Ta much, dear Edosan!

Ta much, dear Edosan!

Breakdance @ Spike Jones. All Star Revue. 1951-1952
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAzm9yBfoHM

Ub Iwerks FTW

Always repost.

Via my BF

see more Dropping The Science

Ta much, dear Matt - who's also most awesome!

... It is an irony noted with relish by critics of the protests – one also glumly acknowledged by many of the protesters – that the purchase of so many Vendetta masks has become a lucrative little side-earner for Time Warner, the media company that owns the rights to Moore's creation. Efforts have been made to avoid feeding the conglomerate more cash, the Anonymous group reportedly starting to import masks direct from factories in China to circumvent corporate pockets; last year, demonstrators at a "Free Julian Assange" event in Madrid wore cardboard replicas, apparently self-made. But more than 100,000 of the £4-£7 masks sell every year, according to the manufacturers, with a cut always going to Time Warner. Does that irk Moore?

"I find it comical, watching Time Warner try to walk this precarious tightrope." Through contacts in the comics industry, he explains, he has heard that boosted sales of the masks have become a troubling issue for the company. "It's a bit embarrassing to be a corporation that seems to be profiting from an anti-corporate protest. It's not really anything that they want to be associated with. And yet they really don't like turning down money – it goes against all of their instincts." Moore chuckles. "I find it more funny than irksome."

He has a tricky relationship with Time Warner, umbrella company to both DC Comics, which published V for Vendetta in its graphic novel form, and Warner Brothers, the studio behind the big-screen version. Like many of us, Moore thought the 2003 film made out of his late 90s comic strip The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen a great failure, and by the time V for Vendetta had been adapted for the screen, in 2006, he wanted his name removed from the credits; perhaps even from future editions of the graphic novel too. At the time an interviewer asked Moore if he might be "throwing out the baby with the bathwater", and he gave the sort of strolling, storyteller's response that ought to be laminated and distributed to any artist uncertain about giving over their creations to Hollywood. "Well, I don't own the baby any more," said Moore. "During a drunken night it turned out that I'd sold it to the Gypsies and they had turned my baby to a life of prostitution. Occasionally they would send me glossy pictures of my child as she now was, and they would very, very kindly send me a cut of the earnings…" ...

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Yup. It's that time again.

Guardian and Observer writers are picking their favourite albums – with a view that you might do the same. Here, Killian Fox pours praise on an album by Tom Waits

Tiny figures are popping up all over London's East End
Audrey Gillan
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 August 2011

A 200-year-old bottle of Château d'Yquem has broken the record for the most expensive bottle of white wine ever sold, after a collector bought it for £75,000 at the Ritz in London.

The buyer was private collector Christian Vanneque, former head sommelier at the Michelin starred La Tour d'Argent restaurant in Paris.

Though Château d'Yquem is famed for being one of the finest and most expensive sweet white wines, the 1811 vintage has a particular attraction for wine enthusiasts.

The climatology of the year, reviews from tastings, as well as the auspicious appearance of the Great Comet in that year, all indicate an excellent wine.

"This wine is very special – it is attached to the most renowned white wine in the world, and it was produced in the year of the Great Comet, which was believed to enhance the quality of the wine," Vanneque said.

"It is a rare wine, which been tasted on three occasions and each time received five out of five stars," he added. ...

Godly documentary film - can't recco it enough, and John Waters narrates!

see more Hacked IRL - Truth in Sarcasm

Ta much, dear MSiegel

AUGUST 13, 2009

Duchamp's Secret Masterpiece
A coming show sheds light on the French artist's final work

By CANDACE JACKSON

Marcel Duchamp was known for creating cryptic, provocative art out of bicycle wheels and urinals. But his final piece, an installation that requires viewers to peek through peepholes to look at a plaster model of a naked woman in front of a waterfall, was in many ways his most mysterious.

This weekend, to coincide with the 40th anniversary of its installation, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is unveiling a new exhibit on Étant donnés (which roughly translates as Given), Duchamp's last work. The show, which features previously unreleased photographs, drawings and castings used to create the elaborate installation, aims to open a new window into the French-born artist's hidden world.

Built over a 20-year period beginning in 1946, after Duchamp announced he was giving up art to play chess, Étant donnés was partly constructed in a secret space off the artist's bathroom in his small, fifth-floor walk-up apartment in Manhattan. After its completion and Duchamp's death in 1968, it was installed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969 per detailed instructions the artist had left behind. Art historians credit "Étant donnés" with being the world's first example of installation art—and a major influence on many contemporary artists, such as Jeff Koons, Matthew Barney and Cindy Sherman.

Designed specifically for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has the world's largest collection of Duchamp's work, Étant donnés is housed in the museum's contemporary wing. A large, old-fashioned wooden door framed in brick seems perfectly ordinary until viewers look through its two tiny peepholes. Through the small apertures, viewers see a naked woman laying down on a pile of twigs, holding a lamp in front of a hilly nature scene.

Experts say the piece could be a statement on voyeurism in art as well as a sexual metaphor. It may also be an homage to three women Duchamp loved in his life.

Much of the mystery surrounding the piece, perhaps Duchamp's most elaborate, stems from how little is known about how it was actually made. "Duchamp's work process is important, sometimes more important than the final product," says Paul B. Franklin, who works with the Duchamp family to help manage the artist's estate, and is the editor in chief of "Étant donné Marcel Duchamp," a Paris-based scholarly journal dedicated to his work.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art's exhibit begins with some of Duchamp's very early work, including a drawing he did at 15 years old of a lamp similar to the one used in Étant donnés. Michael R. Taylor, the show's curator, says it foreshadows his final masterpiece. "Things that obsessed him as a boy, still obsessed him as an adult," he says.

A catalogue that will be released to coincide with the show features 35 previously unpublished letters written by Duchamp to Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins. Duchamp and Martins, the wife of the Brazilian ambassador to the United States, carried on an affair for years during the construction of Étant donnés, before Duchamp was married to his third wife, Alexina "Teeny" Duchamp. The letters, held by Martins' family until recently, reveal much of what was unknown about how Duchamp created his last work, and provide insight into his emotional life. "My little one, let us devote the most possible time to ourselves alone," he writes on Sept. 5, 1950.

Though for the past 20 years it has been widely believed that Martins's figure was used as a mold for the nude in the piece, it wasn't previously known what materials were used to construct the model, with some experts speculating that it was made of pig skin, which could have been seen as a misogynistic statement. The letters reveal that the figure was made with plaster casts and parchment, painted to look like skin.

In recent years, some writers have argued that Étant donnés was partly inspired by Hollywood's so-called "Black Dahlia" murder in 1947 of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short. The 2006 book "The Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder" by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss, theorizes that because the nude in Duchamp's installation is in a similar position to that of the murder victim's body, and because Mr. Duchamp's confidant, the photographer Man Ray, was friends with one of the suspects, Étant donnés was partly based on the case.

Duchamp scholars and most art historians disagree with this theory, partly because Duchamp started work on the piece a year before the murder took place. The artist was traveling on a transatlantic ocean liner at the time the "Black Dahlia" murder was committed. The crime remains unsolved.

Duchamp's work has a history of sparking debate. Early in his career he created a controversy at the 1913 Armory Show in New York with his Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2, an abstract, cubist-influenced painting that mimicked stop-motion photography. Critics at the time slammed it, and a New York Times review said it resembled "an explosion in a shingle factory."

Later pieces like Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel, which consists of a bicycle wheel on top of a wooden stool, were built using what he called "readymade" materials, or mass-produced objects he could purchase. In 1917 he rocked the art world with a readymade when he submitted a men's urinal to an art exhibition in New York and called it "Fountain."

Though Duchamp detested the idea of his art being turned into a commercial product, several of his pieces have fetched significant prices at auction. His perfume bottle "Belle haleine-eau de voilette" sold in February for $11.4 million at a Christie's auction in Paris of the estate of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, 10 times its estimated sale price.

Francis M. Naumann, owner of the Francis M. Naumann Fine Art gallery, which has sold many Duchamp pieces, says despite the recent record sale, Duchamp's work is not easy to sell.

"Ninety-nine point nine percent of works of art are meant to just be appreciated aesthetically," says Mr. Naumann. "With Duchamp, there's no choice but to penetrate about two inches behind the eyeballs into the brain."

If you wanna live
Treat me good
If you wanna live, live
I tell ya, treat me good

I'm like a walkin' razor
Don't you watch my size
I'm dangerous
Said I'm dangerous...

Wow. Just Wow.

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Ta much, dear Anneliese

Our hero, already terrified by the prospect of interviewing Mark E Smith, just as he is about to start:

... I suddenly realise I am pissed mindless.

IN: Mark, I've got a present for you, (namely Brilliant Orange, a book about the cultural changes in post World War Two Dutch society, as mirrored through Dutch football, specifically the Ajax teams of the seventies. Okay, trust me, it's actually a lot more exciting than it sounds. Mark E seems pleased at any rate).

MES: Oh, cheers, I like stuff like that, have you read Tor? That's a book about German football, that's a really good book that... So, then, sit down, don't jump about. What part of Yorkshire are you from then?

IN: You f*cker, I'm from Accrington!

(I suddenly realise through my drunken fog, that I have called - albeit with a fair amount of jest - a man who can lay claim to be the greatest and most consistent artist of his generation, if not of the entire alternative rock genre, a f*cker. I squirm inside and fumble for a question. However, Mark has beaten me to it.)

MES: I used to go out with a girl from Accrington some time back. Is it still as mad up there? I remember that when I split up I had the entire family round, granddads with shotguns and stuff. They were nice people, but it was a bit mad. Do you like it?

IN: Me? Yeah, I go back at Christmas... but I live here now. Sometimes I like it here better than in Accrington.

MES: What isn't better than Accrington? Always raining. (A long laugh ensues) What's it like over here then, to live?

(I then go on a long and rambling explanation of why I am in Holland and how I think the country has changed since the time I have been here. All the while I am thinking, "Ask him a bloody question you prick". And all the while I keep rabbiting on... Finally I pluck up courage. But Mark has beaten me to it.) ...

The Outsider
The Wire 183, May 1999
Mark E Smith in conversation with Tony Herrington



... TH: You have a new group now.

MS: Yeah, it's great. I'm really lucky. It just fell together. This new band is great. Tom the drummer, I'm lucky to get him, he's brilliant. His older brother is a good mate of mine. He said: Our Tom plays drums. He played me this tape he'd done with his brother and it was like Zappaesque stuff. I said, yeah, do you think he'd do it? And he said, yeah, I'll ask him, and he did. He's great because he does exactly what you want. He can do it. He'd played jazz, Country & Western, he can play anything, I mean, really play it. It used to take days, weeks and months sometimes before the drummer got it right. He can get what you want like that [clicks fingers]. He's great, touch wood. It's a pleasure to be on stage now. Which is the first time it's been like that for a bit. It's quite weird actually. [pause] A lot of the things that were frustrating me have disappeared. A lot of things that were put down to me rambling and all that was in fact the group. That last group, they were efficient, lazy, old fashioned, I thought, everything The Fall shouldn't be.

TH: Is that something that frustrates you: you get all the credit for The Fall, but all the blame as well?

MS: For sure, course you do. I take it anyway. You've got to take it. You can't say to interviewers, Well actually, I thought the set was rubbish last night. If people say that set was a bit long, or a bit flat, you have to say it was my idea. You take the rough. . . But they've got their own band now, and everyone says. . . It wasn't you [laughs]. ...

The oldest printed star maps in the world, drawn by German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, which show the northern skies teeming with the creatures of the zodiac, are to be sold at a Sotheby's auction in London with an estimate of up to £180,000.

Only a handful of surviving copies are known of the woodcut prints, published in Nuremberg. The charts were a commercial venture by Dürer and two astronomers, the German Conrad Heinfogel and the Viennese Johannes Stabius.

Despite the fantastic creations swirling through the heavens, the charts were also a serious and much-copied scientific undertaking, accurately placing the stars of the 48 constellations identified by the Greek scholar Ptolemy 1,300 years earlier. The southern hemisphere, not yet in 1515 mapped by astronomers, is almost empty in the prints.

The northern map is decorated with an image of Ptolemy, sporting an improbable top hat for second-century Alexandria, along with the Greek, Islamic and Roman astronomers Aratus, Al-Sufi and Marcus Manilius.

Only 10 other examples of the 1515 charts are known, all in academic or museum collections, and only three with contemporary hand colouring such as these. ...

