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genderlessghoul · 6 months

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I've been wanting to do this post for a while now so here is EVERYTHING I CAN TELL YOU ABOUT THE GHOULS' IMPERA COSTUMES.

Buckle up because I have a LOT to say about those, this is gonna be a very long one.

The costumes were designed by B Åkerlund, a Swedish costume designer who's worked with Ghost since at least Meliora (that's as far back as I was willing to scroll on her Instagram page lol). B Åkerlund has also worked for many other musical artists such as Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Madonna, the Rolling Stones, Ozzy Osborne, Blink 182 and Hollywood Undead (information from her own website)

The masks were made by Bob Basset, a visual artists who works a lot with leather. I find his work fascinating, you can look him up on Instagram (nsfw warning, there's a few naked ladies).

Fun fact! The horns are real cow horns. That's the reason some of them have gold tips, to hide the imperfections that come with working with actual horns.

He does have a shop where he sells his items, there's a mask there very similar to the Impera ones. You can also buy Papa's batwings if you happen to have 2500$ lying around!

The jackets are made on the same model as one of Papa's. The back is decorated with a spine-like design made from leather and cording. It's adorned with a few of our classic Impera buttons. Some of the hems were left raw and some deliberate weathering was done to make it look old and worn.

Fun fact! The shoulder pieces are not sewn into the garment, I would assume for easier cleaning. I don't know if they're held by strong magnets or snap buttons.

The vest (my beloved 😩) is made from flocked velvet in a paisley pattern, the front hems embellished with satin piping. It closes in the front with custom metal clasps that are riveted into the garment. The D parts are attached with what seems to me like wide elastic, which would lessen the pression on the clasps when moving around a lot. The back is made from two different types of fabric, I'd have to touch it to be able to tell you what they are. I assume the panels closer to the sides have some mild stretch to them. The top of the shoulders are decorated with Impera grucifix patches.

The shirts were not custom made for the ghouls, altho they were altered. The original shirt in the vintage painter linen shirt from Punk Rave and it is still being sold. Some of the cuffs were altered, removing the ruffles for some of the ghouls, but not all. They were removed for Dew, Mountain and Phantom, Aether's didn't have them either. As far as I can tell, all the ghoulettes still have them.

An unfinished piece of linen serves as an ascot, that piece is decorated with a metal devil skull. The colour of the skull doesn't appear to be consistent between each ghoul, Dew's looks gold almost bronze while Phantom's is a silver-like colour.

Another modification is the buttons, a small portion of them were removed in favor of our Impera buttons. Some of the ghouls have more buttons replaced than others, which is still a mystery to me.

The pants are called Jodhpurs, they were invented in the 1800s as horse riding pants. The wide part at the hips and thighs allowing for better movement. The ones the ghouls wear don't reach all the way to their ankles, they stop a bit past the calf muscle, hidden by the boots. (Yes, the ghouls are effectively wearing capri pants)

The boots are motorcycle riding boots, decorated by a grucifix. Like the shirt, they can still be bought online through the All American Boots website, altho the price tag is... Headache inducing to say the least.

The cape is a piece of costume that was only briefly worn on stage by the ghouls, Aurora being the only one who still wears one. I would assume it gets in the way of playing very easily. The cape itself is made of two fabrics, a light blue satin and a dark grey suede. The two pieces are not sewn together at the bottom, they move freely from each other. The cape is attached on the left shoulder with a harness piece that has one strap across the chest, decorated with a metal buckle, and one under the armpit.

Aight that's it for me, have a nice day byyyyye!!

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tutyayilmazz · 2 years

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Yes, because I forget every part of my identity whenever I go somewhere. This is ridiculous: Max has been in the industry for 30 years, he came to Sweden to work in LA and help mould the American sound you apparently hate so much with his SCANDINAVIAN EUROPOP SENSIBILTIES (hence the shift in sound from the less polished stuff to more wall of sound stuff). Also, your hatred of American music is quite telling, seeing as much of today’s popular music is influenced by Black American musicians. If you don’t like the song, fine, but stop trying to pretend to hold the higher moral ground using words you clearly don’t understand. Also, and this is crucial: the other half of the production team is in Stockholm. Which isn’t in America.

you won't even consider what I'm saying so just leave my ask box will you

#have fun going around saying iTs AcTuAlLy sWeDisH when people talk about their fave american artists #ask #anon

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slavghoul · 1 year

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Hello, I prepared some statistics to give you a short overview of Ghost's amazingly successful 2022. It is based on data I collected between 22/12/2021 and 22/12/2022.

The big Ghost event of 2022 was of course the release of the band's fifth album, IMPERA.

Since March 11, it has sold nearly 500,000 copies, won the American Music Award for Favorite Rock Album and received a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance ('Call Me Little Sunshine').

Within the first week of its release, the album reached #2 on the Billboard 200 (ranking the 200 most popular music albums and EPs in the United States) and ranked in the top 20 best-selling albums in 19 countries across the world:

#1 in Sweden, Austria, Germany, Finland, Spain

#2 in US, UK, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands

#3 in Australia, Canada

#5 in Switzerland, Ireland, France

#7 in Poland

#8 in Hungary

#12 in Denmark, Portugal

#20 in Italy

IMPERA is Ghost’s best charting album to date.

On YouTube, the band amassed a staggering 260 million views. 840,000 people subscribed to the channel this year, which makes up 42% of all current subscribers.

5 most watched videos on YouTube in 2022:

Mary On A Cross (Official Audio) – 32 million views

Call Me Little Sunshine (Official Music Video) – 15 million views

Square Hammer (Official Music Video) – 11 million views

Mary On A Cross (Live in Tampa 2022) – 8.2 million views

Spillways (Official Music Video) – 6.8 million views

On Spotify, the band amassed 1,285,625 new followers. That’s around 61% of all followers since the band appeared on the platform.

5 most streamed songs on Spotify in 2022:

Mary On A Cross - 193,709,473 streams

Call Me Little Sunshine – 41,108,589 streams

Square Hammer – 29,720,042 streams

Dance Macabre – 26,494,053 streams

Spillways – 24,910,870 streams

It goes without saying that the viral success of Mary On A Cross on TikTok brought in a lot of new fans this year, but the magnitude of it becomes even more astonishing if you look at numbers.

On this graph, I marked a few events that resulted in a noticeable spike in the number of monthly listeners on Spotify, including the approximate time when MOAC began to gain traction on TikTok. As you can see, nothing, not even the release of a new album, gave the band as much attention as the 3-year old song suddenly raising in popularity on one single platform.

Between end of July and beginning of October, the number of monthly listeners on Spotify skyrocketed from 2.5 million to 12 million. This is a 380% increase.

Although the numbers have been in decline since then, it appears that for the past month they have stayed at a steady 9 million. As of today (Dec 22, 2022) the exact number is 9,110,996. Exactly a year ago (Dec 22, 2021) the number was 1,999,951. A hefty 355% increase in only a year.

Some other milestones and fun facts:

On June 7, Cirice, Dance Macabre, and Square Hammer were all certified Gold by the RIAA for sales of 500,000 units in the USA. Following the viral success, Mary On A Cross was also certified Gold on November 20.

The band's most liked post on Instagram this year was a video of Papa throwing the first pitch at the White Sox game (273,241 likes).

The episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live where Ghost performed Call Me Little Sunshine was watched by around 1.3 million people.

In September, Ghost reached over 12 million monthly listeners on Spotify and was the 450th most streamed artist globally - that's 450 out of over 11 million!

