Hello happy Friday (TGIF) sweet subs.
Today mostly links and Busty Mermaid Statue. Stay tuned. (Buckle up?)
Bulletin Board:
If you are a DSA member: This resolution needs 300 signatures by tonight in order to qualify for the August convention.
This is a resolution proposal for National DSA’s biannual convention in August, where chapters from across the country gets together to vote on organizational priorities. This resolution would commit the organization to fight against fascist anti-abortion and anti-trans measures being rolled out across the country through direct action and ballot initiatives.
Please sign!
Freelance Solidarity Project Benefit this Sunday at Spectacle
Friend of the ‘stack organized this very cool event, a screening of Michèle Rosier's MON CŒUR EST ROUGE (1976) followed by discussion with two movie theater workers; a benefit to raise funds for the Freelance Solidarity Project (@FSP_NWU)!
Reading:
Sad Cactus corner (music recs from friend of the stack)
Shelby watches TV update:
Latest Succession was the funniest yet, absolutely love nepo baby (just needed to say it once in here) Alexander Skarsgård in the show. Him discussing sending his frozen blood to his employee…Perfect! Makes me want to rewatch True Blood! Dare me! I’ll do it!
My friend Tina, who definitely does not read this newsletter but I love anyways, persuaded me to watch a show called “Wicked Tuna” (Wicked Tina, more like it!) which is about a fleet of tuna fishers competing against each other to make the most $$ per season. They are limited to one fish per day which really heightens the suspense. You can get quite good at guessing the weight of tuna per pound based on the transparency of that tail and the fat quantity. Important skills for viewers at home, I wager.
Three books I liked in the past few years:
Perhaps will dive into more detail for subs about why I love these three so much: the play John by Annie Baker (thank you other Shelby for introducing me to Annie Baker), Mercury Retrograde by Emily Segal, and Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. A haunted play about infidelity, fantastic slip-stream-ish fiction that interrogates creativity and creatives, great sci-fi that the movie Stalker was based off. In summary.
Opinion: Let The Mermaid Have Big Stone Behemoth Jugs And An Ass Crack Like A Fault Line
The Guardian published a piece today perfectly titled “‘Too provocative’ mermaid statue causes stir in southern Italy.” Naturally you must see this statue, so here are two angles also provided in that article:
Described in the article as “voluptuous,” the statue—created by students at the Luigi Rosso art school in Monopoli—obviously got attention on social media because, I mean. Look At Her.
The headmaster of the school went to bat for the statue (imagine getting a call from a journalist for comment about the busty mermaid your students created) calling it a “tribute to the great majority of women who are curvy.” Our body positivity king continued, “you see adverts on television with models who are very thin, but the mermaid is a tribute…it would have been very bad if we had represented a woman who was extremely skinny.” It’s like curvy wife guy but for the mermaid with huge jugs. I love him!
Obviously I am in favor of the busty mermaid, but mostly because she is a magnificent stone bimbo ready for our basest projections (posts) and not because she challenges the toxicity of impossible standards for how our bodies should be shaped as told to us by advertising. Plus she’s not really a tribute to “real” bodies now is she? Sir? She’s got a tail, a sickeningly thin waist, circular (silicone? no judgement, they look great) tits, and a loooooong ass crack. She represents no one but herself—how could she!—and that is her beauty.
If you read my…absolutely award-winning…book (no awards given to the book, but many given in the book) you would know I have a long-running fascination with statues as a site of sexual frustration and/or arousal and emotional projection—most literally depicted in the myth of Pygmalion and reimagined countless times since. But where Pygmalion crafts a marble effigy of woman, totally empty, sexless, dependent on the creator to be brought to life, a narcissistic endeavor from toe to tip—the horny teens of Italy. Well well. They’ve given us a lot to work with. And as a collaboration—is she really an object of objectification or simply…an externalization of hormonal lust, whimsy, and allure? Shouldn’t we be celebrating these students for using THEIR HANDS to DO something—namely sculpt gigantic stone tits—instead of TEXTING! Let them make art! This is my new cause! I am being facetious! Protect her!
(Really I am bewitched by her, and can’t stop thinking about her being the only remnant of a future world. Alien archaeologists see from space a planet ravaged by climate change and nuclear annihilation, there is so little detritus for them to put clues about our society together, man we shouldn’t have put everything on the cloud. But then, then. A glimpse of something on the horizon. She stands, impossibly untouched by the ravages of time. The Busty Mermaid. She becomes their God, naturally. A new religion and world order is formed in allegiance to Her.)
I was curious to see what Redditors had to say about this and, well, some points were made.
Rage like Nic Cage brings up a good point here: ignore the ass, and instead question why a mermaid would have a butt at all. It’s fishtail all the way down. Or is it.
Another user summed it up well:
“She’s got massive T&A” then simply a period and moving on…it’s perfect. Agree. Yes. Agree!
0 votes. Cowards.
I do however think it is very funny to imagine—in addition to the aforementioned “society rebuilt after annihilation in Her image”—a family on vacation and they are like okay kids everyone line up by the butt crack. Anyways I love Italians. Brave of me to say!
That is all for now, here is my dog one time when she collapsed into a puddle around a bunch of children and they all pet her at once and then proceeded to gather her sticks, sort of like an offering, the altar of Clem.
I’m aware I have used this picture and story before but it really gets me every time. Thank you for your emails and comments, do share my newsletter in your group chats if you like it because I am, again, bravely off social media (for now…said ominously.)
Remember: She’s got massive T&A.
Shelby + Clem