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EGON SCHIELE / “THE EMBRACE” / 1917 [oil on canvas | 98 x 169 cm.]

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seeking, yearning, reaching hands

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Boris Pasternak, from a letter to Marina Tsvetaeva featured in Letters, Summer 1926

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by Elihu Vedder

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We all have one foot in a fairytale and the other in the abyss.

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We all have one foot in a fairytale and the other in the abyss.

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🧸

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Moss

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People will be writing essays and analyses on Sinners in its regards to music, African American studies, Native American studies, colonization, religion and spirituality, and the diaspora for DECADES to come. And it’s all deserved because that movie was fucking amazing at touching every single one of those points.

Ryan Coogler, you’ve done it again king 🫶🏾

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remmick and the vampires present a false dichotomy

Hogwood (the man who sold the twins the mill) and the KKK are very obviously bad, they are outright malicious bigotry, they use the n-word and plan to lynch the moore's and their community, they are so blatantly racist and hateful it's unavoidably obvious

remmick and the vampires however say that they believe in equality, say that they want to create a community, and yet remmick's goal throught the movie is to both metaphorically and literally steal sammie's ability for his own goal of reconnecting with his irish ancestors, a white man wants to harm a young and upcoming black man and use talents for his own goals without giving any regard to said black man's autonomy or agency

when sammie sings 'I lied to you' in the juke joint and calls forth the spirits from the past and future, it's a blend of cultures; west african, east asian, native american, and african american song and dance blend together across time and space to tell the stories of blues; where it takes its inspiration from, the music genres it then inspired, the complex history of black american culture and its intersections with other peoples of colour in the USA

when remmick and the vampires kill and turn the people in the juke joint, and then perform rocky road to dublin, only remmick's irish culture is on display, there is no influence from the black and asian people he has forcibly assimilated into his song, it's juxtaposition with the earlier scene is blatant, remmick is more than happy to assimilate people of colour into his 'community' of 'equals', and yet its only whiteness that is celebrated, that is normative

remmick claims that he's doing people a favour by turning them immortal, conviently ignoring that he literally has to suck the life out of them to do so, trapping their spirits on earth, he claims that he's the good guy, that the KKK were gonna come and lynch everyone at the joint in the morning anyways, conviently ignoring that he's doing the exact same thing; a white man leading a mob to kill a bunch of black people

in the final confrontation with sammie remmick repeatedly dunks him into the river, a forceful baptism. both the celtic irish and enslaved west africans had their religions suppressed and destroyed by colonialsm, had christianity forced upon them by the british empire, and in that scene we see remmick repeating that cycle, using christianity to inflict harm, and sammie reclaiming christianity, despite all the complex emotions he has arround it, as many colonised peoples have and still do, when he recites the lord's prayer

remmick and the vampires are no less racist than hogwood and the KKK, are no less predatory or evil, they're just less blantant about their bigotry, they represent the system, the normalised white supremacy that is seeped into the very foundation of culture in america, the point isnt that remmick would call any of the black characters in the movie the n-word, i dont think he would, the point is that his exploitation and desacration and inserting-himself-into-when-he-wasn't-invited of the juke joint is a microcosm of what white people have done to black american arts and culture since ever since there have been black and white people in america, and even before that

theres a reason vultures are shown early on in this movie

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the comparison of the Irish experience to the Black experience, finding out that Remmick comes from a time when the Irish were colonized... while still acknowledging that he was able to use that privilege to escape the vampire hunters... and the first thing he did was un-racist those fuckers in the home he ran in to.

and the absolute juxtaposition of Sammie escaping the vampire hivemind with his life, only to go back home to the church where he is expected to give up the music of his life to assimilate into his father's church

FUCK

Ryan fuckin Coogler the man that you are

i'm not going to shut the fuck up about this movie

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and all i loved, i loved alone

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“You are never destroyed by anyone except yourself.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1889)

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Hermann Hesse, Demian, (1919)

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Faust, Part One, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1808)