Funny Things About Serious People: James, Lucia and Sam

"In the month Beckett returned to Paris Lucia decided that she was not fitted for a career as a dancer after all, saying that she was simply not physically strong enough. It was a decision greeted with something less than regret by her father, who had always had his doubts about whether it was seemly for the women of his family to prance about on stages in revealing costumes and had been made uncomfortable by his daughter's insistence on doing so."

from Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, by Anthony Cronin

Stranger with You: Bald Eagles in Mexico

My (Mexican) roommate has a mug that appears to be from Lake Tahoe, in the US Sierra Nevada. It features a somewhat cartoonish painting of a Bald Eagle's head and a block of English text which informs us that "despite its majestic appearance, the Bald Eagle is primarily a scavenger and thinks nothing of stealing food from other birds of prey or taking advantage of carrion…"

It was a surprising way for a coffee mug from the US to present the national bird. Does the Lake Tahoe tourist board just need to hire a new design team? Or was the mug planted at a gift shop by some aging hippie who got a job there in order to disperse subversive messages about American identity amongst unwitting tourists? Or do  all nationalistic artifacts begin to corrupt and degenerate when stranded for too long outside the US borders?

Mexico City: Scenes

Crickets for dinner, la Condesa

On the Street: The Boot

Kent Avenue, Brooklyn

Adventures in Rhythm: The Nicholas Brothers

Forty years before Michael Jackson, these guys could knock your crystal-studded socks off: The Nicholas Brothers with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather from 1943.

Everyone's a Critic: Is There Some Kind of Jazz in Your Poetry?

The interview with Lil Wayne at the end of this video is like a real-life Brüno segment.

Antiquariana: Hardwicke's Science-Gossip of 1887

Two things that don't usually go together.

From the Preface:

The necessity for saying something by way of Preface for the Twenty-Third time renders the formality increasingly difficult with every added year....Twenty-three years is a fair period in which to test the right of such a magazine as SCIENCE-GOSSIP to a literary existence. A good many able competitors and co-adjutors have come and gone; others are still coming and going. There is ample room and verge enough, for a "Struggle for Existence," and a "Survival of the Fittest" among popular scientific journals as well as among other lower organisms.

 

Spanish Lesson

mancha = stain

Obvious to some, revelatory to me. The first in a series of posts.

Take It and Run

The first in a series of posts on love and theft.

ITEM: A pair of white slip-on sneakers

DATE: Semana Santa 2010

LOCATION: Barra Vieja, Mexico

When I woke in the morning to take a piss by the edge of the lagoon they were gone; a pair of Ked knock-offs I had bought two days earlier, expressly for this trip to the beach, from one of those anonymous shoe shops near the Zocalo with glass cases full of business loafers and tennis shoes. I paid 120 pesos for them. Real Keds cost 500 pesos. The night before I had put them outside the tent next to my friend's rubber flip-flops. As I scanned the sand and dirt around the restaurant and picnic tables, empty of vacationers in the early morning, I convinced myself that the shoes must have been taken by one of the stray dogs that prowled endlessly though the palapas of Barra Vieja—and every Mexican beach town, I imagine—partly because a dog's preference for smelly canvas shoes seemed the best way to explain the flip-flops' calm persistence outside the tent, but more so because one day into my first trip outside the city felt too early to start making generalizations about Mexicans stealing from gringos on vacation.

Marvelous Returns: La Surprise

The first in a series of posts. (This Believer article was the original.)

In 2007, a British family held a routine valuation of their country home. In a corner of a drawing room, the appraisers uncovered an oil painting of two lovers engaged in an unexpected embrace while an amused guitarist looks on. The panel was a lost masterpiece by the French-Flemish painter Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), which had not been seen for two hundred years. Appropriately, its title is La Surprise.

Watteau probably painted La Surprise in 1718 for Nicolas Hénin, an adviser to King XV of France. After Hénin's death it passed to Jean de Jullienne, Watteau's biographer, who sold it sometime before 1756. After appearing in a 1764 catalog of Ange-Laurent de la Live de Jully, the first serious collector of French painting, La Surprise vanished from official records during the upheavals of the French Revolution. Sometime in the early 19th century it arrived in England, and in 1848, one Lady Murray bequeathed the painting to the family of the current owners (who have not been identified publicly), where it rested in obscurity until the 21st century. At its auction in 2008, Christies valued La Surprise at nearly $10,000,000. It sold for over $24,000,000.

Watteau himself is a surprising figure. Born in a Flemish town under French control, he was variously identified as French and Flemish during his lifetime, though he spent most of his career in Paris. In 1720, suffering from chronic ill health, Watteau traveled to London to seek treatment from the famous physician Dr. Richard Mead. But the city's climate worsened the frail painter's condition, and he returned to France only to die the following year at the age of 37. Equally surprising is Watteau's improvisational method of composition, in which he began with a landscape and then inserted figures taken from studies in his notebooks, adjusting or deleting them until he arrived at the final arrangement. In the case of La Surprise, the guitar player is an actor from the Comedie Italienne, dressed as the character Mezzetin, while the lovers are copied from a 1635 painting by Rubens which was held in the French royal collection during Watteau's time. Radiographs have revealed an entirely different surprise beneath Watteau's final image: a recapitulation of the painter's older composition, La Sérénade Italienne.

Adventures in Rhythm: King Curtis

The funkiest use of tuxedos in history. Wait until they go into the blues changes at 4:10.

Mexico City: Scenes

Centro Historico

A tianguis near Villa de Cortes

Law enforcement, Alameda Central

 

Centro Historico

Nortec concert, Monumento a la Revolución

Parade, Centro Historico

La Bota, Centro Historico

My Name Escapes Me

hooked to the next!

It was difficult to name this blog. This is the first post in a series of names that could have been.

...from several planets

A new space for connections, links, sightings, pronouncements, denouncements, projects, projections, projectiles, sieges, seizures, searches, disclosures, and the odd reservation.