WayFinding 🏹 🎈 𓄋

“Everyone fails at who they are supposed to be. The measure of a person, of a hero . . . Is how well they succeed at being who they really are.”

I hope to meet you under the real blue sky.

Who chooses to give their island until again the seas are silent and any still alive?To the reasonable world they will appear as Queequeg did to the greenhorns and the Christians, that is, outside of his Nantucket family.

Friends living and dead What’s in a name? Are you lucky? is your God a she?

Some have the mutant X gene that allows for this. Most do not. Great artists have it. You’ve heard them. Some admixture of discernment and stubbornness sufficient to expand the borders of that defiant spirit and enlarge its southern reach, it’s Pan’s labyrinth, the peal of a rebarbative Bell.

What follows from that is obvious. I’m sure it is and has been to many of you. We have to reclaim the custom rights of our ancestors, must secure the physical space under the sky, the vault of heaven, now out of necessity. The alternative is to accept the Panopticon of surveillance and control.

2) Now, the unpleasant thing to share. This may be a final post on BlueSky. BlueSky is my last publicly facing social media account.

There are no ‘safe’ web platforms, no responsible links to share. Nor can they be secured. All digital space is compromised irretrievably, all irretrievably unsafe.

Heh. Two things I want to share.

1) If I caused any person concern for falling off BlueSky for a couple of months, I apologize to you. When I need to internalize something that requires real change, I need silence and reflection. That feeling came over me abruptly in December. Hence my absence.

@jinglecat.bsky.social

Nancy. Will follow me on Bluesky?

If we were meant to fly we would have been born with wings.
#DefyDogma

I am glad you have learned to darn

@tinyobscurae.bsky.social hi

El Greco lines up Renaissance art's superstars: Titian, Michelangelo, Giulio Clovio, and Raphael. We don't usually hear as much about the great miniaturist Clovio, but today is his day!

A Star fall a phone call
It joins all
Synchronicity

W/S

Lovely

At 84, she got the call that changed everything. Iris Apfel had spent six decades building a quiet empire. She and her husband Carl ran a textile company called Old World Weavers, restoring fabrics for some of the most prestigious addresses in America, including the White House under nine different presidents. But her real masterpiece was never the business. It was what hung in her closet. Born in 1921 in Astoria, Queens, Iris grew up between two worlds. Her father sold glass and mirrors. Her mother ran a fashion boutique. As a child, she rode the subway into Manhattan for a nickel, combing through thrift shops and antique stores, collecting pieces that spoke to her. She never stopped collecting. For decades, while traveling the world sourcing rare textiles, Iris bought things nobody else wanted. Tribal jewelry from North Africa. Vintage couture from Parisian flea markets. Costume pieces that cost five dollars sitting next to items worth thousands. She mixed them together without apology, layering necklaces until they became sculptures on her small frame. She paired Dior jackets with dollar-store finds. She wore colors that clashed on purpose because the clash itself was the point. Every outfit defied conventional fashion rules and declared one simple truth: style cannot be purchased. It must be invented. Nobody in the fashion world was watching. Iris was simply living her truth every single day.

Then the Metropolitan Museum of Art called. A fashion historian had mentioned to a curator that somewhere in New York lived a woman with one of the greatest collections of costume jewelry and accessories in the country. When another exhibition fell through, the curator tracked down Iris and asked to see her collection. What he found stunned him. Rooms overflowing with fashion history. Every piece curated with an artist's eye. The museum asked if they could feature her personal wardrobe in a major exhibition. Iris was 84 years old. The show, called Rara Avis (Rare Bird), became a sensation. Suddenly this octogenarian with enormous round black glasses, snow-white hair, and bright red lipstick was everywhere. She became the first living person who was not a designer to have her clothing exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fashion industry did not know how to categorize her. Here was a woman in her eighties commanding more attention than models decades younger. She had not asked permission. She had not sought validation. She had simply dressed herself with complete creative freedom for sixty years until the world finally caught up. She once explained the difference between fashion and style in terms anyone could understand. Fashion, she said, you can buy. Style is something else entirely. It implies originality. It implies courage. It lives in your DNA. As for conventional beauty, Iris dismissed the question entirely. She said she was not pretty and never would be pretty, but it did not matter. She had something much better. She had style. Her philosophy fit in four words: more is more.