... Miró liberated his work in different ways, painting with his fingers and on the floor, burning and slashing his canvases in later life. By the 60s he had created a much bolder, more ferocious style. Spain was still under Franco, and even in Mallorca, Miró felt the dead hand of dictatorship, the anti-freedom he had always hated. With the student uprising in Paris in 1968, he hoped to bring more of the spirit of rebellion home. At the age of 75 he hurled his paint at the canvas as a shared act of defiance: "[This painting] is all explained by the title: May 1968," he later said. "Drama and expectation in equal parts: what was and what remained of that unforgettable young people's revolt..."

At the opening of an exhibition that included this painting, in 1978, after Franco's demise, Miró paced up and down in front of it, uncharacteristically. His wife, Pilar, told him to sit down, and he refused. "Damn it, let them see me standing up," he said. "I painted these paintings in a frenzy, with real violence so that people will know I'm alive, that I'm breathing, that I have a few more places to go." He was 85. "I'm heading in new directions!" he exclaimed.

A lodge at the entrance to the Parc Güell has lovely representation of a fly agaric mushroom

Amanita muscaria commonly known as fly agaric is a poisonous and psychoactive. The common names in English, fly agaric or fly mushroom, are generally thought to derive from its European use as an insecticide, sprinkled in milk...

All images are links.

Ta much, dear MSiegel

...Nonetheless, the impression of Herzog's movies coming laden with gloom persists. The New York Times's Janet Maslin described Herzog as "the consummate master of doom". ("I think Janet Maslin is the consummate master of doom!" giggles Herzog undoomily.)

Yet his films are more aptly described as cheerfully nihilistic. Repeatedly, they suggest that although we are alone in a disinterested universe, glory is possible. They celebrate the grandeur of follies, those who dare to do what few would dare to dream, whether its dragging a boat over a mountain (Fitzcarraldo), flying in a balloon over the rainforest (The White Diamond) or diving into unexplored rock crevices (Cave of Forgotten Dreams.) That Herzog himself does all of those things to make his movies has often been taken as proof that he, like his characters, is an egomaniacal daredevil.

But the aim of his films, he says, is "the illumination of something that is beyond sheer facts", what the New Yorker described as "the ecstatic truth". Does he experience that illumination when he is making his films? "Yes, I sometimes feel like the little girl in a fairytale," says the 68-year-old. "She steps out into the night sky and golden stars fall into her apron. These moments, when you have that shudder of something falling into your lap and you don't know how it happened – that happens."

Werner Herzog Stipetic was born in Munich in 1942. Was he wild as a boy? For the first time Herzog looks tired: "Well, we didn't have fathers around – I was not alone in that."

He was 11 the first time he saw a movie, but it was hardly a moment of ecstatic illumination: "It was about Eskimos building an igloo. It was not convincing enough for me," he chuckles.

Despite the unconvincing Eskimos, Herzog worked hard to become a film-maker, doing all manner of jobs to raise funds, including, according to legend, gun-running in Mexico. He broke through with the 1968 film, Signs of Life, for which he won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

The New Yorker magazine claimed that Herzog's "brooding world view" was informed by the "disaster of nazism". The psychobabble causes Herzog much mirth: "Too obvious. The universe is not harmonious: you know that by looking outside. It has nothing to do with Nazis." But growing up in what he calls "the echo of nazism" has affected his work. He is currently mid-production on a documentary about death row: "Because I am German, I cannot be an advocate of capital punishment," he says. "A state should never be allowed to decide about life or death. It's a core principle that cannot be shaken within me." ...

... Herzog is known for making films that are near impossible to make. But, as he explains in the documentary Burden of Dreams, abandoning a film because it presents difficulties would be akin to living "a life as a man without dreams". And just as the heroes of his films achieve their dreams, the audience also watches Herzog, with his moral seriousness, absolute determination and great good humour, achieve his. This is what makes his films the opposite of gloomy; they are pure triumphant pleasure.

"Every man," he says thoughtfully. "should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life." And then, once again, he laughs at himself.

Buriat boots

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I have this on a t-shirt. The other day a stranger nearly fell down the stairs in their rush to run over and say “OMG SHERLOCK” to me. I highly respected their priorities in that moment. ...




Quality!!!

The milk chocolate-covered, heart-shaped, raspberry flavored (and freaky fuchsia-colored!) Valentine Peeps are Godly. I'm actually shopping around for a case of them. XD I figure if they're $1 ea or less, shipping included, then well done.

The Flowers of Romance
Public Image LTD


Now in the summer
I could be happy or in distress
Depending on the company
On the veranda

Talk of the future or reminisce
Behind the dialogue
We're in a mess
Whatever I intended
I sent you flowers

You wanted chocolates instead

The flowers of romance
The flowers of romance

I've got binoculars

On top of Box Hill
I could be Nero
Fly the eagle

Start all over again
I can't depend on these so-called friends
It's a pity you need to defend
I'll take the furniture
Start all over again




From Flowers of Romance; 1981

Ta much, dear Edosan

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Jaguar E-Type turns 50

Classic Jaguar marque celebrates its 50th anniversary at London's Design Museum – with little sign its appeal is fading

Mark Brown, arts correspondent
Tuesday 8 February 2011


The Jaguar E-Type's first test driver, Norman Dewis, 91, takes retired Formula One driver John Surtees for a spin. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

Being a classic British vehicle, the testing involved hasty improvisation with strands of wool and sticky tape. The result, however, was astonishing. "Even today, you take this car out and people will not walk by it. They will always stop and look at it," says Jaguar E-Type test driver Norman Dewis.

Dewis is standing outside the Design Museum, near Tower Bridge in London, next to one of two original press cars from 1961 to launch a display celebrating the 50th birthday of one of the most beautiful cars ever designed.

The E-Type was a sensation from the moment it was launched. Few could believe a car this pretty was British – it had to be Italian, surely? And, of course, it went like a rocket and was priced at a just-about-accessible-dream price of £2,000.

Dewis recalls driving it from Coventry to Geneva for the launch, and it taking just two hours to get to Dover when you would be lucky to do it in three today. ...

... "Sayer had his own way of designing," says Dewis. "He'd have an 8ft foolscap sheet covered in different coloured lines and figures. We did the testing first in the wind tunnel but we found a slight discrepancy between those results and what you get on the road. So we called in at a wool shop on the way to the test track, and [stuck] four-inch lengths of wool to the car." What followed was a revolutionary design.

Also at today's launch is one of the first owners of an E-type, the motor racing legend John Surtees, who says he was bowled over by its beauty, but not by some of its more technical aspects. "I remember I didn't fancy the gearbox," he says. "It had no synchro on first so you had to do your double de-clutching."

Having said that, Dewis adds: "You didn't need first gear very often." ...

A Picasso painting of his mistress, a young woman he first fell for and accosted outside a Paris Metro station, has been sold for £25.2m at auction in London.

It was a far from frenzied evening. Bidding for La Lecture opened at £9m and crawled slowly upwards, comfortably exceeding a pre-sale estimate of between £12m and 18m.

Sotheby's said the bidder was anonymous and announced themselves pleased with the result. "There were at least seven bidders from all around the world and it was consistent with the interest we had before the sale – it is a widely admired and much appreciated painting," said Helena Newman, European chairman of Sotheby's impressionist and modern art. ...

A cache of unpublished works by famed writer Dashiell Hammett, often seen as the father of hardboiled detective fiction, has been found and is set to be unveiled in America.

Hammett, whose best-known work The Maltese Falcon was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart, died in 1961. Now 15 unpublished short stories are to hit the bookshelves after being unearthed by a magazine editor, Andrew Gulli, among the literary archives of the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas in Austin.

Gulli will now publish one of the stories in his crime fiction magazine, The Strand, later this month. He hopes to eventually help publish them all as a collection in a new book.

"There are some very, very good pieces of fiction here. Some of them are classic Hammett and fit in with the style we know and others are very different and go off to places that were a different direction for him," the editor said. The Hammett discovery is just the latest in a series of coups by Gulli's magazine. In recent years The Strand has also printed previously unseen works by Graham Greene, Mark Twain and Agatha Christie.

The Hammett story that will feature in The Strand is a piece of straight detective fiction, but it is written in the style the writer pioneered and perfected. Called So I Shot Him, it tells the tale of an afternoon by a lake that goes horribly wrong. It opens bluntly with the title sentence and then goes on in a rat-a-tat style familiar to Hammett's legion of fans. The dialogue is crisp and deadpan and the characters memorable, said Gulli. "After reading it, you will be debating it and wondering exactly what it means and then you'll want to go back and read it again." ...

Those of us waiting patiently for the era of flying cars have been stung before. Usually by some delusional old tinkerer appearing on Tomorrow's World or Blue Peter, tantalisingly showing off some hovering hatchback or Cortina-with-wings and promising it'll be an everyday form of transport – soon. It never happens. As the characters in Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes comic strip complained way back in 1989: "A new decade is coming up. Big deal! Where are the flying cars?"

Finally, in 2011, some action. Later this year an American company called Terrafugia will go into "low volume production" on its Transition Roadable Aircraft – a genuine, non-delusional, you-can-actually-buy-it-and-it-actually-flies flying car. It looks a bit like the Ghostbusters' vehicle with fold-out wings, and will cost something between £125,000 and £160,000. Terrafugia CEO Carl Dietrich hopes to sell 200 a year.

"A lot of people said they never thought it would fly," Dietrich has said. "But we have a vehicle right here, right now that drives and flies, and converts between the two in 20 seconds."

Terrafugia (Latin for "escape from land") was founded by Dietrich and a team of pilots and aeronautics engineers. Partly funded by the US Department of Defence, they've been quietly beavering away on the car in Woburn, Massachussetts since 2006, and are almost ready to start selling.

Owners of a new Transition will need 20 hours of flying time on record before being allowed to unfurl the car's mechanical wings and take off, but it's easy to pilot once they do – or so says Colonel Phil Meeter, the first man to fly the Transition in tests over upstate New York in 2009. On landing he enthused: "My daughter could do this! Anyone can do it!" The retail machine will have a flight range of just less than 500 miles (enough to get from London to, say, Zurich) and will travel at speeds of up to 115mph. ...

Ta much, dear Anneliese

Somewhere in the great gym in the sky, Jack LaLanne, the pioneer of the modern physical fitness movement who died yesterday, is probably doing fingertip press-ups. Or perhaps, having dedicated the majority of his life to sculpting his body, he is lying back and finally helping himself to an ice cream sundae - he reportedly last ate dessert in 1929. The former scenario is altogether more likely.

LaLanne, who died aged 96 from pneumonia, went from being a puny weakling to the world press-up record-holder. But his obsession with diet and exercise wasn't confined to personal improvement, as he co-opted Americans to join him in his quest for physical perfection. He espoused bodybuilding and the virtues of lifting weights, at a time when few had access to them. The Jack LaLanne show, in which he demonstrated his fingertip press-ups, plus other exercises more suitable for mere mortals, and educated viewers on how to eat healthily, ran from 1951 until the 1980s. ...

... The week we met he was casting his vote for the Oscars. Will he be going to the ceremony? "Oh no, those things aren't much fun. But when I did once go, I got pushed out of the way twice, in one weekend, by Diana Ross. Literally, her hair went into my face. And one of those times, she was pushing me out of the way to get to the dancefloor to dance to one of her own songs. Isn't that just the best?"

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The First Doctor was the first incarnation of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. Most accounts of him were drawn from a period of time close to the end of this incarnation's life. In the beginning this incarnation was selfish, and thought he was superior in a way compared to other species, in these cases, Humans. In time, he changed is opinion about other species and opened the doors to many humans as companions. He met his end whilst battling the Cyberman for the first time on Earth; having finally been forced to Regenerate into his second body due to exhaustion and a loss of strength to maintain his ancient body. ...

The Second Doctor was the second incarnation of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. Though outwardly depicting himself as a warm, bumbling, almost clownish, buffoon, this Doctor possessed a darker, more cunning aspect to his personality, one which he usually kept hidden in order for him to carry out his plans successfully. Battling countless alien menaces throughout his lifetime, such as the Cybermen and Daleks, the Second Doctor developed a strong thirst for justice and righteousness. However, his actions were viewed upon by the Time Lords as in direct contrast to their Non-Interference Policy, and he was subsequently put on trial and exiled to the planet Earth in a new body as punishment. ...

