December 21, 1942

Judith Anderson, Ruth Gordon, Gertrude Musgrove, Tom Powers, and Katherine Cornell in the stage production Three Sisters.

Katharine Cornell, Judith Anderson & Ruth Gordon

yay Ruth

Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt

Angela Davis 1972 Prison Interview

Final Installment of WE BELONG DEAD

“Frankenstein’s monster is monstrous because he lets history too far in, going so far as to embody it instead of merely feeling it…. He certainly emblematizes the passionate attachments to archival materials that were increasingly barred from historicist methodology as the nineteenth century progressed. But he also figures history’s ability to effect shifts in bodily constitution in ways that were increasingly demonized, problematized, or disavowed.”  --Elizabeth Freeman, Time Bends: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 104.

"In Margaret Meehan's "WE BELONG DEAD" we considered the overlap of the beautiful and the monstrous, studying examples of that overlap in history and poetry. The issue ends with Chelsea Weathers' editor's statement and two excerpts: one from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), and the other from John Gardner's Grendel (1971)."
- The final installment of my artist project for Pastelegram. Check it out here.

Nazi Summer Camps In 1930s America?

In the 1930s, while Adolf Hitler was inciting the German people toward bellicosity and Nazis were establishing horrific concentration camps around Germany, Nazi summer camps for youngsters — like the one near Windham, N.Y. featured in the clip — popped up around this country. The pro-Hitler retreats were sponsored by German loyalists, such as the German-American Bund led by Fritz Kuhn.
The Bund, "which came to include more than 70 local chapters," according to a 2014 National Archives blogpost, "was founded in 1936 to promote Germany and the Nazi party in America. The most well-known of the organization's activities was the 1939 pro-Nazi rally held at Madison Square Garden that drew a reported 20,000 attendees." NPR story here.

Nina Simone- Baltimore

Dieter Roelstraete über das Wunder von Harald Thys und Jos de Gruyter

"confusion of the living and the dead- the uncanny"

pj harvey- is that all there is

Everything is Going to be Fine

Aurélien Villette

What we leave behind can be as telling as what we preserve. It’s with this idea in mind that the photographer Aurélien Villette explores and documents a variety of abandoned places — from the sacred to the industrial — for his “Spirit of Place” project, which is collected in a new book.

Kathrine Switzer (261)

Switzer  in action as BAA co-director Jock Semple attempts to tear off Switzer's bib during the 1967 Boston Marathon.

Sports Illustrated/Getty Images

Olive Kitteridge

Myself Among Others

Francisco Goya

Witches’ Sabbath, 1797-98

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos), Caprichos 43
1797-99

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is an etching by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya. Created between 1797 and 1799, it is the 43rd of 80 etchings making up the suite of satires Los Caprichos. Goya imagines himself asleep amidst his drawing tools, his reason dulled by slumber and bedeviled by creatures that prowl in the dark. The work includes owls that may be symbols of folly and bats symbolising ignorance. The artist's nightmare reflected his view of Spanish society, which he portrayed in the Caprichos as demented, corrupt, and ripe for ridicule. The full epigraph for capricho No. 43 reads; "Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."

The Night Witch: Nadia, Soviet Bomber Pilot

Cher: Similar but Different

"When Chastity Bono's homosexuality was divulged to the world by a tabloid in 1990, she felt publicly crucified and called the outing "terrifying." Eight years later, with her book "Family Outing," she set out to make the coming out process a healthier, less agonizing one for other gay youth and their families...
Ironically enough, Bono's mother Cher, despite her flamboyance and shock-value, was most resistant to her daughter's sexual orientation. While dad Sonny, whom she told first, was extremely supportive and loving. Bono recalls her mother "going ballistic for a couple of days, but she came around quickly and we started to deal with it."
"For (my mother), it was very much of a parental thing," says Bono. "She would have liked a little girl who would have liked to play dress-up in her closet. I was not one of them. I think she had certain expectations, hopes and dreams of what her child's life would be, and she wanted it to be as smooth and easy as possible."
Nevertheless, when Sonny Bono became a Republican congressman from California, differing political views severed the bond between father and daughter. When he died in a skiing accident in January, Chastity had not seen or spoken to her father in over a year."- CNN

Sister Corita Kent

“The only rule is work,” read the seventh point on the Immaculate Heart College art department’s list of rules, devised by Corita Kent, known as Sister Mary Corita, one of the most unlikely Pop Art phenomena of the 1960s and ’70s. “If you work, it will lead to something,” the edict continued. “It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.”
-NYTIMES article here.

Studio

Joan Jett

Sworn Virgins of Albania

Sworn Virgins of Albania from T.Poppy on Vimeo.

