Johan Palme

Rippled structures should prevent people from attaching stickers onto objects. Here some examples from Seoul/Korea (traffic-pole) and Linz/Austria (garbage-bucket)

A triumph, pretty much. Peter Pilotto and Christopher De Vos invented a new grammar for their brand today, coming at their signature maximal-print aesthetic from various unexpected angles and introducing, with this collection, an entirely novel Pilotto tone. There was a surprising hardness here, evident in the very first look: The cropped jacket in matador red was squared off, with shoulders of an intimidating size; it was covered with bold painterly embroidery and paired with a geometric wrap skirt in red, black, and white. The next looks out elaborated the mood and established two of the show's key silhouettes; there was another all-red ensemble, confrontationally graphic and boasting stiff, exaggerated shoulders, and then a boxy embroidered coat with shoulders even more imposing. This season's Pilotto woman was none too fussed about looking pretty, in other words, although the fluttery short dresses that appeared later in the show delivered froth in a very measured dose.

So the first half of this show really packed a punch. But then, about midway through, Pilotto and De Vos reverted back to form. There were new shapes of printed puffer jackets, and pencil dresses in kaleidoscopic patterns, and iterations of the now-familiar Pilotto nipped-waist, full-skirt dress silhouette, albeit with an inventive construction that utilized 3-D printing techniques. These looks were strong—the nipped-waist dresses, in particular, were sculpted in a way that felt fresh. But they simply weren't as forceful, or as distinctively new, as the dozen or so pieces that opened the show. A single garment marked the transition from one phase of the collection to another: After the printed puffer coat with the voluminous skirt and ruff-like collar, most everything on the runway seemed a bit of a retreat. That said, even in retreat, this was a compelling and convincing show.
—Maya Singer

Itz Tiffany – Fake London Boy

IMAGE: Acoustic tribology diagram via NIZO.

First, drink some black coffee. Next, rub your tongue against the roof of your mouth. It should feel a little rough, like very fine sandpaper: the tiny bumps on your tongue, called papillae, are raised just enough to create friction against your palate.

If you now add cream to your coffee and try again, the sensation should be much smoother — almost velvety. A layer of fat and mucous is now coating your tongue, providing lubrication and preventing friction.

What you have just done was, until very recently, the most accurate method for evaluating the oral perception of fat — the precise degree of tongue-coating creaminess in milk, mayonnaise, or chocolate pudding.

IMAGE: Diagram showing the effect of fatty emulsions on the touch receptors in the tongue’s papillae, via NIZO.

In the worlds of both taste research and product development, fat is an unsolved problem. Scientists are still trying to determine exactly how the human sensory system perceives fat; last year, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis were the first to find a specific taste receptor for fat, but most experts agree that people identify high-fat foods in large part by texture.

Meanwhile, for food giants such as Nestle and Unilever, formulating low fat or fat-free yogurts, cheese spreads, and ice creams that somehow still seem creamy and rich is something of a holy grail.

Until now, however, a company seeking to test the mouthfeel of its new fat-free cheesecake dessert has had two not very satisfactory options: hiring humans to repeat the rubbing experiment you undertook at the start of this post, except with cheesecake dessert, and then comparing their reported perceptions, or else simulating that experiment in a friction-measuring device that uses an analogue human tongue (often from a pig, though a bumpy, moulded silicone surface is sometimes used instead).

IMAGE: Tribometers measure the amount of friction as two surfaces rub together. The photograph on the right (via NIZO) shows a close-up of a pig’s tongue in the tribometer head. The schematic diagram on the left comes from a paper authored by scientists at a Nestlé Research Centre in Switzerland.

The problems with both methods are several and obvious. Human beings are expensive, time-consuming, variable, and imprecise — oral sensory perception can be affected by mood, previous meals, humidity levels, and even the earlier application of lotions and moisturizer to other parts of the body.

Meanwhile, measurements made using a machine that rubs cheesecake against a pig’s tongue are microscopically detailed, quantitative rather than qualitative, and much more easily controlled against external factors — yet, unsurprisingly, they frequently do not end up correlating very well to human sensory perception. Given these limitations on innovation, it is perhaps no wonder that fat-free products still generally disappoint.

