Stargirl

Phil reposted this tweet!

You see this?

That's not a river. That's the South Canal in Mesa, Arizona (Phoenix metro area).

This is a view of the East and South canals. At least half of all the Phoenix metro canals were originally built by the Hohokam (from roughly 200-1400 CE), and are still in use (restored) today.

Phoenix, Arizona actually has more miles (kilometers) of Canals total than both Venice and Amsterdam. No, really. Phoenix has about 180 miles of canals, many of which are built on ancient canal foundations.

below is an aerial view photo taken in the late 1930's of one branch of Phoenix's canal systems:

Also have the "Montezuma Castle," if you need a castle:

That is to say, there is a certain subset of gamerbro who interacts so rarely with real women, that his primary touchstone for how women look is fiction: often video games and anime. So when a video game woman looks too realistic--too close to having traits that one might find in real flesh and blood women--this is foreign to them. This is unattractive. They have been jacking it to hentai and blender animation porn for too many years, and have inadvertently conditioned themselves to only be sexually aroused by the exaggerated cartoonish traits of animated women.

Two years ago, we got this update on the life of this roachfucker:

This quote was taken from a podcast interview which Menakem participated in, which you can find here.

except that in the version i read, it was a guy asking the generations of women in a family why they cut off the ends, and the great grandma answered that it was because when she was young her family was so poor and didn't have a big enough oven to fit the entire ham in

the point was that often if you go back far enough, the origin of bizarre, backwards and even harmful traditions/rules of society were often the result of people in that time period making the best of what they had, not because they thought it was the "right" way

the family in this story now has a big enough oven to fit the whole ass ham but its tradition to cut off the ends, its just how its done and the crazy part is that two fucking generations removed don't even know why but they do it without questioning it because thats. how. we've. always. done. it.

Aside from Duchamp’s readymades, I love “Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even”. Pictured below, the work invokes a complex machine, one my professor spent a great deal of time studying. Eventually, he reached his conclusion. My professor had been pranked. He believes “Bride Stripped Bare” is a joke about masturbation, hidden to all except those study it excessively.

As a lover of art, there are many complex and technically impressive works being created today, which both embrace different artistic traditions and break from them. To ignore those is to ignore contemporary art.

Here, OP is raging against conceptual art, which stimulates thought and challenges tradition. He wants his followers to believe that art has “degenerated”, because the West has “degenerated”. OP is intentionally engaging with fascist ideas of “degenerate art”.

If OP wanted to be accurate, he would seek to restore the Salon System, the Beaux Arts Academy, and classical training in the arts. The collapse of this specific system allowed for Modernism to evolve. Of course, that’s not what OP is talking about. He’s evoking beauty as a moral standard, telling his followers to “restore Western tradition”, to fight against aesthetic “degeneracy” in culture.

(By the way, Duchamp is commenting ON MODERNISM with “Fountain”. Duchamp submitted the work to the Society of Independent Artists’ salon in New York, who would accept any work by any artist, for a small fee. In part, Duchamp is saying, “Is this what you Modernists want? A urinal? Look me in the eyes and prove this is not art.”

Duchamp had other readymades, like his snow shovel, where if you actually look at the photos, the handle is square and the bowl is way too flimsy. Why would manufacturers make a snow shovel with a squared-off handle? It’s impossible to hold! Duchamp slapped the “readymades” label on all these items and the hoity-toity art people who were so good at looking at things didn’t see it (probably because they’d never had to do labor like shovel snow imo, amongst other things).

And they’re different! If it was a real “readymade” he could have just bought some more at his local hardware store, but no. He changed them in OBVIOUS WAYS.

See the triangle of holes?

Here’s the one from the Tate Modern:

Oh hello, cross-holes. Fancy seeing you here.

SFMOMA’s edition has the triangle holes, but it also has a line of holes at the top that are completely different from either other version.

Here’s one from Moderna Museet. Line and a circular set of holes!

Duchamp definitely intentionally made these different on purpose. It’s a “readymade” but it’s not, really, each of these is a specific custom creation.

It’s not even clear if he made it! He wrote a letter to his sister claiming that a female friend sent it to him, and he just enrolled it in the art exhibit under his own name. There’s also a possibility that that female friend was himself, since he later had a female pseudonym of Rrose Sélav.

Duchamp is laughing at that tweeter. The rest of us are laughing WITH Duchamp.

But also, we understand the quality of that laughter. There’s rage in it. It’s wry. It’s rueful. It’s desperate. It’s a little vindictive. And most importantly it’s shared.

Even if it was an off the shelf Urinal (which it wasn’t) Knowing what to make and how to present it was and is what is important here. It takes its place in the world of art juuuuust so to invoke exactly the right message in context.

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.

I gestured a hand across an explanation of a Scottish field geologist character named Ken(dal Mint Cake) stating that he always has a packet of Kendal mint cake somewhere and received a message from a friend saying “I didn’t know you also knew (guy that Ken could conceivably be based on)”. I didn’t. This is just a portrait of too many extant guys.

There are several species of this man crashing cheerfully around the UK receiving deep spiritual pleasure from crouching in a puddle in a howling gale up a mountain nibbling pieces of violent mint sugar and apparently metabolising sufficient joy from this to polish off Kendal Mint Cake in marketable quantities for over 100 years.

Unless they made too much of it originally and are still selling it.

Step 1: go on an entirely optional adventure

Step 2: get into an unpleasant condition in bad weather

Step 3: become very uncomfortable and hateful

Step 4: Kendal mint cake

Step 5: access stratosphere with tits blown off

Step 6: summit

these are hyraxes! they're not rodents or canines or anything like that. they belong to their very own order known as hyracoidea. their closest relatives are elephants and manatees, and these mamas and babies have FREAKY teeth

also important to note that the

and: