iambic pent-up aggression
things I blog about:
photography, tea, books, movies and TV, sexuality, the homogay, death, drugs, birds, travel, baseball, aestheticism, funny internet ephemera, music, musicians, war, history in general, the Bear Jew, other less important Jews, comic books, a small subset of animu and mango, 4chan, mobsters, medicine, video games, viruses, turn-of the-century Americana, the Roaring 20's, fashion, Russia, the 18th and 19th centuries, smoking, Marvel comics, gender issues, the Leopold and Loeb murder case, cool tattoos, samurai fiction, tasteful pornography, tasteless pornography, human tragedy, mortal dreads.
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Post reblogged from station am horizont
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.
Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.—Elie Wiesel, Night
Today at sunset begins Yom HaShoah, the day we commemorate the 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust—people with names, families, and stories that were mercilessly cut short. But after all these years, the Nazis still did not fulfill their goal: we have not perished; we have not lost ourselves and our identity; we are still here, standing strong, and will be here forevermore. Remember the horrors of the Holocaust. Honor the 6 million holy souls.
To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
Never forgive, never forget, never again.
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Photo reblogged from shakespeare in the park.
Why is life worth living? It’s a very good question. Um… Well, There are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. uh… Like what… okay… um… For me, uh… ooh… I would say… what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing… uh… um… and Wilie Mays… and um… the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony… and um… Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues… um… Swedish movies, naturally… Sentimental Education by Flaubert… uh… Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra… um… those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne… uh… the crabs at Sam Wo’s… uh… Tracy’s face…
Manhattan, 1979 (dir. Woody Allen)
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Photo reblogged from Criminal Wisdom
Easter Revolution
On this day in 1916, the Easter Rising began in Dublin, with the aim of ending British rule and creating the Irish Republic. It came to be known as the Poets’ Rebellion, because many of its leaders were poets, teachers, or men of letters.
Schoolteacher Patrick Pearse and Socialist leader James Connolly called for supporters of the Republic to gather at Dublin’s General Post Office on Easter Monday, bearing whatever weapons they could find. Members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, about 1,200 in number, turned out, but most citizens of Dublin were unprepared for, some even unaware of, the uprising.
The uprising itself was, by many conventional measures, a failure: Poorly planned and lacking solid support, it was quashed by the English after a week, and the Irish leaders were hastily executed by the English for treason.
But as George Bernard Shaw wrote in The New York Times the following month, “It is absolutely impossible to slaughter a man in this position without making him a martyr and a hero, even though the day before the rising he may have been only a minor poet. … The military authorities and the British Government must have known they were canonizing their prisoners.”
Outrage over the executions resulted in a wave of nationalism among the Irish, many of whom had previously been ambivalent about an Irish Republic, and galvanized the movement.
The Republic of Ireland achieved independence from Great Britain five years later. (Via)
Via canisfamiliaris.
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Photo reblogged from the owl hooteth
Hokusai (1760 - 1849) Japanese Woodblock Print Crow and Sword Surimono (via Fuji Arts Japanese Prints - Crow and Sword Surimono by Hokusai (1760 - 1849)
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Quote reblogged from we've got our guns and horsesWar is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket’s red glare. It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (via ohmeinliebgott)
(Source: detoulouse)
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Photo reblogged from Old Time Family Baseball
It’s easy to throw around the superlatives when referencing Jackie Robinson. He was a tremendous athlete and had stoic endurance. Above all else he was courageous.
In 1947 when Jackie ran onto Ebbets Field he was doing so under the smothering weight of an entire nation. Jackie was one of the few individuals that could see the big picture and nobody would bully him out of his civil rights.
Jackie Robinson is a national treasure.
