quiet life

rewatching Mamma Mia! and just. it’s so perfect in it’s imperfection. people are sweating and their hair is messy and the makeup is minimal and the older people have wrinkles and also look hot and the costuming is chaotic and perfect and the actors were a little tipsy and they mess up lines and aren’t always perfectly on pitch and some of them are clearly not singers or dancers but they look like they’re having so much fun and I really believe that they’re on a greek island that’s the site of Aphrodite’s fountain and god it’s just a perfect movie.

Just reread the song of achilles, haven’t stopped thinking about Patroclus committing Achilles to memory in the crystal cave with “Achilles' eyes were bright in the firelight, his face drawn sharply by the flickering shadows. I would know it in dark or disguise, I told myself. I would know it even in madness,” and later when Achilles is whisked to Scyros and Patroclus crosses the sea to find him and recognizes Achilles among the dancers and thinks to himself “Had she really thought I would not know him? I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world,” and when the Greek army finally arrives in Troy, Patroclus admires the walled city from a distance and “Later, I would see those walls up close, their sharp squared stones perfectly cut and fitted against each other, the work of the god Apollo, it was said. And I would wonder at them at how, ever, the city could be taken. For they were too high for siege towers, and too strong for catapults, and no sane person would ever try to climb their sheer, divinely smoothed face,” and a decade later he’s driven to that very act of madness by grief and violent desperation “I leap from the chariot and run to the walls. My fingers find slight hollows in the stone, like blind eye-sockets. Climb. My feet seek infinitesimal chips in the god-cut rocks. I am not graceful, but scrabbling, my hands clawing against the stone before they cling. Yet I am climbing,” and when Patroclus proves so fearsome that Apollo is forced to intervene and send Patroclus to his death, “The last thing I think is: Achilles,” and after the war when he finally joins Achilles in the underworld, “In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun,” and how Patroclus kept his promise to recognize Achilles in death, in madness, in darkness, at the end of the world.

Psst, hey, Marilyn Monroe’s image as a freewheeling sexpot was a carefully constructed lie. The real Marilyn Monroe was a roiling tragedy and her life was an indictment of our society as a whole. She was orphaned after her mother had a schizophrenic breakdown, bounced around between foster homes where she was sexually abused, and married a 21-year-old at 16 to get out of being sent to an orphanage. Hugh Hefner published nude photos of her without her consent that were taken when she was 23 and desperate. She suffered severe anxiety and depression, which she coped with by drinking and using barbiturates, and was already a full-blown addict when she became famous in the mid-50s. Her career was one of exploitation, condescension and alienation, and she killed herself at 36. That Hugh Hefner, a man who was at best an unpleasant footnote in her life, felt entitled to be buried next to her is one more humiliation in a pop cultural landscape we should all be ashamed of.

She deserves better

Marilyn was a founding member of the Hollywood branch of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and had lifelong left-wing political views with a particular emphasis on racial equality. She formed her own independent production company that survived for several years and earned a credit as an executive producer on several films. Additionally, she was not only concerned for workers rights, she acted for them, using her own fame to stop staff being unfairly sacked from several of her films. She was a loyal, kind woman and her early death remains a great tragedy. Worse still, as OP notes, is the co-opting of her image by exactly the sort of people she would have loathed in life.

Harry's house feels like it's summer break but you are an adult but you got nothing exciting to do and days are just the same so you find escape in your past and then one day you go for a walk while the sun sets and it starts raining all of a sudden and you just stand there doing nothing and taking it all in. While memories play like a film reel in your brain and you are just about to give up.

actually i love growing older and learning how i work as a person like realizing what kinds of fabrics feel best on my skin or what brand of yogurt i like best or how I want to be touched. watching myself change, enjoying brussel sprouts when I used to hate them as a child, understanding why I got angry in that one conversation 10 years ago… there are so many mysteries inside me that i have yet to unravel and there will always be more and sometimes i think maybe its all worth it

This is my reminder to make a photoshoot of this kind. God, I need my tripod. 🙏🙏

✨women✨❤️

there is no audience to perform for, there is no approval, no admiration to attain. there is no role worth playing, there is no one to convince. let it go

Oh wow.