In days of yore, pre-just about everything, people were bored. The Black Plague and the Crusades and the Victrola and fits of tubercular coughing can only kill so many hours, you know? So wise folk came up with automata. Some of the earliest, of course, were invented by the Greeks for scientific purposes. Another fascinating fellow living in the 13th century, Al-Jazari, made numerous automata that were both useful and fanciful: "His automaton was a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties. His musician had a programmable drum machine with pegs that bump into little levers that operate the percussion. The drummer could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns if the pegs were moved around . . . Al-Jazari also constructed a hand washing automaton first employing the flush mechanism now used in modern flush toilets. It features a female automaton standing by a basin filled with water. When the user pulls the lever, the water drains and the female automaton refills the basin."
Nurse is most interested in "the period 1860 to 1910 known as 'The Golden Age of Automata'. During this period many small family based companies of Automata makers thrived in Paris. From their workshops they exported thousands of clockwork automata and mechanical singing birds around the world. It is these French automata that are collected today; although now rare and expensive they attract collectors worldwide. The main French makers were Vichy, Roullet & Decamps, Lambert, Phalibois, Renou and Bontem." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton
Singing birds birds in cages and clocks incorporating human figures were among the most popular automata at this time, but all sorts were devised, including this marvelous lion. See how well he works at 100+ years old!! The second video is even nearer to nurse's heart. The third is just an added bonus.
Paypal
7/29/11
7/28/11
Another basket of quotes for your attention spans to chew on a bit
"A good friend will always stab you in the front."
— Oscar Wilde
"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
— Joseph Joubert
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
— Robert Frost
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
— Theodore Roosevelt
"The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last."
— Oscar Wilde
— Oscar Wilde
"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
— Joseph Joubert
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
— Robert Frost
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
— Theodore Roosevelt
"The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last."
— Oscar Wilde
An excerpt from a recent Guardian article on Slavoj Zizek
"The 62-year-old Slovenian Lacanian Hegelian is in London not to confront importunate anarchists, but to promote the paperback edition of his book Living in the End Times and to share a platform with Julian Assange to discuss the meaning of WikiLeaks. He is professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London; senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana and regularly a visiting professor to some American university or other. Žižek is rarely at home in his flat in the Slovenian capital: he is philosophy's answer to Bob Dylan, frontman of a live roadshow that shows no sign of ending.
The book, which he denounces heartily ("I wrote about Avatar before I'd seen the film, but having seen it I was right to attack it . . . The suggestion that capitalism is ready to collapse is perhaps, I admit it, wishful thinking"), represents the best and worst of his thought: its flashes of genius highlight a mind that seems incapable of following a thought for more than a page and a half.
His performance with Assange and radical American journalist Amy Goodman at the Troxy theatre in east London proved better – part pomposity-deflating vaudeville turn and part devastating critique of contemporary capitalism. "I have to subvert these events," he tells me afterwards. "The pious questions, the solemn speeches. My God, how can you sit through these things without wanting to make a joke?" About 40 minutes into the event he yielded to temptation and mutated briefly into Frankie Boyle: there is some good news and some bad news, a doctor tells a husband. Your wife is alive. The bad news is that she has anal and vaginal leakage so bad that she cannot have sex. The husband is revolted. The punchline? The doctor is only joking – the good news is that his wife is dead. It's worth watching the scene on YouTube just to register how Goodman and Assange heroically contained their disgust. Assange, to his credit, also kept his composure when Žižek called him a terrorist. "You are a terrorist in the way that Gandhi was. In what sense was Gandhi a terrorist? He tried to stop the normal functioning of the British state in India. You are trying to stop the normal functioning of information circulation."
Žižek was entirely serious. He wrote about it in a fine essay, arguing against a liberal interpretation of WikiLeaks that reduces its impact to "a radical case of 'investigative journalism'. Here, we are only a small step away from the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President's Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth!"
