#something to live for

[recycledmoviecostumes]

Edith Head designed this blue gown, accented with open vertical stitching, for Barbara Stanwyck to wear in the 1949 film The File on Thelma Jordan. The piece was seen again a few years later in the 1952 film Something to Live For, where Teresa Wright wore it as Edna Miller. 

The costume went up for auction at Bonhams in 2019. The auction description describes the dress as follows:

Paramount Pictures, 1950. Designed by Edith Head. Blue-gray linen cap-sleeved day dress with a vertical design of cream-colored stitching from top to bottom, with a flared skirt and built-in cream-colored belt, bearing an interior blue-lettered “Paramount” label inscribed, “Teresa Wright” in black ink. Universally beloved Barbara Stanwyck is believably evil in this underrated film noir directed by Robert Siodmak in which she plays Wendell Corey for a fool. Edith Head, well known for reusing costumes, used this dress two years later for Teresa Wright in Something to Live For (1952) in which she plays an alcoholic. Both actresses wore the dress in their respective films as well as in publicity portraits. Accompanied by 2 publicity stills and a color lithograph of Stanwyck wearing the dress.

Costume Credit: Veryfancydoilies

Follow: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest | Instagram

[troius]

[howifeltabouthim]

I'll tell you what I want,—something to live for,—some excitement. Is it not a shame that I see around me so many people getting amusement, and that I can get none?

Anthony Trollope, from Can You Forgive Her?

[girlthing-to-live-for]

Something to live for

Chapter 1

The landscape was beautiful as much as it was deadly. The rivers were completely frozen and long icicles of a radiant blue color were decorating the bare crowns of the trees. Their black bark stood in stark contrast to the pure whiteness of the snow that covered the earth. The setting sun drenched the sky with a fiery glow, but soon that flame dwindled and darkness set in. The snow swallowed all sounds and no wind whispered between the trees. Time itself was frozen here.

The wanderer had reached her final destination. She had longed for purpose for as long as she could remember, something to die for. As death seemed inevitable she had pledged hers to treading where no man had walked before. Chasing the horizon for as long as her feet would carry her. And now the cold would embrace her and this untouched land would be touched by her. The twilight of the blue hour illuminated her path as she continued onwards into the night.

As the wanderer collapsed to her knees, ready to breathe her last breath, she noticed that she wasn't alone. She felt something being there, something calling for help, something needing her. At first she hadn't seen the girl but now that she had felt her cry, she couldn't take her eyes off of her. Her skin was as white as the snow, her feathered wings were as dark as the trees and her eyes shined crystal clear like the ice around them. The vibrant red of the blood that ran down her torso was the only thing out of place. The girl seemed to shine as bright as a distant star and her small curled up body towered over the wanderer. A tearful gaze met with the wanderers' wonder and the cold retreated.

The wanderer set two bowls onto the wooden table and filled them with a soup that smelled like home. She called out and the girl that had watched the flames in the fireplace, whilst shielding her naked body with her wings, got up and attempted to walk towards her. She stumbled as if she was unfamiliar with such things as gravity and having a body, but the wanderer was there to catch her and guide her to the table. With distrust at first the girl inspected the soup, but after the wanderer explained the soup, the girl began devouring it as well as four more bowls filled to the brim. After cleaning the small cooking area the wanderer joined her at the fireplace. She observed the girl, her long dark hair, her mystical face, her thin arms, her delicate hands, her small breasts, her tummy, her long legs and her crotch. The wanderer had patched most of her wounds but she was certain that some would be ripped open again eventually and if that happened she wanted to be there to treat them again. She slowly got up and gathered a few blankets and pillows draping the girl in them and building them a small soft island of comfort. The small girl cuddled up to her as she began telling stories of the lands she had visited and soon both of them had fallen asleep.

Next

[mileycyrusguatemala]

What happened to flowers? Going out in the rain and And you're living the dream Everyone don't see it Can't let your hair down Looking over your shoulder You can try to stop it but You're still getting older

The conversation is so absurd It's the condemnation The, the fucking circus There ain't no gold at the end of a rainbow But maybe we can find something to live for

So yeah, I love attention Sometimes I get high and then I can't come down I guess you call me shameless now

So yeah, I love attention Sometimes I get high and then I can't come down I guess you call me shameless now

The time it's so wasting What is it achieving? Puking up useless information I wanna get conscious, ah This time I wanna know the deal Before I buy it I wanna know it's real

The conversation is so absurd It's the condemnation The, the fucking circus There ain't no gold at the end of a rainbow But maybe we can find something to live for

So yeah, I love attention Sometimes I get high and then I can't come down I guess you call me shameless now

So yeah, I love attention Sometimes I get high and then I can't come down I guess you call me shameless now

So yeah, I love attention Sometimes I get high and then I can't come down I guess you call me shameless now

The conversation is so absurd It's the condemnation The, the fucking circus There ain't no gold at the end of a rainbow But maybe we can find something to live for

[sentimentalnobody]

new episodes of the bear coming soon omfggg

[amerasdreams]

Maybe I should rescue 2 embryos and experience pregnancy and help kids experience life who wouldn't otherwise

I probably am not going to get pregnant any other way

I have to have a stable home 1st tho..... !