As of today with over 1.6 billion accumulated streams Ghost is one of the 1,000 most successful artists on the platform of all time (currently #808).

On September 11, Mary On A Cross peaked at #1 in the Viral Hits chart on Spotify in 54 countries across the world.

It was also the highest charting Swedish song on the platform in 2022, peaking globally at #31.

At this point I think it’s safe to declare that Ghost’s global success reached unprecedent heights this year and even allowed them to officially join the ranks of mainstream artists. With all of the above, 70 completed shows this year and many more to come in 2023, and with media of the likes of The Wall Street Journal proclaiming Ghost “the next generation of arena stars,” it looks like that the band is well on the way to become one of the biggest rock acts of this century. Not bad for a side project started by one Swede in his bedroom somewhere in Linköping.

Let us hope 2023 will be as devilishly good!

#the band ghost

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casismycherrypiebaby · 1 year

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“San Marino that hasn’t been in the final since 2021 when the American artist Flo Rida helped them out. No one really knows why yet”

- Swedish commentator about San Marino

#eurovision #esc #eurovision song contest #esc 2023 #esc23 #eurovision 2023 #eurovision song contest 2023 #san #san marino

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mote-historie · 6 months

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Emma Löwstedt-Chadwick (Swedish, 1855 - 1932) aka Emma Löwstädt-Chadwick, Strandparasollen, Bretagne, 1880

Emma (Hilma Amalia) Löwstädt was born in Stockholm and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts 1874 - 1880, she traveled to Paris and settled in Grez. There she met the American artist FB Chadwick. They married in 1882. Along with him, she bought the inn, which became the focal point for the Swedish 'konstnärskolonien' (artist colony) Grez. Emma's sister Eva was also an artist.

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rebeccalouisaferguson · 1 month

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Rebecca Ferguson: Wildly subtle

Find out why actress Rebecca Ferguson makes us lose our minds. We show and tell you here. You will surely agree with us.

There are no half measures with Rebecca Ferguson. Her gaze is as intense as her voice and from there comes a sensuality that makes her footsteps feel. If the movie screen were made of rock, surely the footsteps of this Swedish actress have pierced the surface with the steps of her characters, which can never be described as lukewarm.

Rebecca Ferguson: the actress who dazzles with her subtly wild style

On the day of our session with her, the freckles on her chest and face shine like the red spice of the sands of the planet Arrakis from her two Duna films in 2021 and 2024, the result of the reflectors of our great photographer JuankR, who captured each one of their movements during the photoshoot that accompanies these pages, held in the English capital. Pointing. Approaching. Throwing himself to the floor. Feeling the spell of Rebecca, a movie star who has not stopped shaking us with that intense look that begins in sensuality and ends in melancholy. A sort of modern Ingrid Bergman from Casablanca (1942).

This is a dance One that we invite you to hold in your hands in these pages, where Rebecca's photographic plates are added to the words that we captured in this interview by telephone from London. The woman who has been queen in The White Queen, a spy alongside Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible series, a psychic in the sequel to The Shinning, even the mother of a messiah in the Duna series with sorceress powers, was also the muse and impossible love about to drive Hugh Jackman crazy in not one, but two films: The Greatest Showman and Reminiscence.

“As a photographer, JuanKr allowed me a lot of freedom. He let me play and reveal what I wanted to do. Show only what I decided at my own pace. And together with Caterina, the session's stylist, dress the way I wanted. We had an incredible day and that was because there was freedom, in a dance very similar to the Argentine tango.”

And she continues: “You know?… Tango has a lot to do with paying attention to your partner. May you always be willing to lead others, that's why I love it. Think about any relationship, company, any form of collaboration… tango teaches you that in order to move your partner forward you must lean back. You have to provide him with tiny amounts of movement, to make him notice that you are about to move. You can't push your body on the other person, otherwise you will run over them. You must communicate with your body, your foot, the center of your body and then you lean back, activating the movement for your partner to move forward. That represents for me the world I want to inhabit,” Rebecca's melodious voice tells us from the other side of the line, finishing off like a “shoe strike”: “In this case Juan Carlos was the leader as a photographer, but he was inclined backwards to allow me to enter and thus both of us move forward together.”

Listening to her talk about tango makes me realize that she has taken away the first question from me, after reviewing that in her beginnings as an artist she managed to set up an academy of this Latin American musical genre that tells stories of complicity as a couple with double bass hits, violin undulations. and the daring notes of the piano in a rhythmic rhythm.

How would a girl born in Stockholm, Sweden, end up surrendered to tango and then one day to the cinema? She is totally the stuff of a fairy tale. Daughter of Swedish businessman Olov Sundström and Englishwoman Rosemary Ferguson, Rebecca Louisa Ferguson Sundström took her stage name from her maternal ancestry, whose grandmother is Irish and her grandfather is from Scotland. Of the Libra sign, the actress has the year 1983 on her birth certificate.

“I studied at Adolf Fredrik's Music School, very famous in Stockholm, where we even went to sing at the Nobel Prize ceremonies. The arts are the fault of my mother, who encouraged me to be a dancer as much as to learn jazz and funk. She wanted to expose me to everything, I even learned to play ‘forehead poker’ and canasta with ladies her age.”

And Rebecca's mother knew what it meant to soak up the art in your own city. In 1973, Rosemary Ferguson helped the local band ABBA translate the lyrics of their song “Waterloo” from Swedish into English to compete in Eurovision (a contest where the quartet's fame exploded).

As if prophetic, the cover of ABBA's third album in 1975 shows Rosemary's face peeking out from outside the car that transports the group's members, with champagne in hand, looking curious under her wavy reddish hair. Less than a decade later, Rebecca herself would be the one born to walk in that world of art and glamour.

“One day I tried what I would call Argentine dance, tango, and I fell in love with it. Even when I was older my teacher, Danielle, took me under his tutelage and we made a great duo. I had many classes but never became a professional; However, I was good enough to be an instructor,” she clarifies.

And she adds: “I liked teaching the elderly in the fishing village where I lived. That joy of dancing never gets old. You have in front of you 80-year-old men or women dancing with 20-year-old men or women. That didn't matter. The romance and the electricity, the communication without people even knowing their names, nothing gets in the way. Just the existence of that moment between the two,” Rebecca shares, enjoying the memories of her.

For Ferguson, his first flirtation with acting was in the soap opera Nya Tider at the turn of the 20th century to the 21st and at 17 years old, there she was given the opportunity to dream big. The story goes that in 2011, one day at the Stockholm market, director Richard Hobert, after observing her, invited her to be part of his film A One-Way Trip to Antibes for which Rebecca received the Promising Star award at the International Festival. Stockholm Film Festival.

At 28 years old, Rebecca's character in A One-Way Trip to Antibes takes the veteran protagonist, Sven-Bertil Taube, on a Vespa-type motorcycle and helps him rediscover the reasons for living, when he knows that his children want him to leave to steal his inheritance.

That same vitality behind his blue gaze, which also conveys the need to react quickly, such as not letting a definitive moment pass or holding one's hands on the edge of a cliff, has been part of the reasons why actors like Tom Cruise have called Rebecca to be their ally in film adventures.

The British spy Ilsa Faust, who also points guns at Ethan Hunt (Cruise) who allows herself to be lowered from the heights with him, was the opportunity for Rebecca to put her control over her body into practice, even though she herself has said that the heights are dizzying, which he had to challenge in his three Mission Impossible films between 2015 and 2022.

