Awesomestuffwomendid:

Sam Cooke - A Change Is Gonna Come (Ain't That Good News - 1964)

I was born by the river in a little tent Oh, and just like the river I been a runnin' ever since It's been a long, a long time coming but I know A change gon' come, oh yes it will It's been too hard living but I'm afraid to die 'Cause I don't know what's up there beyond the sky It's been a long, a long time coming but I know A change gon' come, oh yes it will I go to the movie, and I go downtown Somebody keep tellin' me "don't hang around" It's been a long, a long time coming, but I know A change gon' come, oh yes it will Then I go to my brother And I say "brother, help me please"  But he winds up knocking me Back down on my knees There been times that I thought I wouldn't last for long But now think I'm able to carry on  It's been a long, a long time coming but I know A change gon' come, oh yes it will

hotandrogirls:

(via smut-to-go)

Diane Kruger

Martial Arts Files-Yanin “Jeeja” Vismitananda ญาณิน “จีจ้า” วิสมิตะนันทน์

Style: Muy Thai,Tae Kwon Do,Jeet Kun Do

Vismitananda was born in Bangkok, Thailand. Her mother Prasita Vismitananda and her father Pawadol Borirak is a businessman and died when his daughter was 17. She has an older brother, Nantapong “Jeed” Vismitananda. She is mainly of Thai descent with some English and Burmese ancestry.

She holds a 3rd Dan black belt in taekwondo.

She was discovered by Prachya Pinkaew in 2003.

Her film debut was the starring role in the film Chocolate (2008), and her second movie was Raging Phoenix (2008).

Filmography:

Chocolate (2008)

Raging Phoenix (2008)

Jak Ka Ran (2011)

The Kick (2011) 

Disarming Armenians is a genocidal tactic, the young turks did the same thing. The nazis disarmed the Jewish population as well.

girlsinsuits:

(via retrospectivity)

(via plaidblood)

Chocolate

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1107767469/get-anna-may-wong-on-public-tv/widget/video.html

From Colorlines:

by Channing Kennedy Thursday, November 10 2011

If you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in the history of racebending and POC representation in cinema — and that means you need to get familiar with Anna May Wong, the black-and-white-era film star who made a career out of smashing barriers in Hollywood. A new documentary by filmmaker Yunah Hong, Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words, can bring her story to PBS, but not without your help.

Wong’s Hollywood career is fascinating and instructive. Despite being a California-born native English speaker who didn’t visit China until adulthood, Wong was only given roles that reinforced stereotypes about hypersexualized, deceitful Asian women. Time’s film critic Richard Corliss identifies three rules that hemmed in Wong’s career, even at the peak of her success: she couldn’t kiss (unless she was being savaged by an Asian man), she had to die, and off-screen, she always got paid a fraction of what her co-stars earned. And for her trouble, she was cast by Chinese newspapers as a traitor and an embarrasment.

So why, as someone subject to her own misrepresentations of Asian women, did Wong take these roles? One answer is illustrated in a role she didn’t get, a cowering Chinese peasant in 1937’s The Good Earth — played in yellowface by German actress Luise Rainer. Landing the roles was Wong’s only chance to humanize the stereotypes.

Want to know how Anna May Wong felt about her career? Yunah Hong’s new documentary, made over the last eight years, tells Wong’s story through new interviews and archival footage. The film is completed, but in order for PBS to air it, Hong has to raise $12,000 in the next 19 days to pay for the archival footage’s licensing fees.

As Hong says on her Kickstarter page:

Many older Asian Americans look down on Anna for playing stock Asian characters. But a younger generation sees her as a pioneering artist who beat the odds in a tough industry. Besides her strength as a woman, I admire her for pushing herself as an actress. When her film roles were limited, she traveled around Europe performing in cabarets, polishing her talents as a singer, dancer and monologuist. When MGM didn’t cast her in The Good Earth, a film set in China, she went to China anyway and filmed her trip. Long before anyone was called a “community activist,” she devoted herself to the Chinese American community’s war effort during World War II. She was way ahead of her time. Her courage to be herself against all odds is truly inspiring, the kind of story I want my ten-year-old daughter to know.

todayigotup:

Royal Wood. Do You Recall

“I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”

—

Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)

this passage planted itself in my consciousness when i was 24, and 10 years later, it informs so much of my approach to living, thinking, creating.