Bruce Springsteen Art!!

in my aquaculture class, i’m taking care of a tank with a mojarra fish and a european rock shrimp. i, naturally, bestowed them with the names jessica and leto, respectively. i walk into class today and the shrimp is fucking dead?? when he was completely fine on friday?? why does reality mirror fiction 😭

This is not the point but Kris Knoblauch is kinda—oh they’re down 0-5 okay

exactlyyyy

Illusions can be very powerful. Particularly when they take this form.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962) | dir. David Lean

OPPENHEIMER (2023) | dir. Christopher Nolan

Florence Welch by Luis Alberto Rodriguez

“My cottage is a gem of gems - in the eyes of its owner. You see, I’ve almost made it, from the roots up. It is as ugly as my sins, bleak, angular, small, unstable: very like its creator. Yet I love it.” - T.E. Lawrence’s handwriting, in a letter about his cottage Clouds Hill.

Lawrence of Arabia holds this absolutely fascinating position of being made by an Englishman who had grown up during WW1 and seen Britain go through WW2 and then decolonization and whose movies are so closely interwined with the direction Britain was heading as an Empire: from his propaganda-film In Which We Serve during WW2 to the dismantling of British military ideology and philosophy in Kwai in 1957, and then every movie for the rest of his career (except Zhivago, which is still an illuminating movie wrt his thoughts on Empire, the birth of ideology, authoritarinism, etc) is deeply concerned with Britain as a nation and doesn't shy away from the Colonial and Imperial legacy that continued to colour British society even post-decolonization. Lawrence is, on the one hand, one of the few British films about WW1 that doesn't center on the domestic experience of the war or on trench warfare on the West Front (both of which obscures the Imperialist and globalized reality of WW1 and excludes colonized peoples from narratives about the war) but on the other the main character is very much a white, English man in an archetypical White Saviour narrative but on the other hand again it is a deconstruction of the White Saviour story; Lawrence fails at his primary ambitions and does not get to "get his and go home" as Auda puts it, and leaves Arabia exceedingly traumatized, unsecure, insecure, and disillusioned: with Imperialism, with his romanticized notions of Arabia and the Bedouin, and with himself. Created by a visionary director who became almost as much as a "desert-loving English" as Lawrence himself and whom also, as can be seen from his movies, is disillusioned with Britain's Imperial past, present, and future while still being firmly in love with colonial areas (Arabia, India) that he tries to engage with and represent "authentically" while still coming from the vantage-point of a white Englishman whose whole life has been spent in a colonialist country grappling with it's territories and identity once bereft of them.

there's something about deeming women simply biologically incapable of playing five sets, as they used to be deemed biologically incapable of running marathons, before giving them a chance to actually play five sets in the first place, and then using five set tennis — something only men have been given the opportunity to partake in and test themselves in and practice and train for — as the benchmark for what qualifies as good, chatrier night session worthy tennis.

Alec guiness’s hatred of star wars makes so much sense when you remember lawrence of arabia because imagine you make one of the greatest films of all times. No one even cares you were in brownface for it. Then years later youre taken back to the desert. But now youre in a bath robe saying things like “darth vader” and “lightsaber” hanging out with some kind of gay robot. He probably thought his career was over lmfaoooo

Obsessed with this song right now. It captures such a specific feeling, but I don’t know the name for it. Can’t believe this beautiful, fantastic album turns 45 this year.

“I’m learning to lie. I’m learning to be insincere.”

Becoming the Fly

This video was inspired by Kelly Eddington's words in her article:

"In my mind, late 80s Bono was a mysterious figure. He was nowhere near as accessible as he is today, and he came across as intelligent and even brooding when discussing the band’s rise to fame. He didn’t seem to belong to that decade. His long hair wasn’t teased and sprayed (well, not anymore). He didn’t sing about rock ‘n’ roll debauchery. He possessed an above-it-all purity and even dressed like a Depression-era preacher. Then he and his band disappeared for a while.

They surfaced briefly in 1990 with “Night And Day,” a gorgeous Cole Porter cover I loved immediately. It left me wanting more and made me curious. U2 seemed to be on a new sonic path with Bono’s sensual/tortured performance and that doom and gloom synth. The shadowy video seemed to be a message transmitted from the center of the band’s own dark chrysalis. 

And one year later, a black butterfly emerged".

Excerpt from Kelly Eddington's article: #AB30: U2 Know How Beautiful U2 Are (@kellyeddington)