… I don’t even know.
These were done by artist Dorothy Tang for the Star Wars x adidas Originals Collection launch in Taipei. Larger images can be seen here.
[via the constantly delightful Wunderkind Jellygraph]
For many of us who have been following the story of Chrissy Lee Polis, the 22-year-old transgender woman who was brutally attacked in a suburban McDonald’s near Baltimore ten days ago, it’s been a difficult week. Watching the story go viral provided a sobering look at the amount of phobia and ignorance that still surrounds many people’s concepts of both gender and race.
The attack occurred on April 18th, when Polis stopped at the restaurant to use the ladies’ room. Polis told the Baltimore Sun that she heard her assailants saying “that’s a dude, that’s a dude – and he’s in the female bathroom.” Immediately afterwards, she was beaten, dragged across the floor by her hair, and kicked by two teenagers as a McDonald’s employee recorded the attack on his camera phone and other workers stood by idly. The cell phone recording of the attack (TRIGGER WARNING: extremely violent) shows several employees gawking and laughing as the attack progresses. A sole employee makes an attempt to break up the fight, but retreats almost immediately. A grandmotherly woman attempts to come to Polis’ aid; a police report revealed that she was punched in the face by one of the assailants when she tried to intervene. After two minutes, Polis collapses into a seizure on the floor. The McDonald’s worker who is taping the scene warns the attackers that they need to flee because the police are coming.
A crowd rallies outside the McDonald’s where the crime took place
Coverage of the story on the web has been as painful to watch as the footage itself. It was awful to witness the first wave of discussion, which appeared almost exclusively on white supremacist blogs, with transphobia piling on top of racism as details about Polis’ identity emerged. It was painful to watch mainstream, high-traffic blogs use the word “tranny” in their coverage (the best example of this being, if memory serves correctly, Time-Warner-owned blog Smoking Gun, though their posts appear to have now been scrubbed of the slur). And it was painful to watch Polis’ own twin brother continually refer to her as “my brother” and pointedly use male gender pronouns at her support rally (here, at 1:15). All around, a damning look at the country’s state of gender awareness, or lack thereof.
Polis has been released from the hospital, and spoke to the Baltimore Sun about her experience living as a transwoman in her neighborhood. The McDonald’s employee who filmed the attack has been fired. Both attackers have been apprehended and charged with assault. Hate crime charges may or may not be applied to the case; we’ll likely know in about a week.
In the face of the ugly, seething hatred that surrounds this story, the most encouraging element has been the turnout of support. Over 135,000 people have signed a petition demanding that the McDonald’s Corporation holds its employees accountable for the assault. More inspiring than anything have been images of the rally held at the scene of the crime this past Monday. Hundreds of people showed up outside McDonald’s to voice their solidarity with Chrissy Lee Polis. One of the right-wing hate sites covering the assault early on asked the question, “what happens when sanctified leftwing grievance groups collide over black homophobia?” In their small imagination, people can only choose one side: black vs. white, gay vs. straight, trans vs. cis. There are no gradations or complexities in their world.
Except, that’s not what the images and footage of this rally show us. There are people from all across the race, gender and class spectrum standing up for Chrissy Lee Polis. Trans activist Dayna Beyer, who helped organize the rally, recounts the event:
What was initially intended to be a vigil as the victim appeared severely injured… evolved into an upbeat rally of a united community demanding an end to violence and discrimination.
Having been involved in far too many vigils for murdered trans women over the years, and accepting the general apathy in both the trans and LGBT communities, I expected 30 people to ultimately show up. Instead, 300 did.
…when the program ended and the crowd would have normally dispersed, a funny thing happened. No one left.
People mingled for another 75 minutes until the lights were turned out in the parking lot. There had been no trouble, no counter-demonstration, no hate speech – just love and sisterhood and camaraderie. Locals and activists, gay and straight, cis and trans.
Maryland still has a long way to go. Earlier this month, the Maryland Senate voted down a bill that would have provided protection for trans people against discrimination in housing and employment. Before the bill even hit the Senate, language pertaining to use of public accommodations was stripped from it. Blogger Amanda Hess writes, “opposition to the bill largely focused on the toilet issue—a hysterical concern over gender non-conforming people sharing public restrooms.” Perhaps the tragedy of this event will push lawmakers to rethink their position.
