming under the pseudonym Barbette, his act was sexual and female-- until the final act, when he revealed himself a man. Performing everywhere at the Harlem Opera House to the Moulin Rouge, critics "[Had] seen no comparable display of artistry on the stage since Nijinsky."

Myopic

Never Let Me Go

Because it never, ever, gets old.

It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of ANNABEL LEE; And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me. I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea; But we loved with a love that was more than love- I and my Annabel Lee; With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven Coveted her and me. And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee; So that her highborn kinsman came And bore her away from me, To shut her up in a sepulchre In this kingdom by the sea. The angels, not half so happy in heaven, Went envying her and me- Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee. But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we- Of many far wiser than we- And neither the angels in heaven above, Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee. For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride, In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea. -Edgar Allan Poe

Old Hollywood Tumblr

Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir gather to distribute copies of the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple on the street after it is banned by the government (Paris, 1970).