For some reason I find images of naked women underwater peculiarly erotic. It must be connected to whatever impulse it was that prompted the ancients to imagine that Aphrodite had been born from the foam of the sea, an idea that makes perfect sense to me.
. . . on the North Carolina coast.
You can't imagine how excited I am about this . . .
. . . loves to entertain family and friends with her exquisite water ballets, performed in her pool. Here she demonstrates her famous “swan pose”, which never fails to bring a gasp from onlookers.
. . . looking stylish on the patio of my sister Anna's house in North Carolina.
. . . about the art of the 20th Century:
Curiously, it was cinema, a supposedly new art form, that remained, along with jazz perhaps, the most self-confident of arts in the 20th Century, never for a moment doubting its task, which was traditional, conservative even, humane and popular, unlike the older “high art” forms which became the province of ever-dwindling cultural elites.
Hiding behind the mask of its purely technological novelty, it carried on the art projects of the 19th Century without shame — Victorian academic painting, Victorian theater (especially Victorian spectacle-theater), program music and the variety stage.
This has to be one of the most astonishing sleight-of-hand acts in the whole history of art.
Baumhofer was an American illustrator with good, solid draftsmanship and a knack for creating thrilling spatial effects, even for scenes not quite as spectacular as this one . . .
My friend Juniper was in town from the Bay Area this weekend. On Saturday she attended a wedding, today we ran around in search of further adventures.
She found some shade in Red Rock Canyon, above. Below, she ate Bananas Foster at Mon Ami Gabi — high adventure, indeed.
She pocketed $10 playing roulette at the El Cortez Casino . . .
. . . and left town a winner. Yes!
My nephew Harry and my friend PZ discussing movies — the subject here, Kurosawa!
The former Miss Ruby Stevens, in excelsis . . .
My mom and my friend Mary Zahl discussing smocking in the living room of my sister's house in Hampstead, North Carolina.
Just as the industrial labor process separates off from handicraft, so the form of communication corresponding to this process — information — separates off from the form of communication corresponding to the artisanal process of labor, which is storytelling. This connection must be kept in mind if one is to form an idea of the explosive force contained within information. This force is liberated in sensation. With the sensation, whatever resembles wisdom, oral tradition or the epic side of truth is razed the ground.
— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Storytelling is linked to artisanal labor because it is created out of the life experience of an individual storyteller, most especially the time spent learning the craft of it. It's not so different from making furniture by hand. Information, by contrast, is merely collected and repackaged. It has the nature of an industrial product, which can be separated from the process of its creation and sold like any other commodity.
Storytelling embodies, at its best, as Benjamin notes, wisdom, tradition and a truth that transcends both the moment and the immediate context of its telling — it is epic in that sense. Information has commercial value to the degree that it embodies sensation — sensation in the sense of surprise or shock value, and sensation in the sense of newness or exclusivity.
Most modern movies don't tell stories — they sell sensation.
My sister Roe in her home office in North Carolina, with a picture of herself and her son Max on the computer.
When she was a little girl I used to call her Roetina, and I still do — I don't know why.
As you can see, she is a smoker and allows smoking in her home. Yes!
Illustration, Frankenstein, 1983
We don't really have
Fall in the Mojave Desert, but when the killing heat of the summer
subsides, the change creates an autumnal feeling. Fall doesn't
officially begin anywhere until 23 September, but September is an
autumnal month, and it's Autumn now in my mind, which I'm celebrating
by re-reading Sherlock Holmes stories.
What I like about
these stories is something that's hard to translate into a dramatic
medium like movies — the sense of calm and order, which no sensational
misdeed can ever really disturb. Holmes continues on his unemotional
but relentless battle against crime, Watson continues on his course of
adamantine loyalty. The crimes intrude only to remind us that the
wickedness of this world can't vanquish an everyday dedication to
decency, and that friendship is more thrilling than scandal.