Thursday, May 31, 2007

The Real Surrealist


"She began her apprenticeship with Man Ray, portrayed the famous with a democratic eye, but was to find her true metier as a war photographer. David Hare pays tribute to Lee Miller, a woman who lived the life that her fellow artists espoused as a philosophy"...
'The Real Surrealist' The Guardian

Nikola Tesla



"Nikola Tesla (Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла) (10 July 1856 - 7 January 1943[2]) was a world-renowned inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer. He was born an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution."...

'Nikola Tesla' Wikipedia.org

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Trend Alert: Glimmer & Shimmer








The lovely and inimitable Carine Roitfeld wearing Dolce & Gabbana Fall 2007









Sonia Rykiel Spring 2007

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Night-Ride on Ariel


Your moon was full of women.
Your moon-mother there, over your bed.
The Tyrolean, the guttural,
Mourning and remaking herself.
It was always Monday in her mind.
Prouty was there, tender and buoyant moon,
Whose wand of beams so dainty
Put the costly sparkle
Into Cinderella. Beutscher
Moon of dismemberment and resurrection
Who found enough parts on the floor of her shop
To fill your old skin and get you walking
Into Tuesday. Mary Ellen Chase,
Silver nimbus lit, egg eyes hooded,
The moon-owl who found you
Even in England, and plucked you out of my nest
And carried you back to collage,
Dragging you all the way, your toes trailing
In the Atlantic.

Phases
Of your dismal-headed
Fairy godmother moon. Mother
Making you dance with her magnetic eye
On your daddy's coffin
(There in the family film). Prouty
Wafting you to the ballroom of broken glass
On bleeding feet. Beutscher
Twanging the puppet strings
That waltzed you in air out of your mythical grave
To jig with your Daddy's bones on a kind of tightrope
Over the gap of your real grave.

Mary Ellen Moon of Massachusetts
Struck you with her chiming claw
And turned you into an hourglass of moonlight
With its menstrual wound
Of shadow sand. She propped you,
On her lectern,
Lecture-timer.

White-faced bolts
Of electrocuting moonlight-
Masks of the full or over-full or empty
Moon that tipped your heart
Upside down and drained it. As you flew
They jammed all your wavelengths
With their criss-cross instructions,
Crackling and dragging their blacks
Over your failing flight,
Hauling your head this way and that way
As you clung to the sun - to the last
Shred of the exploded dawn
In your fist-

That Monday.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

So, Farewell Then, Jacques Chirac


"All political careers end in failure," a British statesman once wisely said. Judging by the wreckage of the famous political career that ended this week, he was even wiser than he knew. With the election of a new president of France on Sunday, the lengthy professional life of Jacques Chirac—French president for 12 years, mayor of Paris for 18 years, twice French prime minister for a total of four years—comes to a grinding halt, apparently to the great relief of his compatriots...


'So, Farewell Then, Jacques Chirac' Slate

Saturday, May 19, 2007

The Fecklessness of American Feminism

"The subjection of women in Muslim societies--especially in Arab nations and in Iran--is today very much in the public eye. Accounts of lashings, stonings, and honor killings are regularly in the news, and searing memoirs by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi have become major best-sellers. One might expect that by now American feminist groups would be organizing protests against such glaring injustices, joining forces with the valiant Muslim women who are working to change their societies. This is not happening." ...

'The Subjection of Islamic Women' The Weekly Standard

Atheists with Attitude



"[Hitchens] relates what he has seen or knows of warring factions of Protestants and Catholics in Ulster; Christians and Muslims in Beirut and in Bethlehem; Hindus and Muslims in Bombay; Roman Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbians, and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia; and Shiites, Sunnis, and Christians in Baghdad. In these cases and others, he argues, religion has exacerbated ethnic conflicts. As he puts it, “religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.” ...

'Atheists with Attitude' The New Yorker

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Napoleon Complex

"THE owner of Napoleon’s penis died last Thursday in Englewood, N.J. John K. Lattimer, who’d been a Columbia University professor and a collector of military (and some macabre) relics, also possessed Lincoln’s blood-stained collar and Hermann Göring’s cyanide ampoule. But the penis, which supposedly had been severed by a priest who administered last rites to Napoleon and overstepped clerical boundaries, stood out (sorry) from the professor’s collection of medieval armor, Civil War rifles and Hitler drawings." ...

'Collect-Me-Nots' NY Times