(via loveyourchaos)
Hieraconism 3, by Gerwell.
If this looks weird, it’s because it reverses a centuries-old convention of art - the snow-white lady and her dark-skinned ladies-in-waiting. Hell, I’m aware of that racist convention, and this picture looks weird even to me. It’s also strikingly beautiful (I think the artist may have goldfish in mind) and a little frightening. I could never be the imperious figure at the centre, only one of her fleshy pink admirers - and she has more important things to think about; they’re taken for granted. Perhaps this is a small taste of what that perpetual visual exclusion is like.
This didn’t strike me as odd. Just beautiful.
Don’t give me any liberal points for it - I’m as subject to unexamined racism as the next white person - but damn. The composition is lovely, and the overall effect is stunning. And the with the clouds, it’s almost as if she has wings.
(Source: theonlymagicleftisart, via sexgenderbody)
I fall in love with everyone, maybe that’s my worst imperfection, I fall in love with people on the bus, in the subway, people who bump into me in the hallway and say, “Sorry,” people who look my way, someone who can make me laugh, I really hardly ever laugh, so people who can make me laugh are…
There’s nothing wrong with this; nothing at all.
What do plants eat? They eat dead animals; that’s the problem. For me that was a horrifying realization. You want to be an organic gardener, of course, so you keep reading “Feed the soil, feed the soil, feed the soil…”
Alright. Well what does the soil want to eat? Well it wants manure, and it wants urine, and it wants blood meal and bone meal. And I…could not face that. I wanted my garden to be pure and death-free. It didn’t matter what I wanted: plants wanted those things; they needed those things to grow…
So, I sort played a moral hide-and-seek in my mind. I was left with this realization that I could eat an animal directly, or I could pass an animal through a plant and then eat it, but either way there were animals involved in this process. I could not remove animals from the equation.
I had to accept on some level that there was a cycle here, and it was very ancient, and ultimately very spiritual. It was really hard for me to accept the ‘death’ part of that equation. Years. It took me years to finally face it. But there wasn’t any way out of it if I was going to grow things.
"Lierre Keith, on gardening as a vegan; October 8, 2009 on Underground Wellness Radio (via weeta)
Life isn’t “pure and death-free,” is it? It never can be.
(Source: blogtalkradio.com, via petrichoriousparalian)
Inspired by another post here on Tumblr, I decided to look into the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong a bit more, it truly was one of the most amazing and terrifying places on earth. Being slightly smaller than an NFL stadium, the structure was built of 350 smaller interconnected buildings and hosted, at it’s peak, a population density of 5 million people per square mile.
To put those numbers in perspective, this would be like taking the entire population of metro Philadelphia, the 4th largest in the US, and putting it in 1 square mile instead of 1,744.
The area was also largely ungoverned and unregulated. Factories, apartments, schools, temples, churches, shops, cafes, hotels and almost anything else one could imagine were housed within the structure that never had a full blueprint of it done. Buildings were built onto buildings, expanded, rebuilt, and re-purposed as needed without a central authority of any kind.
Within the structure, natural light was almost non-existent, and an unknown number of miles of jury-rigged wires provided electricity to everything. Water constantly dripped down to the lower levels from both rain and leaking pipes, while garbage filled every passage. A constant yellow haze filled the structure and there were never any government safety inspections.
The Kowloon Walled City was demolished in the early 1990s as part of the deal that returned Hong Kong to the Chinese from the British. The entire area is now a park.
I find places like this fascinating, it is just incredible what we, humans, build and live in. This, hive, for lack of a better term, was one of the most interesting structures I’ve yet looked at.
For a documentary shot inside of the Kowloon Walled City, check here:
(via ladderax)
I want to be that man. The one in the center, with naked people falling worshipful at his feet.