However, in a paper to be published in June 2013 in the journal Food Hydrocolloids, scientist George A. Van Aken of NIZO, a Dutch food research company, reveals a new method of measuring mouthfeel: the wonderfully named “acoustic tribology.” Van Aken took a tiny contact microphone, packed it in polyethylene to keep it dry, and secured it behind a test subject’s upper front incisor teeth in order to record the acoustic signal produced by the varying vibrations of their papillae as their tongue rubbed against their palate.

IMAGE: Diagram showing Van Aken’s experimental acoustic tribology set up, from his forthcoming paper “Acoustic emission measurement of rubbing and tapping contacts of skin and tongue surfaces in relation to tactile perception.”

In short, Van Aken’s device means that we can now listen to what our tongues feel.

The process works by picking up vibrations within tongue tissue, which vary depending on the amount of deformation the papillae experience when rubbing against the palate. To return to our initial experiment, you can actually listen to a recording of the feel of black coffee (mp3), and then compare it to the softer sound of the feel of coffee with cream (mp3) or hear them both back-to-back in this NIZO video (wmv) — from sawing wood to depilling a sweater, and back again, interrupted by an occasional higher-pitched pop (apparently, these are caused by the “snapping of salivary films and air bubbles at the papilla surfaces”).

IMAGE: Fat-free black coffee offers the papillae no protective coating, resulting in greater friction, more oscillation within the tissue, and hence a louder acoustic signal. The addition of cream deposits a lubricating layer of fat on the tongue, dampening the friction and thus the vibration-causing movement of the papillae, and resulting in a much softer recording.

Using his new acoustic tribometer, Van Aken tests milk of varying fat content, cream, yogurt, quark, and even “cheese systems,” achieving a much higher resolution picture of mouthfeel than could ever have been achieved using human tissue before. In particular, he finds some intriguing patterns in the acoustic signatures of mouthfeel over time: for example, although skimmed milk initially produces a loud signal (it actually “cleans” fat off the tongue), eventually the sound tapers off, leading Van Aken to speculate that “the tongue surface is smoothened by wear.”

In other words, it’s possible that everything tastes creamy when your tongue is worn out — which perhaps lends weight to the Victorian advice to chew each mouthful one hundred times before swallowing.

IMAGE: Acoustic signals of milk samples with increasing fat content, potentially suggesting that optimum creaminess occurs at 3% fat content. Diagram from Van Aken’s forthcoming paper “Acoustic emission measurement of rubbing and tapping contacts of skin and tongue surfaces in relation to tactile perception.”

Van Aken is, no doubt correctly, excited at the opportunities his system offers to food scientists trying to engineer creamy fat-free versions of everything. For me, however, the synaesthetic pleasures of hearing mouthfeel remind me of psychologist Charles Spence’s fascinating work on crossmodal interactions between the senses, including the IgNobel award-winning finding that Pringles actually taste crispier when your consumption is accompanied by an amplified recording of in-mouth Pringle crunching. Perhaps Van Aken’s device will enable us to bypass the food scientists and their fat-free alternatives altogether, and instead add the sensory equivalent of cream to a skim latte through a smooth mouthfeel recording, available for 99p on iTunes…

The tragic robber-hero. The mystical gunslinger. The cerebral crime-lord, drawn into events beyond his control. One of the most straightforwardly literal ways in which popular culture is able to challenge official ideology is in creating complexity and human drama around criminals that the state would rather have seen as villains whose only wish is evil. From Dick Turpin to drug-dealer hip-hop, from Waltzing Matilda to dacoity films, from Stagolee to The Last Tycoon, there’s a definite sense of resisting the most simple explanations, inherent in the depiction of criminals as human beings capable of  having complex motivations, heroism, mistakes, weakness and resolve. (Even in their most archetypal guises.) All of which definitely makes this hip-hop video from Somalia’s Waayaha Cusub all the more interesting.

Barely any group has been as de-humanised as much in recent history as the pirates in the Gulf of Aden. The news in blanket fashion depict them as a dark force of nature, without voices or obvious motivations. In the massive, 18,000-word Wikipedia article Somali pirates are treated almost like vermin to be rooted out; nowhere in this exhaustive text cares to mention even with a casual glance what could possibly drive them, nor solutions other than shooting, warfare and (possibly private, mercenary) invasion. (It is difficult not to compare to the power-play propaganda from yesteryear; intensely false images, like those propagated by the British in the 50s of Mau Mau as barbarian ghosts descending invisibly in the night to slit colonialists’ throats.)