"We learned nothing new really from WikiLeaks," he tells me later. "Julian is like the boy who tells us the emperor is naked – until the boy says it everybody could pretend the emperor wasn't. Don't confuse this with the usual bourgeois heroism which says there is rottenness but the system is basically sound. It is like a man who finds his wife has been fucking around – until he can see in great detail what she has been doing, he can pretend to himself nothing is wrong. Julian strips away that pretence. All power is hypocritical like this. What power finds intolerable is when the hypocrisy is revealed."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jul/15/slavoj-zizek-interview-life-writing
The book, which he denounces heartily ("I wrote about Avatar before I'd seen the film, but having seen it I was right to attack it . . . The suggestion that capitalism is ready to collapse is perhaps, I admit it, wishful thinking"), represents the best and worst of his thought: its flashes of genius highlight a mind that seems incapable of following a thought for more than a page and a half.
His performance with Assange and radical American journalist Amy Goodman at the Troxy theatre in east London proved better – part pomposity-deflating vaudeville turn and part devastating critique of contemporary capitalism. "I have to subvert these events," he tells me afterwards. "The pious questions, the solemn speeches. My God, how can you sit through these things without wanting to make a joke?" About 40 minutes into the event he yielded to temptation and mutated briefly into Frankie Boyle: there is some good news and some bad news, a doctor tells a husband. Your wife is alive. The bad news is that she has anal and vaginal leakage so bad that she cannot have sex. The husband is revolted. The punchline? The doctor is only joking – the good news is that his wife is dead. It's worth watching the scene on YouTube just to register how Goodman and Assange heroically contained their disgust. Assange, to his credit, also kept his composure when Žižek called him a terrorist. "You are a terrorist in the way that Gandhi was. In what sense was Gandhi a terrorist? He tried to stop the normal functioning of the British state in India. You are trying to stop the normal functioning of information circulation."
Žižek was entirely serious. He wrote about it in a fine essay, arguing against a liberal interpretation of WikiLeaks that reduces its impact to "a radical case of 'investigative journalism'. Here, we are only a small step away from the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President's Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth!"
"We learned nothing new really from WikiLeaks," he tells me later. "Julian is like the boy who tells us the emperor is naked – until the boy says it everybody could pretend the emperor wasn't. Don't confuse this with the usual bourgeois heroism which says there is rottenness but the system is basically sound. It is like a man who finds his wife has been fucking around – until he can see in great detail what she has been doing, he can pretend to himself nothing is wrong. Julian strips away that pretence. All power is hypocritical like this. What power finds intolerable is when the hypocrisy is revealed."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jul/15/slavoj-zizek-interview-life-writing
7/27/11
Excerpt from 'Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home' from 1922, by Emily Post
You can read the whole thing here, free of charge: http://www.bartleby.com/95/
More from the Kids
remember back in the depths of winter when Nurse brought the katzenjammer kids to your attention? http://www.hangovernurse.com/2011/01/ich-bin-ein-hangovernurse.html
Feast your eyes on their 1968 pepto bismol advert!
Feast your eyes on their 1968 pepto bismol advert!
Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner on their wedding day
Frank left Nancy for Ava. Ava's first husband was Mickey Rooney! That didn't last long, though. She also had a long affair with Howard Hughes, and was married again to Artie Shaw. She and Frank were married from 1951-1957.
7/26/11
Underused word corner: Malarkey
ma·lar·key
[muh-lahr-kee]
ki
speech or writing designed to obscure, mislead, or impress; bunkum: The claims were just a lot of malarkey.
Noone seems to know the real origin. Perhaps these people do? http://www.malarkeyroofing.com/
To see how different the explanations as to word origin can be, have a look at this: http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091113072329AA8oZzg
.
7/25/11
Excerpt from 'Down and Out in Paris and London' by George Orwell
A very fine book. Orwell was only his pen name; his real one was Eric Arthur Blair. Moreover, you can access nearly all of his works for free online, here:http://georgeorwellnovels.com/books/down-and-out-in-paris-and-london/
"By the morning I had made my plans. Sooner or later I should have to go to B. for more money, but it seemed hardly decent to do so yet, and in the meantime I must exist in some hole-and-corner way. Past experience set me against pawning my best suit. I would leave all my things at the station cloakroom, except my second-best suit, which I could exchange for some cheap clothes and perhaps a pound. If I was going to live a month on thirty shillings I must have bad clothes — indeed, the worse the better. Whether thirty shillings could be made to last a month I had no idea, not knowing London as I knew Paris. Perhaps I could beg, or sell bootlaces, and I remembered articles I had read in the Sunday papers about beggars who have two thousand pounds sewn into their trousers. It was, at any rate, notoriously impossible to starve in London, so there was nothing to be anxious about.