The third Doctor was the third incarnation of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. Throughout the majority of his life, this Doctor found himself stranded on Earth as part of his exile by the Time Lords, a fact that on many occasions left him somewhat bitter. During this time, the Doctor entered the service of UNIT, becoming their unpaid scientific advisor, and would remain in their service long after his exile was lifted. This Doctor stood out from his predecessors in his willingness to engage others physically, and cut more of a dashing figure compared to his predecessors. Eventually, he was forced to regenerate after being exposed to large amounts of radiation during his efforts to stop the Eight Legs of Metebelis III. ...

It's said you never forget your first Doctor.

Mine was Tom Baker, the Great Fourth.

Thank you, TV Ontario!

The Fifth Doctor was the fifth incarnation of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. Appearing younger than his predecessors, the fifth incarnation expressed a new and more Human side to the Doctor's alien nature. ...

The Sixth Doctor was the sixth incarnation of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. Arrogant, dramatic, self-absorbed, driven, and stubborn, the sixth incarnation instantly believed himself superior to almost anyone he encountered, though had a very compassionate side only experienced by his companions....

The Seventh Doctor was the seventh incarnation of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. Although originally an eccentric, light-hearted character, the seventh incarnation's jolly persona eventually darkened into that of a mysterious, cunning manipulator. Unfortunately, his schemes often strained the relationships with his companions, resulting in them losing their trust in him on several occasions. By the end of his life, this Doctor seemed to have become at ease with the universe, with his manipulative nature having somewhat mellowed. He was forced to regenerate after Grace Holloway performed exploratory surgery on him, thinking he was a Human. ...

The Eighth Doctor was the eighth incarnation of the Doctor. Unlike many of his predecessors and successors, this incarnation expressed a more Human and emotional side, with a love and respect for all life. His own life was a temporally complex one, which so frequently involved time paradoxes and parallel universes that it was impossible to know with authority how the major epochs of his existence fit together. Complicating the matter even further was his possible involvement in the Last Great Time War. ...

The Ninth Doctor was the ninth incarnation of the Doctor, the brooding and melancholic survivor of the Last Great Time War. By the end of this incarnation, he had largely emerged from the angry fog of his survivor's guilt, largely thanks to his relationship with Rose Tyler. The Doctor later regenerated after absorbing the energy of the Time Vortex to save Rose Tyler. ...

The Tenth Doctor was the tenth incarnation of the Doctor. Unlike his immediate predecessor, who was plagued by melancholy due to his actions during the Last Great Time War, this incarnation was much more outgoing and genial, a demeanor that hid the "survivor's guilt" that had plagued him since the war. Throughout his life, however, the weight became much more pronounced, haunted by companions lost, enemies believed long-dead and events that threatened the fabric of time itself. He met his end after he absorbed a huge quantity of nuclear radiation whilst saving the life of his friend, Wilfred Mott, leading to his regeneration into his next incarnation. ...

The Eleventh Doctor was the eleventh incarnation of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. He was erratic in behaviour and very alien compared to his previous incarnation, yet he retained his youthful vigour for defending the universe. Shortly after he began his travels, this incarnation of the Doctor encountered and gained his first companion, Amy Pond and later, Rory Williams. ...

A Picasso very similar to a painting which, if it wasn't for a billionaire's unfortunate elbow, would have become the most expensive work of art ever, is to appear at auction in London next month.

Sotheby's announced today that the star lot in its impressionist and modern art sales will be Picasso's La Lecture, left, a portrait of his young mistress and muse Marie-Thérèse Walter.

It is a significant painting, executed within days of Le Rêve (the Dream) which won notoriety in 2006 when Las Vegas casino owner Steve Wynn managed – in the course of showing its wondrousness to friends – to put his elbow through it causing a six inch tear. He was about to complete the $139m sale of it to hedge fund tycoon Steven Cohen in a deal which would have made it the most expensive work ever. Wynn took the incident as a sign not to sell and after it was repaired it was revalued at $85m.

Another Picasso work, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, from the same year and with the same subject, holds the current record price paid for a work of art, after its sale for $106m (£66m) at Christie's in New York in May. Having said that, La Lecture is about half the size of the other two Picassos so it would be a surprise if it became a record breaker. But surprises happen. Not least at the same sale last February when a Giacometti sculpture sold for an eye-watering £65m, setting an unexpected record until the Picasso pipped it in May. ...

Martin Freeman is set to star in both the new series of Sherlock and also Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films. Both of these projects are set to film in the coming months – indeed, The Hobbit is due to kick off in just three or four weeks, and now, Mark Gatiss has revealed via Twitter, that Sherlock is going to film in May.

For those kindly asking, we start shooting the new series of #Sherlock in May.
3 x 90 mins again.

How long does it take to shoot three ninety minute episodes of Sherlock? Oh… quite a while, eh?

So, I’d say there’s a riddle here. ...

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table
David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel

/ D - / - A / - - / - D / - - / - G / A - / - D /

There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist
Socrates himself was permanently pissed

/ A7 - / / - G Cdim7 A7 /

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will
On half a pint of shandy got particularly ill
Plato, they say, could stick it away
Half a crate of whiskey every day
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle
Hobbes was fond of his dram
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart

"I drink therefore I am"

Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed

/ A - - - / - AD /

... Some of the philosophers are portrayed according to their works.

* Kant['s] being "very rarely stable" harkens to his theory of a stable universe.
* Nietzsche's teaching of the "raising of the wrist" references the rising of the sun at the beginning of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."
* John Stuart Mill['s] becoming ill "of his own free will" alludes to his work On Liberty, which argues for liberty that does no harm to others.
* The Descartes line, "I drink therefore I am", is a twist on his well known phrase "Cogito, ergo sum," or "I think therefore I am".

The assertion that Heidegger "could think you under the table", is another of the plays on "think" vs. "drink". ...

When I’m walking down the street it’s always you I seem to meet
Long hair down and sneakers on your feet
And write your letters to the Evening News
I clench my fist and sing this tune - I said, “Hey student, hey student, hey student
You’re gonna get it through the head...”
tagged as The Fall. I LOVE this song.

Click each pic & see the fabulous SOGO Phalænopsiseses!

They make the best face powder (Natural Shimmer) I've ever used. The compact's cool, too. It most effectively covers a multitude of sins (and dark circles and zits and red bits), and the stuff wears like iron. It doesn't need re-application after I blow my nose FFS. Its shimmer is subtle enough for day wear & square chicks, and it's buildable w/o turning trashy. Adding another layer makes it more shimmery, but it's never overpowering.

I love getting some on my fingertips so I can play with it. It's so smooth and silky - it feels like magic.

They make the second best face powder (Sparkle Light) I've ever used. It feels even more like magic than StarGazer's - even more silky & smooth. It's even more sparkly too, but the coverage isn't anywhere near as good nor is it as long-lasting.
It's a great highlighter, too. That particular shade can act like a psychotic highlighter on the end of your nose if you aren't careful, though. It made the tip of my nose look like the Great Pyramid, which it certainly does not resemble!

Proving that age is no boundary to publishing success, the French book world has been taken by storm by a surprise Christmas bestseller: a political call to arms by Stéphane Hessel, 93.

The unlikely publishing sensation is a former resistance hero whose 30-page essay, Indignez-vous!, calls on readers to get angry about the state of modern society.

Launched in October by Indigène, a small publisher working out of an attic in Montpellier, southern France, the book had a tiny first print-run, 6,000, and sold for €3, unprecedentedly cheap in a country where book prices are regulated and kept high by the law.

Hessel's success has stunned France. After two months on the bestseller lists, the book has spent five weeks at number one, beating Michel Houellebecq's award-winning latest novel La Carte et le Territoire and a host of Christmas fiction. It has sold 600,000 copies and – publishers predict it will reach a million. Translations are underway for Italy and other European markets.

The book's soaring sales reflect a general mood of French exasperation at the social inequalities of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidency. But the phenomenon is mostly down to Hessel's charisma and his life story. ...

Residents' home page

The first thing the comics writer Grant Morrison did when he arrived at the podium to address the Disinfocon convention in 2000 was to unleash a bloodcurdling 10-second scream. "Okay, I'm pissed," he admitted to the audience at the bash for the anti-establishment publisher. "And in half an hour, I'm going to come up on drugs."

Footage of his speech was greeted with chuckles when it cropped up in Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods, screened last week at the ICA in London. It's sort of how Morrison's fans want him to behave – and, with its copious hallucinogenic drugs, magic symbols and alien encounters, the Talking With Gods documentary didn't disappoint.

Morrison, who is in the DC comics stable, certainly plays up to his own myth with his shaved head, shades and trenchcoat. But he's thoughtful and well read, too. This was a properly interesting – albeit rather worshipful – portrait of one of the most interesting writers in the comics medium.

Morrison's friend Warren Ellis, another excellent comics writer, points out that Morrison's occultism is actually very pragmatic. The only reason he was abducted by aliens in Kathmandu in 1994, says Morrison, is "because I went to Kathmandu in 1994 to be abducted by aliens. And it works! These fuckers, they will turn up!" Morrison practises magic, and encourages his readers to do the same. He's matter-of-fact about it: "Anyone can contact the scorpion gods."

At their best, Morrison's comics are crammed with ideas. They are exhilaratingly strange, and kind of puckish. His Doom Patrol featured a gang of supervillains called The Brotherhood of Dada, a sentient piece of roadway called Danny the Street and a painting that ate Paris. But Morrison's masterwork remains The Invisibles, a series about a cell of existential resistance fighters – including a transsexual shaman, a grumpy Scouser, a telepath from the future and their bald-headed leader King Mob, who is the dead spit of Morrison himself. No summary can do justice to how mind-bending and bizarre – and yet compellingly in earnest – this comic is. ...

... You know how in the first pic Sherlock has his coat on and that blanket thrown over and it’s like he’s hiding underneath all those layers. Then in the second one, the blanket’s not there because Sherlock’s started to open up. But in the last one, he’s only wearing that suit. No coat, no scarf, just his bare neck because now he’s vulnerable...

Captain with the 'Magic' touch
David Hepworth remembers Captain Beefheart, the maverick musician loved by everyone from the Beatles to the White Stripes
18 Dec 2010

...1969's Trout Mask Replica, which is the Finnegans Wake of rock 'n' roll, the only album about which every serious rock fan has an opinion, having either deciphered its dry mathematical playing and lupine delivery, or retreated in confusion muttering, "It's too strange for me." The music writer Jude Rogers recently wrote about having bought it 10 years ago, at the age of 20; it felt like a rite of passage. But she found it so frightening that she took it back to the shop. Certainly, Trout Mask Replica makes The Fall sound like Take That. Compared to that, most pop music is, as Beefheart observed, "just a lullaby".

Although he was marketed along with the rest of the West Coast psychedelic wave of the late 1960s, he resisted any attempt to place him alongside the peace and love generation. Songs like Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones and Kandy Korn and Gimme Dat Harp Boy were aimed squarely at the self-indulgence of the very long hairs who were idiot-dancing to his records.

Throughout his career he did everything possible to puncture the expectations of his fans, opening his show at the Royal Albert Hall in 1972 with a ballerina and a belly dancer, excoriating the audience for always wanting to hear what they had already heard, and suggesting their craving for what he called the "big mama heartbeat" of rock 'n' roll was a sign of decadence. When they called for "more", he approached the microphone and whistled the Andy Williams tune of the same name.

At their best, his records hit a unique nerve. Safe as Milk is one of the few blues revival records that gets beyond aping the originals. Moonlight on Vermont, which sounds like Cecil Taylor dueting with James Brown while on a tightrope, is one of the few art experiments in rock that's worthy of your attention. Big Eyed Beans from Venus anticipates hip hop and heavy metal by at least 15 years. His best stuff is a bold departure and a dead end at the same time. Maybe one of the reasons he rarely followed up his best work was that he knew he couldn't. ...

...He was the first rock star to realise that if you don't talk, but rather declaim, even your zanier pronouncements will be treated as a piercing insight. "There are only 40 people in the world, and four of them are hamburgers," was one. "Everyone's coloured. If they weren't, you wouldn't be able to see them," was another.

He often hit the mark. When I met him in 1982, a television in the background was showing Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher posing for photographs. I haven't been able to look at them together since without hearing Beefheart announce, in his characteristically stentorian tones, "Oh, please. Do these people think we'll fall for that corn?"

Captain Beefheart, who has died aged 69, was provocative and unpredictable

The influence of Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, stretched from the Grateful Dead to the Sex Pistols and beyond

Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Saturday 18 December 2010

... Although his style was rhythm and blues based he introduced a completely unorthodox approach to structure, rhythm and key. The band wore a mixture of cloaks and second hand outfits, and the Captain wore a hat, usually a topper, which became his trademark.