[titleofpersonage-p01]

[liquidstar]

If my mom sees a significant amount of blood she gets lightheaded, and has fainted on some occasions. Once it happened when we were kids, I wasn't there to witness it but I heard the story from my dad. Basically my brothers, around 7 or 8 at the time, were playing outside while my mom was making their lunch, and she accidentally cut her finger. It wasn't anything serious, but it drew a fair bit of blood and she passed out. My dad saw this and rushed over, but he didn't really know what to do so he just sort of started slapping her to wake her up (not recommended, but he had no idea and panicked)

At that exact moment my brothers both came in from playing, and all they saw was our mom unconscious on the floor and our dad slapping her. So, like, without even saying a word to each other they both just INSTANTLY start whaling on him, like, full blown attack mode to defend our mom. Which obviously didn't help the situation, but she did wake up and everything was fine.

Now our dad says that he's actually really glad they attacked him over what they thought was going on, because it means he raised good boys. And I still think that's true, they're very good boys.

[hamletthedane]

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.

[druid-for-hire]

[image id: a four-page comic. it is titled "immortality” after the poem by clare harner (more popularly known as “do not stand at my grave and weep”). the first page shows paleontologists digging up fossils at a dig. it reads, “do not stand at my grave and weep. i am not there. i do not sleep.” page two features several prehistoric creatures living in the wild. not featured but notable, each have modern descendants: horses, cetaceans, horsetail plants, and crocodilians. it reads, “i am a thousand winds that blow. i am the diamond glints on snow. i am the sunlight on ripened grain. i am the gentle autumn rain.” the third page shows archaeopteryx in the treetops and the skies, then a modern museum-goer reading the placard on a fossil display. it reads, “when you awaken in the morning’s hush, i am the swift uplifting rush, of quiet birds in circled flight. i am the soft stars that shine at night. do not stand at my grave and cry.” the fourth page shows a chicken in a field. it reads, “i am not there. i did not die” / end id]

a comic i made in about 15 hours for my school’s comic anthology. the theme was “evolution”

[howifeltabouthim]

There has to be something to look forward to, otherwise I just can't go on living.

Chris Kraus, from I Love Dick

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[girlthing-to-live-for]

Something to live for

Chapter 10

Sarah was already waiting at the cafe and the caretaker was already late. She wanted to try to make this work and here she was already failing. She had hoped that her first date would start off less chaotic, but now she needed to salvage what she could and so she started to sprint the last bit of the way. Sarah's head snapped around to look at her, "Took you some time.", "Sorry, I still had to...", "Wanna go inside?". Sarah held open the door, as the out of breath caretaker entered the cafe. Gathering herself the caretaker asked: "Hey, how are you?". "Eh.", was the response, "Could be better, didn't have much food yet and i don't like the weather today. You?". The caretaker thought for a moment, whilst taking a seat, then answered "Pretty good, I mean I don't just have a first date everyday.". Silence took hold as it started to rain outside and giant drops of water began hammering against the big front window. They ordered some cake, Sarah a plain chocolate cake and the caretaker a cheesecake adorned with an assortment of wild berries and the conversation slowly warmed up. There were only a few other guests, none of whom the caretaker was particularly close to, though she had seen most of them in meetings before. They talked about this and that, their friends, the local Fauna, the next village meeting before they got to talking about the future. "So what do you wanna do? I mean once you finish settling in?", the caretaker rested her head in her hands as she observed Sarah pick around in the remains of their cake. "This Summer I will probably go study, so I will be gone for a while.", "Oh, what will be your subject? And where?", "Well history of course, specifically Archeology. And I am applying to the University in Svalberstedt, as far as i know it's the closest place that is free of cinder brigade influence. What about you? Would you like to come along and study with me?"

The girl took another last look into the mirror. Her shiny black feathers had been cleaned, light makeup highlighted the parts of her face she found bearable and a long sleeved black dress conveniently covered up all the scars. Still she wasn't happy, she readjusted her hair again and then tore her gaze away from their mirror. Restless she wandered as the thoughts spun around faster and faster in her head. A knock on the door provided the long awaited end to her waiting, her guest was here. Jasmine wore a black shirt and a deep red tie, as well as a shy smile on her face as the girl opened the door. "Oh I brought a gift", she stuttered as the girl led her inside. "For you." She reached out her hand towards the girl and revealed a small cat shaped brooch. Touched, the girl accepted the gift then hastily made sure that her guest would be comfortable, apologizing countless times for any minor inconvenience. She then tried on the gift in front of Jasmine to make her happy but as her gaze wandered up to her face again she could feel her insecurities rising again. She had to step away, she needed distraction, otherwise her fears would come to suffocate her. One of the wounds had started to tear again and she wanted nothing more than to escape into the caretaker's arms. But she knew she couldn't do that. The caretaker was put on a date today, her first ever as she had confessed to the girl and she didn't want to ruin that. No, she needed to find another way, to not be a burden for the caretaker and as she didn't even dare to think, to find a way for when the caretaker had replaced her. She thought back to before the caretaker had found her and came to the conclusion that only one thing was intoxicating enough to make her forget her insecurities for at least some time.

First

Previous

[harleylot]

I miss my boyfriend so bad i wanna watch him play his fave video games i wanna feel his hands on my ribs when we nap i wanna crawl inside him and sleep on his heart im so happy and at peace when im with him . Mand is truly motivating me to grow as a person

[lgbtlunaverse]

Nothing will dispell the "the curtains were just blue" myth faster than writing something yourself, because the amount of pretentious symbolism i am putting in my silly little fanfics is ridiculous. I mean SO much with these words, literally every single one of them. This fic has twenty five typos and zero correct uses of punctuation but if there's curtains you bet your ass I put thought into what colour they were.