Source: jaimestarks
“Loud Talking or Whistling Not Allowed!”
1910s Movie Theater Etiquette Glass Slide
Source: maudelynn
Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.
“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.
Source: johns-stripedjumper
Guinevere van Seenus by Tim Walker for Vogue Italia
Source: sisterwolf
I wrote this on request so it’s sort of forced but
The Maiden Maddalena turned her child’s face down
And shook out, unfurled like so many a herald’s banner,
Her rapids of sunray’d scarlet-gold hair,
And with the frantic stretch of a marionette,
She let the white flesh of her arms extend
And let the shimmering sunrays spill into a glass.
This is another rare photograph of Elizabeth Siddal, this time painted over with gouache probably by Dante Rossetti himself. I expect it’s the closest we’ll get to knowing exactly what she looked like.
(via zoedangerawesome)
Source: funeral-wreaths
i don’t really like when duende is applied to things outside of andalucian/roma/moor culture. duende is a part of that; it’s tied to the struggles of those people. you can’t sum it up in a quick deffinition—that defeats the purpose of duende.
if anyone cares…
“According to Christopher Maurer, editor of “In Search of Duende”, at least four elements can be isolated in Lorca’s vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. The duende is a demonic earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence, reminding them that “ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head”; who brings the artist face-to-face with death, and who helps them create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art. The duende is seen, in Lorca’s lecture, as an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call “angel”), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. Not that the artist simply surrenders to the duende; they have to battle it skillfully, “on the rim of the well”, in “hand-to-hand combat”. To a higher degree than the muse or the angel, the duende seizes not only the performer but also the audience, creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort. It is, in Lorca’s words, “a sort of corkscrew that can get art into the sensibility of an audience… the very dearest thing that life can offer the intellectual.” The critic Brook Zern has written, of a performance of someone with duende, “it dilates the mind’s eye, so that the intensity becomes almost unendurable… There is a quality of first-timeness, of reality so heightened and exaggerated that it becomes unreal…”
[The second way music can be new is] when it possesses duende: “black sounds”, as Lorca called them, the dark counterpoise to Apollo’s light, music in which we hear death sing…. Duende lives in blue notes, in the break in a singer’s voice, in the scrape of resined horsehair hitting sheep gut We are more accustomed to its presence in jazz and the blues, and it is typically a feature of music in performance, or music in which performance and composition are not separate acts. But it is also audible in the work of classically oriented composers who are interested in the physical dimensions of sound, or in sound as a physical property of the world. Even if it is structurally amorphous or naïvely traditional, music whose newness lies in its duende will arrest our attention because of its insistence on honouring the death required to make the song: we sense the gleam of the knife, we smell the blood…. In reflecting on the key images of Western music’s two-part invention – the duende of the tortoise and the radiance of Apollonian emotional geometry – we are reminded that originality is truly radical, that it comes from the root, from the mythic origins of the art.[4]
(note: in Greek myth Apollo kills a tortoise to create the first lyre).In his brilliant lecture entitled “The Theory and Function of Duende” Federico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. “All that has dark sound has duende”, he says, “that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain.”
Source: romantic-chasm
My little sister is the Infanta!
I'm Elizabeth, poet and firebird! I like beautiful things, flowers of all shapes, sizes, and colours, esoteric-and-poetica, romanticism and morbidity, and dragons. Dragons are the best.