Find out all of Rebecca Ferguson's revelations in our exclusive interview, available in the April print issue of Esquire.

translated from spanish for @rebeccalouisaferguson

#rebecca ferguson #interview #juankr shoot #esquire mexico

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ducklooney · 5 days

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One question. What do you think Disney from America controls European Disney and must be their canon, what's the matter? Is there something they don't like?

Hi and sorry for not answering this question earlier. You have asked a good question, but I am not sure how to answer it through a long essay or through short explanations, although I will answer it this way.

After all, Disney was created in America by Walt Disney and originally they created all the important characters we know, European writers and artists used them in their comics only later, after the Second World War. Back then, there wasn't so much censorship and writers were free to do whatever they wanted without ruining the originality. And so for several decades until the last decade. Romano Scarpa and Guido Martina created separate comics in their own ways, different from Carl Barks and Al Taliaferro and you have an Italian vision through Topolino comics. You also have Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish writers and artists who, relying on Carl Barks and the American Disney, made comics in their own way and thus created a separate kind of Donald Duck comics. Yes, you also have Brazilian comics who have written a lot of comics especially about Jose Carioca ever since the movie Saludos Amigos from 1942 was shown. And they created those comics in their own way, which is quite different from American comics. Unlike Latin American and European comics, American comics after the 1940s era clearly separated Mickey and Donald so that they neither see each other nor know each other except at times, since they live in different cities, such as Mousetown and Duckburg. American comics, not counting Archie comics, Peanuts, Garfield, and superhero comics, declined after the 1980s because television took precedence, so many watched television, either series, movies, or cartoons instead of reading comics. So Disney comics also experienced a market decline during that period and then you have the making of the OG Ducktales in 1987 which was made mostly by Disney's animation studio in Tokyo, Japan. And since then, the American Disney has not relied on comics, although since the time of Walt Disney, the differences between the canon in cartoons and in comics have been clearly made.

From what I've talked to others, Walt Disney was also unhappy with the popularity of Scrooge McDuck that Carl Barks created, because a different Christmas comic should have been created. However, the American Disney has clearly indicated that the canon in cartoons is the only official canon, while the comic book is not, except in some exceptions, but that's why they force their other productions where they have ownership to obey and respect the given canon that Disney requires. I think since the golden age of cartoons, the story started about how the official Disney can't really stand their comics, even though the comics took Mickey, Donald and other characters to a high level. Many of the characters we know came from comic books rather than cartoons. I'm not saying this for nothing, since your question just stated that since everything is under the Disney name, although they deviated from the path set by Walt Disney, they still determine the main editorial policy for many comics published in Europe and Latin America. Yes, before, as I mentioned, the authors made independently in their own way, but so that Disney didn't even know, but with the arrival of the Internet, that changed and a kind of censorship had to be done. Sometimes due to public pressure, sometimes due to wrong decisions, although I don't like to talk about politics here, but I think that lately politics has had a lot of influence on it, although I will tell you that politics had a lot of influence during the Second World War as well. Propaganda cartoons are very much the case. But in order not to deviate from the topic, I will tell you a couple of examples where American Disney had a lot of influence on European comics and how the writers still had to respect Disney's canon.

Donald Duck had several girlfriends in addition to Daisy and that the earlier Donald Duck fandom preferred Donald with other people rather than Daisy because Daisy was a bitch who treated Donald horribly, although that's not Daisy's fault as much as the writers who over Daisy mocked feminism. Yes, I love when Donald and Daisy fight over stupid things, but not that Donald constantly suffers from Daisy's impossible wishes that never come true and then kicks Donald like that for her displeasure. Disappointed, Donald finds other people who will suit him better. One of the most common examples with whom Donald is on excellent terms is Reginella, the queen of the planet Pacificus, and she appeared for the first time in the comic "Paperino e l'avventura sottomarina" or Donald and the underwater adventures from 1972 by the writer Rodolfo Cimino and the artist Giorgio Cavazzano when Donald first meets Reginella. Reginella became Donald's new hope and their couple was really great in my opinion and so in several comics. Yes, I love the Donald and Daisy romance, but Reginella with Donald is very special to me and I understand why others prefer it over Donald and Daisy.

However, since Disney found out what other comics were doing unofficially, Disney imposed an unwritten rule that their canon must be respected, so Donald must be with Daisy and no one else. So the last comic with Reginella from August 2021 called "L'ultima avventura di Reginella" or The Last Adventure with Reginella by authors Alex Bertani and Vito Stabile and artist Stefano Zanchi is about the breakup between Donald and Reginella because supposedly Scrooge can't more to finance Donald's trip to another planet, and Donald also admitted to Reginella that Daisy is his first and only love. Yes, Daisy has improved a lot in the last comics and treats Donald differently, but again it was really pathetic that something like that had to be done instead of making some kind of deal to make a clone of Donald and stay with Reginella or something like that. It just tells you that official Disney made the decision that way. However, Reginella appears in two more comics after that and has one comic with Daisy, but I haven't read that comic so I can't tell you exactly. Those who are and who know it, would tell you. Although I would like to see Daisy and Reginella together.

Of course the love relationship between Donald and Reginella is not the only one, but I put it as the most common example that Donald is not only with Daisy as the only "canon" girlfriend. You also have romantic relationships Donald with Lyla Lay (Paperinik New Adventures), Xadhoom (Paperinik New Adventures), Kay K (Double Duck), and others. However, in the comic Double Duck "Agent Zero" Kay K admits to Daisy that Donald's greatest love is Daisy and that they are still friends and Daisy was ashamed of that because before she was very jealous that Donald was with someone else and not Daisy. And there you can see that even though Donald is with someone else, he still stays with Daisy, but it is by no means a breakup under Disney's directive as it was done with Reginella.

2. Canceled characters due to certain things

Dutch comics mostly until 2019 and 2020 drew characters from Song of the South such as Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and Brer Bear and they even had separate comics and were often represented together with Mickey, Donald and friends because they were anthropomorphic characters that also represented classic Disney. Of course, because of the problems in America related to the African-American population, Disney had to stop it and exclude the given characters because they represented caricatures of the African-American population from the South of the 19th century. The South, I mean the South of the USA, where there used to be a Confederacy that seceded and where the Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865. Of course, they could have just stated that it was a product of its time and that the value system back then was not the same as today's, but no, Disney banned Song of The South and cut those characters out, and those characters never appeared again, in those Dutch comics. Yes, I certainly condemn racism, but one must know that it should be censored in a different way, that is, to send a warning. Warner Bros. did a good job with Looney Tunes where they just said it was a product of its time and we don't make it anymore. In this way, you respect the old materials, and you also respect other people of other races. That is, everyone is satisfied. However, in the Dutch comics, Brer Rabbit is presented differently, after all, Disney takes the lead and they are not interested in excuses.

Not to mention the censoring of two Don Rosa comics because of Bombie the Zombie. Instead of giving a warning that it was the product of a man who created under the influence of Barks and that Disney had nothing to do with it, they simply banned it as if they were ashamed of the past. And you know who is ashamed of the past and simply forgets it, is condemned to repeat it, but worse. But I would not talk about that, because it is too difficult a topic.