This song and its video, on the other hand, is far from the stereotype. Instead, here is a lyric that’s an appeal: youth, do not become pirates, you’re worsening our prospects for peace and development! One fictional young pirate’s tale forms a centerpiece and a warning: his story of being shot at, almost drowning and slowly reaching shore is a pirate’s possible grim fate. And at the same time it’s got the pirates as gangsta-style hard men, and drapes itself in pirate iconography, and you get a sense of the intense appeal the lifestyle presents. The container ships that are the focus of all Eurocentric media depictions form just an ominous, hazy background, a reminder of world inequalities. And it has everything those de-humanising stories miss: a feel of the complexity, of the humanity, of the implied questions that should rightfully surround our understanding.

* Thank you to Amal Shair for translation help for this story.

red40lake:

ok

Recently The Gordon Parks Foundation discovered over 70 unpublished photographs by Parks at the bottom of an old storage box wrapped in paper and marked as “Segregation Series.” These never before series of images not only give us a glimpse into the everyday life of African Americans during the 50′s but are also in full color, something that is uncommon for photographs from that era.

IMAGE: A random mutation caused this Golden Delicious apple to turn half-red, half-green. According to Susan Brown, she can breed apples with a stable variation of this mutation that creates candy-cane red stripes on a pale yellow-skinned apple. Photo ARCHANT via The Daily Telegraph.

In a 2011 talk titled “Taste the Apples of the Future,” Cornell University professor Susan Brown, one of only three commercial apple breeders in the United States, offered an enticing glimpse of yellow-red chimeras, pink-fleshed varieties, and the non-browning NY-674, whose resistance to discoloration was discovered by chance during an equipment failure.

Before moving onto her own, more practical work developing higher yielding, earlier fruiting varieties that are resistant to cold storage “scald,” Brown also mentioned that in Japan, farmers were already growing appl...

Natalie Ratabesi, the new designer of Philosophy di Alberta Ferretti, is off to a strong start. Her debut collection for the label was pre-fall; today she began the work of articulating her vision of the Philosophy woman in earnest. Ratabesi's inspiration for this collection was a bit daft—she imagined a Mongolian princess mooching around Paris at the height of the haute couture fifties—but it led to clothes with a modern, matter-of-fact appeal. Two seemingly simple looks serve as a case in point: One, all white, paired a trim jacket with an architectural peplum and a lean but diaphanous wrap skirt; the other, all black, matched a pair of soft, high-waist trousers with a superb blouse with sheer stripes and voluminous sleeves. Those two looks seemed to lay the foundation for the Philosophy era to come: They retained the brand's characteristic sense of romance, but elaborated on it in a way that was free of both froth and fuss. These were real clothes, and very chic ones at that.

Of course, not all the looks were so spare; Ratabesi really went to town on knit, proffering glimmering, long-haired Mongolian ski sweaters, sculptural hand-knits, and sweatshirt-shaped jumpers featuring variegated stitch details. She cuts a mean full skirt too, the best of which were done in pleated chiffon, and weighted at the hem; they had a casual hang that served to update the shape. Further updating was accomplished by means of the collection's slick outerwear: Philosophy is going to sell loads of the white, fur-trimmed, zip-off parka. The one quibble here, really, was with Ratabesi's swirly, jolie-laide prints, which seemed a little out of place. But on the whole, this was a collection full of winning pieces, with a ton of promise.
—Maya Singer

Man Ray's photographs of muses Kiki de Montparnasse and Lee Miller were the driving force behind Bibhu Mohapatra's Fall collection, a modern take on 1930s eccentric style. A lattice print wove its way almost all the way through, from a gray and black jacquard coat for day—belted with a shapely leather corset—to a navy crepe evening gown with laser-cut leather sleeves. "My work is always very geometric," the designer said backstage at the show.

The graphic theme worked, but when Mohapatra swerved away from his vision, things were less peachy. A jet-beaded rose chiffon bustier gown—topped off with a purple velvet cape—looked out of place and dowdy, really. As did a navy bustier gown, overlaid with embroidered tulle.

