"If you want your children to be brilliant, tell them fairy tales. If you want them to be very brilliant, tell them even more fairy tales."

— Albert Einstein.
at the Daily Bleed

"Dominique
I Am Not A Star
—
She changed her name to Luc Dominique and recorded the controversial Glory Be To God For The Golden Pill.
—
She left the church in 1967 to pursue a professional singing career, but her songs grew more and more political through the years. Then she and her partner, Annie Pescher, founded a school for autistic children. Her world came toppling down in the '80s, when the Belgian government billed her for $60,000 in back taxes on her earnings as Soeur Sourire, even though all of the money had been donated to her convent. Facing bankruptcy, the singing nun killed herself in a suicide pact with Pescher (who was rumored to be her lover) - an ending you would never see in an MGM musical.
The Singing Nun (1966), MGM's highly fictionalized story of the real-life nun who rose to the top of the pop charts
on TCM:Tuesday 11/18/2003 01:00 PM

Moscow in Motion
Bee Flowers

Pascal Blanché

Landscape
Jack Fitch

Fitch lost touch with his relatives. He never married and lived quietly and alone in a small flat on Minna Street in San Francisco. He had no other education after leaving Minnesota, but took a few WPA art classes while in the Bay Area. He set up his easel in his apartment and filled it with canvasses, which often were painted on both sides. He painted memories, families, mothers and children, gardens, mountain meadows and forest landscapes, things he considered "pleasant matters." He kept all his paint-ings in his apartment and could not be convinced to share them.
—Ames Gallery

link path thru gmtplus9

London 1753

"mediocre efforts masterminded by marketing men"
Paul Weller's apt description of record companies starts with an 's'
—Ananova 07.03.03

Medicine Man The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome
with The Phantom Museum, a film by the Brothers Quay
at The British Museum
________

link from the lovely and whimsical Sophie Blackall

Lucrecia

Singularity
...quantum physics versus the convenience stores. “Nothing is absolute. Comfortably real, our world is constructed from overlapping possibilites. Added together we perceive a seamless reality in a discontinuous world.”
Alice and Martina Mrongovius
Noise (AU)

Orange Alert
Kirsten Ulve

Heavy Backpack

Camille Rose Garcia

Fafi links list

Me And Jesus The Pimp In A '79 Granada Last Night

...Ain't got no close potnahs, socially I cain't function
From the pen he would scribe, on how to survive:
"Don't be Microsoft, be Macintosh with a Hard Drive"
Used to tell me all the time to keep a bitch broke
Did I mention that my momma was his number one hoe?
Clunked the 40 on the flo' and placed his palm on the dash
and wheezed out, "C'mon man, make this motherfucker mash!"
Ain't gon' mash too fast, cause my tags ain't right
Me and Jesus the Pimp in a '79 Granada last night

Chorus: *sung* (2X)

Oakland do you wanna ride?
I can't hear you! Oakland do you wanna ride tonight?

[Boots]
City lights from far way can make you drop yo' jaw
Sparklin' like sequins on a transvestite at Mardi Gras
There's beauty in the cracks of the cement
When I was five I hopped over them wherever we went to prevent
whatever it was that could break my momma's back
Little did I know that it would roll up in a Cadillac
And matta-fact, she couldn't see him like a cataract
And on the track, she went from beautiful to battleaxe
And back at home, she would cry into her pillow
Vomit in the commode, I was six years old
I would crawl onto her lap and we would hug and hold
She asked me what I thought of Jesus when he broke off some bread
I said, "He missin' a arm, and he seem like a pee-pee head"
She said, "Don't cuss," and my teeth to go brush
And get ready for bed, and the toilet to flush
With tears in my momma's eyes, I was her everything
Before she went out on the stroll
She'd tuck me into bed and sing:

You're much too beautiful for words (4X)

—The Coup

9 years ago
Genocide and Juice

"Well, if you're blind as Helen Keller
you can see I'm David Rockefeller
So much cash, up in my bathroom there's a Ready Teller"

"Don't let me get my flex on
Do some gangsta shit
Make the army go to war for Exxon
Long as the money flow, I'll be makin' dough
Welcome to my little pimp school
How you gonna beat me at this game?
I made the rules"

'Why don't you rap for us?'
'No, no, no, no'
'Come on boy I did mine'
'It's so... tribal'
'Well, very well'
'Oh, goodie'
'But hold my martini...
I have to do those hand gestures.'
—
"Just say no to drugs
But say yes to what?"

—The Coup/seditionists.org

Flown from the generation of WATER

...night drenched and steaming, a moonless night

on the street of the militia,
the book of hell lay in the gutter,

the pages oozing, the black print blurred
back into pulpy weight;

I wrapped it in my coat and carried it to my room...

—Susan Stewart/ Poetry Daily 10.26.03

the trial of Warren Hastings
"Those who could not raise the money were most cruelly tortured: cords were drawn tight round their fingers, till the flesh of the four on each hand was actually incorporated, and became one solid mass: the fingers were then separated again by wedges of iron and wood driven between them. Others were tied two and two by the feet, and thrown across a wooden bar, upon which they hung, with their feet uppermost; they were then beat on the soles of the feet, till their toenails droped off. They were afterwards beat about the head till the blood gushed out at the mouth, nose and ear; they were also flogged upon the naked body with bamboo canes, and prickly bushes, and, above all, with some poisonous weeds, which were of a most caustic nature, and burnt at every touch."
—Morbid Fact Du Jour 10.13.03

Ω{So I was debating whether or not and how to put up the biography of Jane Austen I've been reading, last night in fact, trying to marshall the perspicuity to do it justice, it's a warm, loving, and agile book, like being at an Aunt's house you know well and know she loves you and she loves the things she sets before you out of love for you and for the things themselves.
So then there was this. Hastings was the cuckolder of Austen's uncle, almost certainly the father of her cousin by her father's (married to another) sister. It's important to Austen's life story because it elevates the cousin, Hastings being a man of considerable wealth and position, and the cousin a close member of the extended Austen family.
My own biography is such that my sympathies for Austen, which Claire Tomalin has secured in perpetuity, in this context seem connected to or excusing of the cuckoldry and 'poisonous weeds' of Hastings. But truth to tell the author of 'Sense and Sensibility' had no direct connection to that colonial backwash, other than being alive, and in her social place by birth in contemporary England. One of her closest non-relative friends seems to have been a servant, Anne Sharpe. And her work has achieved more lasting gain in the awakening to, and restructuring of, an inequitable social contract, than many more directly confrontational authors'.
Tomalin's prose lilts:

'They would still be writing to one another, the sort of cheerful informative letters their mother wrote to her friends and relations; but the significant adventure of their lives—the brief, high moment which set a young woman at the centre of the stage and saw her determine her future by her actions—would have been accomplished long since and passed into history.'

In addition, Ms. Tomalin supplies a reference to Robert Bage's Hermsprong; or, Man As He Is Not, which can be found online, entire, free as the library ever was.

'If human nature be always the same, it cannot have changed much since Mr. Addison's time; and there may still be readers who will peruse a book with more satisfaction, when they know something of its author. The question now, perhaps, would not be so much, whether he is tall or short, round faced or long; as, How does he dress? Is he a person of any fashion? What his rank? What his condition? But before I reply to these interrogatories, I must answer another species of curiosity, which may, especially after perusal, arise in the minds of some readers: Why did he write at all?'

Hermsprong VOL. 1, chap. 1