3. There are no dark scenes in Disney comics like before

There are no more dark scenes like gun chases, dark and dangerous scenes as well as related to the depiction of women and ladies in a realistic view, because it is certainly not for children according to Disney, even though those comics are also read by adults, nor should there be anything dark related to Mickey and friends, and you have the Mickey Mystery comics where exactly such scenes appear. Mostly done for security reasons. However, due to Disney's recent policy and knowing what the authors of European comics are doing, they had to take a different approach. It is no longer the 1990s where you could have scary scenes like in PKNA and where you would feel sorry for Donald as if you were watching some dark blockbuster movie, yet the American Disney which supposedly has its main rules and its main say to decide what can be done in comics and what not not. And they deny comic book material, which is really ironic. Although I'm more frustrated about these things that Disney is doing lately, I still partially understand the need for censorship, but not to ban certain characters (especially Hiawatha), but you can't show racist caricatures like before, but it certainly doesn't mean that you should ban them to give the content to be displayed and read, because this negates the past, which is a great danger for future generations. Of course, European comic artists and writers approach these problems differently and write differently, but they certainly have the free right to draw and work, but they must adhere to the main canons that Disney sets. One of the reasons why you don't even get to see Donald's parents alive or the father of Donald's nephews appear and if he even exists.

There is a lot to say, but I think this is enough. I also apologize if I offended anyone with some of my comments, as it is not necessarily aimed at anyone except for certain stupid Disney decisions. I may have been vague, so I ask especially those who know Disney comics to correct me if I made any mistakes and feel free to add what you want to say. I hope these answers will help you enough to know why there are no more dangerous scenes in Disney comics like before. And thank you for asking me and if he has anything to ask me, feel free to ask me.

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the-cricket-chirps · 6 months

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Jean Francois Millet, The Gleaners, 1857 (top)

Guy Rose, The Potato Gatherers, 1891 (center)

Ester Almqvist, Potato Pickers, circa 1924 (below)

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shadowjackery · 1 year

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This post was brought to you by Parts of the Body and the letter H.

Continuing the train of thought from: https://www.tumblr.com/shadowjackery/709801424218963968/pick-a-live-action-movie-keep-one-human-actor?source=share

Design sketches and casting notes after the cut.

The token human is Hamlet. This seems obvious to me.

Bert and Ernie are Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. Their doppelgänger are what-not muppets, who turned out looking a lot like Andy Candy and Eddie Spaghetti from "Captain Vegetable" on Sesame Street.

Gonzo is The Player. Again, this feels perfect to me. The death-challenging artiste! Gonzo turned out to be surprisingly tricky to figure out how to draw well.

Piggy would demand to be Queen Gertrude, so Kermit has to be King Claudius. Mirroring her, Link Hogthrob in drag is the Player Queen. And for the Player King, Camilla, also in drag, to stay in theme.

I never got around to casting the Ghost of Hamlet's Father. Maybe Rolf? You could talk me into Uncle Deadly, or a bedsheet ghost, or that Jim Henson muppet they used in the ol' jugband numbers, or the hideous CG recreation of Jim himself with a machine AI voice.

In Stoppard's text, the youngest player, "Alfred", plays a Queen. I changed that here: Elmo plays Alfred who plays a Princess, mirror to Ophelia, and for her I just made up a girl monster because the girl monsters on Sesame Street seem too young to be fooling around with college boys. Though, yes, now that you mention it, Elmo is also far too young to be pimped out by Gonzo, but that part of the play is supposed to be transgressive, and anyway have you ever seen Elmo interviewed on a late night show? He and Gonzo would love the joke. They would conspire to make it somehow worse.

Last minute thought that I never drew: Ophelia could also be played by a fish, because she drowns.

Laertes: "...How?!" Claudius: "Well, it's too complicated to go into here. This play is long enough." Laertes: "I understand entirely. Shall we continue?" Claudius: "Please."

Sam the American Eagle is perfect for Polonius, and I invented a different bird for his player equivalent.

Grover plays Laertes cranked up to 11, and I think that's Harry Monster or someone similar as his player equivalent.

Scooter could be Horatio. I did think of Rizzo the Rat at one point, but he would not put up with Hamlet's shit for very long, while Scooter would shrug and roll with it, which is more true to the text.

I never quite figured out castings for Osric and Fortinbras, who don't appear in these drawings, because I honestly like Sweetums for either part and couldn't decide. I think I tend toward making him Osric ("A palpable hit!"), because the Swedish Chef playing the Norwegian Prince could be hilarious:

Fortinbras: "...Wat du hey?!"

Horatio: "What is it ye would see? If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search."

Fortinbras: "De chicky cri un hackensvacken! O Morp, Wat festen toward yer unendinlindinlindin cell Ther thoo soo muchen kingen in un kaboom So bludili hast stroock?"

(My apologies to Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians...)

And, naturally, the Gravediggers who gleefully desecrate the grave of a certain much-despis'd court jester couldn't be anybody else but Statler and Waldorf.

#hamlet #rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead #the muppets #fancomic #character design sketches #tw child prostitution #referenced but not depicted #fan casting

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jeniffercheck · 8 months

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i am begging for a oneshot (or more) that touches on the shivlina silly mirror thing 👁️👁️ give me all the whump pls!!

thank u sm for the prompt! i had a leftover argument set during kill list that was very fun to play around with, i've placed it in the Sepsis universe, but parts 1 and 2 are not required readings. follows all canon up to 4x05, including tomshiv being on-again/off-again. silly mirror (and more) included<3

read here or on ao3

words: 3.4k

“What were you and Tom talking about last night?”

Shiv’s hovering over her suitcase in her slate and granite pseudo-cabin, Karolina sitting on the couch in the corner of the room. It’s late now, the Norwegian forest outside slowly dimming as the night draws near. They’re flying back to the States in the morning, and they’ll accept the deal from Matsson and get rid of the cruise lines and the fascists and Shiv is going to be the fucking American CEO and they can finally just put Dad to rest and all this other bullshit with him. It’s simple.

At least, it should be. Because what fucking business does Karolina have hanging around Tom all weekend anyway?

“Me and Tom?” Karolina asks. She doesn’t look up from the laptop in front of her, her furious typing barely faltering as she speaks.

“At the party,” Shiv says. “You were standing next to each other for an awfully long time.”

The typing finally slows, and Shiv looks at her, unreadable per usual.

“Oh,” Karolina says. “Nothing much. Just, making fun of Swedish dance music. And—I mean then, Tom tried to lecture me on why Swedish House Mafia is actually one of the greater electronic music artists of this generation, which, sure I guess, but I don’t think he even understood which generation he was talking about—”

“Karolina, this is serious.”

“I’m being serious, Shiv,” Karolina says, eyes focused back on the laptop. “I don’t ever want to hear about Swedish House Mafia again.”

The typing picks up and Shiv turns back to her suitcase, rearranging the contents for the fifth time. It shouldn’t make her so upset, but it does. Much like a crossed line or a broken boundary, it’s out of her control. Her pull on Tom is getting looser every day, she can feel as much, and her pull with her bothers is getting looser every day, and Matsson sends fucking blood bricks to his ex-girlfriend, so really, her entire livelihood is hanging in the balance by a group of men all held together with a bunch of loose threads and screws, and she’s fucking asking Karolina the simplest question in the world, and the only answer she can give Shiv is Swedish House Mafia.

Shiv turns around.

“So, if I called Tom right now and asked him what you talked about last night, he’d just say Swedish dance music?”

Karolina looks at her then, calculating eyes not leaving Shiv as she closes her laptop. She’s weighing the pros and cons, thinking through the risks and consequences of telling Shiv the truth, and Shiv’s had it. If she has to force Karolina’s hand, then so be it.