But there were some formalwear highlights. A creamy tulle gown embroidered with vines of black diamonds looked modern, thanks to the addition of not-too-thin, not-too-thick off-the-shoulder straps. It all just needed to come together better. Mohapatra launched his collection in 2009 with decent fanfare. It's time for him to more thoroughly focus his ideas and define his mission.
—Lauren Sherman

While waiting for my bagel this morning, the TV behind the cash register had a commercial for Superfocus, in which Joel Grey, Penn Jillette, and others were hawking glasses that resemble what architects were wearing half a century ago. Lo and behold, the Icon Collection Frames go by the names Bauhuas and Corbu. Some screenshots and descriptions from their website.

Named Bauhaus in appreciation of the iconic movement created by design master Walter Gropius in Weimar in the 1920s.

The Bauhaus has been a profound worldwide influence in art, architecture, graphic design, and last but not least, product design.

We believe that Dr. Gropius would have approved of the sleek, utilitarian look of these Superfocus glasses.

We proudly call this style Corbu. Named after Le Corbusier, one of the great pioneers of modern architecture, whose signature look was his famous, round, dark-rimmed glasses, with the temples centered on the circular rims. Look familiar?

It looks the only difference between the two frames (besides the optional finishes) is the where the arm connects to the rim. So if you pick up one of these "superframes," don't be surprised if people mistake you for Gropius when you're wearing Corbu, or vice versa.

“A woman from the audience asks: ‘Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?’ and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ’50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.”

- Stephen Scobie, on the Naropa Institute’s 1994 tribute to Allen Ginsberg  (via thisisendless)

okcebooks - “In which a bunch of earnest dudes try to chat up notorious twitter robot “Horse_ebooks”, via Dan W.

“A fashion-conscious criminal who tried to ‘bling’ her electronic tag after being inspired by My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding has been fined £140. Rebecca Gallanagh used nail glue to spell out her name in fake diamonds on the ankle tag which was meant to ensure she kept her curfew.”

Woman, 22, ordered to pay £140 after using dozens of fake diamonds to ‘bling’ her electronic curfew TAG | Mail Online

junglebarbie:

These are hype. #love #african #naildesign. Need to find these to put on ma nails

Yo! Ankara nails.

“A young person with a university degree can’t sing, but a minister with a 6th grade education can legislate?,” Dama do Bling sang in her 2007 song “Sai,” a musical response to inquiries why, in spite of her law degree, she chose a career in the music industry. This statement is exemplary of Dama do Bling’s provocative personality that has sparked much debate, at least in the early years of her music career in her native Mozambique, where she’s a big star.

Called a lusophone Queen Latifah and Mozambican Lil Kim, Dama do Bling (“lady of bling”) has become the Queen of Mozambican hip-hop, and through her collaboration with Pan-African superstars like Nigeria’s Sasha P, Kenya’s Yvonne, and Bleksem from South Africa she has become well-known all over the continent. Currently recording her fifth studio album and writing her third book, she is “one of the female voices to watch in 2013.” Her latest music video “Bad Girl” features her own fashion designs, some of which she presented at Mozambique’s fashion week in December last year.

Dama do Bling, born as Ivannea Mudanisse in 1979, started her career featuring on two tracks of the second album of Mozambique’s Queen of Reggae, Lizha James, in 2005. In 2006, she launched her first self-titled album, produced by Bang Entretenimento, with participation of other Mozambican stars, including Lizha James. Her first big hit was “Dança do Remexe,” which won two of South Africa’s Channel O Music Video Awards in the category “Best Female Video” and “Best African Southern” in 2007.

Before she became Mozambique’s queen of hip-hop, though, Dama do Bling was the queen of scandal. Standing for a new, younger generation of Mozambican musicians, she offended the “old guard” in several ways. Her sexy clothing and provocative moves on stage became the target of fierce critique, in particular when, despite being pregnant and starting to show, she continued to perform. One commentator in the country’s independent newspaper O País called Dama do Bling’s shows an “attack on moral decency and a crime” since she disrespected moral values of proper female public conduct and violated the dignity of the child in her womb. In another article, the same journalist called Dama do Bling’s way of exposing her body “anti-African” and a consequence of non-African influences that don’t value the female body. He called on the government to devise rules for musicians’ proper behavior on stage.

Dama do Bling’s law degree from Mozambique’s national university in Maputo, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (UEM), made some commentators ask why she preferred appearing scantily clad in public, if she could help solve the country’s problems. Her music was accused of lacking a message. The need for well-educated people in Mozambican society and the fact that Dama do Bling received her education at a publicly financed institution made people strongly criticize her choice of pursuing a career in the music industry.