To sell my clothes I went down into Lambeth, where the people are poor and there are a lot of rag shops. At the first shop I tried the proprietor was polite but unhelpful; at the second he was rude; at the third he was stone deaf, or pretended to be so. The fourth shopman was a large blond young man, very pink all over, like a slice of ham. He looked at the clothes I was wearing and felt them disparagingly between thumb and finger. ‘Poor stuff,’ he said, ‘very poor stuff, that is.’ (It was quite a good suit.) ‘What yer want for ‘em?’ I explained that I wanted some older clothes and as much money as he could spare. He thought for a moment, then collected some dirty-looking rags and threw them on to the counter. ‘What about the money?’ I said, hoping for a pound. He pursed his lips, then produced a shilling and laid it beside the clothes. I did not argue — I was going to argue, but as I opened my mouth he reached out as though to take up the shilling again; I saw that I was helpless. He let me change in a small room behind the shop.
The clothes were a coat, once dark brown, a pair of black dungaree trousers, a scarf and a cloth cap; I had kept my own shirt, socks and boots, and I had a comb and razor in my pocket. It gives one a very strange feeling to be wearing such clothes. I had worn bad enough things before, but nothing at all like these; they were not merely dirty and shapeless, they had — how is one to express it?— a gracelessness, a patina of antique filth, quite different from mere shabbiness. They were the sort of clothes you see on a bootlace seller, or a tramp.
An hour later, in Lambeth, I saw a hang-dog man, obviously a tramp, coming towards me, and when I looked again it was myself, reflected in a shop window. The dirt was plastering my face already. Dirt is a great respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all directions.
I stayed in the streets till late at night, keeping on the move all the time. Dressed as I was, I was half afraid that the police might arrest me as a vagabond, and I dared not speak to anyone, imagining that they must notice a disparity between my accent and my clothes. (Later I discovered that this never happened.) My new clothes had put me instantly into a new world. Everyone’s demeanour seemed to have changed abruptly. I helped a hawker pick up a barrow that he had upset. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said with a grin. No one had called me mate before in my life — it was the clothes that had done it. For the first time I noticed, too, how the attitude of women varies with a man’s clothes. When a badly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat. Clothes are powerful things. Dressed in a tramp’s clothes it is very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded. You might feel the same shame, irrational but very real, your first night in prison."
"By the morning I had made my plans. Sooner or later I should have to go to B. for more money, but it seemed hardly decent to do so yet, and in the meantime I must exist in some hole-and-corner way. Past experience set me against pawning my best suit. I would leave all my things at the station cloakroom, except my second-best suit, which I could exchange for some cheap clothes and perhaps a pound. If I was going to live a month on thirty shillings I must have bad clothes — indeed, the worse the better. Whether thirty shillings could be made to last a month I had no idea, not knowing London as I knew Paris. Perhaps I could beg, or sell bootlaces, and I remembered articles I had read in the Sunday papers about beggars who have two thousand pounds sewn into their trousers. It was, at any rate, notoriously impossible to starve in London, so there was nothing to be anxious about.
To sell my clothes I went down into Lambeth, where the people are poor and there are a lot of rag shops. At the first shop I tried the proprietor was polite but unhelpful; at the second he was rude; at the third he was stone deaf, or pretended to be so. The fourth shopman was a large blond young man, very pink all over, like a slice of ham. He looked at the clothes I was wearing and felt them disparagingly between thumb and finger. ‘Poor stuff,’ he said, ‘very poor stuff, that is.’ (It was quite a good suit.) ‘What yer want for ‘em?’ I explained that I wanted some older clothes and as much money as he could spare. He thought for a moment, then collected some dirty-looking rags and threw them on to the counter. ‘What about the money?’ I said, hoping for a pound. He pursed his lips, then produced a shilling and laid it beside the clothes. I did not argue — I was going to argue, but as I opened my mouth he reached out as though to take up the shilling again; I saw that I was helpless. He let me change in a small room behind the shop.
