swan lake starts out with the prince seigfried with his hilariously stupid name.
his mother is the queen of some unnamed kingdom, and on his birthday she not only gives him a crossbow, which is apparently common in quasi victorian times, but she also reminds him that since he is 21 and like an adult now that he needs to have some responsibilities. these include governing the kingdom and taking a wife, because you know, WHO RUN THE WORLD? GIRLS.
so he’s all like “gosh mom okay whatever i get it” and goes out with some of his broskies to go hunting with his new crossbow. he goes running after some swan and gets separated from his buds. the swan actually morphs into a woman and she’s all like “damn son please don’t shoot me”
he’s all like “man girlfriend you so fine but you’re like half swan and that’s kind of weird what’s your story?”
she tells him that her name is odette and shes a princess turned into a swan by a vengeful sorcerer rothbart who apparently has nothing better to do than torture young ladies, and trapped her and her swan maidens on a lake made out of her mother’s tears and they’re all pretty upset about it
at this point there is a lot of dancing of the swans which is probably the most memorable and gorgeous part of the ballet, but has absolutely nothing to do with the story other than being like “damn these girls are swans”
she’s all like “hey the only way i can get to be a real human again and save all my swan lady sisters is for a man to fall in love with me and swear it to the world”
and despite having known her and danced with her for only like 20 minutes by now he’s all like “oh course ill do that for you bae, in fact my mom is having a ball tonight you should come we’ll do it then”
von rothbart, who is listening in, is all like “hell no am i letting my swan bbs go” and he starts to concoct a plan to fuck up their love swearing shindig
act three flashes forward to the next night, with the ball. seigfried’s queen mom has brought all these eligible princesses from neighboring kingdoms to try to egg him on like “please get married already.” all the princesses are of course into it because hey, cute prince, and they all try to do their best dancing for him to remind him that they are the most marry-able
they dance with their entourages in a lot of traditional dances, like the hungarian czardas, until BOOM INTERRUPTION
in busts odette, or who we think is odette, and some dude. turns out rothbart has used his magic to tranform his daughter odile to look like odette, but she is a black swan, instead of a white swan.
this sassy bitch dances with seigfried and he’s completely enraptured- he totally thinks this is the same swan lady from the other night. she’s such a boss ass bitch with her rad thirty two fouettes and her like mad gorgeousness that he is completely convinced that she is odette, and of course he goes in front of everyone to swear his motherfucking love TO THE WRONG GIRL
this is the terrible moment where we see odette frantically flying at the window, and he realizes THAT HE HAS MADE A GRAVE MISTAKE
odile and rothbart laugh it up and leave in a flash of smoke because they think that odette is now going to be a swan forever with her swan girlfriends and seigfried busts out to there to go look for her
he gets to the lake and odette is in tears, surrounded and protected by her flock, who don’t want to let this dude in. she listens to his plea and forgives him
then she decides that the only way to free her flock of swans is to kill herself, and she leaps off the cliff into the lake, drowning herself, despite the fact that SHE IS A BIRD AND SWAN CAN SWIM, and seigfried, unable to live without her and wracked with guilt, follows her and jumps to his death.
with the two’s selfless death and eternal love, the swans are freed from their bondage and rothbart dies, as we see their eternal souls floating over in the horizon.
(in some versions, the two promise o jump off the cliff and the romise in and off itself frees the swans so nobody has to die, and in some versions, they fight rothbart and kill him, and in other versions, only odette dies, so i can see how this might get confusing)
*shuts story book* and that’s the ballet of swan lake
Best description of Swan Lake ever. Also, why are the princes in ballets so dumb?? Odile has black feathers… Odette has white feathers… You’re drunk and need glasses, Siegfried.
I’m almost three years and over 350 letters into this project and today was the first time something I read made me cry. (And I mean like ugly, middle of the sentence, no warning cry.)
The letter at first appeared to be a pretty standard turn of the century thank you note (albeit with unusually neat handwriting), but it soon became clear to me that it’s actually something much more important.
It’s from a young woman named Serrata Spann and was sent to Rachel’s Grandmother and her Aunt Allie (Will and Jack’s mom) on November 26, 1901, thanking them for paying for her education at Scotia Seminary in North Carolina.
Scotia Seminary, now Barber-Scotia College, was the first institution of higher learning for black women in American history.
Serrata Spann’s parents were born as slaves. She was going to college.
I’ll post the whole letter at some point, but this was the line that got me…
“you help me to obtain something that no one can take from me”
I always got very excited when it would spell out ACDC
OMG SAME FOR BOTH
I always got very afraid when it was the same letter 4 times in a row
when I was 4 or 5, my mom was a prof at a college and she used to hand me the scantron sheet before she wrote the exam and let me colour whatever lettered bubble i wanted for each answer. if i coloured two by accident, she made an ‘all of the above’ option. one time she gave me it and i coloured the ‘a’ bubble for each of the 130 questions except for the second last one and she just went with it
later on, she told me that it was the most entertaining exam she had ever watched her students take
A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.
