Masahisa Fukase, Yoko, 1974

Fukase almost exclusively photographed his wife, Yoko, for 13 years until their breakup, afterwards obsessively photographing ravens,as symbols of his grief.

Fukase died in 2012,  having been in a coma for 20 years following a near-fatal fall down the stairs of his favorite bar in 1992. Yoko visited him twice a month throughout his long limbo – though, heartbreakingly, he would have been unaware of her presence.

saints

Hours of Louis de Laval, France ca. 1480

vaginas:

Right now, aave is so entwined with social culture and “internet speak” that there really is no way to police (for lack of better words) the use of it. It has worked its way into the way we talk, and it would be unreasonable to ask people to just stop using words and phrases that are now part of everyone’s vocabulary.

That being said, the primary issues I have with the way aave is used on the internet are:

a) people don’t even know what the word that they’re saying means and have no idea how it even works in the sentence. I’m sure you’ve all seen a few posts floating around about how aave has its own rules to follow and isn’t just throwing in random words and “bad grammar”. This is how you end up with the misuse of words like “finna” (the example I stated in the tags, “I’m gonna finna”, makes absolutely no sense), “chile”, “tea”, “asf”, “be”, etc. The misuse alone is already weird in and of itself, but it also indicates that the people using it do not actually have those words in their vocabulary and are using them to mimic certain patterns of writing they see on the internet. Many of these patterns, of course, are stereotypical caricatures of the “sassy black woman”. So the people who misuse these words are doing it for shock value, in a way saying “haha look at me I’m so sassy and cool right now,” completely disrespecting people who actually incorporate aave (the CORRECT way) into the way they speak, boiling them down into a template to use whenever you want to seem sassy and culture savvy on the internet. For more examples (and a good laugh), I suggest searching up “aave struggle tweets”.

b) it’s becoming increasingly obvious (especially here on tumblr) that people lean on aave to show aggression. Very often you will see users who type the way they normally speak slip into aave mode when they are angry or in an argument and/or trying to “throw shade”. Why do they do this? The most obvious answer is that they associate aave (and Blackness itself) with anger and aggression. This directly ties into the stereotypes of Black people being violent, aggressive, loud, and angry. By heavily relying on and using aave to convey your negative emotions, it subconsciously enforces those stereotypes in both your mind and the minds of your readers.

I suppose the best way to avoid this is to be conscious of what you’re saying and why you’re saying it. If you find yourself using “internet” language, especially words that aren’t in your regular vocabulary, ask yourself 1) “do I know what I’m saying? or am I just using a word that I’ve seen floating around and vaguely understand?” and 2) “why am I choosing to use this language in this post at this moment in time? do I have a pattern of relying on it in specific instances? what role does it play in my post that I couldn’t use my normal speech patterns to do?”

Art + Chilling on a Green Sofa

“He is lounging on the olive green velvet sofa with two patterned pillows. Very focused in. (No eliminations.) Very French. Also a bit, alas, Sargent.”

— Joe Brainard, letter to Fairfield Porter, 1973