“Forget it,” Shiv says. “I’m calling.”

“Shiv—” Karolina says, standing up. “Hold on.”

“Remember something else?” She waits for Karolina to speak, feigning patience they both know she doesn’t have, and it doesn’t take Karolina long to speak up.

“We got into an argument,” Karolina admits.

“About?”

Karolina crosses her arms and looks away.

“You,” she mumbles.

Perfect. That’s perfect.

“Anything specific, or just which pair of pants you think my ass looks better in?” Shiv asks, feeling satisfied as Karolina rolls her eyes. Shiv’s getting that answer.

“He asked why we’ve been spending so much time together,” Karolina says, which expeditiously turns Shiv’s minor jealousy into major fury, because this was not on her agenda for the trip.

“And what the fuck did you tell him?”

“Nothing,” Karolina says. “I—I just—”

“You just what?”

“I just—fuck—I threatened him,” Karolina says. “Okay? I threatened him.”

“Oh, you threatened him,” Shiv says, as if it’s the simplest thing in the world. “Would you like to share what you threatened him with, Karolina?”

“No,” Karolina says. “I don’t.”

Karolina has her world-renowned poker face on, and Shiv can only imagine what it is that Karolina used against him. She probably has a war supply of paper trails against every person in the company, let alone Tom. And it’s not that Shiv wants to protect him, but Karolina’s a different force when it comes to Shiv, and she isn’t sure that Tom would ever stand a fighting chance against Karolina.

“You know, I don’t need you fighting battles for me,” Shiv says. “I’m perfectly capable of fighting them on my own.”

“Yeah, that’s why he’s still your husband and not your ex-husband,” Karolina says.

So, Karolina’s mad. Fine. Shiv can be mad too.

“I’ll divorce him when I want to divorce him,” Shiv says.

“Because that’s what you said the last time, right?”

It’s fair. Shiv came crawling back, divorce papers dangling like a bird in her teeth and Karolina believed her. Wanted her. Shiv believed it too, she did, and then Tom took it back. He gave her another chance, and she’d made a commitment, right?

“I didn’t say anything,” Shiv says. “I said we were separating, that’s not a fucking divorce.”

“Seriously?” Karolina says. “That’s how we’re doing this? Fucking semantics?”

“If you have a problem with my relationship with Tom, then fucking say it to me,” Shiv says. “I don’t need you running around and screwing shit up.”

“I’m screwing shit up?” Karolina asks. “He’s fucking you, Shiv. He’s fucking you right to the finish line, like he always has been, but I’m the one who’s screwing shit up.”

“Yeah, Karolina,” Shiv says, crossing her arms. “You are.”

Karolina laughs hollowly and she picks up her laptop as if she’s ready to make her exit.

“Sorry for trying to defend you, Shiv,” she says, walking away from the couch. “I won’t fucking do it again.”

“It’s not your place,” Shiv says, and Karolina freezes, expression now angered.

“Please, Shiv, explain to me what my place is.”

Shiv feeds into the anger as well, and somewhere in the back of her mind she begs herself to stop, to just let it go and sleep it off and remember that Karolina cares about her, that Karolina wants what’s best for her, that finally having someone irrevocably in her corner doesn’t mean that she has to immediately try and push them out, but Shiv’s never been adept at accepting care. Not without mutually assured destruction.

“To just shut the fuck up and let me handle my shit, Karolina,” Shiv says.

“One foot out Tom’s door and one foot in mine,” Karolina says. “You’re really handling it, huh?”

“This is ridiculous,” Shiv mutters. “Don’t you—fucking have a job to be begging for right now?”

“If it’s working under you?” Karolina asks, stepping forward. “Fuck no.”

Shiv feels the words like the wind biting at her ankles; the tantalizing chill still finding its way to sink into her skin despite it being something she’d come dressed prepared for. The silence is thick, Karolina’s heavy breath waiting for Shiv to bite back.

“Did you forget my dad just died, or are you still getting off on all the crisis management?”

“That’s not funny, Shiv.”

“No?” Shiv asks. “So, just to be clear—you did, or you didn’t start writing the press release on his death before they’d even gotten the defibrillators out? I mean, fuck—you’ve probably had it written for months, haven’t you? What, since the stroke? Just biding your time until you could swoop in and play PR doctor?”

“What the hell is your problem?” Karolina asks, her hands now gripping the laptop tightly. “I’m sorry your father owned a Fortune 500, Shiv. I’ll make sure to let him know we need time to stabilize the stock market first the next fucking time he—”

Karolina cuts herself off and Shiv swoops forward with a taunting gaze.

“What, croaks?” Shiv asks. “You’d love to do it all again, huh? You fucking love it. Exploiting death, it’s what you’re good at, right?”

“Fuck you,” Karolina says, her eyes filling with tears. Shiv can’t stop it when the sudden display of emotion sets her off.

“Jesus, tears?” she scoffs. “We should get a mirror in here for how fucking stupid you look.”

She doesn’t realize what she’s said until after it’s come out, the words leaving a horrible after-taste in her mouth. Karolina scoffs so quietly Shiv is almost certain she’d made it up, not hearing much between the pounding of her heart filling her ears.

“What?” Karolina asks, her small voice laced with disappointment and disbelief, and if Shiv thought the hole in her heart couldn’t get any bigger, well, she was wrong.

Shiv opens her mouth to speak, but there’s nothing for her to say.

Karolina takes a tentative step forward, arms still crossed and eyes still wet, and she speaks, clearly shaken.

“I’m sorry that I interfered with Tom, and I’m sorry that I’m in a position where I have to treat your father’s death like it’s just business, truly, Siobhan, I am, but—” Karolina pauses, her words hanging, and Shiv’s almost grateful when she doesn’t complete the thought. She heads for the door, opening it slightly before stopping briefly, “I’m going to go look stupid in my own fucking room.”

—

Shiv sits long past the sun-setting and the last-night festivities going quiet and the other cabin’s lights going off one by one, replaying the argument in her head. She pokes and prods at it, wondering at which point it went sour, whether it had been the whole time. Karolina started it. She brought up the divorce and she baited Shiv. It was her.

Yet somehow, Shiv still feels like she’s done something irreparable.

When she can’t take it anymore, she braves the woods with just her phone flashlight and the skin of her teeth, and she goes to Karolina’s room. If Shiv were counting, she’d note that it only took Karolina twenty seconds to open the door, and she’s definitely been way less mad at Shiv and taken way longer.

“Hey,” Shiv says.

“Hey,” Karolina repeats, with no hint of her current mental state.

They stare silently for a second until Shiv hears a bristling in trees, and she remembers she’s outside in the wilderness.

“Uh, you wanna let me in before Norwegian Jason fucking hops out of the bushes?”

Karolina rolls her eyes but opens the door wider, allowing Shiv entry. Shiv immediately shivers, in disbelief at how cold it is in her suite.

“You know we’re not in charge of expensing utilities, right?” Shiv says. “You can turn the heat up without getting fired.”

“You mean I won’t have to beg for my job?” Karolina asks.

Shiv fucked up. She knows she did. She can see it in the tensing of Karolina’s shoulders, hear it in the curtness of her words. It’s not unfamiliar territory though, and that’s the only thing keeping her going. She’s done this before. She can grovel.

“You’re not going to lose your job, Karolina.”

“Good, good,” Karolina says. “Did Matsson tell you he has a death he needs you to exploit? I’ve been told I’m good at that.”