The clothes were a coat, once dark brown, a pair of black dungaree trousers, a scarf and a cloth cap; I had kept my own shirt, socks and boots, and I had a comb and razor in my pocket. It gives one a very strange feeling to be wearing such clothes. I had worn bad enough things before, but nothing at all like these; they were not merely dirty and shapeless, they had — how is one to express it?— a gracelessness, a patina of antique filth, quite different from mere shabbiness. They were the sort of clothes you see on a bootlace seller, or a tramp.
An hour later, in Lambeth, I saw a hang-dog man, obviously a tramp, coming towards me, and when I looked again it was myself, reflected in a shop window. The dirt was plastering my face already. Dirt is a great respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all directions.
I stayed in the streets till late at night, keeping on the move all the time. Dressed as I was, I was half afraid that the police might arrest me as a vagabond, and I dared not speak to anyone, imagining that they must notice a disparity between my accent and my clothes. (Later I discovered that this never happened.) My new clothes had put me instantly into a new world. Everyone’s demeanour seemed to have changed abruptly. I helped a hawker pick up a barrow that he had upset. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said with a grin. No one had called me mate before in my life — it was the clothes that had done it. For the first time I noticed, too, how the attitude of women varies with a man’s clothes. When a badly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat. Clothes are powerful things. Dressed in a tramp’s clothes it is very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded. You might feel the same shame, irrational but very real, your first night in prison."
7/24/11
Neuronic (Academy Artworks)
Certain vistas contract. Awareness of this crests, recedes, gets reabsorbed. Maybe this is what it means to be in beta?
Subgroups permeate. The cutest of the halcyonic myths prove so enduring as to incite themselves, even.
Moreover? There needs to be a better term for strip mall; someone a few weeks ago described
a certain grim agoric structure as a word from the italian, now forgotten.
Perhaps it will show up sometime. Thinking back, raw language ran rampant; it went hand in hand with, entwined in, a larger reckoning. A certain proverbial odor.
Symbols are very very variegated these days.
Subgroups permeate. The cutest of the halcyonic myths prove so enduring as to incite themselves, even.
Moreover? There needs to be a better term for strip mall; someone a few weeks ago described
a certain grim agoric structure as a word from the italian, now forgotten.
Perhaps it will show up sometime. Thinking back, raw language ran rampant; it went hand in hand with, entwined in, a larger reckoning. A certain proverbial odor.
Symbols are very very variegated these days.
7/23/11
7/22/11
RIP Freud
Apart from the genius of his work, Nurse always enjoyed the fact that he was expelled from school at 16, either for dropping his trousers on a public street, or attempting to burn the place down (accounts differ).
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| The painter surprised by a naked admirer, 2004-2005 |
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| Girl with a kitten, 1947 |
| Hotel Bedroom, 1954 |
7/21/11
Quentin Crisp Quote Dump
A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.
When I awoke the morning after my first orgasm, I remembered it instantly and wondered if I should die, go mad or contract some incurable disease. After a few days it became obvious that I was to experience no noticeable physical ill effects. Cosiness was restored. About my immortal soul I did not worry. vice is its own reward. . . the one thing I would not wish on my worst enemy is eternal life.
I have always held the view that the union of two hearts whose incomes are equal is a complete waste of time.
Throughout my early life, the amount of food I ate was a cause for incessant criticism by my friends. At first I used to point out in a whimpering voice that most of my acquaintances only saw me in cafes where, since I sat in them from noon til nightfall and sometimes beyond, the least I could do to appease the proprietors was to spend money. Later I grew tired of defending myself. I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.
When I awoke the morning after my first orgasm, I remembered it instantly and wondered if I should die, go mad or contract some incurable disease. After a few days it became obvious that I was to experience no noticeable physical ill effects. Cosiness was restored. About my immortal soul I did not worry. vice is its own reward. . . the one thing I would not wish on my worst enemy is eternal life.
I have always held the view that the union of two hearts whose incomes are equal is a complete waste of time.
Throughout my early life, the amount of food I ate was a cause for incessant criticism by my friends. At first I used to point out in a whimpering voice that most of my acquaintances only saw me in cafes where, since I sat in them from noon til nightfall and sometimes beyond, the least I could do to appease the proprietors was to spend money. Later I grew tired of defending myself. I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share.