He was a provocative and unpredictable figure, given to primal screams into the microphone or even grunts and was outspoken and candid about the music industry and the people in it.

He disbanded his group – or they abandoned him – in the 1980s, with some complaining he ran a regime that was little short of tyrannical. He concentrated instead on painting and became reclusive.

Tom Waits, another musician who was influenced by Beefheart, said of him: "Once you've heard Beefheart, it's hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood."

He stubbornly refused to conform and that was perhaps one of the main reasons that commercial success eluded him as a musician, although he was fond of the lifestyle that success brought.

He loved fast cars and owned variously a Hudson, a Corvette and a Jaguar. However it was his art that brought him more commercial success: despite having no formal training he drew and painted throughout his recording career.

His first exhibition was in Liverpool at the Bluecoat Gallery in April 1972, while he was touring in England. In 1982, on the advice of New York art dealer Michael Werner that he would never be taken seriously as a painter unless he gave up music, Beefheart turned seriously to art.

In the past few years he gained a reasonable reputation as an artist, mainly doing large abstracts in oils, and was able to demand high prices for his work.

The Michael Werner Gallery, in a statement carried by Rolling Stone magazine, said: "Don Van Vliet was a complex and influential figure in the visual and performing arts." It described him as one of the most original recording artists.

"After two decades in the spotlight as an avant-garde composer and performer, Van Vliet retired from performing to devote himself wholeheartedly to painting and drawing. Like his music, Van Vliet's lush paintings are the product of a truly rare and unique vision."

He leaves behind his wife of more than 40 years, Jan.

Captain Beefheart: dust blows forward and dust blows back - an appreciation

Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, was mysterious, alchemical, inexplicable and unrepeatable

Alexis Petridis
Saturday 18 December 2010

He never sold many records. His biggest hit album, Lick My Decals Off Baby, reached number 20 in the UK in 1970. But in a recording career that lasted from the 1960s until 1982, he succeeded in redefining the parameters of rock music.

His sound shifted over the years, from relatively straightforward blues rock to doomed attempts to court a mainstream audience; but at its height, it reached hitherto-unimaginable heights of avant garde experimentation.

Beefheart's most celebrated album, Trout Mask Replica of 1969, offered a world in which rock music appeared to have spun entirely off its axis.

The singer's earthy holler grounded it in the blues tradition, but the lyrics were wild and surreal. And the music seemed to be from another planet, far beyond even the most acid-fried psychedelic band could muster.

Standard time signatures were disregarded. Instruments – which extended beyond the standard guitar, bass and drums were set up to incorporate bass clarinet and musette – clashed to the point that it frequently sounded like everyone in the Magic Band was playing an entirely different song to everyone else. ...

Captain Beefheart obituary

Discordant and mesmeric, the 1960s Magic Band singer Don Van Vliet was rhythm and blues based but completely unorthodox; latterly he won fame as an artist

Caroline Boucher
Saturday 18 December 2010

Captain Beefheart, Don Van Vliet, who has died at the age of 69, was one of the most influential American musicians of the 1960s and early 1970s. His status was always cult rather than commercial, and for most of his career he was broke.

Yet he remained a hero to most of the musical avant garde...He was John Peel's favourite artist, and the DJ did much to promote Beefheart by playing his records when no other radio programme would touch them.

In 1964 Beefheart formed the Magic Band, the first of many line-ups under the name. They sounded pretty discordant, but due to Beefheart's extraordinarily mesmeric presence as frontman, a four and a half octave vocal range, his eccentric ability with lyrics, and his inexplicable one-liners to interviewers, the band was unforgettable.

Beefheart once described his thing to an uncomprehending radio interviewer as "music to dematerialise the catatonia". His style wasrhythm and blues based but completely unorthodox in its approach to structure, rhythm and key.

Magic Band musicians had names like Winged Eel Fingerling, Zoot Horn Rollo, the Mascara Snake, and Rockette Morton. They wore a ragbag of cloaks and thrift-shop outfits, and the Captain wore a hat, usually a topper, which became his trademark.

Van Vliet was born in Glendale, California on 15 January 1941, an only child who showed artistic talent from an early age: he claimed he was producing respected sculpture when he was five. When he was 13, his family (his father drove a bread truck) moved to the Mojave desert, an atmosphere that was to have an enormous influence on him, and particularly his painting, and a place where he lived on and off all his life. In 1959 he was offered a place at Antelope Valley junior college as an art major, but instead he hung out at home (doted on by his mother and grandmother) with his schoolfriend Frank Zappa, listening to old r'n'b records and planning various projects, most of which came to nothing. One was dreamed up sitting stoned in a car ("not Zappa," recalled Beefheart, "Frank never turned on") in the desert in 1962 , to shoot a film called Captain Beefheart meets the Grunt People. The film was never made, but the name stuck. ...

CM: (Playing piano) "Ma-ma-ma-ma-cita, donde esta Santa Cleese...the vato wit da bony knees...he comin' down da street wit no choos on his feet...and he's going to..." No, no, that ain't it... "Mamamacita, donde esta Santa Claus...da guy wit da hair on his jaws...he's..." Nah. Hey, man, come over here, man. I need some help, man.

TC: Yeah, man. I can dig that. Like, uh, what are ya doin', man?

CM: Aw, I'm trying to write a song about Santa Claus, man, but it's not comin' out...

TC: About who, man?

CM: About Santa Claus, man. You know, Santa Claus, man?

TC: Oh, yeah, man. I played with those dudes, man.

CM: What?

TC: Yeah, last year at the Fillmore, man. Me and the bass player sat in, man.

CM: Oh, hey, man, you think Santa Claus is a group, huh? No, it's not a group, man.

TC: Wha? They break up, man?

CM: No, man. It's one guy, man. Y'know, he had a..a red suit on, man, with black patent leather choos...you know the guy, man.

TC: Oh, yeah...he's with Motown, ain't he? Yeah, I played with that dude, too, man. He's a good singer, man.

CM: No, no, hold on, man. He's not with Motown, man.

TC: Well, then he's with Buddha, man.

CM: No, aw, man, you don't know who Santa Claus is, man!

TM: Yeah, well, I'm not from here, man. Like, I'm from Pittsburgh, man. I don't know too many local dudes.

CM: Ohhh, I see. Well, hey, man, sit back and relax and I'll tell you da story about Santa Claus, man. Listen...

(background music begins)

Once upon a time, about, hmmm, five years ago, there was this groovy dude and has name was Santa Claus, y'know? And he used to live over in the projects with his old lady and they had a pretty good thing together because his old lady was really fine and she could cook and all that stuff like that, y'know. Like, she made da best brownies in town, man! Oh, I could remember 'em now, man. I could eat one of 'em, man, wow...

TC: Wow, did you know these people, man?

CM: Oh, yeah, man. They used to live next door to me, y'know...until they got kicked out, man. ...

Helen Mirren laments Hollywood ‘penis worship’

Actress says film industry is still obsessed with young and ‘mediocre’ male actors
By Natalie Davies
LAST UPDATED 4:08 PM, DECEMBER 9, 2010

The actress Helen Mirren has hit out at sexism in Hollywood saying the film industry is guilty of "worshipping at the altar of the 18 to 25-year-old male and his penis". In a speech at a Beverly Hills event honouring the 100 most powerful women in entertainment, Mirren said that "with all due respect to [the] many brilliant and successful women in this room..." nothing had really changed.

Mirren, who was given the Sherry Lansing leadership award at the ceremony organised by the Hollywood Reporter, also lashed out at the poor choice of roles for women in an industry where "virtually every drama made for film, stage and television has 20 male parts to maybe one, two or, if you're lucky, three female characters".

The Oscar-winning actress also took a swipe at her (unnamed) male contemporaries, saying she resented "the survival of some very mediocre male actors and the professional demise of some very brilliant female ones". ...

I especially want those boots.

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.

It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position.

He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer--excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory. ...

Jon Henley
Interview by Jon Henley
Wednesday 1 December 2010

This was taken on the set of Jules et Jim in 1962. The scene was an old-style French boxing match between Jules and Jim. Someone on the set turned a radio on in the break and it was playing one of Strauss's waltzes. The actors, Oskar Werner and Henri Serre, heard the music and in an instant the gym was transformed into a kind of village dance. Obviously there was the potential for a nice shot. The abandoned boxing glove, on the floor down to the right, looked like it might play a part, too, and I framed the picture accordingly.

This kind of photograph is uncontrollable, of course. You have to be ready, to anticipate, because by the time it takes for your brain to tell your finger to activate the shutter, the moment has gone. I love the balance in their gestures. But if you look at the contact sheet you'll see there were plenty of pictures that were less successful.

My approach to set photography was really that of a photojournalist. Stills photography then was purely for publicity purposes; I was interested in the film-making process. I didn't want to shoot what the movie cameras were filming. ...

Watson is strutting in a fez, your argument is invalid.

... I wrote this so I wouldn't lose track of interesting areas of extremely long pages. This extension will let you dog-ear parts of a page so you can move on without fear of being unable to find them later. Marking a spot will place a digit, starting with 1, on the page. You can then quickly return to these marked areas by using a hotkey (Shift+Spacebar) or by clicking the status bar icon. ...

This extension allows you to export your saved passwords and disabled login hosts using XML or CSV files that can be imported later. ...

A very clean and compact theme with classic arrow buttons that minimizes space consumed by menu, tool, tab, find and status bars without hurting the overall usability. Supports Windows, Mac & Linux. ...




This is a major space-saver, esp when Tiny Menu is installed. The navigation window lives on my menu toolbar, as do the back/fwd, stop, reload, etc buttons. Other buttons (print, re-open last closed tab, reload w/o cache, etc) live with the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder links.
I no longer have a Navigation Toolbar!

Customize application menus.

Rearrange or remove menuitems from the main context menu (right-click menu) and main menubar (File Edit View etc.) ...

Annoyed by adverts? Troubled by tracking? Bothered by banners? Install Adblock Plus now to regain control of the internet and change the way that you view the web. ...

The best security you can get in a web browser!
Allow active content to run only from sites you trust, and protect yourself against XSS and Clickjacking attacks. ...

Brilliant extension which lets you remove not only images, but whole chunks of the useless tat which clutters so many websites.

Greasemonkey must be installed before you can use this extension.

Are you an OptimizeGoogle user? You should be if you run Firefox and search with google.
OptimizeGoogle (among many other wonderful features, like removing click tracking!) lets you set up filters which remove those evil sites which provide unwanted, crappy search so-called results. Asterisks can be used, which is ever so useful. I run a lotta searches all the time, and I often come across massive nests of spammy/scammy/crappy sites which use the same domain. Block the domain (http://*.crappysite.com/*) and it never shows up again, which makes Yr Humble Narrator very happy indeed.
I have run searches recently, and many of the "results" inspired the following filter: http://*/.*
Watch out for websites what have a dot immediately following the third slash.

Should this extension pique yr interest, you may wanna click my 'Firefox extensions' tag and check out the no-longer-updated CustomizeGoogle. OptimizeGoogle is a replacement which features the features of CG, but updated and reflecting google's changes.
The info I'd posted about CG shows many more of the features OG now uses, far more than OG's Firefox page.

‘I am not a thief’ says the 71-year-old - but Picasso’s son can’t believe his story
By Gavin Mortimer
LAST UPDATED 8:01 AM, NOVEMBER 30, 2010

Claude Picasso admits his father was a generous man but he can't believe he bequeathed 271 of his works to his former electrician. Yet according to 71-year-old French sparky Pierre Le Guennec, Pablo Picasso gave him the collection in the three years preceding his death in 1973 – a reward for Le Guennec installing an alarm system in the artist's villa on the Cote d'Azur.

For reasons that are now being investigated by French police, Le Guennec stashed the 271 works in his garage for nearly 40 years, uninterested in the haul that includes sketches, lithographs, a portrait of Picasso's first wife, Olga, and nine cubist collages.

Then, on January 14 this year, Le Guennec wrote to Claude Picasso, administrator of his father's estate, informing him of the collection and asking to have the works authenticated.

A sceptical Picasso assumed at first that the letters were the work of a crank but when he was sent photographs of some of the collection as proof, he agreed to meet Le Guennec in Paris in September. The retired electrician arrived with the works in a suitcase and proceeded to show Picasso items that hadn't been included in his father's inventory at the time of his death.

Having been shown the collection, and having had them authenticated by experts (who valued them in the region of €60m), Picasso instructed his lawyer, Jean-Jacques Neuer, to file charges against Le Guennec and his wife for receiving stolen goods. At the beginning of October officers from the Central Office for the Fight against Traffic in Cultural Goods (OCBC) visited the couple's home outside Cannes and removed the collection.