Perhaps things will change.
Image by Anne’s Legacy Photography
Via DJ Dead Billy, thanks!
Designed and built by the architecture team of Tonkin Liu and completed in 2006, this award-winning sound sculpture called The Singing Ringing Tree stands atop a plateau in the Pennine mountain range overlooking Burnley in Lancashire, England. It’s one of a series from the Panopticons arts and regeneration project.
Galvanized steel pipes of various sizes are bound together in a nine-foot-tall, spiraling configuration. Depending on where and how the wind strikes it, The Singing Ringing Tree creates discordant choral sounds over a range of several octaves. Tonkin Liu tuned the pipes “according to their length by adding holes to the underside of each.” The eerie music created as a result is capable of ringing out across great distances.
Photo by Felix Spencer
What happens when dialog taken from MTV’s “Jersey Shore”, the nadir of current American culture, is filtered through the lens of Oscar Wilde, one of the greatest wits the world has ever seen? Magic, that’s what. Playbill — with the help of Santino Fontana and David Furr, current cast members of Wilde’s most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest — presents a grand experiment: “Jersey Shore” Gone Wilde. This is, perhaps, the best thing I have seen this year.
Via Sean Dicken.
You know, ladies, you can never be too proactive about sagging facial musculature. (Or too enthusiastic about Placido Domingo, apparently.)
*shudder*
Other workout clips that belong in the Well-Intentioned Yet Squirm-Inducing category:
“You remember that old song ‘Que Sera Sera, Whatever will be, will be, the future’s not ours to see’? I’ve always felt that. It’s been a rollercoaster ride, but I wouldn’t change a thing.” –Poly Styrene
Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, best known as Poly Styrene, legendary singer for the short-lived, seminal punk band, X-Ray Spex, has died at the age of 53.
This sad news comes to us mere weeks after Styrene officially released her final solo album, Generation Indigo, shortly after revealing to the press that she was fighting for her life. (Oh, cancer, up yours.)
Young Poly Styrene wore braces and bright Technicolor dream coats. She looked and sounded nothing like Crystal Gayle or Karen Carpenter. Instead, she hollered jagged lyrics from the bottom of her heart with all of the raw strength and fire of her male contemporaries in the ’77 UK punk school, plus a bit of something extra: full on, straight-up, unapologetic female outsider outrage, and a ferocious personal philosophy of anti-consumer culture environmentalism the likes of which punk would not see again until the Dead Kennedys.
In fact, Billboard would one day call her the “archetype for the modern-day feminist punk”. She certainly was, to put a point on it, “one of the least conventional front-persons in rock history, male or female”. [via]
NME writer James McMahon:
We live in an age where Jarvis Cocker and Beth Ditto are long established alternative icons, where Lady Gaga dressing head to toe in offal barely raises a shrug. Within the reign of Olivia Newton-John, like all the best popstars of their time, Poly Styrene must have seemed like she’d fallen to earth from another – most likely day glo daubed – world. She was to the spirit of individuality what Christopher Columbus was to having a wander.
Rest in Peace, badass woman. You broke the mold.
Press release photo for Generation Indigo.
Before finding these illustrations I had never heard of the Slovak illustrator, Albín Brunovský. It was unsuprising to learn that he was quite well-known, and well-regarded, in his own country. This series of women with fantastical heads pieces, some of them growing out of their owners’s heads, features a perfectly surreal juxtaposition of the absurd and macabre.
The fine people of Cinexcellence have toiled countless hours to bring us the most comprehensive compilation of “Wilhelm Screams” to date:
Even if you don’t know it by name, chances are you’ve hear the Wilhelm Scream more than once! A film/television/video game stock sound effect first used in the ’51 Western film Distant Drums (during a fatal alligator attack scene), its use has continued to grow in popularity over time. At this point, the Wilhelm Scream’s got to be of the most persistent in-jokes in pop culture history. We should all buy Ben Burtt a drink; he’s the brilliant sound designer who got into the habit of sneaking Wilhelm into various action flicks he was working on, like Star Wars and Indiana Jones.
