Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
Caramel vape with your latte? ‘Banana ice’ with your curry? The perfect pairing is out there – and vapeologists are keen to help you find it
Name: Vape sommelier.
Age: Emerging.
Continue reading...Cannes film festival: Set in a beautifully filmed provincial Japanese town, what could have been a soapy drama is told with poetic restraint and subtlety by Kôji Fukada
Japanese film-maker Kôji Fukada has created a film of great lucidity and calm, a walking-pace drama set in the quiet town of Nagi in the south of the country; this is a provincial place of seclusion and restraint, notable for its military base but also an interesting contemporary art gallery. The movie is less overtly sensational and emotional than Fukada’s previous pictures such as Love Life or Goodbye Summer, though it has the same Rohmeresque gentleness, the same considerate and caring mien, the same palate-cleansing wash of cool daylight. These are factors which do not however preclude intensity, even passion and a feeling that a dreamlife of yearning is taking place underneath innocuous waking reality.
At the centre of the film is an enigma: Yoriko (Takako Matsu) is a single woman who runs a dairy farm in Nagi, but her real passion is art. She draws and sculpts, but entirely for her own pleasure. None of her pieces get exhibited or sold. One warm spring day – the movie is elegantly interspersed with chapter-heading closeups in which different kinds of calendar get the days torn off – Yoriko is visited by her good friend Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi), an architect who after some time in Tokyo, moved to Taiwan to start a practice there with her husband Masato but returned to Japan after her divorce. What makes their friendship interesting is that they are sisters-in-law, or perhaps ex-sisters-in-law. Masato is Yoriko’s brother. So how exactly has their friendship survived and thrived for so long?
Continue reading...Exclusive: In letter seen by the Guardian, 30 members of Congress warn US president’s Cuba military operation would worsen ‘mass suffering’
More than 30 members of Congress have urged Donald Trump’s top officials to end the use of Guantánamo Bay naval base for immigrant detention and rule out any plans for military action on Cuba.
In the letter to the secretaries of defense, state and homeland security on Wednesday morning, reviewed by the Guardian, Democratic lawmakers led by Delia Ramirez, a representative from Illinois, linked a rise in migration from the island nation to the heightening US aggression on Cuba.
Continue reading...Keir Starmer set out bills to abolish NHS England, overhaul Send provision, limit jury trials and forge ties with EU
Keir Starmer has laid out long-promised changes to education, health and the courts in the king’s speech, which maps out the government’s agenda for the next year.
The speech delivered by King Charles cited bills to abolish NHS England, overhaul the provision of special educational needs teaching, limit trials by jury, introduce digital ID and end the leasehold system in England and Wales. It also included vehicles for closer alignment with the EU, and measures to boost the economy through the nationalisation of British Steel and pilot schemes to boost innovation in areas such as defence technology and AI-controlled ships.
Continue reading...‘This is part of my series Mother. I would ask my subjects: Do you feel more like a Mary Magdalene or a Virgin Mary? It’s always a fun question to ask’
Paul McCartney famously says that he got the melody for Yesterday in a dream. I used to think that was artistic licence, but then it happened to me with this image. I had a dream about a half woman-half animal, standing alone in the middle of a field, with trees surrounding her.
I was working on a series of images, called Madre, about the depiction of womanhood. The media in Bolivia always present women in a traditionally feminine way. It is rare to see a woman who displays more masculine attributes and her not be immediately labelled as a lesbian – there is no nuance.
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