I think about you
and the last time we spoke it was
whispers at the break of day,
how my lips were stuck to your neck
and how desperately I wanted to stay.
I collapse into the road
burning miles from new orleans
to pensacola, home to home,
this journey a stark reminder of the
life currents between us.
I think of you and swim, adrift,
satiated, humming in the determined glow
of the morning sun.
Sometimes, when it’s really quiet and really late, I’ll let myself go there.
I’ll write a little one act play in my head in which you and I are the only players. I will be beautiful and desirable and float about in something diaphanous and my hair will move when I walk as if picked up by soft breeze. You will be achingly handsome and adorably eager and profess that you want me more than life itself. There will be a muted backdrop only hinting at a location, maybe Paris, maybe New York, but always it will be a place where people fall in love. Sometimes I will resist your advances initially, and other times I will fall instantly and irrationally in love with you. But every time, when the curtain comes down and the stage goes dark, we will be in each others arms, making plans for forever.
It’s really quiet and really late and I’ve let myself go there again.
Lovely
First, I love Tumblr and want to keep loving it. And yes, it is immediately terrifying to hear that Yahoo (which, from a lot of our perspectives, is a laughably backwards and culturally irrelevant company) is going to own Tumblr. I sympathize.
But there are a number of circumstances in which this will not be a disaster. Let’s think:
WHY TO NOT BE TERRIFIED
- David Karp is being kept on as CEO for at least 4 years. Karp’s policies made Tumblr what it is.
- Tumblr is only as good as we (its creators) are. The idea that the cultural identity and creations we’ve fostered here have become worth a billion dollars is both inspiring and worrisome. But nevertheless, since we hold the value, we hold the power.
- Tumblr is being kept as a separate company. This is what Google did with YouTube and significant changes were very slow to come to YouTube (though they eventually came, and are still coming). My guess is there will be no significant changes to Tumblr for at least 12 months.
- They’re buying it to become more culturally relevant. They know that controlling the platform will reduce or even remove that relevance, so they would be idiots to do it.
WHEN TO ABANDON SHIP
- If Tumblr requires an account somehow linked to Yahoo.
- If David Karp steps down, no matter what the reasons are.
- If you have to pay to reach all of your followers (FACEBOOK!)
- If Yahoo begins censoring legal images and videos.
- If your dashboard becomes three columns by default.
- If more than 10% of the dashboard is taken up by advertising.
ADVICE TO YAHOO! PEOPLE
- Don’t do any of the above things or we will leave and you will own a billion dollar hole in the internet.
- Drop the exclamation point for chrissake…it’s gaudy and grammatically confusing.
Yes, I do wish that Tumblr (being a more interesting kind of company) could have found a more interesting kind of exit for its founders and investors than the old standby of selling to a floundering company trying to revitalize itself. But I think Yahoo and Marissa Mayer are intelligent enough to not totally fuck it up. Here’s hoping.
- Hank
Succinct.
And I don’t love advertising either but there are two ways to fund media 1) ads or 2) subscriptions. (Yes there are others but really these are the mainstays.) So which would most tumblrs want? I can, and at this point would, pay a subscription fee. Ads, as intrusive as they may be, mean that someone else is paying for our blogging.
These aren’t utopias built for the good of all society to simply exist. David Karp knew it could make money, and I assume, hoped it would. (Heck Edison invented stuff to make money…and maybe make the world a better place.)
So how do you want to site to make the money? Out of your pocket? Or from ad revenues?
Just a thought.
Pierce Brown - Red Rising Trilogy
I’ve been doing “required reading” for well over a month, and now that that’s done I am a little at a loss. I don’t know where to start! So many good books have come out in the last few months, plus let us not forget the mountain of backlist waiting for “some day.” A crippling amount of possibility. Fortunately someone just told me that I MUST READ THIS BOOK IMMEDIATELY (it doesn’t come out until February 2014 in the meantime, which just goes to prove that I am perpetually either 6 months behind or 6 months ahead) so I started it last night. I haven’t gotten to the Star Wars part yet; if I had to I’d say probably that the first 50 pages remind me more of the Mudder Colony in Firefly, but this is in no way a bad thing. —Jenn
(via bookrageous)
Interesting
I think about you
and the last time we spoke it was
whispers at the break of day,
how my lips were stuck to your neck
and how desperately I wanted to stay.
I collapse into the road
burning miles from new orleans
to pensacola, home to home,
this journey a stark reminder of the
life currents between us.
I think of you and swim, adrift,
satiated, humming in the determined glow
of the morning sun.
Their melodious awakening
a herald to our own
preceding the booming Call
that floated ethereal
through the hotel windows
tugging an eager Sun
over the mountainous horizon
they added their voice
to the harmonies
of Mecca
humming tinny hymns
over the heads
of the poor on Earth,
yet wealthy in the Hereafter
elated they flew, swooping
glorifications intensifying
while night paid heed
to pale day
they grew louder
as the circle swelled
the revolutions steadied
flapping with the carefree vigor
of a rising Sun
they chirped above the tune
of memorized supplications,
circling faster
than our bare feet could carry us
around the eternal Kaaba
yet they fell silent
before our heads
could touch the groud—
prostrating with the humbled millions
then saying their salams—
naira badawi
Awesome
Hieroglyphic of a person doing yoga in Ancient Kemet.