In an interview with French newspaper Liberation, Picasso dismissed Le Guennec's claims that they were a gift in return for electrical skill: "To give away such a large quantity, that's unheard-of. It doesn't stand up," he said, adding: "This was part of his life."

Claude Picasso says that the cache includes work from his father's Blue Period (1901-1904), his Rose Period (1904-06) and many other pieces from the early years of the 20th century when he was at his most creative.

"Claude Picasso was astounded. He couldn't believe his eyes," Jean-Jacques Neuer said yesterday. "Just about everybody has felt that way... when you have 271 Picasso works that were never seen, never inventoried, that's just unprecedented." ...

... On the set of the upcoming installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, Smith asks Depp what it’s like to play the iconic role of Captain Jack Sparrow. “Somebody once asked [Hunter S. Thompson], “What is the sound of one hand clapping, Hunter?” and he smacked him. Captain Jack was kind of like that for me, an opening up of this part of yourself,” Depp says. “There is a little Bugs Bunny in all of us.”

“They couldn’t stand him. They just couldn’t stand him,” Depp says of Disney’s reaction to his controversial interpretation of Sparrow. “I think it was Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time, who was quoted as saying, ‘He’s ruining the movie.’ Depp reveals to Smith, however, that he remained unfazed by the studio’s hysteria. “Upper-echelon Disney-ites, going, What’s wrong with him? Is he, you know, like some kind of weird simpleton? Is he drunk? By the way, is he gay?… And so I actually told this woman who was the Disney-ite… ‘But didn’t you know that all my characters are gay?’ Which really made her nervous.”

Depp tells Smith why his role of a mathematician in The Tourist appealed to him: “I was always fascinated by people who are considered completely normal, because I find them the weirdest of all.” Of the complications of having played so many eccentric roles in his career, he says, “They’re all still there, which on some level can’t be the healthiest thing in the world…. I always picture it as this chest of drawers in your body—Ed Wood is in one, the Hatter is in another, Scissorhands is in another…. They’re still very close to the surface.” ...

The Simpsons' racism dig at Fox just a storm in a Tea Party cup

Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly may have been riled, but producer admits 'feud' benefits show as well as owner News Corp

No one knows where ginger evolved, and it no longer seems to exist in the wild. In Sanskrit, singabera means horns or antlers, and the plant may well have spread from south Asia, but we can be no more precise than that. It lends itself supremely to cultivation: at the right latitudes, you can plant a stick of ordinary ginger in your back garden, and the tan or green rhizomes will knobble and seep into the earth. This is a plant we were destined to enjoy. ...

Ta much, dear Edosan

Benedict Cumberbatch is the second best name ever - Yolanda Squatpump shall never lose her crown!

Ta much, dear Edosan

designboom's friends, swiss creative lab MB&F, known for their 'horological machines', have recently collaborated with 152-year-old french high-jewellery house of boucheron, on a new haute-jewellery version of MB&F's horogological machine no.3 (HM3) named the 'jwlrymachine'.

the original HM3 was first presented in 2009. its kinetically energetic engine is displayed on the top of the watch, where the swinging battle-axe-shaped rotor - an iconic MB&F symbol - and the fast-oscillating balance are visible. the time is indicated around twin cones which rise from the watch's three-dimensional sculpted case that is driven by oversized ceramic ball bearings. MB&F's engineers and watchmakers machine, hand-finish and assemble the 305 parts of the HM3 engine to tolerances of a micron.

for 'jwlrymachine', boucheron's artisans have conceived the HM3 as a three-dimensional jewelled owl, presented either in 18k white gold, with amethyst, diamonds with blue and violet sapphires, or in 18k red gold, with pink tourmaline, rose quartz, diamonds and pink sapphires.

the owl's eyes are large glowing cabochons, set over the twin cones, its wings wrapped protectively around the HM3's engine, pavé-set with brilliant-cut stones. its feathered breast is sculpted and engraved from a single block of amethyst or rose quartz. beneath the breast, the owl's heart appears to be beating. this visual illusion is created by the faintly perceived swings of MB&F's solid-gold battle-axe-shaped rotor beneath the translucent stone. ...

Colonel Frank J. Hecker House (Alternative View, B&W)--Detroit MI

The Hecker House is perhaps the most opulent of the late-19th century mansions that once lined the city's main thoroughfare, Woodward Avenue. Around the corner from this manse you will find the home of Mr. Hecker's business partner, Charles Lang Freer. Both homes are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The mansion was built in the early 1890s at a cost of approximately $175,000 (including the cost of two lots on Woodward Avenue). At today's prices, this would work out to about $4 million--assuming you could find artisans to duplicate the structure's workmanship.

Architect Louis Kamper designed the Hecker House and another Chateauesque wonder, the Old Eighth Precinct building located on Grand River Avenue in Detroit. ...

Ta ever so much, dear MSiegel

Passiflora caerulea - Blue Passion Flower



Ta much, dear Edosan

Tried to grow a Maypop (Passiflora incarnata, AKA Wild Passion Flower) plant

but a particularly nasty and foul Winter put paid to it, I'm afraid.

Little Shop of Corman: A Conversation with Roger Corman

... I spoke to Roger Corman via telephone from his offices in Los Angeles, California in August 2009. ...

... Sam: From the beginning your films were, obviously, early independent successes before there was even an independent film industry. I would describe you a pioneer of the independent film industry. Do you think that is a fair assessment?

Roger: I would say that I was one of the pioneers. There has always been a little bit of an independent film industry, but I, as well as a number of other people, was dedicated in the 1960s to making it more popular.

Sam: Your films and your career has inspired so many people. As I said, for myself, as a fan, your movies helped shape the way I value movies. Your work is an inspiration to a lot of people. In this industry, who inspired you?

Roger: Well I would say as a filmmaker I like the works of John Ford and specifically I’ve always admired the great Serge Eisenstein.

Sam: Well Roger, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. It was such a thrill for me as a film fan.

Roger: Thank you.

Not long after I conducted this interview with Roger Corman, it was announced that he would finally be getting the recognition that he deserves when the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced that it will be bestowing an honorary Oscar to Roger Corman for his contribution to the shaping of Hollywood, and for his mentoring of so many talented actors, producers and directors during his amazing career. In an official statement, the Academy stated:

“The Honorary Award, an Oscar statuette, is given to an individual for extraordinary distinction in lifetime achievement, exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences, or for outstanding service to the Academy. Roger Corman is the director and producer of such notable low-budget films as “It Conquered the World,” “The Little Shop of Horrors,,” “The Intruder,” “The Raven,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Wild Angels,” and “The Trip.” He has directed more than 50 films and produced more than 300 during his five-decade career. In addition to his own credits, Corman is widely known for the opportunities he provided as a producer to a number of filmmakers as they embarked on their careers, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme and Ron Howard.”

Roger Corman’s legacy has finally been validated beyond that of film geeks and cult film connoisseurs. Roger Corman truly has proven himself to be one of the unquestionable legends of Hollywood.

Starting from scratch with Scratch
Published: Sunday | October 3, 2010
Howard Campbell, Gleaner Writer

The colourful Lee 'Scratch' Perry in performance - contributed
... Kiss Me Neck: A Lee Perry Companion, a book by British reggae historian and Scratch archivist Jeremy Collingwood, was released in late August by Britain's Cherry Red Books.

In a recent interview with the unitedreggae.com website, Collingwood said he wanted to make up for some missteps on Give Me Power, his previous Scratch discography.

"I found so many mistakes and additions that needed to be done on Give Me Power, I decided to start from scratch with Scratch," he said.

Kiss Me Neck was completed following 10 years of research. It includes matrix numbers and a guide to blank label records for Perry's massive catalogue which dates back to the late 1960s.

photos of Scratch in his heyday

The book also includes photos of Scratch in his heyday at the Black Ark, the mysterious studio where some of reggae's biggest hit songs were recorded. Perry, whose mental health was reportedly deteriorating, allegedly burnt the complex in 1979 and left shortly after for Europe where he has lived since.

Collingwood is one of the most respected figures on Lee 'Scratch' Perry. In February 2005, his acclaimed four-CD box set I Am The Upsetter was released by London-based Trojan Records. Collingwood also compiled rare sound system Perry productions for the Sound System Scratch album which was released in August by another British re-issue company, Pressure Sounds Records.

eccentric behaviour

Though he earned international recognition as a producer of classic songs by The Wailers (Duppy Conqueror, Small Axe), Junior Byles (Beat Down Babylon) and Junior Murvin (Police and Thieves), it is Perry's eccentric behaviour and work as a recording act that have won him renewed fame. His Jamaican E.T. won a Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album in 2004. His latest studio offering, Revelation, was released in the summer and features Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.

In August, Trojan released Sipple Out Deh: The Black Ark Years, a compilation of some of Perry's productions from 1973-79.

The Hanover-born Perry, now 74 years old, lives in Switzerland.

The film world has been paying tribute after news of Tony Curtis's death at the age of 85, at home in Las Vegas. The Clark County coroner reported Curtis had a cardiac arrest.

In his 60-year career as a film actor, Curtis met and worked with almost everyone who was anyone in Hollywood's glory years, from James Stewart in Winchester 73 to Robert de Niro in The Last Tycoon. In between he was directed by the likes of Douglas Sirk, Stanley Kubrick and Billy Wilder. He married Janet Leigh and they were the golden couple of the early 50s before divorcing in 1962.

In a prepared statement Curtis's daughter with Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis, said: "My father leaves behind a legacy of great performances in movies and in his paintings and assemblages. He leaves behind children and their families who loved him and respected him and a wife and in-laws who were devoted to him. He also leaves behind fans all over the world."

Tributes have come pouring in for Curtis, even if his acting career diminished in quality and quantity after its 1960s heyday. Sir Roger Moore, who acted with him in the TV series The Persuaders in the early 70s, said: "We had a lot of laughs together for about 15 months, working together every day. He was great fun to work with, a great sense of humour and wonderful ad libs. We had the best of times."

Because of his colourful personality and reputation as a carouser, Curtis became a popular chat show guest. Sir Michael Parkinson said: "He was an extraordinary man. Hollywood tried to make him into a sex symbol in the 1950s and 1960s but he was his own man. He was wonderfully indiscreet but he was very bright and did not take himself too seriously."

Although they never made a film together, Curtis and Sir Michael Caine became good friends. Caine said: "When his time as a leading man was over he went off to Hawaii and painted. He had a very happy life. Every time I saw him he was the happiest man you could think of." ...

Tony Curtis, a tremendously witty and self-deprecating raconteur in his later years, used to tell a story about starting out in the movies. Playing the tiny role of "bellboy" in the 1949 Barbara Stanwyck film The Lady Gambles, he was in his bellhop costume, getting ready to come on for a rehearsal, when he saw the director picking his way towards him behind the set over the light cables. Curtis fluttered with excitement: what did he want? Give advice about the craft of acting? To discuss his motivation? His characterisation? To discuss a fascinating, subliminal frisson of erotic connection with Stanwyck? At last the director arrived, leant over and hissed: "All you want is a TIP!"

Something in Curtis's cheeky, lovably attractive face meant that he would get a huge tip out of audiences for the rest of his career. He was extremely beautiful as a young man, a quality most famously deployed on screen in his legendary "bathing" sequence with Laurence Olivier, playing the manipulative Roman senator in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960). Playing the comely bath-attendant slave Antoninus, Curtis is asked in what appears to be coded language by the lascivious Olivier if he might not prefer "snails" to "oysters". As a young actor, Curtis probably had a strong following in both the snail and oyster demographic.

It was his charm and a certain imcomparable roguishness which meant that his greatest roles were in comedy – and probably the greatest was in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, playing the penniless young jazz musician who, with Jack Lemmon, has to disguise himself as a woman to escape the Mob; hiding in an all-girls' band he falls helplessly for Marilyn Monroe, who herself, for different reasons, thinks of herself as an impostor. There was a fascinating charge between Curtis and Monroe, and it was many years later that Curtis revealed that there was a real relationship between them. Something in the chaotic thwartedness of his character's adoration for Monroe brought out the comic charm of his personality, which remained ineffably boyish. When he did his famous improvised impression of Cary Grant in that picture, he seemed to be impersonating a grownup. Part of Curtis's secret for beguiling audiences was that tiny hint of Peter Pan – albeit a wised-up, street-smart Peter Pan who knew all the angles.