Shiv looks down in embarrassment.

“That was…” she trails off, biting her tongue. What else can she say? It always comes to this. Things are good until they’re not. Shiv is happy until she’s not. She treats people right until she doesn’t.

“Low, Shiv,” Karolina says. “Even for you.”

“Yeah,” Shiv says. “Digging into old wounds—whatever. Not cool, I know.”

The silence around them is suffocating. Shiv wishes there were some sort of card she could present, some pharmacy junk-drawer filler that says, “Sorry for being a cunt. Will do it again!” and maybe another one that says, “My dad just died and all I got you was this card!” and then she wouldn’t have to explain it, she’d just be able to give Karolina something concrete, something that explains she doesn’t know how to be a person right now and please don’t hold that against her.

But Karolina gives her the chance to try.

“Can you—can you just tell me what happened?” Karolina asks.

“What happened is my dad just died and Matsson is fucking insane, and you, you just—” Shiv has to turn away. She doesn’t want to rile herself up again, doesn’t want to resort to lashing out.

“What, Shiv?” Karolina asks. “I dislike how Tom treats you? I want you to be happy?”

“You’re meddling, Karolina,” Shiv says, turning back around.

“Shiv, you included me,” Karolina says. “You approached me, and you said you were getting a divorce and you told me it could all work out. I’m sorry if I crossed a line, but some of those lines belong to me now.”

“Tom is not—”

“Including Tom,” she says. “The second you invited me back into your life, that included Tom.”

Shiv can’t argue with that. She made Karolina a liability, she told Karolina that Tom wouldn’t be around for much longer, and she told Karolina that she wanted her.

“Okay,” Shiv says. “It’s just—this deal and the fucking funeral, it’s—it’s a lot, Karolina, alright? And a fucking, property war over me is not helping. It’s not.”

Karolina’s facade cracks just a little, her eyes softening and frown deepening.

‘You’re right, Shiv, I’m sorry,” she says. “But Tom’s just—he’s a fucking asshole, and I can’t just stand there and watch him gloat while the rest of our jobs are on the chopping block, I can’t.”

“You’re not going to be on the kill list,” Shiv says. She made sure of that.

“You don’t know that, Shiv—”

“I said, you’re not going to be on the fucking list,” Shiv repeats, voice hoarse yet strong all the same.

Karolina freezes at the interruption. She huffs, something like a challenge in her eyes and Shiv narrows hers in response.

“You’re not on the list,” Shiv repeats again, softer. “So, whatever superiority Tom thinks he has over you right now, he doesn’t. Including me.”

Karolina stares at Shiv, a host of emotions swimming in her eyes, but the one that sticks is a quiet despondence that makes Shiv regret ever having scolded Karolina at all.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Karolina says, turning away.

She sits down on the bed, avoiding Shiv’s gaze, the tell-tale sign of her tears returning when she brings a taught sleeve to the corner of her eye. A pang of guilt rolls through Shiv’s gut at the words she said earlier. It’s a disgusting little feat, learning how to weaponize the very things that were once used against you. Matsson had said it himself not even twenty-four hours earlier.

Like your dad.

Shiv sits down next to Karolina, not waiting for an invitation, and she mulls in the silence, unsure of what she could say to fix this. If what she could say would even be enough. That she doesn’t want everything she touches to be shrouded in venomous generational warfare. That this isn’t fun for her.

Shiv stares out the window ahead of them, barely able to make out the trees in the darkness. If Shiv Roy falls in a forest, does she make a sound? Or does she let herself go quietly, without a fight? It’s been so long since her voice actually mattered, she’s forgotten that it still affects people. People she cares about.

“If I apologize, will it even mean anything?” she asks.

“It always means something,” Karolina says. “Every time.”

Every time should feel like a dig, but it doesn’t. It’s comforting in some fucked up way, that admits the struggle and the chaos and cruelty, Karolina hears her. That she listens, and fights for Shiv’s honor even when Shiv doesn’t want her to. That she cares, too.

“Everything is so fucked right now,” Shiv says. “I can’t be the person you need me to be.”

Karolina’s eyes turn sad suddenly.

“I don’t need you to be anything,” Karolina says. “I’m not trying to hold you to some impossible standard, Shiv, I—I just want you to be honest with me every once in a while.”

“Honesty,” Shiv laughs, though it quickly settles, and she can’t stop her eyes from pooling with tears and her throat from constricting tightly. Karolina squeezes Shiv’s hand, always her lifeline when nobody else seems to be there. Shiv looks away, voice taught. “I can’t lose Tom right now. Not both of them.”

Karolina sighs, the sound smooth yet resolved. It hurts, thinking Shiv’s caused endless disappointment inside this woman, but she reminds herself that there has to be something good between them, for disappointment to exist at all.

“Okay,” Karolina says.

“If this changes things—”

“Shiv,” Karolina interrupts. “It’s not me or him, okay? You’re not going to chase me off that easily.”

“What if me and Tom—you know, what if we never end?”

“I don’t know,” Karolina says. “But for right now, I know that I still want you, that hasn’t changed.”

Shiv nods, running out of worries to throw out in the air. It’s fucking pathetic, but everything is pathetic right now. She’s almost content to wallow, just this once, until Karolina steers the conversation in a direction Shiv was hoping they could just both forget about, a skeleton of a conversation she hoped they’d shove under the bed and never speak about again.

“Shiv—what you said—about getting a mirror—”

It was a nasty thing to say at all, but especially to Karolina. Karolina, who trusts Shiv. Who’s shown Shiv vulnerability, and who’s trusted Shiv with that vulnerability. She’s disgusted with herself for having abused that privilege.

“It was cruel and fucked up,” Shiv says. “You’re allowed to cry, of course you are.”

“I know I’m allowed to cry, Shiv,” Karolina says. “Do you know that you’re allowed to cry?”

Shiv’s tears pool at the question, and even still, she can feel herself holding back. It’s a reaction she can’t control, holding it all back. Some days it’s like the only emotion she has is the absence of it; like the only thing she can do is swallow herself whole, scale down her tears and turn them into something more useful like anger or spite. She learned early on that if they see her cry, they’ll know. They’ll know just how fucking stupid she is.

She clears her throat, and Karolina shifts closer to her, wrapping an arm around Shiv’s waist.

“When we were younger, and we were upset, Dad—he would take us in front of this mirror and he would make us look at ourselves as we cried,” Shiv says. “He, uh, called it the Silly Mirror.”

Karolina says nothing, but Shiv doesn’t know what she would expect her to say, anyway. The context only adds an extra heaviness to the statement, and it’s a hard pill to swallow that she’d said it at all. It’s one thing to use her dad’s words against herself, her brothers even, but to use them against Karolina? It’s a vitriol Shiv had hoped wasn’t in her. Karolina called her rotten once, and Shiv considers that it could still be true. She’s lived in this body for too long now, of course, it would’ve spoiled somewhere along the way. It’s possible she’d been rotten from conception, that she spent too long in her mom’s belly and ruined her chances before she even knew what self-sabotage was. The evidence is there; the last born before Caroline ran. It was Shiv. Rotten Shiv.

Two built a company. Three a crowd.

“Shiv—” Karolina starts, but Shiv doesn’t want to hear it. Not yet.

“I thought it was my mom,” Shiv continues. “The mirror—I thought it was her. And when Dad died—I mean, when Ken told me, I thought it was her, too. I knew it wasn’t, but I just—I hoped it was, you know?”

