Finished reading: The Idiot by Elif Batuman 📚

I’ve never read a book that seemingly had no arc. But I think that was the point.

Captures college life (and email!) in the 90s well. It’s a little painful to recognize bits of your own partially-formed self in the characters.

Finished reading: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen 📚

More engaging and realistic characters than The Corrections, but they make such terrible decisions it was like chewing glass sometimes, and I had to put it down.

Finished reading: The Lehman Trilogy by Stefano Massini 📚

Crazy book. Originally written in Italian. No Italian characters or settings. A fictionalized account of the German-Jewish Lehman family and the construction and ultimate demise of their financial empire. Written in blank verse and particularly enjoyable as an audiobook.

Labor Day Weekend

My family are all away. My favorite bar and backup favorite are closed. I have not felt this abandoned since my mother practiced the Ferber method.

Elliot Page




zacharylevis:

Many of the political attacks on trans people—whether it is a mandate that bathroom use be determined by birth sex, a blanket ban on medical interventions for trans kids or the suggestion that trans men are simply wayward women beguiled by male privilege—carry the same subtext: that trans people are mistaken about who they are. “We know who we are,” Page says. “People cling to these firm ideas [about gender] because it makes people feel safe. But if we could just celebrate all the wonderful complexities of people, the world would be such a better place.”

Page was attracted to the role of Vanya in The Umbrella Academy because—in the first season, released in 2019—Vanya is crushed by self-loathing, believing herself to be the only ordinary sibling in an extraordinary family. The character can barely summon the courage to move through the world. “I related to how much Vanya was closed off,” Page says. Now on set filming the third season, co-workers have seen a change in the actor. “It seems like there’s a tremendous weight off his shoulders, a feeling of comfort,” says showrunner Steve Blackman. “There’s a lightness, a lot more smiling.” For Page, returning to set has been validating, if awkward at times. Yes, people accidentally use the wrong pronouns—“It’s going to be an adjustment,” Page says—but co-workers also see and acknowledge him.

Whatever challenges might lie ahead, Page seems exuberant about playing a new spectrum of roles. “I’m really excited to act, now that I’m fully who I am, in this body,” Page says. “No matter the challenges and difficult moments of this, nothing amounts to getting to feel how I feel now.” This includes having short hair again. During the interview, Page keeps rearranging strands on his forehead. It took a long time for him to return to the barber’s chair and ask to cut it short, but he got there. And how did that haircut feel?

Page tears up again, then smiles. “I just could not have enjoyed it more,” he says.

ELLIOT PAGE for TIME Magazine › 2021 interview by Katy Steinmetz, photography by Wynne Neilly via Tumblr

Self-Portrait


philamuseum:

Believing “human experience is the proper subject matter of art,” Martha Mayer Erlebacher employed her meticulous technique to paintings of people. Trained as an abstract painter, she studied the history of art and eventually was drawn to the more precise figurative style of Italian Renaissance artists. In this self-portrait, she focuses her direct gaze on herself, rendering her torso in a shallow space defined by a fabric-draped wall with her head framed by sky.

See this work and more in our newest exhibition “Painting Identity.”

“Self-Portrait,” 1975, by Martha Mayer Erlebacher via Tumblr

Don't Give Up


sogothefaithless:

“The sensitive treatment Kate gave our give-and-take on that song was gratifying, because it’s not just a song about a woman supporting a man in a demanding relationship. The chief thing dragging them down is unemployment, which is presently tearing the social fabric of Thatcher’s England apart. The catalyst for ‘Don’t Give Up’ was a photograph I saw by Dorothea Lange, inscribed ‘In This Proud Land,’ which showed the dust-bowl conditions during the Great Depression in America. Without a climate of self-esteem, it’s impossible to function.” — Peter Gabriel weaves generations together in SPIN magazine, September 1986. via Tumblr