lemmonady

[lemmonady]

i used to be a green onion

[lemmonady]

people love to find progressive ways to say we should all be arranged into separate groups and try our hardest to not relate to one another

[lemmonady]

padme // lolita

fandom wiki article for padme amidala / nabokov interviewed by herbert gold / lolita p.16 / dominique swain as lolita (1977) / phantom menace promotional photo / “the good queen” by mia waller (editeé) / cheatsheet headline / princess weekes for mary sue / kevin polowy for yahoo / archived starwars.com article / waller / swain as lolita (1977) / portman behind the scenes of phantom menace / lolita p.4 / annotation by alfred appel / revenge of the sith (2005) [sc: george lucas] / lolita p.309 / the phantom menace (1999) [sc: lucas] / “darth vader: dark lord of the sith” issue no. 13 (sc: charles soule) [ac: giuseppe camuncoli] / jeremy irons as humbert and swain as lolita (1977) / ian mcdiarmid as palpatine and portman as padme (1999) / revenge of the sith novelization by matthew stover / lolita p.280 / stover / elizabeth janeway for the new york times / waller / eric lemay for penn state / waller / portman as padme (2005)

[lemmonady]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[lemmonady]

due to factors such as "time pressure" and "tulle is of the devil" my expectations for this shirt are not high. but i spent a lot of time imagining these button bands and they turned out pretty nice

[lemmonady]

never going to stop thinking about this loom weight that features an owl, a symbol of athena, in the act of preparing wool to weave. and it has human arms. humans have been cranking out absolute bangers for millennia

[lemmonady]

play that hurdy gurdy white boy

[lemmonady]

figure 1: burial of a princess with grave goods indicative of her station

[lemmonady]

[lemmonady]

close but no shortnose gar

[lemmonady]

Guy on metro had a shitty little dog who spent 20 minutes untying his laces and waiting patiently with his nose 3 millimeters away for them to be re-tied before wreaking havoc again. Over and over. Owner did not care. Dogs name was Quentin.

[lemmonady]

Hey. Look at me. Please leave yourself a note somewhere you'll see it later that says "it is going to take years if not decades to get the United States government to the level of functionality it had in November of 2024." If we elect a democrat in 2028, we are not going to be up and running by 2032.

Please make sure you have a reminder in your phone reminding you to not look at 2028/32/36 Democratic candidates and say "why are they not promising/delivering Cool Shit?" because you are going to understand that to get Cool Shit we must have competent people running a decently funded government, and we are not going to have that.

We are not getting UBI. We are not getting single payer healthcare. We are not getting free college or free preschool. We are not redistributing wealth on a large scale. We are not getting free internet. We are not getting ranked choice voting.

If we are lucky, we are going to get an IRS that can collect taxes, qualified schoolteachers, research grants, Social Security, and a government that thinks maybe it should be a priority for people around the worlds to not have AIDS, malaria or TB.

[lemmonady]

it's okay, ulysses ogre. you can back up and try dubliners, it's a short story collection with much more straightforward prose, you can dive deep on one piece at a time, and once you've toyed around with that then I'm sure you'll have an easier time with ulysses. besides, I had an irish lit professor who'd been studying finnegans wake for twenty years and she said she still didn't really know what was going on in it. ulysses ogre, what really matters is if you are enjoying your time with literature and feel like you are gaining something, not whether you reach the "correct" conclusions. there's no need to try and force yourself through something if you feel like you aren't on an even enough plane with the text to reap any of its rewards.

[lemmonady]

No tech CEO or NYT bestselling novelist will ever match the creativity of a humble French postman who decided on a whim to spend thirty-three years building a surreal, majestic palace with the bricks and mortar of his dreams.

[lemmonady]

If you're not a protester but you want to protect protesters from criminal prosecution, start wearing a mask out in public when you're doing ordinary things. Mask up at the grocery store, on public transit, at the library, to work, to school. Make the case with your face that protest is ordinary.

[lemmonady]

Wait I'm one of the like top most reposted tumblrs on reddit and facebook?? "Curated tumblr" type communities share my posts like every other day? That's been a thing for years?!

[lemmonady]

Speef is real to me. I'm sorry for that.