Jill Peters

Sworn Virgins: Men by Choice in the Balkans

 

Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Up Above My Head (France 1965)

Ruth Gordon is in the air...

Ben Affleck asks to censor his PBS episode because the ancestors may have been slave owners.

"It’s clear that Affleck worried that his family’s history might hurt his “brand,” but by covering it up, he is doing a disservice to the victims of his ancestors. As previously noted, lots of people descend from slave owners, and the goal is to look at that troubling history with clear eyes, not with the hopes of covering it up. As Henry Louis Gates pointed out, Affleck isn’t even the first person on the show to find out his family had owned slaves. There are ways to handle it that doesn’t make you look as if you are complicit in the actions. The best example being CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who upon learning a slave killed his ancestor with a farm hoe had a brilliant response."

human zoos

When artists Mohamed Ali Fadlabi and Lars Cuzner first heard mentions of Norway's historic "human zoo" they were surprised, sure. But what Fadlabi (from Sudan) and Cuzner (Canadian-Swedish) found even more astonishing, was how thoroughly that moment in time had been erased from their adoptive country's collective memory. So they decided to bring the dusty photo album back to life by recreating the village, in the same city park, from May 15 to August 31.
Full story here.

Playmates from the frozen Arctic—Eskimo youngsters and their tame bear, World's Fair, St. Louis, Mo.

Wugazi in the studio

dryfus

While watching a sunset with Harold, Maude sees a flock of seagulls and refers to Dreyfus. Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), a Jewish officer in the French army, was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894, and sentenced to life in solitary confinement on Devil's Island (a penal colony off the coast of French Guiana). He was pardoned five years later, and ultimately exonerated when the evidence against him was proved false. The incident is seen by most historians as a revelation and indictment of French antisemitism, and its implications for French Jews still reverberate in France. The Dreyfus conversation coincides with Harold seeing Maude's concentration camp tattoo for the first time, which juxtaposes two of the most infamous instances of institutionalized European antisemitism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and strongly implies that Maude had been a Jewish concentration camp prisoner during World War II. 

The Holocaust Encyclopedia resource on the website for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., says that tattoos of serial numbers were given only (and specifically) to prisoners at the Auschwitz complex of concentration camps (which included Auschwitz I [Main Camp], Auschwitz II [Auschwitz-Birkenau], and Auschwitz III [Monowitz and the subcamps]) who had been selected for work. Prisoners at other Nazi concentration camps were not tattooed; neither were prisoners at Auschwitz who were selected for immediate extermination instead of a work detail. The purpose of the tattoo was for the Nazis to have a system by which they could identify the bodies of prisoners after their deaths.

via:generoqueer

Hermaphrodite (Pitch Card), Unknown Photographer, early 1900s.

Edmonia Lewis

“Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptor, residing in Rome . . . is below medium height; her complexion and feautures [sic] betray her African origin; her hair is more of the Indian type, black straight and abundant … her face is bright, intelligent, and expressive . . . She is one of the most interesting of our American women artists here, and we are glad to know that she is fast winning fame and fortune.”
—Morning Republican, Little Rock, AR, May 17, 1871

In Civil War, Woman Fought Like A Man For Freedom

Jennie Hodgers, masquerading as Cashier, marched thousands of miles during the war. She was at the Siege of Vicksburg and the surrender of Mobile. Her regiment took part in more than 40 skirmishes and battles.
"Albert Cashier seems to have been in [the war] from the beginning to the end," Davis says. "She stuck it out."
... After her secret was discovered, Hodgers told different stories to different people about why she had chosen to live as a man. She reportedly told one newspaper that lots of people had enlisted under fake names, and she did, too. "The country needed men, and I wanted excitement," she said. -
 NPR story here.

NPR Monsters on Magazine Covers

"Responding to putting a photo of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine — a hallowed spot in American culture — the publication's editors posted an on the website version of the story. It says: "The cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism."
True enough. Putting the faces of evil people on magazine covers has a long and controversial tradition. And controversy sells. At least it used to.
One of the arguments against the Tsarnaev cover is that Rolling Stone is glamorizing him."
More here.

Enter Sandman - METALLICA Cover - The Warning

Women self defense in 1947

Posted by Meetville on Monday, April 6, 2015

Coco the Nazi?

The question is, if Chanel was a Nazi, how would that impact her legacy, if at all? It’s not like she would’ve been the only one in the creative field to be a fascist.

 

 hyperallergic

Brian Rochefort

 Untitled (Cup #5), 2014, ceramic, multiple glazes

Untitled (Cup #10), 2014, ceramic, multiple glazes

Victor Man

Kate Lyddon

Untitled (smiley) 2013

Untitled (Sunny) 2010

Ruth Gordon Love