Yoga was practiced in Ancient Egypt, North East Africa, for a very long time. Research has indicated that the philosophy of personality integration, or yoga, was practiced in Egypt for about 10,000 years which is a great expanse of time.
The teaching of yoga that was espoused in the country of Egypt was derived from the meditations and insights by the early sage priests and priestesses. Egypt is not the original term for the country. Egypt is a modern term; the original inhabitants of the country called it Kemet, meaning black or the black land, because of the yearly inundation of the Nile River which caused the rich silt to overflow its banks. …
Yoga is the practice of binding individual consciousness with universal consciousness. This individual reality that you are experiencing is actually only a small reflection of your true nature and yoga is the practice of how to achieve the knowledge of one’s abiding and immortal aspect.
In the Kemetic teachings this process of yoga is called Smai Tawi which means UNION OF THE TWO LANDS, not to be confused with physical land masses, but is an explanation of the higher and lower nature within the human entity.
(via kya)
Obit of the Day: Willy Wonka’s “Candy Man”
The 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, opens in a candy store as children rush the counter to purchase their favorite Wonka bar. In his red and white stripes and bow tie, Aubrey Woods then breaks into song introducing “The Candy Man” to the world.
(The song was written for the film by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. A year later it was recorded by Sammy Davis, Jr. and it reached number one in the U.S. It became closely associated with Mr. Davis who was sometimes called “Candy Man.”)
Mr. Woods was well-known in England for his stage performances, including replacing Ron Moody as Fagin in the original musical production of Oliver!. He would spend much of his early career on stage in various productions working alongside luminaries such as John Gielgud and Paul Scofield.
Doctor Who fans will recognize Mr. Woods for his performance as The Controller in Day of the Daleks a four-episode series from 1972.
Aubrey Woods, who last appeared on stage in a 1991 revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat as Jacob and Potiphar, died on May 7, 2013 at the age of 85.
Sources: The Guardian, IMDB.com, Wikipedia
(Video is copyright Warner Home Video and courtesy of BestMovieClip on YouTube.com)
Writers write. They take complex, involved ideas and turn them into stories, and novels. They live within a very precise definition of rules. Grammar, syntax, punctuation etc. Regardless, there is loads of room inside the confines for them to continue to be artists.
Poets breathe. They throw all the rules out the window. They don’t care if you don’t like their grammar, syntax or punctuation. They don’t care if what they write is read backwards or forwards. They hide their ideas like pearls in oysters. They run amok amongst the madness of being. No emotion is too harsh, no idea too strange. Poets, are artists of words.
Free yourself in whatever fashion you like.
Love this!
The reflection of red clouds burned inside of me
like alcoholics who had found
their evening spot
I whistled away the thoughts from my mind
and moved to New Orleans
where I saw the praying trumpets
and found the unknown thought of a hoodoo mystic
at that time bottles
were littering the gutters of Bourbon Street
my face planted
in the golden dew
and I was still humming
on a mystery train
The reflection of red clouds burned inside of me
like alcoholics who had found
their evening spot
I whistled away the thoughts from my mind
and moved to New Orleans
where I saw the praying trumpets
and found the unknown thought of a hoodoo mystic
at that time bottles
were littering the gutters of Bourbon Street
my face planted
in the golden dew
and I was still humming
on a mystery train
in the whiteness of my life
I left the crowd of superficial hypocrisy
my memory a face on a box of cereal
found the name of the book my father was reading
when I was born
it didn’t look interesting
forgot the taste of sour verbs
in my warm wet throat
and swallowed
hard
Suppose we are standing together a minute,
suppose your face is close to mine and your lips,
suppose your lips are a breath away from my lips.
Suppose I kiss you.
It’s light and airy.
We have chemistry.
We aren’t hiding.
We are grown ups of a sort, but there are no
grown ups in America, not anymore.
When I kiss you, it tastes like a goddess
yet to be named, still, fevered,
with a tender tongue I collapse into you.
This pressure and release tells you everything you ever
wanted to know about me.
I am gentle when I need to be gentle.
I am glib and romantic and foolish and obtuse,
the kind of caring you live for and the kind
of ecstasy you can’t live without.
Let’s kiss
and never stop
Love always surprises you, that makes it love.
listen to me
with your heart
stop waiting
for me to say
the perfect line
of words
that you
want to fit
in between the
needy spaces
of your bones
i’m not talking
to you
from my lips
anymore
I’m tired
of throwing words
around like knives,
and watching them
tear
into the softest
pieces of both
of us
instead
I will let
the silence
soak deep
into the
invisible crevices
of our skin
and wait
for the truth
to find her voice
in the silent places
that thump
loudly
behind
my rib cage
