A monk at Angkor Wat tied this thread around my wrist and sprinkled water while chanting for a traditional water blessing within the walls of the temple. You leave with a small knot of orange string and a few drops of water on your forehead. The temple stays where it is. The thread travels with you. 📿
Working on an essay now about the Donald J Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room from the perspective of museum and archive studies—here’s a sneak peak at where it’s headed.
📍andymight.substack.com
“The harbor had opinions about the hour. Pitch and tide and the smell of someone’s supper going cold, and whatever had happened inside that theatre was private business.
Thomas had his hand on the rail. Pippin had an orange peel he was turning without looking at it, the way some people work a rosary and some people worry a coin.
Neither of them had moved for some time.
This was, Thomas was learning, a thing that happened after certain plays. The stage cracked something open and the outside air got in and you needed a moment before you could be a person again in the ordinary way.
He had not expected to have this in common with anyone.”
📍New Outlaw Magick — Ep 17: Pied — link in bio or visit outlawmagick.substack.com
#darkfantasy #queerfiction #fantasywriting #serialfiction #substackwriter
@andymight (queer film professor and author) shares about how @rainbowcultorg grew out of quarantine, loneliness, and a backyard projector. What started as movie nights for friends became a space for queer connection and community.
#queercommunity #chosenfamily #lgbtqculture #cultfilms #communitybuilding
I rewatched Dr. Strangelove and realized the film may still be one of the clearest explanations of modern American politics ever made: nuclear masculinity panic, imperial humiliation, spectacle, dominance theater, and the terrifying inability of empires to distinguish strength from stability.
America Is in a Dick-Measuring Contest, and Donald Trump Has a Micropenis
Or, Dr. Strangelove Was Supposed to Be Satire.
💣 andymight.substack.com
Women and children have long held visible ceremonial roles within 葵祭 (Aoi Matsuri) 🌿 Historically, the festival centered on the Saiō, an imperial princess sent to serve the Kamo Shrines as a sacred intermediary between the court and the deities. Today that role survives through the Saiō-dai and accompanying female attendants. Child participants also appear throughout the procession, preserving court customs, costume traditions, and ritual movement patterns associated with the Heian aristocracy 📜🍃
Today I attended 葵祭 (Aoi Matsuri) at the Kyoto Imperial Palace 🌿 Held each year on May 15, the festival began in the 6th century after floods, famine, and epidemics were interpreted as signs of divine unrest. Imperial envoys were sent north to the Kamo Shrines to restore harmony between the court, the land, and the gods. More than 500 participants still process through Kyoto in painstaking Heian-era dress: ox carts, mounted guards, layered silk robes, hollyhock leaves worn as protective symbols against catastrophe. Nearly 100,000 spectators gather annually to watch Kyoto perform one of the oldest continuously maintained ceremonial traditions in Japan.
🏔️🐑 Wandering the shores of Lake Suwa in the so-called “Japanese Alps,” where Japan’s mountain regions sometimes imagine themselves through a curious imported pastoral fantasy: shepherds, sheep, alpine air, chalet rooftops.
🌫️ 諏訪湖 (Lake Suwa) has anchored pilgrimage routes, volcanic hot springs, and Suwa Taisha shrine culture for centuries. Also: an unexpectedly militant swan-boat economy. 🦢⛩️
