Sylvie Vartran

Her parents were from Armenia and Hungary, which seems to prove that being French can be an existential condition.

Sunny Phillip Larkin Explains It All

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don't have any kids yourself.

Out of the past

"Using techniques she picked up with the Miami Forensic Imaging Bureau, photographer Angela Strassheim captures black and white bloodstains. After a violent incident at the college where she taught, the Manhattan-based photographer began researching crime scenes and convincing new residents, some oblivious to the unpeaceful past, to let her photograph their homes. Sprayed down with “Blue Star,” hidden spatters and streaks of blood are illuminated and captured through long exposure photographs"

I've often walked into rooms and felt . . .not blood on the walls, necessarily, but traces of things that may have happened.

via

John Waters on Christmas

I talk to people about how you can’t ignore Christmas. You can love it, you can hate it, but you can’t ignore it. I love it without irony, but I understand why some people hate it. It’s a financial burden, it’s an emotional burden, it’s a decorating burden. But it’s a happy time for criminals and a happy time for people who are attracted to elderly men who are overweight and wear velvet. It’s a time for perversion.

Giving gifts is incredibly difficult. The smarter you are, the easier it is to find a gift for you, because you have interests. And if you’re really smart, you tell people what you want and they get it for you. If you leave it up to people who you know are going to get you bad gifts, that’s your own stupid fault. Basically, a lot of the time people want to be told what to get you, because then they don’t have to worry if you’ll like it. But the best kind of presents are when someone you know collects something, and you find something that they never even knew existed. That’s the top present, even if it costs a nickle. It’s just finding something that they want that they didn’t know existed.

 I'm suddenly feeling better about Christmas.

via

Anouk Aimee

 

Photo by William Klein

Chelsea

Photo by Mark Sink

I'm shocked. Shocked!

"We started our research seeking men in their twenties who had never consumed pornography. We couldn't find any," says Simon Louis Lajeunesse, a postdoctoral student and professor at the School of Social Work.

Canadian researchers studying the effects of porn encountered that obstacle. Still, they say it doesn't seem to damage people.

Of course, they can't really make a comparison with guys who haven't watched porn, because they apparently don't exist.

Read the article.

Put the Blame on Mame

Rita Hayworth's "clothed striptease" directed by King Vidor.

Brian Eno, and the fine line between clever and stupid

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness. (via)

So, this is a decently perceptive comment, altough I doubt very many people are taking advantage of the ubiquity of culture to access Hildegaard of Bingen, to use his example. Or that it's made her more or less "cool."

Why is Brian Eno, of all people, framing things in terms of cool/uncool as if he was a tweener from Dubuque?

Celebrating the end of the division implies that it mattered, once.

And it should never matter to genuine adults. (You could cite the exception, perhaps of  marketers and the sellers of culture who could make money out of the notion that consuming something makes you cool.  But that's not paricularly cool, either.)

Crazy Uncle Bill's Thanksgiving Prayer

From Mr. Bridge, by Evan Connell

Autumn

That night he was sleeping when he realized his heart had stopped. Instantly he opened his eyes, and just then it resumed beating. He laid both hands on his chest, licked his lips and waited for what would happen next. But his heart pumped along, and after a while he dropped his hands on the blanket and shut his eyes and tried to sleep, but sleep would not come.

He could not stop thinking about his heart. He did not think there was anything seriously wrong, yet these seizures were occurring more and more often. He resented the fact that his heart was not in perfect order; and because he was unable to sleep or to forget about it he got out of bed and sat down in a chair beside the window where he plucked at his wrinked pajamas and meditatively observed the dark street.

Leaves were dropping from the maple trees, fluttering like butterflies in the night wind. He watched them and it occurred to him that they were trying to tell him something. As a leaf flattened itself against the window beside his head and leaped away into the darkness, a feeling of profound despair came over him because everything he had done was useless. All that he believed in and had attempted to prove seemed meager, all of his life was wasted.

(photo credit: unknown -- did a tineye search and didn't find the source -- if you know, please note it in the comments.)

From Mr. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell

(From the brilliant novel, just a scene or two to give you a hint of the book. In this one, Mr. Bridge's daughter as asked him for $250 so she can accompany her friend to Tijuana. It's the late 1930s.)

Then he inquired, jokingly, why her friend wished to go to Tijuana, and Ruth answered that her friend was going to have an abortion.

Before he knew what he was about to do he jumped up from behind the desk and slapped her across the mouth; then he sat down again as though nothing had happened, and ruth walked out of the study. He noticed with astonishment that the hand which had slapped her was dancing around on the desk as if it was attached to a string. He seized it with his other hand and bowed his head. 

He could not believe he had struck her. His fingers burned at the memory. When she was a baby he had held her in his arms while she was falling asleep. There were nights when nothing more than the knowledge of her existence had been enough to waken him so that he had gotten out of bed and gone to the crib to watch over her.