There were darker sides to Curtis, too. As the Boston Strangler in 1968, he was able to bring something more sinister to his cherubic, but now ageing, look. More importantly, he was the cringing, and faintly desperate press agent Sidney Falco in The Sweet Smell Of Success (1957), who adopts a masochistic, self-hatingly subordinate position to the bullying, syndicated columnist JJ Hunsecker, played by Burt Lancaster. Again, Curtis was callow and youthful but brought a depth and intensity to the role, which showed the excellence of his craft, his superb sense of timing and dialogue, and his innate movie star's sixth-sense of how and where to play to the camera. ...

Tony Curtis was shocked and delighted when he learned that a young Elvis Presley had emulated him. :)

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Jack Russell Terrorier courtesy of dear Edosan

it's a ball it's a ball it's a ball
throw it throw it throw it throw it throw it OMG fucking throw it willya throw it
OMG you threw it
gotta get it gotta get it gotta get it gotta get it

The above is caused by years of breeding to inspire:

OMG a fox a fox a fox a fox a fox
gone to ground OMG gone to ground
gotta dig him out gotta dig him out gotta dig him out gotta dig him out

Hence, No Fox + OMG NO FOX?! = throw the ball throw the ball throw the ball

Simple as.

The week in pictures: 24 September 2010


Looking like a massive firework display, this spectacular northern lights photo shows green and purple colours rippling across the Arctic sky. The picture was taken on September 16 2010, near Skittenelv in the Tromsø area, in northern Norway, by photographer Ole Christian Salomonsen. The aurora borealis is a reflection of recent solar activity which has caused some amazing light shows. The light is caused by explosions on the surface of the sun which throw out electrically charged particles towards the earth. When the solar wind carrying the particles hits our atmosphere it is swept towards the poles by our magnetic field where the particles react with ions in the atmosphere, causing nature's greatest light show. See the next photo for another amazing display...


...This picture of the northern lights - taken by Thilo Bubek - was also shot near Tromsø in northern Norway earlier this month


A statue of Ceres, Roman goddess of agriculture, is silhouetted against the rising super harvest moon as it stands on top of the Missouri State Capitol building in Jefferson City. The rare occurrence of the Super Harvest Moon occurs when the autumnal equinox coincides with the full moon and what NASA calls a '360-degree, summer-autumn twilight glow that is only seen on rare occasions'. The last time such a Super Harvest Moon happened in 1991


The moon rises behind Coit Tower in San Francisco, California - the first time in two decades that the Sun has sunk as a full Moon has risen exactly opposite to it on the autumnal equinox, or the beginning of autumn


These false-colour composite images provided by NASA, constructed from data obtained by the Cassini spacecraft, show the glow of auroras streaking out about 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) from the cloud tops of Saturn's south polar region


The NGC 1365 galaxy, also known as the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy, is seen in an image that combines observations performed through three different filters with the 1.5-metre Danish telescope at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. The ESO's website describes the galaxy, at 60 million light-years from Earth, 200,000 light-years across and about twice the size of the Milky Way, as one of the largest known to astronomers


The heart of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) is pictured in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. Seen as a massive cloud of glowing dust and gas, bombarded by the energetic radiation of new stars, this placid name hides a dramatic reality. Located 4,000 to 5,000 light-years away, in the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer), Messier 8 is a huge region of star birth that stretches across 100 light-years. Clouds of hydrogen gas are slowly collapsing to form new stars, whose bright ultraviolet rays then light up the surrounding gas in a distinctive shade of red


A giant corn field maze at the Kelley Farms welcomes the riders for the World Equestrian Games, in Lexington, Kentucky


Visitors examine a super bus concept project by Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, at the IAA Commercial Vehicles expo in Hanover, Germany

Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes, aka “Cantinflas,” created a simple, universal character whose roundabout phrases and meaningless speeches confounded those around him, but delighted Spanish-speaking audiences for decades...

... Mario “Cantinflas” Moreno, whom the legendary comedian Charlie Chaplin dubbed “the funniest man in the world,” began his career in the 1930s in the “carpas” (tent shows) of Mexico City. After early attempts to find his comedic voice, he embraced his own heritage as a lowly slum dweller, and audiences enthusiastically endorsed this comic persona. With his tiny mustache tipping the corner of his mouth, a cockeyed cap over dark, disheveled hair, dirty vest and a rope for a belt, Cantinflas became the idol of the masses by satirizing the police and politicians.

As a pioneer in the Mexican film industry, Cantinflas helped usher in its golden era. His foray into American cinema landed him a Golden Globe® as Best Actor for his role in Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), but his comedic presence shined brightest in his Spanish language films. People everywhere identified with the struggles of this winsome ragamuffin, and when he died in 1993, thousands endured a violent downpour in order to touch his casket as it lay in state. His funeral was a national event, lasting three days and attended by the presidents of Mexico, Peru, and El Salvador, and the United States Senate held a moment of silence for him.

It’s not hard to see a connection between Cantinflas’ screen persona and the Toro-san comedies of Kiyoshi Atsimi and Yoji Yamada that followed on the other side of the globe. Tora-san is uneducated, a drunkard, a gambler, and a low level yakuza who leaves home in his teens who returns in an attempt to re-enter some semblance of a family. Comedy and romance are blended in just about every movie as Toro-san’s well-meaning, usually crude interference upsets others while he falls in love only to have his hopes dashed.

It’s a familiar formula that we can find in vaudeville and the films of Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy, among many others. But whereas Toro-san is simple, naïve and – let's face it – a little stupid – a typical Cantinflas character always gives the impression that he knows more than he is letting on, that there is method in his madness. He is never anyone's fool.

Comparisons to Chaplin are often cited, but my impression is quite different. True, El Circo and Si yo fuero disputado acknowledge Chaplin's The Circus and The Great Dictator, and both men are clever social satirists, poking at the rich and pompous - But how they go about it is very different. Chaplin is polished, artful, contrived. Cantinflas is rough, spontaneous, improvised. Chaplin is hapless. Cantinflas, a juggernaut. Look at how he wears his clothes: like his movies, they are slapdash, his trousers about to fall off at any moment. Chaplin's wardrobe is unmistakenly the product of a smart costume designer. Cantinflas is sly. He is Groucho and Chico by way of Preston Sturges. (In El Gendarme Desconocido look for a scene at a ballroom that could have been lifted directly out of The Lady Eve, released earlier the same year.) ...

GROWING UP IN the United States during the 1950s and '60s, the comic actors I loved were Dick Van Dyke, Danny Kaye, Peter Sellers, Jack Lemmon, Jerry Lewis. …

And, thanks to my love for older movies, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Abbott & Costello. …

But if you grew up South of the Border during that same period, the No. 1 comic movie star was Cantinflas, often dubbed the Charlie Chaplin of Mexico.

My first exposure to Cantinflas came in 1956 when I was 8 and my parents took me to see "Around the World in Eighty Days."

Co-starring with David Niven in this epic version of Jules Verne's novel, Cantinflas handily stole the show as Passepartout, valet to Niven's stiff-upper-lip Phileas Fogg. Quite an accomplishment, considering the remarkable roster of cameos by A-list movie stars.

I was quite taken with Cantinflas, as were many Americans who saw him for the first time. He was hilarious, and a wonderful conduit for the audience, since Niven's character was so aloof.

A few years later a Hollywood movie called "Pepe" was built around Cantinflas, a misguided effort to bring him to American audiences via another star-laden extravaganza. But this time it was a misfire. (Although, considering all the bit movie stars on hand, it's surprising that it's never been released on American DVD.)

Too bad he didn't get another shot at U.S. audiences with better material. Not that it mattered to him … or his core fans. Cantinflas was beloved by Latin America and remained a huge star in Mexico into the early 1980s.

If you've never had the opportunity to see him in his element, Sony has released a batch of Cantinflas comedies with English subtitles, and they are most enjoyable, offering insight into both the talent and appeal of his screen character, as well as a view of a comic culture with which most of us are unfamiliar. ...

1949 Delahaye 175 S Roadster
Delahaye + Saoutchik = Profuse Yearning
Ta much, dear Edosan

1949 Delahaye 175 S Roadster

1937 Delahaye 135MS Figoni et Falaschi Roadster

1937 Delahaye 135MS Figoni et Falaschi Roadster - Auto Shows
2003 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance
August 2003

This car was Delahaye's 1937 Paris show car, resplendent in the latest flowing, aerodynamic aluminum bodywork from Paris's Figoni et Falaschi bodyworks, draped over a short-wheelbase competition chassis. The original design included such innovations as scissors-jacks under the running boards to assist with tire changing, an ultra-light tubular seat frame, a "disappearing top" (meaning it was concealed beneath a rigid tonneau cover), and a windshield that could be retracted into the bodywork. The show car's styling was somewhat different, lacking a front bumper, and employing a single central headlamp with horns where the driving lights now reside....

1939 Delahaye 135M Figoni/Falaschi

The current owner first saw this fabulous Figoni & Falaschi designed roadster when it premiered at the French Pavilion at the New York World's Fair in 1939. He purchased the car in 1964, not realizing that this was the car he sketched as a captivated eleven year old 24 years earlier. It has been displayed at Retromobile and the Centre International de l'Automobile in Paris.

This is the second Paris Salon Cabriolet mounted on the short chassis. It was brought to the U.S. immediately before World War II and shown at the New York World's Fair in 1939. The Delahaye was purchased by first owner Bale Greer after the fair closed. It was then acquired by Malcolm Pray, the second owner, in 1964. The car participated in early hill climbs and has been recognized as a leading show car in concours around the world because of its striking design. Its fully enclosed front and rear wheels enhance the drama of its aerodynamic lines. ...

1939 Delahaye Type 135 M
Delahaye + Figoni et Falaschi = Copious Longing
Ta much, dear Edosan

1925 Delahaye Tourer - Rasta Gold!

Ta much, dear Edosan. My Inner Mongolian loves it even more than I.

Wish we could see more of this splendidly-faced horsie, though.

Jeremy Clarkson: the Stig is 'sacked'
Presenter hits out at racing driver Ben Collins, AKA the Stig, and says Top Gear is 'damaged but not out'
Tara Conlan
Tuesday 7 September 2010

Top Gear co-host Jeremy Clarkson has said that the man who plays the Stig is "sacked" and admitted he was "hurt" that Ben Collins decided to unmask himself as the show's anonymous white-suited driver.

Clarkson said that "Top Gear is damaged but not out", adding that he has spent the last three weeks "doing nothing but work out what to do instead", after it emerged that Collins was planning to out himself as the Stig in his autobiography.

The BBC failed last week to have an injunction granted to stop Collins, the racing driver who has played the Stig since 2003, from publishing his book.

Clarkson said he felt "a bit hurt really". "It was such a shock. It was horrible actually because I liked him and he came round to my house and had drinks and all that time he was writing a book," he added, in a video interview published online today by Oxfordshire-based community news service WitneyTV.

"He's just decided he'd rather be ... put it this way he's history as far as we are concerned. He's sacked," said Clarkson, who was interviewed at a charity auction at Chipping Norton Lido.

"I've spent the last three weeks doing nothing but trying work out what out what an earth to do instead. You may remember a film called Wall Street in which Gordon Gekko said greed was good and greed works. It doesn't, if you're watching this children, greed is bad," he added. ...

Wildlife enthusiast Jimmy Hoffman, 50, scours the vegetation around his home in the Costa Brava, Spain, looking for praying mantises. After finding his subjects, Mr Hoffman can spend up to two hours waiting to get the perfect shot. He said: "My favourite picture is of a mantis about to catch a butterfly. Unfortunately for the mantis the butterfly was too fast and managed to fly away before it could be caught. I got my picture at exactly the right moment and it was very special for me because I had waited a couple of hours for something interesting to happen. After that I decided to called the picture 'Patience'.


A trio of Empusa Pennata mantises perch clutched together, on a twig


Keen plane spotter Bernardo Malfitano took this shot of a rainbow effect pouring off the back of an F-22 at an air show in Miramar, California. The aeronautical engineer from Seattle works for Boeing, and he said: "This is an F-22 at Miramar at the top of a loop. He is pulling so many Gs, the low pressure air over the fuselage that is sucking the plane into the loop gets cold enough for the water vapour to condense. The angle is just right for sunlight to undergo total internal refraction and make rainbow colours around the plane."

... Explaining where it all began, Banksy says: "You're 14, 15. It's a big world out there, you wanna make your mark, and no one listens to a word you say. Whereas, yer know, one night, one spray can, all of a sudden people notice you."

Banksy was plugged into the trendy street scene, and gives a nod to fellow Bristolian, 3D from dance music outfit Massive Attack.

