Rat King

down by the river

Min Ding

Via: https://www.instagram.com/p/DG2QuZWPkGz/

Why do they play this so fast live

severance sketch repost. tweaked some colors

While taking a nap today I dreamt there was a hazard sign called "never found" which was used to indicate a location where people disappeared never to be seen again

HE FROM ON HIGH RAVING EVERYMAN

STRANGER-IN-BATHROOM STAIRMASTER

disco elysium-inspired portraits, thoughts below

kendall — the boy prince with a crown of thorns, imprisoned at the top. he overlooks the city, painfully distant from it all. a reflection in broken glass haunts him; his father, the waiter, himself. shattered and bloodied and dripping onto him still. so high and so blue, a puzzle barely together. his gaze tells you he knows how pathetic he is.

connor — the relatable uber-rich. the eldest son, forgotten, overtaken by the background. his political ambitions are yet another hobby to fill a void; his ranch, his wine, his presidency. he is pastel, faded, swathed in republican red that even then is all vanity. sees himself in screens. he is blowing away in the wind.

roman — doing the dirty work in the dirty room. he's ready to sling over offers and quick wit but there is a childishness about him, like he's scrawled in crayon. something's off, something's wrong with him and you can't figure out what exactly. he lives within it, then: slimy and blood-hot and close. his eyes dart around. the trained dog that might just bite when he's nervous.

shiv — all that effort to go nowhere. a girl with a pearl earring: wealthy, intriguing, unknowable. can't be bothered to face you fully, but baring her back in the process. bathed in the lines of light that her father gives her in inches. she is doomed to be pushed, and to be helped back up, which might be worse than the falling. exuding something sharp, startling, hot pink: forever pinky.

and if you got here... THANKS 4 reading & looking

If I stretch my arms as far as they go, I can feel the edges of the sky

In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”

Imagine if they find Luigi innocent and he has to go through the rest of his life as That Guy Who Got Turbodoxxed That One Time Because Everyone Thought He Was An Assassin.

mark s. acrylic on paper (had to play with the colors a bit to get the scan to look like the original)