7/20/11
The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974)
One of the best thrillers/heist films/movies about New York City ever made, with a very fine soundtrack to boot. The fact that they remade this with Travolta is laughable. See the original, you won't be sorry. Interestingly, "Realizing that it would become too much of a reminder to the public after this movie was released, the New York City Transit Authority for many years banned any train leaving Pelham station at 1:23" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taking_of_Pelham_One_Two_Three_%281974_film%29
7/19/11
Notable addict Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859)
Laudanum was an addiction for old Thomas, though it seems to have had only positive effects on his literary productivity, at least according to wikipedia. A mix of opium and alcohol sounds quite delicious, if you ask Nurse. His most famous work was Confessions of an English opium eater, which you can download for free at project gutenburg! Hooray! http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2040
He inspired loads of drug-cultural things over the years, including Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz. Nurse made the collage below with an image of his head, as well.
He inspired loads of drug-cultural things over the years, including Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz. Nurse made the collage below with an image of his head, as well.
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Underused word corner: EPITOME
A nice solid word. Greek in origin. Who knew it had that third meaning? Not me, at least.
e·pit·o·me
e·pit·o·me
noun /iˈpitəmē/
epitomes, plural
epitomes, plural
- A person or thing that is a perfect example of a particular quality or type
- - she looked the epitome of elegance and good taste
- A summary of a written work; an abstract
- A thing representing something else in miniature
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| Vaudeville poster, 1899 |
7/18/11
Marigold jamboree, with a song from the 1997 album Marigold Sky by Hall and Oates!
Marigolds, yes indeed. Flower of the dead to the Mexicans, national symbol in the Ukraine, symbol of festivity to the Nepalese. Of the Tagete family. Wiki says that "the common name marigold probably refers to the Virgin Mary, or its old Saxon name 'ymbglidegold', which means 'it turns with the sun'."
Nurse doesn't feel like writing much more about them here. Go google it if you care to, which you don't, otherwise just listen to the song, okay?
Nurse doesn't feel like writing much more about them here. Go google it if you care to, which you don't, otherwise just listen to the song, okay?
The Rockefeller Center Atlas Statue
From the wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_statue:
Atlas is a bronze statue in front of Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, across Fifth Avenue from St. Patrick's Cathedral. The sculpture depicts the Ancient Greek Titan Atlas holding the heavens. It was created by sculptor Lee Lawrie with the help of Rene Paul Chambellan, and it was installed in 1937.
The sculpture is in the Art Deco style, as is the entire Rockefeller Center. Atlas in the sculpture is 15 feet tall, while the entire statue is 45 feet tall, as high as a four-story building. It weighs seven tons, and is the largest sculpture at Rockefeller Center. The North-South axis of the armillary sphere on his shoulders points towards the North Star as seen from New York City.
When Atlas was unveiled in 1937, some people protested, claiming that it looked like Mussolini. Later, painter James Montgomery Flagg said that Atlas "looks too much as Mussolini thinks he looks".
Atlas is a bronze statue in front of Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, across Fifth Avenue from St. Patrick's Cathedral. The sculpture depicts the Ancient Greek Titan Atlas holding the heavens. It was created by sculptor Lee Lawrie with the help of Rene Paul Chambellan, and it was installed in 1937.
The sculpture is in the Art Deco style, as is the entire Rockefeller Center. Atlas in the sculpture is 15 feet tall, while the entire statue is 45 feet tall, as high as a four-story building. It weighs seven tons, and is the largest sculpture at Rockefeller Center. The North-South axis of the armillary sphere on his shoulders points towards the North Star as seen from New York City.
When Atlas was unveiled in 1937, some people protested, claiming that it looked like Mussolini. Later, painter James Montgomery Flagg said that Atlas "looks too much as Mussolini thinks he looks".
7/17/11
7/16/11
First two pages from The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp's autobiography, with a song by Sting
"From the dawn of my history I was so disfigured by the characteristics of a certain kind of homosexual person that, when I grew up, I realized that I could not ignore my predicament. The way in which I chose to deal with it would now be called existentialist. Perhaps Jean-Paul Sartre would be kind enough to say that I exercised the last vestiges of my free will by swimming with the tide--but faster. In the time of which I am writing I was merely thought of as brazening it out.