"There was always a lot of graffiti in my home town growing up, urmm, I think 3D from Massive Attack had brought it back with him off tour in America and he'd been painting all over the city. I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it. I always used to get things too close together or too far apart and it used to take me ages. So I had to come up with a way of making it quicker, otherwise I was gonna get nicked."

The works that catapulted Banksy into the spotlight almost all involved black and white stencil drawings, such as the iconic image of two policemen snogging.

"I mean they're very efficient, stencils. You get to put something up in very little time and it's hard to mess it up.

"When I moved to London I just carried on painting. I never saw that there was anything bad in it.

"You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something. And I always felt that it was all right to answer back a little bit, I suppose. That the city shouldn't just be a one-way conversation "I didn't see why you'd settle for just walls. So I started vandalising statues and that led to vandalising parks. It just kept going really. ..."

Stiggy, Stiggy

He's our man!

If he can't drive it

No one can!

... When punk came along, everyone picked up guitars. I wanted to pick something up too, so I picked up a camera and reinvented myself as a film-maker.

The downside of affordable technology is mediocrity. Back in the 70s every three minutes of film cost £20. Now you can get a 90-minute digital tape for a fiver. The price used to weed out people who were just fucking about.

Youth culture in the west is increasingly conservative. Music has become a soundtrack for consumerism. It feels like punk never happened.

Racial problems are more complicated now. I've got mates who moan about Polish people stealing their work. I'm like, "You can't say that. That's what people said about our parents."

I gave a lecture last week and the kids in the audience said, "Don, you sound like an angry old man." I said, "It's because you kids aren't bloody angry enough."

I was never a herd person: I was always a freak. I just refused to be defined by my colour.

Dept. of Merch
Torso
by Rebecca Mead
August 9, 2010


...For his part, Pop wears no underwear, exposed or otherwise. “Things like that give me the creeps,” he said. He feels similarly about socks.

Pop’s venture with Sony Music, which is producing the Pop T-shirts as part of its Archive 1887 line, is only the latest in a recent spate of commercial activity: in the past year, he has appeared (shirtless) in advertisements for a broadband company and an insurance company. “It’s like this: I made some fucking great-sounding music that still sounds fucking great, and—to drop my intellect and just get emotional about it—a bunch of fat fucks and pricks wouldn’t play my music anywhere where anybody could hear it, wouldn’t sell it in a part of the store where it could be bought,” he said. “From the commercials, other people get to know me, and they check out the music.”

Pop conceded that there are occasions that call for a T-shirt, particularly now that he has a free closetful of them. “I wear one when I get cold, like anyone else,” he said. There have been two T-shirts in his sartorial history that he has worn with any enthusiasm: a concert shirt that he bought after seeing T. Rex in London in 1972, and one designed for Tony Hawk, the skateboarder, in the eighties.

He stays in shape with daily Qigong practice. “It’s about increasing your breathing capacity to the point where air becomes food,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you eat, you won’t gain weight. After forty minutes of it, my troubles seem smaller, and I am more excited and more calm at the same time.” But Pop admitted that there have been times, lately, when his unclad torso has met with disapproval. “You know, from time to time, if I take my shirt off now, it doesn’t look the way it did when I was thirty-two,” he said. “It’s, like, ugh. But look—when I am playing, I’m the shit. As long as that’s true, I can take it off.”

... Robert Lantos, who produced many of the films Chaykin appeared in including "Whale Music" and "Barney's Version," called the man "an icon" and "one of the greatest character actors in the world."

"He made a gourmet feast of every moment he was on screen, creating unforgettable characters who he pushed far beyond the writing on the page," Lantos said in a statement.

"The refrain that for a great actor 'no part is too small,' must have been coined with him in mind."

Chaykin was born July 27, 1949 in New York to an American father and a Canadian mother before moving to Toronto.

His extensive resume spanned 35 years but mostly consisted of supporting roles. His legacy as one of Canada's most beloved performers was cemented with a starring role as a has-been music star in 1994's "Whale Music," which earned Chaykin a Genie in 1994 for best actor.

He appeared in many of Atom Egoyan's films, including "Exotica," "The Adjuster," "Adoration," and "The Sweet Hereafter," and could be seen in smaller parts on big U.S. features including "The Mask of Zorro," "Devil in a Blue Dress" and "A Life Less Ordinary."

"He always added such a wonderful dimension to the characters that he played," said Piers Handling, director of the Toronto International Film Festival.

"They were always memorable, no matter how small the roles were or medium-size the roles were. Maury was just a consummate professional, just sort of took over the screen."

Memorable roles included his turn as a suicidal Cavalry major in "Dances with Wolves," as the eccentric TV detective Nero Wolfe, and as an acerbic movie studio honcho in "Entourage."

More recently, he could be seen as the cantankerous father Sam Blecher in the HBO Canada sitcom "Less Than Kind."

"He was one of our greatest actors," said story editor Mark McKinney, adding that the cast and crew were "reeling" from the news.

"Maury's an actor of unparalleled gifts, you cannot learn what he had in spades — you could study for 1,000 years. He had an incredible gift, an instant quickness."

McKinney noted Chaykin long battled kidney problems but appeared to rebound earlier this year.

One of the last roles Chaykin filmed was a supporting part on the upcoming Showcase comedy "Drunk and on Drugs Happy Funtime Hour," created by "Trailer Park Boys" Mike Smith, Robb Wells and J.P. Tremblay.

Smith said a spirited Chaykin spent three days on set last month. He played a demented scientist who creates a hallucinogen that wreaks havoc on the cast of a fictional kids show.

"The character was written as this sort of lighthearted sort of scientist but Maury wanted to play him like a true mad man and he did that," Smith said from Halifax, adding that the cast and crew considered it an honour to work with him.

"It was just fascinating to watch this character we wrote, watch Maury just take it to a completely different level than we had ever imagined."

Lewis lauded Chaykin as a surprising actor full of "brilliant ideas," and a ridiculous sense of humour.

"He would make me laugh. He'd make me laugh until my stomach hurt," said Lewis.

"He was a true creative spirit and sometimes way out there and really kind of absurd. He had a very absurdist sense of humour and he liked the shock value of that."

Lewis said the mild-mannered Chaykin was always very humble about his achievements.

"He was a man of integrity. He was a very upstanding fellow who was very loyal to his friends and always told the truth. He was just a very forthcoming fellow, very forthcoming and I'll miss him. I'll miss him dearly." ...

Forty years with Nero Wolfe

Ta much, dear Edosan

Percy Blakeney: They seek him here, they seek him there
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven?
Is he in hell?
That damned elusive Pimpernel!

Percy Blakeney: [before reciting his poem to Winterbottom] Slap me, I'm bubbling over with good humor this morning. Would you believe me, I've just written a masterpiece.
Col. Winterbottom: Who, sir? You, sir?
Percy Blakeney: Me, sir
Col. Winterbottom: No, sir.
Percy Blakeney: Yes, sir. All about this mysterious Pimpernel fellow. How it came to me Heaven only knows, because it was the busiest moment of the day. Damn me, I was tying my cravat.

Citizen Chauvelin: [after hearing Percy's poem] Delightful.
Percy Blakeney: What?
Citizen Chauvelin: Especially that line, "Those Frenchies seek him everywhere."
Percy Blakeney: Yes, I like that, too, because you see, I hear that they do and that gives the line a sort of something... sort of gives it... uh... uh... something. Uh... u-uh... if I make myself clear.
Citizen Chauvelin: Clear as crystal.

Percy Blakeney: Open up your sleeves, man. Let your ruffles take the air. Let them flow. Let them ripple. So that when His Highness takes snuff, it will be a swallow's flight!

Col. Winterbottom: Are you being offensive, sir?
Percy Blakeney: Who, sir? Me, sir? No, sir.

"We seek him here, we seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven?--Is he in hell?
That demmed, elusive Pimpernel!"

From the circular main hall of the Sackler Library in Oxford, an unassuming corridor leads to a staircase that takes you down below street level. Through a door marked "archive", office ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights stare down on a cheap blue carpet and a row of grey rolling stacks.

The hum of the air-conditioning lets slip that this ordinary-looking room is hiding something special. The temperature is held at 18.5C (65F), several degrees cooler than the sunny July day outside, while a humidifier keeps the moisture level tightly controlled. For those grey stacks contain the forgotten secrets of the most famous find in Egyptology, if not all of archaeological history: the tomb of Tutankhamun.

This is the Griffith Institute – arguably the best Egyptology library in the world. One of its most prized collections incorporates the notes, photographs and diaries of the English archaeologist Howard Carter, who discovered Tutankhamun's resting place in 1922. The only intact pharaoh's tomb ever discovered, it contained such an array of treasures that it took Carter 10 years to catalogue them all. Yet despite the immense significance of the discovery, the majority of Carter's findings have never been published, and many questions surrounding the tomb remain unanswered.

Jaromir Malek is the soft-spoken keeper of the archive whose own Tutankhamun project is nearing completion. By making all of Carter's notes available online, Malek wanted to ensure that the public would have access to the full extent of the discovery – and to spur Egyptologists into finishing the job of studying the tomb's contents. He has ended up creating a model that other researchers hope will transform the field of archaeology.

The effort has taken even longer than Carter's gruelling excavation. It began in 1993, when Malek says he realised that fewer than a third of the artefacts from Tutankhamun's tomb had been properly studied and published, a situation he describes as "unacceptable".

A total of 5,398 objects were found in the tomb, covering every aspect of ancient Egyptian life, from weapons and chariots to musical instruments, clothes, cosmetics and a treasured lock of the royal grandmother's hair. A few, like Tutankhamun's gold burial mask, are instantly recognisable, but many are not well known, even to experts.

Part of the reason is that Carter died in 1939, just seven years after his excavation ended, and before he could fully publish his findings. "He started working on the final publication, but he was physically and mentally exhausted after a very hard 10 years," says Malek. By all accounts a difficult man to work with, Carter had no collaborators left to continue his work when he died. And while the artefacts themselves are held in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo, Carter's notes were donated to the Griffith Institute, where they have lain largely undisturbed ever since. ...

If you enjoyed those Peter Kay one-liners, they were probably written by Emo Philips
Helium-voiced survivor of 1980s alternative comedy boom on internet plagiarism, his 'subconcious' hairstyle, and being the original emo kid
James Kettle
Saturday 10 July 2010

... 'British audiences never laugh at my routine about mowing the lawn. I have no idea why. You can't all be using goats'

His bizarre look is of a piece with an equally peculiar outlook on life. The onstage Philips exists in a state of permanent arrested development, at times displaying childlike innocence, at others showing a sinister enthusiasm for perverted behaviour. Philips explains his freakish stage persona as an extension of some of his real-life quirks. "Everyone, everywhere, and all the time, used to laugh at me when I was growing up. So, when I was around 18, I thought, 'I'll become a comedian, and then if everyone laughs at me, I'll be famous.' So I went on stage one night and, for the first time in my life, everyone stopped laughing at me." Given his off-putting appearance and manner, does he ever get groupies? "There is a fine line between a groupie and a fan that finds you attractive. But in either case, no."

Although Philips is happy to play the outsider as a stand-up, British audiences have always given him a particularly warm reception. Maybe it's because his love not just of puns but all kinds of ludicrously contrived wordplay means that he fits neatly with a tradition of humour that's always been popular over here. Were it not for the lack of Home Counties vowels, you could almost imagine him among the cast of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. ...

The Bugatti Veyron is, once again, the fastest production car on the planet.

Bugatti says an orange-and-black Veyron 16.4 Super Sport achieved an average top speed of 267.8 mph at the hands of test driver Pierre Henri Raphanel. Stop and think about that for a moment. That’s more than 393 feet per second and almost 4.5 miles per minute. Even Bugatti’s engineers were surprised.

“We took it that we would reach an average value of 425 km/h (264 mph),” chief engineer Wolfgang Schreiber said in a statement. “But the conditions today were perfect and allowed even more.”

Raphanel made his record-setting run at Volkswagen’s test track in Ehra-Lessien, Germany, in the latest version of the greatest automobile ever made. He had one hour to make back-to-back runs in each direction. The speedo hit 427.933 km/h against the wind and 434.211 with it. That came to an average of 431.072, which by our math is 267.8 mph.

And that was more than enough to take the title back from Shelby Super Cars and the Ultimate Aero, which had held the record since peeling off an average of 256 mph in 2007. Raphanel set the record on June 24; Bugatti announced it on July 4. Bugatti says Guinness was on-hand to verify the record, and we imagine the guys at SSC will not take this sitting down.

