"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."

 

— The Painted Drum, Louise Erdrich

A Nice Surprise

Snake in the Water

What Does This Image Have To Do With The Next Crimespree?

Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont on a flight that rounded the Eiffel Tower c.1907

Famous, Infamous and Iconic Photos

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

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In 1898, the Parisian art gallery owner Maurice Joyant photographed his childhood friend defecating on the beach at Le Crotoy, Picardie. The series of photos would have been forgotten, had Joyant’s friend not been Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the acclaimed French painter. Their intention in taking these photos — and later allowing them to be published in postcard form — was unclear, but these photographs remain the earliest photographic testaments to celebrities behaving dubiously, a century before Internet made such indiscretions well-known and widespread.

By this time, Lautrec, who precociously displayed prodigious artistic talent earlier, was slowly going downhill. Earlier that year, Joyant arranged a one-man show for Lautrec in Goupil & Cie, the leading Parisian art dealership. The show was a total failure. Alcoholism and venereal diseases plagued Toulouse-Lautrec’s life, and he moved back in with his upper-class family, which disapproved risque subjects he depicted in his paintings. His uncle even set fire to some of his canvases. To humor Toulouse-Lautrec, Joyant would take him to the coast for yachting weekends and to England. They also regularly visited Le Crotoy, where a lot of French artists (including Jules Verne and Colette) vacationed. It was at Le Crotoy that the above photos were taken, a year before Toulouse-Lautrec was committed to an asylum, and three years before he finally succumbed to complications caused by alcoholism and syphilis in 1901.

Maurice Joyant would live for another thirty years and work harder than anyone to preserve his friend’s memory posthumously. He wrote extensively about his relationship with Toulouse-Lautrec and staged retrospectives to the painter in 1902, 1907 and 1914. Entrusted by Toulouse-Lautrec’s parents as executor of his paintings, he would also convince the painter’s mother, the Countess Adele de Toulouse-Lautrec to create a museum to the artist, where works rejected by the salons of Paris, were proudly displayed.

From Iconic Photographs

"Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking."

- Leo Tolstoy

"…recite the list
of what you’ve learned to do without.
It is stronger than prayer."

— Stephen Dunn, from “Traveling”

Latest Wallpaper - Inside!

One Does What One Must

From

For Me

From

Grab:

• a small glass of rubbing alcohol or vodka
• 10 strips of newspaper (bigger than your nails)
• LIGHT nailpolish. white, clear, light pink, etc. anything LIGHT

Do:

• dip your nails in the alcohol for a while so the whole nail is wet
• press a strip of the newspaper on your nail and hold firmly for 30 seconds. do NOT move the strip, keep it firm
• go over with a clear coat so it’ll last

Cuz bouncing is what Tiggers do best!

Cougar at the St Louis Zoo.

Rushing to Find a Job in Strifeland

“One day in 1954, while I was producing the TV series The Halls of Ivy, Eleanor Aherne, the wife of the actor Brian Aherne, called to invite me to dinner. She asked me not to mention the invitation to our mutual friends the Colmans. This seemed odd, but because it was always a pleasure to visit the Ahernes at their wonderful house in Santa Monica, I saw no reason not to comply with Eleanor’s request. I did ask for an explanation, and her reply was short and dramatic: “We have Garbo staying with us.”

Eleanor Aherne was observing a cardinal Greta Garbo rule: Fewer is better.

Garbo sat opposite me, so I had a chance to study her closely. She was in her late 40s, and absolutely beautiful. She was wearing black velvet pants with a white blouse and a black velvet bolero. Her hair, cut Prince Valiant–style, came to just above her shoulders, and she kept pulling it back in a repetitive gesture. “Why do you have cotton in your ears?” I finally asked. “You know, Mr. Frye, I have a hole in my head, and here at the beach the wind blows right through, from one ear to the other. I cotton them up!” she replied with a straight face. I was totally charmed.

After dinner I told Brian that it must be thrilling to have Garbo staying in his home. “My dear boy, it’s not at all a thrill,” he said. “It can be goddamned embarrassing. When I go down to the pool in the morning to have breakfast, she’s already out there sunning herself, stark naked. I never know which way to look.”

— William Frye on meeting Greta Garbo (above, photographed by Cecil Beaton)

Life, Give me Reason to Dance Badly