Although this debate didn’t go as far as the debate on Lady Gaga in the US, Dama do Bling challenged previous views on the role of women in society. It was clear that this critique was especially about Mozambican women, since (as far as I know) there was no criticism of the fact that you could watch South African music channels featuring similar performances to Dama do Bling’s in many of Maputo’s restaurants and bars.

Maputo-based sociologists therefore discussed the “phenomenon Dama do Bling” widely as a symptom of change in Mozambican society (e.g., Carlos Serra from UEM on his blog). The sociologist Patricio Langa spoke of a “silent revolution”—a change of social values, disguised in a debate about what Mozambican music should look like. Carlos Serra, sociologist at the UEM’s African Studies Center, ridiculed the debate about Dama do Bling’s “untraditional” style by posting pictures of traditional dances featuring women in short skirts with uncovered breasts. Serra argued that behind the discourse on what is (and should be) Mozambican was a deep concern over men’s loss of control over the female body. Langa called out for diversity in Mozambican music: “Just let people be!”

This was also Dama do Bling’s reaction to the whole polemic. Asked for her response to the wide-spread accusations, she pointed out that she wasn’t scandalous, but “irreverent” and just said and did whatever she liked. “People tend not to receive new things well since it’s something that they have never seen,” she explained in response to the public outcry. Justifying doing things differently, she said: “We the young can’t build on those things from 20 years ago, because [if we did so], we would die.” Her first book, hence, was an autobiography with the title O Diário de Uma Irreverente (The diary of an irreverent woman). Beyond acting as she likes and defending the young’s inventiveness, though, her attitude didn’t seem to have much of a political or feminist message.

But all this seems forgotten now. Dama do Bling’s comparison to Lil Kim belongs to the past: “That was when I was young heheheheh. I’m a grown woman now… I must behave,” she said in an interview in 2010. And other Mozambican artists, like Ziqo, have taken over as targets of moral outrage. However, this doesn’t mean that Dama do Bling said goodbye to sexy moves or stopped standing up for herself. In a recent interview with Afroziky she explained the idea behind her newest video, “Bad Girl,” “A bad girl is a woman who fights for her ideas, a woman who is not intimidated by the opinion of other people. She does what her heart tells her to do. A bad girl owns her life.” And that is what many Mozambicans have become to admire her for. For her daughter (the first baby she lost in a miscarriage), with whom she was featured on the cover of the April/May 2012 edition of the journal MozCeleb she wishes that “she will be as irreverent as I am.”

"Ostwald Helgason" is a bit of a mouthful. But you might as well get used to saying it, because this London-based line is going places, fast. Susanne Ostwald and Ingvar Helgason's clothes are confirmed street-style favorites, and since their brand made its New York fashion week debut last season, it has been picked up by several pacesetting stores, including Louis Boston and Ikram. That momentum should only increase with this collection. The theme here was a hilarious one: a punning juxtaposition of French Symbolist poets, notably Charles Baudelaire, author of Les Fleurs du Mal, and the campy Little Shop of Horrors, a musical about a bad flower. The latter reference served as fodder for the designers' spirited riff on Americana; the poetry, meanwhile, they parlayed into an homage to the textile designer William Morris, a contemporary of the Symbolists.

It also inspired the duo's first forays into tailoring, for which they have a knack. A neat suit of Morris-esque gold brocade, with neoprene lapels on the jacket, was a collection highlight. So too the board shorts in Morris-inspired silk floral prints—a minor quibble, here, was that these looks didn't seem particularly appropriate to Fall. But then, it seems mean-spirited, and perhaps even unwise, to quibble with any item of clothing featuring a cannibal flower. The board short print had one, and the joke was sophisticated and funny. Which is a pretty good way of summing up the Ostwald Helgason modus operandi; they seem to work from the position that having a good time needn't come at the expense of intelligence and refinement.
—Maya Singer

"I have lived", said Mr. Humphrey Repton in 1816, "to see many of my plans beautifully realised, but many more cruelly marred, sometimes by false economy, sometimes by injudicious extravagance.  I have also lived to reach that period where the improvement of houses and gardens is more delightful to me than that of parks and forests, landscapes, or distant prospects."



