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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · May 3

Old Sindhi tombstones from Kirthar, near the same town of Than Bula Khan (loosely speaking; they are 70 km away from it). So magical, and a bit reminiscent of Armenian Khachkars.

Source: heritage.eftsindh.com/site/561/jam...

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 1d

I like this statement very much :(

Helene von Bismarck @helenebismarck.bsky.social · 1d

Atheism is no guarantee of tolerance.
And faith is no guarantee of intolerance.

But it serves the agenda of any authoritarian to suggest that it is that simple.

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American Association of Wine Economists AAWE @wineecon.bsky.social · 2d

"No more than a liter of wine a day" - In the early 1950s, when French wine consumption was 140+ liters/capita, France launched the campaign "Santé Sobriété" to limit alcohol consumption. In 1954, Philippe Foré became the chief designer. #WineHistory`

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Robert Bickers @bickers.bsky.social · 2d

I've written about the life and just some of the achievements of my former classmate Andy West aka 魏安, Ando, and BabelStone @babelstone.co.uk
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Andy West obituary

Other lives: Expert in encoding scripts for languages

www.theguardian.com

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 1d

Now its priests can perform official marriages and teach religion in schools (the only two perks that the state doesn't grant to smaller confessions)

Dr Francis Young @drfrancisyoung.bsky.social · 2d

Today is a big day for the Dievturība (native faith) movement in Latvia, as Latvia becomes the first country in Europe to enshrine the place of its pagan religion in law

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 5d

I wonder how the economy is gonna become better without immigration and with even more pressure on women to perform the keeper of the hearth role tho. (i guess a rhetorical question isn't it...)

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 5d

But when the thing is about war, being so well-behaved and withdrawn and Japanese and beautiful _becomes_ a statement, doesn't it? Perhaps a stronger statement than if it were more "thematic" in appearance?

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 5d

What I mean by aesthetics is exactly that: that it's pretty. It's a museum / propaganda thing (at least to a degree), but it looks so pretty, neat, nice, and Japanese!, and wonderful. It is breathtaking, in a way, isn't it? It's not even russian "Church of WAR" level of aggressive. It's beautiful!

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · Nov 8

Maki Haku (1924–2000), Japanese print-maker. During the war, was trained to become a kamikaze, but the war ended.

These are not his most famous pieces - in fact, they seem to be more of a transient phase in 1957, I just happen to really like them.

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · Aug 24

Wow, these are the two photos from @chapps.bsky.social post below side-by-side; a modern photo, and one from ca. 100 years ago. And I HAD NO IDEA these frescos were damaged that much in this time! This area wasn't hit by a war afaik, and still!.. We're bad in keeping stuff intact, aren't we?

the same fresco about 100 years ago, less damaged

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · Oct 19

Here's the source (not a sink! the source!!!) of river Cetina in Croatia! Can you only imagine?

(I'm saving tweets, before Xitter gets banned in Europe. Sorry. Just mass-copying all the tweets. Leaving less loved one behind, like a migrant when packing in the old house)

View from even higher above: this giant tube of well, and a church nearby

Somebody swimming in the well, and it looks scary and somehow almost illegal

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 5d

Yeah, I added a bit of clarification below (after myself reading a bit more about it). They added the most controversial remains in like 1970s!! So the opposite of normalization in a way, but an intentional pushing of an envelope, it seems?..

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 5d

Yeah, it immediately asks for a comparative analysis. But it also gets increasingly complicated as you go further from "obvious" cases like Hitler and Stalin.

Back when the USA were still hopeful, and tried to trash statues of slavers, I wrote about memorials and monuments. It's complicated.

Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · Oct 27

For a long time I thought that museums are exactly the best place for downcast "heroes" of the past, but that's coz I was young, naive, and optimistic. Moscow used to have a museum of defeated heroes, where they brought the statues of lenins, stalins, dzerzhinskies etc. The demons defeated. But 🧵1/3

A sculpture of Dzerhinsky lying on his back

A sculpture of Stalin, lying on the ground

Some half-broken coat of arms of the Soviet Union

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 5d

The aesthetics of it all is so weirdly questionable tho. So yep it's a shrine. But also inside it looks more like a museum, and on days of the dead it presents names of the dead, as if they were victims, heroes. Real pretty on the outside, cherry blossoms and all. Propaganda inside (apprently)....

a wall of lanterns with writings, are these names of the dead? not sure but seems plausible

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 5d

(Although to be fair, the Japanese shrine is also different: it used to be a memorial to imperial patriots, then morphing to a generic military memorial, and only in 1960-70s (!!!) intentionally turned into a more controversial place by enshrining convicted war criminals. Appropriation of sorts?..)

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 5d

Russians have graves at the Kremlin wall, including that of Stalin. Oddly Putin haven't ever personally put flowers on Stalin's grave, but there are always flowers on it, provided by the state. But russia also doesn't have elected leaders having to communicate anything to anyone, so hard to compare

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 5d

I double-checked German and Soviet cases. Germany doesn't have a site like that; many Nazi members simply don't have graves; there's also at least one case when a grave became a site of Neo-Nazi pilgrimage, and was sorta neutralized to prevent it from happening (that of Rudolf Hess)

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 5d

til Japan has a special shrine with tombs of war criminals, the sole purpose of which at this point seems to be to communicate to the public the political views of their political leaders: whether they would show public respect to war criminals or not, and how often
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasukun...

Yasukuni Shrine - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 6d

Just discovered your account, and these are so good!! Thank you for existing, and thank you for posting here!

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ᴄʜᴀʀʟᴇʏ★ᴘɪʀᴏᴛʜ @charlespiroth.bsky.social · 9d

📷 Jacob Mitchell

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Mark Lippett @marklippettart.bsky.social · Aug 24

I’m currently moving things into my new art studio. I’ve rediscovered a number of older pieces from the back of the old space. This one won the Shire Hall Gallery open exhibition back in 2005. I miss that place!
#acrylicpainting #urbanlandscape #artstudio

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 6d

Days when the share of art to politics on my timeline drops below 1 are the dark days

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 6d

I haven't tried anything Finnish yet except for the music, so now I'm curious and even more hopeful :)

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Nick Brumfield @nickjbrumfield.bsky.social · 6d

JRR Tolkien but happily

Philip Seymour Hoffman character Gus from Charlie Wilson's War yelling "I spent three years learning Finnish!"

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Arseny @elstersen.bsky.social · 6d

Speak of the devil:

Nicholas Whyte @nwhyte.bsky.social · 6d

J.R.R. Tolkien on the Finnish language: "It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me." (from a 1955 letter to W.H. Auden)

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