Karolina nods, her hand now rubbing sympathetically across Shiv’s back.

“He has to be what I remember, because if I’m wrong about him, then who else am I wrong about?”

If she cries for a monster, is she a monster too?

“You’re not him,” Karolina says. “A result, maybe, or—or a product, but you’re not him.”

A product sounds much too clinical a word for what’s supposed to be daughter, but it’s a nice thought, that it’s nurture over nature and she’s not inherently evil for acting the only way she knows how.

“I don’t deserve you,” Shiv says.

Karolina just sighs and rests her head on Shiv’s shoulders, and it feels something like a truce. Shiv wraps her own arm around Karolina’s waist, and knows this connection is something she often takes for granted. Karolina links their free hands together in response.

“I wish you could see that you do.”

#one location arguments where the girlies are not doing anything other than arguing is hard i have learned #shivlina #shiv x karolina #shivlina fic #shiv roy #karolina novotney #succession fic #but we did it joe #duskfalls

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respectthepetty · 10 months

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Reading the (Visual) Rainbow 101

Lesson 6 - Cultural Awareness

Because I get so many asks about colors, I decided the best way to celebrate Pride is to educate anyone who is interested in how to better Read the (Visual) Rainbow and simultaneously allow myself to appreciate queer media.

With each lesson, we've been working through how to read visual messages, but what if the message is in another language, literally or figuratively? What happens when you Just. Don't. Get. It?

This will be the toughest lesson because it requires active engagement with the media you consume, so let's get to work!

Basics

Ethnocentrism is the practice of evaluating other cultures based on the expectations of your culture. When you do this, you misinterpret messages and place value on concepts that aren't important to that culture.

Cultural Literacy is the capability to understand one's culture as well as others while appreciating the similarities and differences.

Way back in Lesson 1, rhetorical situations were mentioned. Within a rhetorical situation, we must think about the work's creator and its intended audience because sometimes, the intended audience isn't YOU and you cannot relate to the creator. So what do you do?

All of the video examples I have suggested up until now are from American artists or artists whose country predominantly speaks English. Language and culture are closely connected, but language isn't the only aspect of culture. However, for time's sake, think about how not knowing a language hinders us from understanding a culture. If we can't understand what people are saying (literally), we won't understand what they are trying to say (figuratively).

Which means we have to actively investigate the media we consume.

Video Examples

Much like Hayley Kiyoko's "She" music video, where we needed to understand the cultural reference for "This Coke is a Fanta" to understand its purpose within the video, the two videos suggested in the previous lesson require cultural understanding. Both were from cishet men yet dealt with trans rights, but if you were unfamiliar with the cultural context, you probably missed it.

Sweden

Avicii's "Silhouette" is a song about progress and self-realization. The video reflects this. We see a masc-presenting person wake up in the morning. The video shifts to a fem-presenting person waking up later in the day. The transition between cool lighting to warm lighting lets us know this isn't simply a difference in day or two different people, but an evolution of ONE person, a concept we learned in Lesson 2. We see similar bottles next to the clocks, with two additions later in the day.

If you didn't realize these characters are the same person, go back and notice the use of red. While the first person is being operated on, we see red blood mixed with shots of the second person in red.

So how is this about trans right? We can see it is about a trans woman, but we have to think about the rhetorical situation to understand the rest.

The creator is Avicii who was a Swedish DJ and producer. The audience would be other Swedes. In 2012, when the video was released, the Swedish government debated whether to amend its transgender laws. The most significant being forced sterilization, which was a requirement if a person underwent gender affirmation surgery. A person also had to be unmarried. People were loud about this.

In the video, right before the masc-presenting person is about to undergo surgery, the song stops as the older doctor's CD player begins to skip. He hits the player several times while cursing, "Does it have to be so fucking difficult?"

When the song comes back on, the lyrics pick back up at:

Straight ahead on the path we have before us Day by day, soon the change will come Don't you know we took a big step forward Just lead the way and we pull the trigger And we will never get back to To the old school To the old rounds, it's all about the newfound We are the newborn, the world knew all about us (We are the future and we're here to stay) We've come a long way since that day And we will never look back, at the faded silhouette

If you weren't a Swede in 2012, you probably missed how significant this video was, and it's because you don't understand most of the context in which is was made (rhetorical situation) since you weren't the intended audience.

Puerto Rico

The other suggested video was Bad Bunny's "Yo Perreo Sola" which translates to "I twerk alone." It's a feminist anthem about a woman not wanting to be harassed while dancing by herself rather than for the attention of men. However, it's also about trans rights.

We begin the video with Bad Bunny as a fem-presenting character in red with X's in the doorway. We see him in various scenes like the pink room surrounded by pink flowers and chained up by women as he continues to push against the ideas of masculinity.

All are important, but the most significant is the scene where his two characters meet and dance with each other.

The neon signs read "Las Mujeres Mandan" (women rule) and "Ni Una Menos" (not one *woman* less). These two signs are layered historical messages.

The first started as the title of an old Mexican movie about a man who left his wife and kids for his mistress (shenanigans follow), but the famous Mexican musician Paquita la del Barrio popularized the saying by turning it into a feminist anthem about demanding respect from men. It's on the level of Aretha Franklin's "Respect."

The second sign is a fourth-wave feminist saying popularized in Argentina regarding femicide and other gender-based violence. Its message demands that not one more woman be the victim of this violence.

Now, to start connecting the dots: Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican. His audience would be other Puerto Ricans and, largerly, Spanish-speakers in Latin American countries. That's a lot of people who understand these two messages. But also, Bad Bunny placing himself as a feminine character emphasizes that trans women are included in these messages. Trans women are women, so they too rule, and we should also be concerned for their safety. This video was his way of commenting on the murder of Alexa Negrón Luciano, a Puerto Rican trans woman.

The murder rate for trans individual is high in PR, especially for trans women. A month after releasing this video, two Puerto Rican men were charged with the murders of two trans women. Puerto Rico is a United States' territory; therefore, it abides by US federal laws, yet this was the FIRST time Puerto Rico charged a person with a hate crime. Advocates have long been vocal about the need for change and should not be brushed aside, but having an internationally famous musician approach the topic helped people see the need for this type of law, but if you weren't the intended audience, you might have simply believed his video to be a fun journey through gender expression and gender performance.

What can you do?

Because most of us are watching our favorite shows with English subtitles, we tend to associate what is happening on our screen with our culture, but we must always remember, for a majority of us, this isn't our culture; therefore we must be aware of the disconnect. Awareness is the first step. Education is the second.

For example, Thai shows might include coordinated colored outfits because Thai culture associates certain colors with days of the week. Depending on the day of the week, there is a good and a bad color to wear. Make a mental note of it, and you'll start noticing it in other shows.

A show might mention a historical event or a holiday in passing that the intended audience would understand, but as an outsider, you might know nothing about. Look it up!

Or the show might touch on current events like unarmed protestors being beaten and arrested. LOOK! IT! UP!

There is no easy way to gain knowledge. Media is a great way to be exposed to other cultures, but you have to be willing to do a little extra work and actually learn about the culture and the issues you are seeing depicted on your screen.

It can be as simple as looking up a book shown.

Or what the characters are eating.

If you want to be a better reader of the visual rainbow, you have to look up cultural references you are unfamiliar with. You don't have to know everything, but you should be curious enough to look up something because you are watching a visual form of media from another country, and the visuals are important to the overall story.