Repton died just two years later after this looking-back, in 1818, having spent his last years in a 'Bath chair', (we would now call it a type of wheelchair) after injuries sustained in a carriage accident.  His confinement prompted him to pen what are to my knowledge the earliest guidelines for accessible gardening:

"...my own infirmities have lately taught me how the solace of garden scenery and garden delights may be extended a little further, when the power of walking fails...The loss of locomotion may be supplied by the Bath chair with wheels; but, if these are to grind along a gravel-walk, the shaking and rattling soon become intolerable to an invalid, and, therefore, glades of fine mown turf, or broad verges of grass, should be provided, as means of avoiding the gravel; and such grass communications may be so made, as to increase the interest of the scenery, by varying its features; for, although a gravel-walk must have its two sides parallel, or nearly so, yet a grass-walk should never be of any uniform breadth; it should rather vary in its outline, sometimes flowing among shrubs, sometimes under trees, as in the chequered shade of an open grove; and sometimes in one ample green mall, or terrace, commanding a distant prospect, a pleasing landscape, or even the curious though confined combination of rare exotic trees, within the sheltered boundary of the pleasure-ground. 




All these may be enjoyed by the cripple, with as much, and perhaps more, satisfaction from his wheeling-chair,or from a garden-seat, than by those who can encounter the fields of the farm, or the haunts of the forest; caring very little for the luxuries of a garden, as felt under the painful pressure of infirmity. These remarks are equally applicable to the fruit-garden, the flower-garden, or the pleasure-ground: they should all be accessible to a garden-chair on wheels, and all should he provided with ample grass-walks, to avoid the offensive noise of gravel."

[Quotes are from The landscape gardening and landscape architecture of the late Humphrey Repton, edited by J.C. Loudon in 1840, and available online at google books.  The images accompanying this post are from the Morgan Library's Red Books for Fernery Hall and Hatchlands.]

Alberta, 1916

christophertsaunders:

The Uniconz, fresh out of school and now starting a new clothing label. #Soweto2013

Fresh.

In a darkly ironic reversal of its normal role, Photoshop is now being deployed to make models look more fleshy than they actually are. In part spurred on by the impossible beauty standards that Photoshop has made commonplace, models have become so adept at self-starvation that magazine editors have to use software to make them look healthier.

Former Cosmo editor Leah Hardy recently described the “reverse-retouching” that occurred under her tenure:

“At the time, when we pored over the raw images, creating the appearance of smooth flesh over protruding ribs, softening the look of collarbones that stuck out like coat hangers, adding curves to flat bottoms and cleavage to pigeon chests, we felt we were doing the right thing… They had 22-inch waists (those were never made bigger), but they also had breasts and great skin. They had teeny tiny ankles and thin thighs, but they still had luscious hair and full cheeks.”

The more we look like ads, the closer we get to some ideal of beauty, the more off-putting we find the results. From anorexia to slumping pectoral implants, perfection has its price: Anthropomorphobia at its most sick.

Story and image via Sociological Images.

Posted both for the music and for the highly problematic hipster meta-understanding imposed on it. Be wary.

The Banquet, Rene Magritte, 1958

“When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty. The world teaches you that the way you exist in it is disgusting — you watch boys cringe backward in your dorm room when you talk about your period, blue water pretending to be blood in a maxi pad commercial. It is little things, and it is constant. In a food court in a mall, after you go to the gynecologist for the first time, you and your friend talk about how much it hurts, and over her shoulder you watch two boys your age turn to look at you and wrinkle their noses: the reality of your life is impolite to talk about. The world says that you don’t have a right to the space you occupy, any place with men in it is not yours, you and your body exist only as far as what men want to do with it. At fifteen, you find fifteen-year-old boys you have never met somehow believe you should bend your body to their will. At almost thirty, you find fifteen-year-old boys you have never met still somehow believe you should bend your body to their will. They are children. They are children.”

-

Stevie Nicks (via actias)

this

and this

““The idea of tribes was brought to Africa for several reasons…. It was easier to place people into categories based on perceived divisions of ethnicity than it was to try to understand the multi-layered, fluid identities that prevailed…. colonial authorities found that placing people into “tribes” with “chiefs” was an effective way of creating a political order.””

-

John Reader

Read more at: “Postcolonial Fantasy and Africa - Against the word ‘tribe’”

(via dynamicafrica)

eeloom:

“Oleku sleeves”

Lagos 1973

More Vintage Nigerian photos

via nigerianostalgia