Yesh, because that bus full of people hoarding all wealth and destroying our planet will just stop if we ask them nicely. Sure.
History lesson: Things never got better for the people on the lowest rung of society without fighting. Serfdom didn’t end without a war. Slavery didn’t end without one either. You have a 40 hour work week and two days free because people fought, bled, and died for that. Revolutions are always born in blood - because those desperately hanging on to power make it so. They are the ones to force us to make the choice to either starve or die with a bullet in our chests.
Question: What kind of radicalisation is good radicalisation then? Stop eating meat? Recycle your rubbish? Don’t buy the cheap things made with slave labour and instead starve while buying “ethically made” clothes?
Ghandi managed to win back his country by non-cooperation. But that doesn’t mean the British were non-violent. They murdered thousands, and that after letting millions starve to death (thanks Churchill, you were such a peach). Ghandi gambled on the independent press putting pressure on Britain which liked to see itself as the pinnacle of civilisation. And it worked because there still was an independent press.
Now all channels, all newspapers and magazines are owned by the same six families. What are the odds of that ever working again? And even if people manage to raise awareness through social media? Petitions get signed, a protest or two, and everything’s forgotten because of the next thing.
But of course Flint has clean water now. Right? Right?
You’re uh, kinda proving my point here. First of all, pretty much all of what you just mentioned didn’t happen through overthrowing the government. You’ll notice I didn’t say “don’t fight for change.” Second of all, you’re not a slave or a serf or a subject of the British Raj, but clearly you’ve been told that your circumstances are equally hopeless, which again, is what I’m getting at. You actually have many options that are neither starving to death nor being shot. Britain wasn’t pressured into giving up its biggest colony because of the media, it was because they couldn’t afford to maintain their empire after being ravaged by WW2. And media outlets aren’t owned by families, most of them are owned by shareholders. I don’t even want to know which six families you imagine own the media.
Seriously though, you’ve just written a great example of exactly the thing I’m warning against, thinking you’re part of a great historical struggle and that your choices are either gruesome death or joining the movement. Toss in the conspiratorial thinking about the media, which I didn’t bring up, but should have because it’s always a factor. This is perfect.
im in a really bad media diversity class where the professor was trying to make a point to us about stereotypes so he was like “when you think of frankenstein you probably think of a big green monster right?” and then when everyone in class was immediately like “no it’s the scientist” he pretended he didn’t hear us
Millennial culture is knowing Frankenstein is the scientist.
Woke Millennial Culture is, however, ALSO knowing Frankenstein was the monster.
Barbara Kruger’s never really talked about Supreme, the skate company who’s been ripping off her ideas and prints letter for letter, color for color, for their red-and-white logo, which you have seen, because it is everywhere.
Artemis: *lounging by a spring on piles of deerskin surrounded by three dozen naked girls with a dead pan expression* Virginity.
“Heracles, they’re lesbians”.
Note that the concept of “virginity” in Ancient times merely meant “unmarried”, and had nothing to do with sexual activity. Some priestesses were “virgins” because they chose (or were committed to) a life of worship, but it was merely a question of social status, not of personal choice or practice. Of course, one can suppose that this lifestyle would be rather attractive for lesbians.
So when Artemis is said to be the Goddess of Virgins, it is meant to be understood as “Goddess of Unmarried Women”, or, quite possibly literally, of lesbians.
(It’s only Christianity that reframed the concept of virginity to mean “never had sex”. Many ancient religions has “Virgin goddesses”, which symbolized feminine power, and in this case too it meant “untied to a man”, or “whole for herself”)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: (1) If you could travel anywhere, where would it be? Who would you want to meet/what would you want to see? OR (2) What is something you are curious about? Do you consider yourself a curious person?
The Picture of Dorian Gray: What are your thoughts on sexuality? (example, is it okay to not label yourself, to be gay/bi/pan/ace, etc.)
Sherlock Holmes: What do you define as "living"? Is it different than surviving? Existing?
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: What is something you regret doing? Something you regret not doing?
Jane Eyre: Do you think it is okay to lie at any time? Is there anything considered wrong that is okay to do?
Peter Pan: What do you think about kids?
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: What is your greatest fear?
Frankenstein: Do you believe that humans are the monsters?
Romeo and Juliet: Do you believe in the concept of soulmates/true love?
If Congress does not pass legislation protecting the tribe and the legal challenge fails, the Mashpee would be stripped of their right to exercise sovereign jurisdiction over their land.
Jessie Little Doe Baird, the tribe’s vice-chairwoman, told Al Jazeera that loss of jurisdiction would prevent the tribe from running indigenous language schools, tribal courts, and housing projects, as well as its own police.
“We have our own police force, which is important because they’re tribal citizens and since we’ve had our own police force, none of our men have been beaten or shot, which we’ve had before with non-tribal police,” she said.
