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on human friendships
What name shall we call someone you love dearly but also despise just as much? Someone you understand deeply but also perplexed by in the same measure? It feels to me that successful continuation of relationships requires some sense of defined feelings. That person X makes me feel like Y,
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faces in the fringe
I was walking back home today at around 7 pm and saw a man standing by the metro gates. He was wearing a dark blue shirt, tight jeans, and a rough (read: well-loved) pair of sneakers. He looked … ordinary. average. prosaic. His face … with no nominal emotion. But neither did
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naked (1993)
Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) captures a pretentious absurdity in the lives of several British characters living in the “big shitty” of London. The film begins with a rape scene, whose perpetrator and the film’s main character, Johnny, flees after being threatened by his victim’s announcement that her
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boy on the plane
On my flight back home, one week ago, I saw a child reading a porn magazine on the plane. He was in the seat in front of me and in an effort to not get caught, he had turned his phone towards the window, away from his mother. Before you
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the merit of a beard
Perhaps I could owe it to my openness, the fact that while transitioning from a major in the natural sciences to computer science, I came into contact with one of the most interesting characters that has graced the comedic play that is my life. Unlike most individuals that I have
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the shrimp girl
The Shrimp Girl is a 25 by 20-inch oil on canvas portrait created by William Hogarth (1697 - 1764) between 1740 and 1745. This painting is distinct from Hogarth’s oeuvre of mostly satirical and conversation pieces about modern moral subjects such as Marriage a-la-mode and The Strode Family, respectively.
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dirty pretty things (2002)
Stephen Frears’ film Dirty Pretty Things (2002) portrays the austerities in the lives of both legal and illegal UK immigrants. Frears’ foreign-born characters reveal how Britain’s rigid immigration system neglects the needs of most non-European immigrants, which in turn handicaps their pursuit of British citizenship. Among several reasons, the
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king Charles I on the hunt
In 1635, Anthony Van Dyck (1599 - 1641) painted King Charles I (1600 - 1649) on a hunt in an archetypical baroque canvas oil painting. English portraiture was steadily adopting baroque from Catholic countries, like Italy and France, in the 1600s (Praz, 171). Van Dyck was a Flemish painter with