Angels Of Revolution [Aleksei Fedorchenko, 2014]

The mystery of icon-preserving bees

For a decade, a beekeeper near Athens, has kept a tradition: every spring, he slips icons of Christ, the Holy Virgin and different saints in his beehives, in order to bless his bees and his yearly honey production. And every year, the very same mysterious phenomenon occurs: bees make their honeycomb cells around the pious images, meticulously avoiding covering them. 

Vaslav Nijinsky and Serge Diaghilev. 1911.

Photo by A. Botkin

(Happy Birthday, Vaslav!)

im starting a gang and we’re gonna go out and destroy every golf course. rip up all the grass and replace it with native plants and fruit trees and shit. we move at midnight be there or be a casualty of the revolution

Psychiatrist Who Argued That Being Gay Is Not a Disorder Dies at 82

Richard Green was one of the earliest LGBTQ allies in the mental health profession.

In 1972, early in his career, Green wrote an article in The International Journal of Psychiatry taking issue with “the premise that homosexuality is a disease or a homosexual is inferior.” The following year, the American Psychiatric Association dropped homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.

“Those were times when, if you spoke up in support of homosexuals, people immediately thought that you were secretly homosexual yourself, or had unresolved sexual issues,” Jack Drescher, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, told the Times. “Richard was very much heterosexual, and it took a lot of courage to argue for gay people.”

Even earlier, in 1962, Green testified on behalf of a Nicaraguan man who was facing deportation from the U.S. for being gay. The man won the right to remain in the U.S. Later, Green “testified on behalf of a transgender woman who was suing to keep her job as a pilot, and a transgender parent who was suing for child visitation,” the Times reports.

Green eventually completed a law degree, and he put that to use in support of LGBTQ rights as well. In 1990 he volunteered his legal services in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Boy Scouts of America’s ban on gay scoutmasters. Although the BSA won the suit, it finally dropped the prohibition in 2015.

May his memory be a blessing. 

Iconic.

Girl from Greece (left) and girl from Mexico (right) in their traditional national costumes

The Sower (Sower with Setting Sun)  Detail   -     Vincent van Gogh , 1888.

Dutch, 1853-1889

Oil on canvas,  204.5 x 162.5 cm

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Unpopular opinion but even if indigenous communities had 100% access to other food sources, they should still be able to continue with their traditional and sustainable hunting practices.

Indigenous people shouldn’t be expected to abandon their cultures’ traditions just because outsiders have decided that those traditions are “wrong” or that there’s better options.

The Eve of Ivan Kupalo/Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupala, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, 1968

“A master of Ukrainian poetic cinema, Yuri Ilyenko gained world-wide acclaim as the cinematographer of Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. As a director, he stands proudly in the anti-realist tradition of Dovzhenko: of his nine films, all but one were banned until last year, when A Spring for the Thirsty stunned SFIFF audiences. The Eve of Ivan Kupalo-based on Gogol’s rendering of a Ukrainian folk tale-is probably Ilyenko’s most inspired and experimental work. The opposite of what one expects from a film taken from peasant mythology, it is neither quaint nor corny, and doesn’t depend on broad acting and hearty singing. Suffused with the earthly pantheism of a half-pagan Christianity, Ilyenko’s film celebrates the unbridled passions of a people linked to nature and the rites of the seasons, to animals and the spirits of the forests. The story-a young peasant’s pact with the evil spirit in order to win the hand of a rich man’s daughter-is a simple parable of the evil power of gold over man. The cinematic treatment is dazzlingly complex, a series of astonishing and inventive images-boldly composed in color Cinemascope-married to an equally ambitious sound montage of music and stylized effects.”

The Color of Pomegranates (1969) 

dir. Sergei Parajanov (x)