The evil stepmother is a fixture in European fairy tales because the stepmother was very much a fixture in early European society–mortality in childbirth was very high, and it wasn’t unusual for a father to suddenly find himself alone with multiple mouths to feed. So he remarried and brought another woman into the house, and eventually they had yet more children, thus changing the power dynamics of inheritance in the household in a way that had very little to do with inherent, archetypal evil and everything to do with social expectation and pressure. What was a woman to do when she remarried into a family and had to act as mother to her husband’s children as well as her own, in a time when economic prosperity was a magical dream for most? Would she think of killing her husband’s children so that her own children might therefore inherit and thrive? […] Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the fear that stepmothers (or stepfathers) might do this kind of thing was very real, and it was that fear–fed by the socioeconomic pressures felt by the growing urban class–that fed the stories.
We see this also with the stories passed around in France–fairies who swoop in to save the day when women themselves can’t do so; romantic tales of young girls who marry beasts as a balm to those young ladies facing arranged marriages to older, distant dukes. We see this with the removal of fairies and insertion of religion into the German tales. Fairy tales, in short, are not created in a vacuum. As with all stories, they change and bend both with and in response to culture.
— Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
Jay DeFeo is best known for this monumental painting, entitled The Rose, which she started in 1958 and completed over the course of eight years. The piece consists of white and gray paints layered so thickly onto the canvas that, in some ares, the paints are almost eight inches thick. She used so much oil paint that she called it “a marriage between painting and sculpture.“
The Rose measures 7.5 x 11 feet and weighs 2,300 pounds,
I love it when you can pick up an animator’s quirks.
I’ve read in old interviews with Milt Khal’s fellow animators that he did the swaggle to purposefully show off. Moving the head in 3-d space is an exceptionally hard thing to do but Khal upped the level of difficulty to a place many animators wouldn’t go. Not only are they all doing the swaggle you’ll notice they are all TALKING while they are doing it. This is back in the days where you had to use a timing sheet to pace your animation and a head swaggle doesn’t work if its too slow or too fast so he had to figure out the right speed so it looked natural while the character finishes what they have to say while not interfering with the distinct mouth shapes. Not only did Khal do it without any shifting weight problems or timing issues he would often do it while moving the rest of the body. This isn’t his signature move just because he was good at it.This is his signature move because he was one of the only people skilled enough to DO IT AT ALL.
Milt Khal was a MASTER.
God, I can’t express to you how fucking DELIGHTED I become whenever they Milt Khal Head Swaggle Post graces my dash with its presence again.
Love that the favorite pass-time of rich people in the 1800s was getting scammed pretending to talk to ghosts
They’re still like this.
I need to go to a amazon funded spiritualist meeting. Tesla self driving planchette
Every “Corporate yoga retreat” within a day’s drive of San Francisco contains enough built up jo crystal energy to blow Alcatraz to the moon.
i wish i could find the article now, but this reminds me of the ~2010 story of the (Florida?) woman who tried to kill her husband by hiding a weapons grade stash of Bad Energy Harsh Vibe crystals under his bed. the judge was like “… i guess this is attempted murder, but the word attempted is doing an unusual amount of heavy lifting”
"To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world ̶ and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.