Definitely a Mammal

- Svetlana Boym, “Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky”

“Bilinguals overwhelmingly report that they feel like different people in different languages. It is often assumed that the mother tongue is the language of the true self. (…) But, it first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed, freeing their speakers to ride different currents.”

I love and admire coyotes; their ability to survive, adaptation, and tenacity has been nothing less than inspirational. They've always been here, and will still be here.

PWYW hi-res download here: https://ko-fi.com/s/aebfb2915d

because of the new tv show. and it’s only going to get worse as we get closer to the show’s release. take notice of it — who’s advertising, who’s talking about it, who’s encouraging you to watch it. it’s going to keep happening. there’s going to be more chocolate guys, more nicholas hoults, more kiera knightleys.

take no shit. give rowling an inch and she’ll take a mile. i don’t care how much you like or don’t like someone — if you see them interacting with harry potter positively in ANY way, drop them. unfollow, block, pretend they don’t exist. scorched fucking earth.

My heirloom tomatoes are doing pretty poorly this year (not surprising considering how late I sowed them), but we still have a few from every variety.

so here’s the floor planers. they’re workmen. they’re workmen. they’re not some rent boy you dolled up with a helmet to be achilles or adonis. artists have been hornily painting working-class models (and sex-worker boyfriends) into their portraits forever, but you’re supposed to frame your appreciation for the male form as an intellectually irreproachable appreciation for the heroic body from literature, or, conversely you could depict the humble beauty of peasants, if you must, but it had to be a sort of ode to nature and the simple life. peasants could be art, as long as they were… out there, you know. in a field. being a metaphor. so there’s your options for looking at a shirtless guy: he’s got to be mythic.

but no. look, here, at the workmen. the floor planers. the workmen’s bodies not dressed up in sandals and helmet, in flowers, on a pedestal. the workmen not employed as some distant paean to an arcadian countryside, not stacking sheaves or holding a lamb or elevating the beauty of nature. they’re here, they’re urban, they’re in a room just like you might have. the workers of your world, in your home, in this reality. the male body as a very real, very nonfigurative tool, humble and employed, but still gorgeous. the beauty of the men that the patrician class pays not to see. the men who come into your mansion through the back door and work unseen and leave unseen. those men. there, right there, this painting, glowing and beautiful.

not adonis. but beautiful.

anyway at the time everyone fucking hated this picture because it’s a direct slap across the classist chops. they were BIG MAD, this was filthy, it was an affront. they hated it. the paris salon rejected it. established intellectuals didn’t want anything to do with this kind of confrontation. it wasn’t art.

i just love that.

like, look at those hot guys go. look at the shine on the floor and the way their arms are. no virtuous framing, no classic allusions. just some regular guys making the floors nice for a rich fucker who never laid eyes on them at all. but here they are: look at them.

I went, "What. no. she/her."

"How does that work? With she/her/hers and they/them?"

I stared at her. "What are you talking about?"

"Well you came out as-" and I said, "I'm asexual."

She replied, "Like an amoeba, I know."

"Oh. My god. No. Mom. It doesn't- it's not the asexual you learned about in biology. I didn't come out as a single celled organism."

With heavy relief, she said "Oh, it has a different meaning?"

The crucial thing is that this dandelion owes its niceness entirely to the mess on the preceding 3 pages.

(Normally I keep this blog strictly for silly dinosaurs, and post all my other work on @vincentbriggs, but this time it's directly related to the use-the-sketchbook dinosaur from a couple days ago.)

Edit: Here's the outline layer in case anyone else wants to embroider it.