Activity

Watch both videos and notice their similarities and differences. Note any symbolic objects and, of course, the colors.

Lady Gaga x Ariana Grande "Rain On Me" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoAm4om0wTs

Naomi Watanabe x Yuriyan Retriever "Rain On Me" parody - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psSdawz69kc

See you for Lesson 6 - It Could All Mean Nothing!

#Reading the (Visual) Rainbow #lesson six - cultural awareness

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art-that-fucks-you-up-tournament · 9 months

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Stats 2: Electric Boogaloo

Our 256 works are comprised of.... 132 paintings, 36 drawings / digital artworks / comics, 26 installation pieces, 20 sculptures, 11 buildings, 11 public artworks, 10 photographs, 4 prints, 3 cave arts, 2 textile arts, and 1 thing I classified as a collage instead of anything else!

More stats below!

Most popular city: New York, with 13 pieces, followed by Paris with 8, and Chicago is third with 7! Washington DC has 6, Florence, Madrid, and London all have 5, Philadelphia has 4, Dublin, Edinburgh, Mexico City each have three, and all the following cities have two: Boston, Cairo, Calgary, Cordoba, Helsinki, Houston, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Munich, Ottawa, Prague, Vienna, Warsaw

Most popular museum: somehow the Art Institute of Chicago has the most with 6 pieces! Followed by the Museum of Modern Art with 5 pieces! The Museo del Prado has 4, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has 3, and the Ateneum, Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museo Dolores Olmedo, National Gallery of Canada, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate Britain, Tretyakov Gallery, and the Uffizi Gallery each have 2! In addition, the single works are spread out amongst 16 city level galleries (ie the Phoenix Art Museum), 5 state/provincial (ie Queensland Art Gallery), 25 national (ie National Gallery Prague), 8 museums named after benefactors (ie the Hirshhorn Museum), 7 museums dedicated to a specific artist (ie the Van Gogh Museum) and numerous other institutions! Churches, palaces, increasingly specific museums, museums that are named after their location rather than their governmental level... and of course a whole lot of private collections and pieces we were unable to find the location of!

Countries! 50 pieces are in the US! 13 in France! 12 in Spain! 7 in England, 6 in Canada and Italy, 5 in Russia, 4 in Ireland, Mexico, and Australia, 3 each in Germany, Austria, and Scotland, and 2 each in China, the Netherlands, Israel, Finland, Wales, Poland, Japan, Egypt, and India, and 1 each in Portugal, Ecuador, Thailand, Singapore, Belgium, Argentina, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Norway, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, and the Vatican!

Demographics! I revoked John Singer Sargents American status for these because he was born in Europe, and spent most of his life travelling around Europe. I tried my best to track down the correct numbers but honestly some of these are likely to be slightly off. I went with easily publicly available information like Wikipedia and where that failed the author's website. I also tracked people's birth countries in addition to where they lived / worked for most of their lives. Anyway! We have 74 pieces by American artists! 27 French, 22 English, 14 Russian, 13 Spanish, 11 Canadian, 9 Italian, 8 Chinese, 8 German, 6 Irish, 6 Polish, 6 Mexican, 5 Greek (four of those are Ancient Greece), 5 Ukrainian, 5 Japanese, 4 Australian, 4 Belgian, 4 Indian, 3 Serbian, 3 Armenian, 3 Dutch, 3 Austria, 3 Latvian, 3 Swedish, 2 each from Finland, Scotland, Malaysia, Cuba, the Czech Republic, and Norway, and one each from Israel (specifically), Portugal, Ecuador, Thailand, Switzerland, Denmark, Iran, Colombia, Chile, Estonia, and Egypt (albeit Ancient Egypt)

Including the one Israeli artist, we have 7 Jewish artists represented, as well as 4 Black, 6 Indigenous (one is half Kichwa, one is Sami, one is Haida, one is Ojibwe, and two are Australian Aboriginals. One of those is Kokatha and Nukunu, and the other one was a group project with eight artists who did the majority of the work, and 6 of those are from Erub Island but the articles did not specify further except that at least one of the eight is non-Indigenous), 1 Chicana, and 1 Asian-American (which I am specifying because I felt very stupid adding tallies to an Asian column when I already said there are 8 Chinese artists and 5 Japanese and 2 Malaysians and....). We also do have 16 artists that publicly identify as queer in some fashion! I have listed 9 works by gay men, 2 works by lesbians, and 5 that have chosen to use "queer" instead of other labels.

And on that note.... we have 155 works by men, 51 by women, and 2 by nonbinary artists!

Most represented artists! Frida Kahlo and René Magritte tied with four works each! Félix González-Torres, Francisco Goya, John Singer Sargent each have three! And the artists that have 2 artworks each are... Claude Monet, Dragan Bibin, Edmund Blair Leighton, Francisco de Zurbarán, Gustav Klimt, Holly Warburton, Hugo Simberg, Ilya Repin, Ivan Aivazovsky, Jacques-Louis David, Jenny Holzer, Louis Wain, Pablo Picasso, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Victo Ngai, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Leonardo da Vinci (although the second is debated attribution)! That means that 205 of the works are not by any of the above! Some have unknown artists (we've got THREE CAVE ARTS) but most are just... really varied!

And lastly, years painted (as sorted by year finished and not year started). Who else loves when something is listed as "13th century"?? Not me, that's who. This is going to be a lot of numbers, and there's no real way to make it more readable. so..... feel free to skip!

The oldest two submissions are from circa 40,000 years before present, and 30 to 32 thousand years before present! Six more artworks came to exist before 0 (CE or AD depending on who you're talking to), and 7 before 1000! 2 from the 1200s, 6 from the 1400s, 8 from the 1500s, 3 from the 1600s, and 5 from the 1700s! Several of those already listed were started in a previous ....age category (for instance, one has no specified date other than 7300 BC to 700 AD) but once we hit 1600, everything is usually finished in a relatively short timespan. 6 are from 1800-1850, 9 from 1850-1880, and the 1880s are extremely busy. 1 from 1881, 3 from 1882, 1 from 1883-1885, 5 from 1886, and two each from the next four years (1887-1890)! 6 from 1891-1895, and 5 from 1896-1900!

We've got 3 from 1901 or 1902, 4 from 1903, two each from 1906 and 1907, and one each from 1908 and 1909! 3 from 1910-1915, 3 from 1917, 2 from 1918 and one from 1919! 6 are from the Roaring Twenties, three of them specifically from 1928! 4 from 1931-1935, and only 3 from the latter half of the 30s! There's 3 from WWII, and 4 from 1946-1949, 5 from 1951-1954 but only 3 from '55-'59. 5 from the sixties, 7 spread out through the 70s, and 10 from the 80s, two each from 81, 82 and 84. The 90s have a lot of duplicate and triplicate years, totaling 20 overall! 11 are from 90-95, the other 9 are 96-99. 7 from 2001-2005, and 8 from 2006-2009. 9 from 2010-2014, 3 from 2015, 6 from 2016, 5 from 2017, 1 from 2018, 3 from 2019, 5 from 2020, 1 from 2021, 4 from 2022, 11 from 2023, and 3 ongoing projects! Whew! If anyone wants it listed By Year instead of in groups like this, that'll be most readable in like... list form and that's way too long for a stats post.

Congrats on making it to the end! If you got this far, uh, let me know if you want to see the spreadsheet after the tournament, I guess. I'm very proud of it.

#art that fucks you up tournament #mod salix #stats for nerds

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