Via Wiki:
The sound is named for Private Wilhelm, a character in The Charge at Feather River, a 1953 western in which the character is shot with an arrow. This was believed to be the third movie to use the sound effect and its first use from the Warner Brothers stock sound library.
Research by Burtt suggests that actor and singer Sheb Wooley, best known for his novelty song “Flying Purple People Eater” in 1958 and as scout Pete Nolan on the television series Rawhide, is likely to have been the voice actor who originally performed the scream. This has been supported by an interview in 2005 with Linda Dotson, Wooley’s widow. Burtt discovered records at Warner Brothers from the editor of Distant Drums including a short list of names of actors scheduled to record lines of dialogue for miscellaneous roles in the movie. Wooley played the uncredited role of Private Jessup in Distant Drums, and was one of the few actors assembled for the recording of additional vocal elements for the film. Wooley performed additional vocal elements, including the screams for a man being bitten by an alligator. Dotson confirmed that it was Wooley’s scream that had been in so many westerns, adding, “He always used to joke about how he was so great about screaming and dying in films.”
In 2010, a Wilhelm Scream App was released on the Apple iPhone. As of 2011, it is still free to download.
Screaming Private Wilhelm from The Charge at Feather River, 1953. (Third known example of the scream’s use, from whence it gets its name.)
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Arizona desert, it’s… NIGHT OF THE LEPUS.
Bunnies have risen! (Truly, they have risen!)
MGM laid this rotten egg in 1972 to a flurry of bad reviews and barely stifled laughter. Based on the 1964 science fiction novel The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Australian pulp writer Russell Braddon, the film depicts the valiant struggle of Arizona townies who are unexpectedly forced to defend their homes against an onslaught of deadly, gargantuan, carnivorous fwuffy wuffly bunneh wabbits. Daawww:
Shot on location in Bumblefuck, Nowhere, Arizona, the best/worst scenes from Night of the Lepus show soft, cuddly domestic rabbits “rampaging” through miniature model sets with what appears to be ketchup liberally smeared on their muzzles and paws. There are also some golden moments featuring shrieking, ensanguined bunny hand puppets, and several instances of human actors dressed in matted shag-rug rabbit costumes flailing their way through poorly choreographed attack scenes. Plus? Janet Leigh reading off cue cards. And? DeForest Kelley with a sexy porn ‘stache. Yusss.
Happy Ēostre, everybody!
To his children everything seemed fine: chasing them around the house when he came home from work, helping them with their homework, acting out the books he read them before bed as always. His wife, on the other hand, had noticed an ever so slight change in Bill. Those nights spent reading in the living room after the children had been put to bed, in quiet co-habitation, punctuated by short bursts of conversation, a brief exchange over a particular news story or a bit of neighborhood gossip — the usual discussions that make up the mundane nights of married life — they were different. Now there was something else.
It was the silence. It had always been there, but now that silence had a strange quality, a cold weight to it. It had a density Agnes could feel pressing in on her. These moments were fleeting, but often she would look up when they occurred, only to find Bill staring off into space, at some point far outside the walls of their house. When asked if everything was alright, he would assure her that it was, flashing his goofy grin at her to drive the point home and send her back to her book.
But everything was not alright. Bill had endured the smirks and the sniggering for too long now, and it was wearing on him, eroding a great rut in his spirit. Who were these people to sneer at him? All he wanted was to make them gay and the best way he knew to do that was to clothe them in the most resplendent fabrics he could find, which he also knew, as should any fool with half a brain, came from the rainbow. What was so funny about that? What was the goddamn joke?
Maybe, he thought late at night, his wife sleeping soundly beside him, maybe they didn’t deserve to be gay. Maybe, he thought, gritting his teeth until they ached and his gums bled, maybe they didn’t deserve to be gilded in the fruits of his labor, those hours spent toiling on that fucking rainbow. Maybe, he thought, his fists clenched, a white hot fire burning in his brain right behind his eyes, maybe they don’t fucking deserve to be here on this beautiful, gay Earth at all.
And maybe he was going to do something about that.
Via Vintage Ads
