Check out Mark Harden's Artchive. He has many images that you can enlarge for better viewing.
So, you're probably wondering why all the art stuff all the sudden? After all, I'm a medical librarian, right?
Well, I have two jobs. One is as a medical librarian in a children's hospital, the other is as a humanities assistant in the distance learning section of a PBS television station. Our thing is 'humanities through the arts', so I learn a lot about art, theatre, dance, etc. along the way. Today's fact? Francisco de Goya suffered from a terrible mystery illness in 1792 that robbed him permanently of his hearing and left him temporarily paralysed. I've seen some speculation that the illness came from handling paint laced with lead, but I haven't researched any definitive cause that has been found. Anyone know right off the top of the head? See, I can mix medical librarianship and art. :)
A lot of these sorts of links are ones I find at work, because I spend a lot of time online for both places and I don't do much personal surfing since I don't have access at home. I do often blog from the public library, though, so if I'm in a browsing mood, I can find some weird things. Also, friends send me or show me quite a bit of their finds, and sometimes I blog about them.
Which reminds me...on something not art related at all, but would be at first glance. A friend pointed this link out to me and I haven't been able to stop thinking about how horrible it is. The news show Primetime did a story on Lamb and Lynx Gaede, early teen twin sisters who sing under the name Prussian Blue. (As in, the artist colour, see how it ties in?) I debated as to whether to link to their site or not, but you might as well go and judge it for yourself. What's my gripe with these apparently wholesome-looking teens whose folksy music has made them popular? Just the fact that it's music built on hate speech and white supremecy. Also, judging from what my friend and I heard and saw, they may be Asatruar, adherents to a Norse pagan religion that is not in and of itself hate-based but has a strong fringe that purport to be far superior than what they term 'mud people' (yes, like JK Rowling's ultimate insult, 'Mudbloods'). Let me reiterate that Asatru itself is not white supremecist, rather there are those within the religion who use its symbols and stories to perpetuate their own narrow view of things. I mention it because 1) no religion has a corner on intolerance and 2) being pagan myself, this sort of thing especially embarrasses me. Most pagans are very much into tolerance, although more than a few need to learn to tolerate Christianity better. I don't know for a fact the girls are Asatru followers, of course...I haven't talked to them. But I have known people who have followed Asatru, particularly because it resonated with their English or Germanic background, or because as a pagan religion it survived a little better intact in places like Iceland than say the Greek, Roman, or Celtic pagan beliefs have. That's a major draw. Yet, there seems to be this inextricable link between Asatru and another group that used the Norse religious symbols (namely, the Nazis, and neo-Nazi and similar groups that have been spawned since). Asatru apologists will tell you it's merely a fringe thing, and as a fringe religion paganism tends to have a truly wacky fringe itself. And I have to admit, it angers me that symbols of Norse and even Celtic paganism are being used by white supremecists. I remember someone from the army telling me how Celtic crosses were even being used that way in tattoos, and that 'everyone' knew what it meant...whereas Celtic crosses mean something totally different to pagans and Christians who might sport them. It was specifically why he, a proud kilted Celt, never got that as a tattoo. Argh!
The whole white supremecy thing has been ingrained into these girls, and I have to admit, I just don't get it. I mean, there is nothing about my skin colour that makes me superior to any other human. And just for the record, I don't like to think of myself as white...I'm actually rather pinkish, with stereotypical Irish skin. I'm proud of my heritage...Irish, Scottish, English, Welsh, Cherokee, and Blackfoot...but I don't think of that heritage as superior in any way. I'm also proud of my Southern heritage but that doesn't mean I think race-based slavery was in any way good and I'm sensitive to how the battle flag of the Confederacy may be termed by descendants of those slaves. I'd like to think in another time I would have been an abolitionist, yet at the same time, I believe in the states' rights to succeed, so who knows where I would have wound up in the Civil War...probably like the rest of Kentucky, right on the border.
Well that's enough of a tirade, I suppose. I'll let you judge for yourself. But I for one would like to see these girls grow into tolerant young women who learn to think for themselves, rather than parrot what they've been taught.
And somehow, somewhere, this is no doubt going to get me put on a list, either by those who support the girls and think of me as some sort of betrayer of the white nation (whatever that means), defenders of Asatru who didn't notice that I'm talking about a lunatic fring rather than the whole religion, or because I linked to a site that is for all the world a somewhat watered-down white supremecy site. Meanwhile, as a librarian, I certainly can't condone censoring the site or the music. (But I wouldn't go out of my way to buy that CD for a library, either. And I think that any festival or venue is within its rights to decide whether or not the girls' music fits with less politicised fare).
PS Tonight they ran a small bit on Primetime about reaction to the girls, and showed some of their comments about Hitler (calling him a great man with good ideas), the Holocaust (saying she didn't see how there could have been even that many Jews at the time, nevermind 6 million deaths) and dancing around a swastika and wearing Hitler happy-face shirts. This is really sick, and beyond that, it's child abuse. It's one thing for an adult to believe as he or she sees fit, no matter how irrational. It's another to spoon feed that irrationality to impressionable children who don't have the experience to counteract it with some independent thought. Nor do I see that home schooling the girls is going to add to their being exposed to different cultures and beliefs. And for those who would say that a child can claim Black Power without any fuss, there's a big difference between being proud of your race or heritage and seeing it as superior to that of others or supporting those who practiced genocide in the name of those same beliefs. Ugh. Kudos to Primetime for showing it, because while it does give them some free publicity (I'm sure their website has received many hits, for example), it also shows people what sort of stuff is out there, shocks their sensibilities, and encourages them to not be complacent.
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