As the name suggests, the Super Sport is a hot-rodded version of a car that already has too much of everything. The 16-cylinder engine has been tweaked and tuned with bigger turbochargers (four, count ‘em, four) and intercoolers. Bugatti says the engine is good for 1,200 horsepower and a staggering 1,106 pound feet of torque.

The carbon-fiber monocoque is stiffer yet lighter, the suspension has been stiffened and Bugatti says the car is capable of 1.4g of lateral acceleration. The body has been revised, and the engine draws air through a pair of NACA ducts in the roof instead of two big scoops. ...

Happy Birthday!

Ta much, dear Edosan

Consider saffron
It's hard to produce and more costly than gold, but there's nothing else like it. How do you use saffron in your kitchen?
Oliver Thring
Tuesday 29 June 2010

How would you describe the taste of saffron? It's sweet but bitter. It smells of hay, the ocean, diesel, bonfire embers and well-rotted apples. Its aroma is gentle but overpowering, as delicate as a surgeon and as sharp as a bitch-slap. Although people use turmeric to approximate its colour, it has no substitute flavour, no lemon-to-lime or cod-to-pollock neighbour. It dominates the dishes it appears in but acts as a mere backnote to other ingredients. Nothing in the kitchen is as full of paradox and subtlety as this singularly beautiful, weepingly expensive spice.

It's the stigma of a very pretty crocus native to a strip of west Asia. The modern plant is sterile, the hard-won result of cross-breeding and human-led Darwinism. Every year, people have to dig it up, split the bulb-like corms that form part of its root and replant them. The flowers bloom in October, pushing out two or three fragile, wispy stigmas that you can only harvest by hand, and pickers work through the night to catch these at their coy, alluring best.

It's punishing, fiddly work. So saffron is notoriously the most expensive spice, its retail price, pound for pound, often exceeding that of gold. Harrods, who know about this sort of thing, were kind enough to give me 2g of the finest: a bit of Spanish and some Moroccan. Together, the tiny jars used around 400 flowers, and cost over £25.

For as long as there have been people, people have known about saffron. A dye from its stigmas colours 50,000-year-old cave paintings in what is now Iraq. Ancient frescoes on the Greek island of Santorini depict a goddess watching – or perhaps blessing – a woman picking saffron, presumably for medicine. No one knows how old this painting is: a volcano buried it in around 1500BC, and the work could have been hundreds of years old even then. Ovid wrote that Smilax changed her pursuer Crocos into a flower, leaving the red stigma as a symbol of his passion. Another myth describes Hermes, the messenger to the gods, accidentally wounding his friend Crocos: blood dripping from Crocos's head fell on the ground, where Hermes changed it into the flower. Zeus slept on a bed of saffron. The spice appears in the sybaritic verses of the Song of Solomon and in Chinese writings dating to 1600BC. Cleopatra used it "before encounters with men" – I haven't been able to find out how, but I'm sure you can use your imagination. ...

Ta much, dear Edosan

... "And do you really ask us to believe," Sir Wilfrid was saying, "that you have discovered a means for instructing animals in the art of human speech, and that dear old Tobermory has proved your first successful pupil?"

"It is a problem at which I have worked for the last seventeen years," said Mr. Appin, "but only during the last eight or nine months have I been rewarded with glimmerings of success. Of course I have experimented with thousands of animals, but latterly only with cats, those wonderful creatures which have assimilated themselves so marvellously with our civilization while retaining all their highly developed feral instincts. Here and there among cats one comes across an outstanding superior intellect, just as one does among the ruck of human beings, and when I made the acquaintance of Tobermory a week ago I saw at once that I was in contact with a 'Beyond-cat' of extraordinary intelligence. I had gone far along the road to success in recent experiments; with Tobermory, as you call him, I have reached the goal."

Mr. Appin concluded his remarkable statement in a voice which he strove to divest of a triumphant inflection. No one said "Rats," though Clovis's lips moved in a monosyllabic contortion which probably invoked those rodents of disbelief.

"And do you mean to say," asked Miss Resker, after a slight pause, "that you have taught Tobermory to say and understand easy sentences of one syllable?"

"My dear Miss Resker," said the wonder-worker patiently, "one teaches little children and savages and backward adults in that piecemeal fashion; when one has once solved the problem of making a beginning with an animal of highly developed intelligence one has no need for those halting methods. Tobermory can speak our language with perfect correctness."

This time Clovis very distinctly said, "Beyond-rats!" Sir Wilfrid was more polite, but equally sceptical. ...

Detroit – Tightrope Rat


NYC – Diogenes


LA


Park City, Utah


Camden / Regents Canal


Hadta bump this.

June 3, 2010
The punk prophet of Ing-er-land
How did Mark E. Smith of the Fall get involved in the World Cup song England’s Heartbeat? It’s in his blood, he says
Terry Christian

... England’s Heartbeat, on which Smith sings, rather than using the sloganeering quasi-rap of the Fall records, is an impassioned and witty appeal for a show of pride from England in South Africa. Smith urges the players to “take care of the invention of your nation . . . socks up at last or be a Brazilian breakfast”. Gone, it says, should be the days of England teams wilting in the June sunshine like a bunch of cry babies.

“I can assure you,” Smith says, “it definitely won’t get to No 1.”

I have spent numerous hours over the past three decades drinking with Smith. I have a fascination with the Fall that dates back to the first time I saw them in 1978. Smith was annoying the crowd by dedicating a song to Elvis Presley, anathema to punks at the time and very amusing to witness. As a young radio presenter, I interviewed him about his albums, from Slates and Hex Enduction Hour onwards. He remains one of the most interesting people I’ve met. Given his ranting stage presence and reputation for not suffering fools, the most unexpected thing about him was always how friendly he was, and what a good sense of humour he had.

A strong part of Smith’s working-class credentials is the appreciation and respect he has for the older generation. The first thing he’d say whenever we met was: “How’s your mam?” This time, when I tell him that she died in April, he’s genuinely sad for me. “April is the cruellest month.”

“Where does that come from?”

“T. S. Eliot, I think.”

Smith has a habit of understating his knowledge. Something he’s been doing with his lyrics for the Fall for more than three decades. He was always reading new stuff, listening to new stuff and plugged into the real world.

The Fall were John Peel’s favourite group; he famously described them as “always the same, always different”, which is as good a summary of their uniqueness as any. So, given his long history on the cutting edge, why has Smith done something as seemingly mainstream as a World Cup record?

Well, he has history with the Beautiful Game, he points out: “The Fall were the first band to ever do a song about football when we did Kicker Conspiracy for Rough Trade in 1983. At the time all these hippies at Rough Trade were saying, “You can’t do that; music fans aren’t into football’. We also did Kurious Oranj, which was about football rivalries, and Sparta FC a couple of years ago.”

There’s the urge, too, to improve on a genre that’s not exactly flush with quality. “All the World Cup songs I’ve heard are rubbish,” Smith says, giving amused short shrift to songs such as New Order’s World in Motion and Skinner and Baddiel’s Three Lions. ...

... With warm reviews for their recent album, Your Future Our Clutter, the Fall’s longevity continues. After years of refusing to sign contracts, Smith retains the rights to all his recorded material. “I always knew, even when we were only getting ten quid a week out of the group, that the last thing I wanted to do was sign all my songs over to some hippy. People in other bands used to laugh at us for not signing contracts or think we were mad. But they’d be massive for two years and then disappear.”

He has a wry sideswipe, too, at the current crop of British bands: “They’ve all been to drama school.” Taking that to be a dig at how middle-class they are, I ask him what it was like working with the artschool-educated Damon Albarn on Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach album. He immediately sees what I’m getting at, smiles and brushes it aside: “It was really good, he really knows exactly what he’s doing and works properly.” ...

WAAAAH!

After keeping us waiting for a century, Mark Twain will finally reveal all
The great American writer left instructions not to publish his autobiography until 100 years after his death, which is now
By Guy Adams in Los Angeles
Sunday, 23 May 2010

Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.

The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.

Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted the first-hand account of his life kept under wraps for so long. Some believe it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Others argue that the time lag prevented him from having to worry about offending friends. ...

... Another potential motivation for leaving the book to be posthumously published concerns Twain's legacy as a Great American. Michael Shelden, who this year published Man in White, an account of Twain's final years, says that some of his privately held views could have hurt his public image.

"He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He's also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there." ...




Hallefrickenluja!

Ta much, dear Edosan

Woo hoo!

May 15, 2010
When Picasso came round to play
To the young boy, he was just a friend of his artist father. Finding out that Picasso was a towering figure came later
Antony Penrose

Pablo Picasso’s work still finds unexpected ways of astounding us even if only for the boggling $106.5 million recently realised at auction by his 1932 painting of his mistress Marie Thérèse Walter titled Nude, Green Leaves and Bust. Now Picasso: Peace and Freedom at Tate Liverpool promises a new look at the political dimension ever present in his life but intimately known only to a few. The Picasso I knew did not wear his politics as an emblem. He came to my home, Farley Farm in Chiddingly, Sussex, in November 1950. My earliest memories are of a person of great warmth. He was generous with hugs, cuddles and games on the floor, and he smelt distinctively of cologne and soap. We liked the same things. My teddy, the pets, Gypsy the old draft horse and our handsome Ayrshire bull, named William, with his retinue of cows.

These events return to me as snatches of conversations, hazy images, smells and emotional traces from memories long ago. I was well into my teenage years before I realised that other people saw Picasso, Paul Éluard, Joan Mirò, Max Ernst, Man Ray and others as the leading artists of the 20th century. For me they were habitué friends of my family. They were warm, funny, hugely talented and sometimes flawed people who were bonded by their love of art and their desire to use it as an agency for bringing change to the world. I urge those who jump to the conclusion that Surrealism was a naive and self-indulgent movement to look at the risks run and the ultimate price paid by the Surrealists who proved their principle against the Nazis. Many of them died as a result.

It was discovering the work of my mother, Lee Miller, hidden in the attic of Farley Farm House that prompted me to research her life and that of my father. Neither of them had ever spoken much of the Second World War, of politics and the principles that guided their lives but gradually these things emerged and meshed with my memories of them as parents. In their external lives, they stopped being my parents and became “Penrose” and “Miller”. They still remain as my mother and father in my internal life.

Picasso had met my father, the painter Roland Penrose, in Mougins in 1936, thanks to the poet Éluard who had invited him there for a beach holiday on the Côte d’Azur. Éluard, a close friend of Picasso, had helped Penrose to gather the loans for his First International Surrealist Exhibition in London held in June of that year. Its success established Penrose as the ambassador of Surrealism in Britain, a nation still struggling to come to terms with Post-Impressionism. ...

...Becoming super-rich was important to him only because it allowed him to be private and to quietly help the people and the causes he admired. Naturally his wealth made it impossible for him to enjoy the simple pleasures of the beach he loved or the townspeople around him, but he found secret ways through trusted friends of supporting what mattered to him, and that allowed him to carry on simply being Picasso. ...

"I live in Brooklyn. By choice," wrote Truman Capote in 1959. Now anyone with a cool $18m to spare can make that choice too and live in the house where the author penned Breakfast at Tiffany's.

The Brooklyn Heights home where Capote lived in the 1950s and 1960s - a five-storey, 11-bedroom townhouse built in 1839 - went on sale with Sotheby's International Realty yesterday for the first time in 70 years. Capote wrote his 1959 essay about Brooklyn, A House On the Heights, while living in the property, describing the splendour of its "beautiful staircase floating upward in white, swan-simple curves to a skylight of sunny amber-gold glass", its walls "thick as a buffalo, immune to the mightiest cold, the meanest heat" and its "porch canopied, completely submerged, as though under a lake of leaves, by an ancient but admirably vigorous vine weighty with grapelike bunches of wisteria".

Capote rented the Willow Street house from the stage designer Oliver Smith, living in two basement rooms. However, George Plimpton writes in his introduction to A House on the Heights: "when friends came to call, he often took them on a tour of the entire house (when Smith was not at home) and said it was his house, all his, and that he had restored and decorated every room ... One of them (which Truman does not mention) contained Smith's mother's favourite furniture - old beaded lampshades, rocking chairs - indeed, a room whose decor must have given Truman pause to explain to his friends on his tours."

The author describes in A House On the Heights how, after a run of Martinis on the porch of the house with Smith, he eventually convinced his friend to rent him a few rooms in the property. "It got to be quite late, he began to see my point: yes, twenty-eight rooms were rather a lot; and yes, it seems only fair that I should have some of them."