Ground-Pound Out Of Existence

*cools ur dashboard down*

Ask yourself, how does this piece make you feel? (No wrong answers)

Look for an artist statement nearby. What does it say about the artist and their relationship to their work? What does the artist say that they are trying to convey with their art? What contextual clues can you pick up from what they say about their background, or what they omit?

Look at the title of the piece. What is the artist saying about their work by naming it that, either explicitly or implicitly?

Look at the medium. Is there anything about the piece that stands out to you, knowing what it's made of?

Look at the year it was made. What cultural events might have been happening around this time? Was this piece part of a particular art movement? What was the purpose of that art movement, and what was it trying to say?

"Horse but make it a lizard and give it bat wings and horns"

didnt know how to interpret "make it a lizard" so i wrote lizard and drew an arrow pointing to the horse so people know its a lizard. Also didn't know what bat horns were so I gave it a horned bat nose

"A body like a big cat but completely covered in scales, the head of a crocodile with the horns of an ibex, and the wings of a bat on its back"

On it boss o7, ive mashed all these animals together and threw scales all over it. This the dragon you saw?

"Take a lizard, extend the neck. Add a pair of bat wings to the back. Add horns and sharp teeth."

Seems like we're onto somethin' boss! Though idk how it'd be so fearsome bein such a small thing.

"Big-ass lizard with wings" "big lizard" "Giant lizard" "Big fucking lizard"

don't seem too special?

"Imagine a winged alligator that was 70 feet tall and aware of its existence"

i dont know if this is a dragon but it could definitely be some kind of god

"Dinosaur with wings and horns?"

Dunno which dino you were talkin about so i just picked a random one. Stegosauus :}

"Big snake with legs and horns that can breathe fire"

Ah. Hm.

Miwackulous Tye Monday

It was 2012 and I was a "white washed" (not real but you know what that means) junior in undergrad and an entire chapter included in this textbook was dedicated to our pidgin/dialect whichever your argument. 14 years later and the amount of borrowing with and without permission of rest of English is truly a marvel to the point where things I know damn well are just AAVE are attributed to wide ranging sources such as "Gen Z/Alpha slang" and "gay lingo" and "internet speak" in general. Our range

These are just a few of our many common grammatical rules:

Habitual "Be": In Standard English "He is working" means right now or generally. In AAVE "He be working" specifically means he works regularly or habitually, a distinction that Standard English can't make without adding extra words.

Copula Deletion: Dropping forms of the verb "to be" in places where Standard English requires them ("She tired" instead of "She is tired" or "They going" instead of "They are going")

Double Negatives: In Standard English, two negatives make a positive. In AAVE, using multiple negatives ("She ain't never going") simply adds emphasis to the negation, a common feature in many of the world's languages.

Metathesis: switching sounds within a word, the most famous example being "ask" as "aks," a pronunciation that has roots in Old English.

Remote "Been": When you say "I been knew that" the stressed "been" means you've known it for a long time, remotely in the past, which doesn't exist in Standard English without adding extra words.

Completive "Done": "I done told you already" is a way of saying the action is finished and the matter is settled with an emphasis on finality or frustration.

Subject-Verb Disagreement: In AAVE verbs are often uninflected for the third person ("She walk" instead of "She walks") to simplify conjugation.

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

remember everyone...

thursday watch: the conditions for thursday are here, but a thursday incident has not yet been confirmed

Telling the kid that it is very brave of them to come forward and admit that they did something wrong.

Having a conversation to find out why they did the bad thing. Sometimes there’s an underlying reason that needs to be addressed like ‘I’m worried the other kids think I’m not cool enough so I broke a rule’ or ‘I was mad at my sister because she called me fat so I broke her toy’, etc. These conversations might be more important than the bad thing.

Telling the kid that we all make bad decisions sometimes and while we should try not to do that again, making a bad decision doesn’t mean we’re bad forever.

Telling the kid that the best way to feel less bad about it is to try to make things right. Did they secretly take mom’s piece of cake? Maybe we can go bake a new piece of cake together and give it to mom. (The point here is not to make the kid really produce something of equal value to what they stole/broke/etc. A child often can not do that. The point is to practice what fixing the damage you have done looks like).

A lot of people know about the very first piece he did when he left the post which was the The Problem We All Live With which depicts Ruby Bridges walking to school under federal protection.

But I don’t think enough people know about Murder in Mississippi which depicts three real civil rights activists who were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and sherriffs. The magazine ran the sketch instead of the finished piece because they felt it had a more striking statement to accompany the article. Norman Rockwell would finish that version after publication which is here

Rockwell’s legacy is sanitized because he decided to maintain his job at the Post for so long despite his frustrations with not being able to express himself. The civil rights movement was just his final straw to change what he could with the little time he had left. Look magazine received a lot of hate for Rockwell painting these as well.

Another favorite piece of mine is The Right to Know which depicts an integrated populace questioning their government. In 1968, the year of Vietnam and the year the Fair Housing Act only just got signed in months prior:

But I think it’s important to include the caption Rockwell originally wrote for the piece as well. I think it represents how a 74 year old Rockwell felt about the America he believed in and the people in it:

likely the most famous picture of a Thanksgiving dinner ever painted and you see it all the time.

What you may not know is its actual title

“Freedom From Want” it’s a part of a series of 4, including this now famous meme

“Freedom of Speech” These paintings were illustrations of FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech where The President laid out a vision that would become what the Allies were fighting for in WWII universal human rights that became a part of the UN charter.

So this homey American Thanksgiving scene was also a bold statement that no one in the world should go hungry

A well known piece but one that resonated with me as a kid for showing that girls can fight (or fight back) and find joy in aggression, while also hinting that consequence exists for those who do so.

A girl unhappy with her role as babysitter, who isn’t naturally nurturing or well suited to taking care of children. This one resonated with me as a girl, and resonates with me as a woman who feels no natural inclination toward babies or mothering. I feel honored to have seen the original in person.

On a similar note to the previous one, a toy saleswoman who is obviously fed up dealing with children, rejecting the concept of an inborn affinity for caretaking.

This one from the 1960s exploring women’s changing role in society, quite literally contrasting one woman (and her daughter) looking back on a traditional model of femininity vs. a woman looking toward modernity. (As an aside, I personally love the fan interpretation that the two women are the same person, and the painting represents the choice between the traditional and expected life path, and something new and uncharted.)