Speech is irreversible; that is its fatality. What has been said cannot be unsaid, except by adding to it: to correct, here, is, oddly enough, to continue. In speaking, I can never erase, annul; all I can do is say “I am erasing, annulling, correcting,” in short, speak some more. This very singular annulation-by-addition I shall call “stammering.” Stammering is a message spoiled twice over: it is difficult to understand, but with an effort it can be understood all the same; it is really neither in language nor outside it: it is a noise of language comparable to the knocks by which a motor lets it be known that it is not working properly; such is precisely the meaning of the misfire, the auditory sign of a failure which appears in the functioning of the object. Stammering (of the motor or of the subject) is, in short, a fear: I am afraid the motor is going to stop.

He found a style in sculpture and stuck to it; he made skinny and elongated, attenuated figures, working a great deal with his wife Annette as a model, as well as his mother and brother Diego who was also an artist. In them, he managed to capture a sense of the human fate in the world as deeply tragic and maybe wondrous too.

Giacometti was a great modern artist partly because of his ability to create a strange and self-conscious iconography of the body. His figures were filled with iconic dignity, a stillness, a solitariness, a sense of a dense inner life, almost a spiritual life. Yet they were made using what seemed the minimum of means.

so I finally found a dress that looks like the one Soad Hosny wore in that one movie

navigatethestream:

its the notion of boycotts

you wanna know why the bus boycotts of the civil rights movement were so successful?

because an alternative black run transportation system was created for those who couldn’t walk to work or whatever they had to go

they didn’t just tell people “oh the bus enforces racist policies so don’t take it and FUCK if you can’t get to work on time or where you need to be!” 

they said “hey you’re paying to get on the bus and not even being given a seat let alone being ejected if a white passenger needs your seat. here’s a potentially better alternative where you pay to sit down and get to where you need to go” 

all this “boycott Target, Walmart, Monsanto owned companies” comes from a notion of boycott located in the politic of privileged white people

and that’s why they are largely unsuccessful

its why Obama just gave Monsanto the green light to commit even more fuckery to your food

its the reason why cooperation are considered people

its the reason why Walmart is allowed to usurp safety and labor regulations in their factories, and underpay their American workers

because you say “don’t spend your money there” and that’s the end of the story 

you expect people to locate their survival in a politic of “abstaining from unethical choices”

and then from there those unethical choices are somehow supposed to magically disappear. when really only a small percentage of people are able to boycott so many things

there wouldn’t be a movement located around the “99%” if 99% of people could really afford to stop shopping at the unethical places and stop buying the unethical brands

good luck with your hocus pocus activist logic 

realfakescientist:

realfakescientist:

El Tufah // Ilham Al Madfai

a beautiful classic Iraqi folk song flawlessly performed by a extremely underrated man, one of Iraq’s greatest singers/songwriters/composers of all time. This gorgeous song leads off the album appropriately titled Baghdad.

treed mini el ruman, mnayn ajeeb el ruman, ba3da el warad na3man, ma thagal el eghsaan.

My father is like the most insufferable person to travel with. He is always in a rush and anxious, and he seems to think he is entitled to go everywhere first. Like he cuts in line or pushes through crowds. And then he will like hang onto my passport and refuse to give it back so that I have to push through crowds to catch up with him so I do not end up alone without documentation. And tonight he was particularly tunnel-visioned and haphazard and he pushed through a crowd and he kept yelling at me to catch up and I rolled my carryon over this old man’s foot and he said “oof” and gave me this heartbroken look and I could barely mutter a gentle “sorry!” before being pushed through the crowd and I feel so so sad about it. I thought about it all night and it makes me cry, because that look he gave me had such a force to it. The magnitude of his fragility, which in the way we push past and through each other on our own ways we rarely acknowledge.

:(

Whenever I am on a flight with middle easterners, they clap exuberantly when the airplane touches ground. I think it is because the nomadic middle easterner has little contact with such advanced technology on the Arab street. As such, the primordial desert soul marvels at the sophistication of the magnificent machine like he does at the sight of a spring in the Sahara. Through the ancient ritual of clapping, they celebrate their encounter with an oasis—albeit brief—from the pristine world of uncomplicated premodernity. JK they are just tired from a 7 hour delay and are excited to gtfo of there

how to say: your performance of masculinity is juvenile and not endearing

realfakescientist:

Ma A7ib ba3ar roo7-Kathim Al Sahir

…ma 2asheelak wasat 3ayni, bas bil galob wil roo7.

(via realfakescientist)

Topkapı Sarayı
Istanbul, Turkey

more photos on my flickr