Check it out, my new Tumblr site. No registration, no fees, no exams. Pure pleasure.
Check it out, my new Tumblr site. No registration, no fees, no exams. Pure pleasure.
Posted at 09:40 PM in Art, Books, Cartoons, Collecting, Current Affairs, Education, Erotica, Film, Food and Drink, Humor, Photography, Poetry, Politics, Post Cards, Quotations, Recommended Reading, Writers | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 03:23 AM in Art, Collecting, Erotica, Photography, Post Cards | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: covergirl, P.O.V. magazine, supermodel, Tyra Banks
You don't have to join. You don't have to pay. Just stop by and listen. I recently added three new mixes on my 8tracks.com site: each of these three (Blues: Volumes 2, 3, and 4) provides over one hour of choice blues tracks. (My "Blues, Vol. 1" mix has over thirty minutes of great music.)
If you skip through too many songs, you'll run up against a wall concerning the rules and permissions for 8tracks.com. Here's the text that pops up once you've skipped too many songs: "Apologies for the inconvenience, but our music license requires us to limit the number of tracks you may skip each hour." But you're not being shut down at that point, and you're not being asked to sign up or spend money. Just keep listening, and a new song will be playing soon.
It's a pleasure to play DJ, to share these great works of art. Enjoy.
Posted at 02:37 AM in Collecting, Music | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: 8tracks.com, blues, DJ, Doyle Wesley Walls, music
I just signed up for 8tracks.com and created my first playlist of music. (Thanks for the info, Russo.) You can check out the playlist, free, without signing up or registering, etc., here. I look forward to creating more playlists in the near future.
I used my photo below as the avatar for that particular playlist. OK, this photo has a general connection to any playlist; however, it has, perhaps, a more specific connection--given the word "interesting" and the price of "$1.99"--to the changing ways music is now available, as opposed, say, to the CDs at brick and mortar stores.
Posted at 02:12 AM in Collecting, Music, Photography, Writers | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: 8tracks.com, country music, couplings, music, playlist, rock music, songwriters
Fotofolio is a superior publisher of postcards. Amazing catalog. Here are three cards from my collection.
First, a 1955 portrait of Sophia Loren by George Daniell:
Second, the model-turned-photographer, Ellen von Unwerth, gives us "Nudes in the Royalton, New York," 1992:
Finally, Patricia Arquette, from the Chelsea Hotel, NYC, 1992, as photographed by Bruce Weber:
Posted at 02:44 AM in Art, Collecting, Erotica, Photography, Post Cards | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: actresses, beautiful women, Bruce Weber, Ellen von Unwerth, Fotofolio, George Daniell, models, Patricia Arquette, postcards, Sophia Loren
Posted at 02:34 AM in Collecting, Erotica, Humor, Photography, Post Cards | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: Amtrak, freecards, GoCard, milk, Nietzsche, Tyra Banks
No matter what the great Henry David Thoreau said about voting, you
should vote. It doesn't have to be a playing with right and wrong, "a
sort of gaming...with a slight moral tinge to it." Don't we know by
now that change is always difficult? We must imagine ourselves happy,
pushing that rock up the hill. Voting is one thing you do that one
day--one thing among others--to nudge the sludge.
Posted at 11:34 PM in Collecting, Current Affairs, Politics, Post Cards | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: Nixon, The Silent Majority, Thoreau, voting
Yes, there is nudity, again, in The New Yorker, the current issue on the stands, January 21, 2008, pp. 60-67 (and not only on the stands, but, gasp!, in private homes as well!). The nude woman who served in 1930 as a model (and a student and a paramour) to a famous photographer--Man Ray--and whom you can see in this particular issue of The New Yorker is Lee Miller. And she, herself, became a famous photographer. Read the article for more on her life; she was the proverbial free spirit. I had forgotten, and Judith Thurman, the author of this essay on Miller, reminds me, that Jean Cocteau, "looking for an actress with the features and aplomb of a Greek statue," selected Miller to play the lead in his film The Blood of a Poet. (While I'm always interested in a nude photo of a beautiful woman, honesty demands that I tell you how much I prefer Miller's photo with no human being in it at all on page 61--Portrait of Space--to Man Ray's "topless" photo of her on p. 60.)
Is the nude shot of this woman--and the very fact that she sat for Man Ray's photograph--a much more comfortable idea given the fact that she was also a woman who worked behind a camera with distinction? For many it is. Should it be? I think not. More credit to her for this excellence as both model and photographer, but these are separate fields, and excellence in being a model shouldn't be denigrated because excellence there is also complicated and difficult. Not just anyone can be a model. By saying this, I do not merely mean that not just anyone "looks" like a model: I mean not just anyone can do what a model does. Some people have the "look," but they cannot model.
I offer the following words on the photo of mine below. I worked with a professional model. She's a college graduate, by the way. Is the topless shot of this woman a much more comfortable idea given the fact that she was already, at the time of posing, a woman who had graduated from college? I think not, though I would wish a college education for everyone interested in working for one. And, no, she's not someone I knew when she was a student in college, much less someone I ever taught. I paid her modeling rate. I have her signed "model release form" on file. I was thinking of Georgia O'Keeffe as I worked on this shot in Photoshop: I was thinking of her watercolor titled Evening Star III. My model from Seattle was the star I was photographing on that particular evening when we shot in Portland. O'Keeffe, as you know, painted many flowers (a traditional but also a suitably innocuous subject that pleases many viewers for what it is not, not what it is); however, O'Keeffe also said this about painting flowers: "I hate flowers. I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move." My model could move, stand still, pose, think, converse, participate intelligently as a fellow artist in the shoot, and set her own modeling fee (more expensive than roses). Georgia O'Keeffe, many of those who valorize her as a feminist heroine in art do not know, also modeled nude...for her paramour, Alfred Stieglitz. Those beautiful nude photographs are not hard to find, though they're not in this particular issue of The New Yorker. Maybe next week.
Posted at 04:50 PM in Academe, Collecting, Erotica, Film, Photography | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: academe, collecting, erotica, film, Lee Miller, photography
Sister Maria lives in a very strict convent where the nuns are allowed to say only two words every ten years. After ten years, she goes to see the Mother Superior.
"Bed hard," she says.
Another ten years go by, and again Sister Maria meets with the Mother Superior. This time she says, "Food bad."
Another ten years go by, and it's time for the third meeting. By now Sister Maria is so unhappy that she blurts out the words, "I quit."
"No wonder," comes the reply. "You've been here thirty years and all you've done is bitch, bitch, bitch."
--from The Big Book of New American Humor, ed. William Novak & Moshe Waldoks.
Posted at 03:29 AM in Academe, Books, Collecting, Humor, Religion | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
"The Same Thing"
What make men go crazy when a woman wear her dress so tight?
Why do men go crazy when a woman wear her dress so tight?
Must be the same old thing that makes a tomcat fight all night.
Why do all of these men try to run a big-legged woman down?
Why do all of these men try to run a big-legged woman down?
Must be the same old thing that makes a bulldog hug a hound.
Oh that same thing.
Oh that same thing.
Tell me who's to blame.
The whole world's fightin' about that same thing.
What make you feel so good when your baby get a evenin' gown?
What make you feel so good when your baby get a evenin' gown?
Must be the same old thing that made a preacher lay his Bible down.
Oh that same thing.
Oh that same thing.
Continue reading "Muddy Waters' "The Same Thing": An Appreciation" »
Posted at 12:52 AM in Collecting, Music, Poetry, Writers | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
Technorati Tags: "The Same Thing", blues, eroticism, lyrics, Muddy Waters, poetry