Treeleaftown

“Writing, like dancing, is one of the arts available to people who have nothing. “For ten and sixpence,” advises Virginia Woolf, “one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare.” The only absolutely necessary equipment in dance is your own body.”

— Zadie Smith, “Dance Lessons for Writers”

“are you busy today?”

When the painter said, OK, you guys, take off your clothes! I startled at the plural, assuming I’d been engaged to model by myself. But then the dark-skinned god I knew as Aaron from my Econ class unzipped his jeans, and dropped them, grinning, on the floor. So I did, too, and clambered up beside him on the plywood box that elevated us above the clutch of paint-stained easels. Thoughtfully, the students posed our naked bodies. Someone fluffed the crispy hair between my legs into a dark brown bristling fan. And someone pinched the sides of Aaron’s face to pinken up his cheeks. Privately, I installed myself inside that mental space where I had hidden as a child when the world could be aborted no other way …

It was part of my plan to walk unclothed among the portraits my unclad body had provoked. So when we broke for lunch, the students lunging in a herd out back to smoke, I did. If you had asked me then why I modeled, I’d have said, to overcome my bourgeois insecurities, to combat my fear of what might happen if I showed myself completely naked to someone else. But if you asked me now? I’d describe the privilege of walking among a museum of strangers’ images devoted to oneself, and tell you what a privilege it was to see myself the varied ways that others did.

Some silly fellow had painted nipples on me the size and shape of frying eggs. Another jokester had shrunk them down as small as M&Ms. But someone serious and sad had shared a vision of my head as a clotted orb of hair and mouth, and brushed in underneath, a body headless as the horseman in the myth. Then I seemed to walk into the darkroom of my mind’s own eye and saw the self I’d always felt inside but never known: a complicated, unsmiling creature with a fear-tinged face. Around her the aura of something golden was fighting with whip-like straps of something black. She was staring straight into the future, trying to get out, trying to conceal her fear, completely unaware of how it glistened and glowed, and of how irresistible it was for the artist to spread it across the canvas so that everyone could see.

kate daniels, when I was the muse

jeju

This South Korean man has been standing in front of the Israeli embassy in Seoul for over 380 days, braving the rain, cold, and loneliness — in solidarity with the Palestinian people and in protest against the genocide in Gaza.

Despite the distance and language barrier, his human conscience stands firmly with us.

Meanwhile, Sami's family in Gaza continues to endure hunger and bombing. They've lost their home and loved ones — but not their hope.

Every action counts. A like, a share, a donation - each one can bring light to those still living in the dark. Donate here.

Miss Piggy's response to misogyny and fatphobia is physical violence and I think we should all take something from that

“I don’t mind being killed, but I don’t want them to touch me.”

— excerpt from Antigone by Jean Anouilh (trans. Lewis Galantiere)