She stacked bangles until her wrists could barely lift. She layered beads and feathers and textures that should have overwhelmed her tiny frame but somehow projected bold, graphic power. Her favorite saying became her Instagram bio: More is more and less is a bore. Fame arrived late and never stopped accelerating. She appeared in a documentary at 93. She signed a modeling contract at 97. She collaborated with major fashion brands into her hundreds. On social media, nearly three million people followed her on Instagram. Through it all, Iris worked. She once called retirement a fate worse than death. When asked at 100 what else she could possibly do, she answered simply: she did not play golf and she did not play bridge. She loved to work. She and Carl had been married for 67 years when he died in 2015 at age 100. They never had children, partly because their work required constant travel and Iris refused to let her children be raised by someone else. Instead, her influence reached millions who never met her. Young people found permission to dress boldly. Older people found permission to refuse invisibility. Everyone found permission to stop apologizing for taking up space.

Iris Apfel lived to 102. For eight decades, she heard the world's narrow definitions of what fashion should look like, what women should look like, what aging should look like. Then she spent two extraordinary decades proving something the world desperately needed to see. Creativity has no expiration date. Beauty exists far beyond narrow standards. And the most revolutionary act any person can commit is refusing to shrink themselves for anyone else's comfort. The woman who built art on her body every single day became exactly what she always was. Completely, unapologetically, magnificently herself.

Iris Apfel :
A most remarkable woman

"More is more and less is a bore."

She became the first living person who was not a designer to have her clothing exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Her story fills the alt texts 👇

I am here for this message. Good and evil is an old fiction.

Create.

Village. It takes a village.

📷 Yamamoto Masao, 山本昌男
Mount Fuji, 1978

These toys. Wow. They meant so much for kids, who came from families that didn't have a lot of money but had lots of fantastical imagination. Dad would occasionally bring me a star wars action figure. He would set it in the package on the arm rest of the sofa beside me. What a treat.

Dexter's Lab had GuyNoir, and any remake needs to character sketch #KinkNoir for Dexter's Lab 2.

Quick lesson in Physics. 🤣

Many-colored Rush Tyrant (Tachuris rubrigastra) in Chile by Yung Niem.

If you are a Dem House member or Senator and your recurring theme is "We don't have the votes, what are we supposed to do?":

RESIGN

HUMONGOUS pizza slices.

Dinner is served.

Lovely, all of this! Very cool share.

Closeup of garden snail (Cornu aspersum, formerly Helix aspersa)

Closeup of garden snail (Cornu aspersum, formerly Helix aspersa)

Closeup of small garden snail (genus Oxychilus)

Closeup of garden snail (Cornu aspersum, formerly Helix aspersa)

Anybody else adore these mesmerizing mollusks? Is it just me?

I'm even a gardener, and I still love them.

Spotted all of these #snails in a single rainy day in the Santa Barbara area.

#photography #animals #maco #macrophotography #pets #garden #gardening

Harvani was born in historical Sarab, Iran. After graduating in Graphic Design, she was awarded the National Art Prize and the art award from the Ministry of Science Research. Her work is inspired by the Iranian Golo Morgh (Flower and Bird) paintings, a traditional Persian way of painting in which the flower is the beloved and the bird is the lover.

Maryam Lamei Harvani (Iran) : Redemption, n.d.

Acrylic & watercolor on cardboard
97x 67 cm

More info in the alt text 👇

Extraordinary chess design, 1923

Fish Life Chess Board, Max Esser, 1923

The whole @profsaunders.bsky.social thread is excellent, but this is worth emphasizing.

I'm going to do that via shameless self-promotion.

@cooleyoneurasia.bsky.social and I first formulated the book that became Exit from Hegemony in the '00s, but we wrote the bulk of the actual text in 2018. 🧵