Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
Frank O’Hara, Mayakovsky (via naranzarian)
Ita Ever (1.04.1931 - 9.08.2023).
It has been announced that the legendary Estonian actress Ita Ever has passed. She was 92 years old.
Ita Ever was a staple both on screen and on the stage in Estonia until very recently. Her perhaps most memorable role for the younger generations has always been Metsamoor in Nukitsamees (1981).
Joanna Karpowicz „7 AM, Poland”, 42 x 29,7 cm, acrylic on paper, 2024 (from artist's fb page)
I’ll have to disengage from online stuff on Ukraine for a while because although I have no intention of isolating myself from the life-changing events that are occurring in my literal backyard and are going to affect Europe for years to come, the rate at which I’ve been consuming the news cycle is starting to affect my head and that’s just not benefiting anything or anyone.
But before I do fuck off, a few words on what I’ve been noticing today. Namely that after the initial shock of seeing the terrorist gas station just going fucking mental and actually invading a sovereign country with no justification whatsoever, people (overwhelmingly uninformed Americans, as is tradition) have gone back to both-sidesing the war and sharing their dumbass radical centrist takes on how maybe Putin not good, but NATO is at fault. How NATO provoked the little fascist oligarchy into two days of nonstop war crimes. How if the evil West had just told Ukraine to fuck off, we don’t want you around, everything would have been peachy keen.
And there’s only one thing I can say to that—if you don’t support a people’s right to decide on its fate, on who it chooses to associate with; if you think that countries are by default beholden to whoever wields the biggest stick and have no right to rock the boat because might makes right, then I don’t give a fuck about how many thoughts and prayers you post—you don’t support Ukraine. You’re not an anti-imperialist and you sure as fuck aren’t a leftist. You’re a useful lapdog for the propaganda of a dying empire stuck in the 19th century notion of great powers that are somehow entitled to a sphere of influence, regardless of whatever said sphere of influence has to say about it or whether it even wants to be one. You’re showing a willingness to throw a free people expressing a desire to live in democracy to an expansionist dictatorship that’s a humans rights nightmare, simply “because that’s how the world works, nothing to do about it”. By regurgitating the Kremlin line on NATO provocation and “expansion” (i.e. Russia’s former colonies doing everything in their power to get the fuck out of Russia’s homicidal reach), you’re actively promoting colonialism and imperialism and you’re as useful to the victims of these horror shows as a soiled toilet paper.
Your “suck it up, buttercup” helps no one whatsoever. Quite frankly, it’s a part of the reason why we got here.
I implore you, read a fucking book on Eastern European history. Go into therapy with your U.S. centrism and “every conflict is like the Iraq War” because I swear, nobody in this part of the world is impressed with your main character syndrome. Grow out of the idiotic thinking that just because US BAD, an authoritarian regime automatically good.
You’re a part of the problem. Get solved, please.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway (via scribnerbooks)
A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the sea, starlings, tortoises, Roman rooftops, a girl, giraffes and much else. He wants only to observe, to learn a modest lesson from creatures and things. But he can’t. There is too much to see in them, for a start. … And there is too much of himself and his culture in the world he watches anyway: the universe is littered with the signs of our needs, with mythologies.
Michael Wood
Harold Feinstein, Window Washer, 23rd st loft, NYC, 1972