I became not merely a self-confessed homosexual but a self-evident one. That is to say I put my case not only before the people who knew me but also before strangers. This was not difficult to do. I wore makeup at a time when even on women eye-shadow was sinful. Many a young girl in those days had to leave home and go on the streets simply in order to wear nail-varnish.
As soon as I put my uniform on, the rest of my life solidified around me like a plaster cast. From that moment on, my friends were anyone who could put up with the disgrace; my occupation, any job from which I was not given the sack; my playground, any cafe or restaurant from which I was not barred or any street corner from which the police did not move me on. An additional restricting circumstance was that the year in which I first pointed my toes towards the outer world was 1931. The tidal wave, started by the fall of Wall Street, had by this time reached London. The sky was dark with millionaires throwing themselves out of windows.
So black was the way ahead that my progress consisted of long periods of inert despondency punctuated by spasmodic lurches forward towards any small chink of light that I thought I saw. In major issues I never had any choice and therefore the word 'regret' had in my life no application.
As the years went by, it did not get lighter but I became more accustomed to the dark. Consequently I was able to move with a little more of that freedom which T.S. Eliot says is a different kind of pain from prison. These crippling disadvantages gave my life an interest that it would otherwise never have had. To survive at all was an adventure; to reach old age was a miracle. In one respect it was a blessing. In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis. In my case this took a very long time."
I became not merely a self-confessed homosexual but a self-evident one. That is to say I put my case not only before the people who knew me but also before strangers. This was not difficult to do. I wore makeup at a time when even on women eye-shadow was sinful. Many a young girl in those days had to leave home and go on the streets simply in order to wear nail-varnish.
As soon as I put my uniform on, the rest of my life solidified around me like a plaster cast. From that moment on, my friends were anyone who could put up with the disgrace; my occupation, any job from which I was not given the sack; my playground, any cafe or restaurant from which I was not barred or any street corner from which the police did not move me on. An additional restricting circumstance was that the year in which I first pointed my toes towards the outer world was 1931. The tidal wave, started by the fall of Wall Street, had by this time reached London. The sky was dark with millionaires throwing themselves out of windows.
So black was the way ahead that my progress consisted of long periods of inert despondency punctuated by spasmodic lurches forward towards any small chink of light that I thought I saw. In major issues I never had any choice and therefore the word 'regret' had in my life no application.
As the years went by, it did not get lighter but I became more accustomed to the dark. Consequently I was able to move with a little more of that freedom which T.S. Eliot says is a different kind of pain from prison. These crippling disadvantages gave my life an interest that it would otherwise never have had. To survive at all was an adventure; to reach old age was a miracle. In one respect it was a blessing. In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis. In my case this took a very long time."
Sting dedicated his song "Englishman in New York" (1987) to Crisp.
7/15/11
7/14/11
7/13/11
Clip from the film adaptation of Under the Volcano - No socks
Finney was nominated for an Oscar for this role. The best portrayal of a drunk since Ray Milland, in Nurse's humble opinion. Read the book first, though, if you can.
7/12/11
7/11/11
7/9/11
Garry Winogrand is one of Nurse's all-time favorite photographers.
He was one of the greatest street photographers ever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Winogrand
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| Couple, 1969 |
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| Camera Night at the Ivar |
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| El Morocco |
7/8/11
Great Actor Takashi Shimura
Not only was he Kurosawa's go-to guy, he also appeared in the Godzilla films. Go see Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, Rashomon, and Seven Samurai immediately, for starters.
7/7/11
7/6/11
Tamara de Lempicka, all around interesting person
Born in 1898 in Poland, she was among the most famous of the Art Deco painters, certainly the most famous female one. Her style is incredibly specific, don't you agree? She was a notorious gadabout, and when she died her ashes were ceremoniously thrown into a volcano. Fin!
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| Girl in a Green Dress, 1930 |
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| The Telephone, 1930 |
7/5/11
Petrified rat discovered in an old woodshed, with a song by Ratt
The poor thing must have gotten stuck in there many a year ago. Nearly weightless. Walking stick Nurse's own addition.
7/4/11
7/2/11
Rene Lalique (1860-1945) was better than all of us combined
Lalique was an amazing glass designer. Bottles, vases and jewelry mostly, but also clocks and even hood ornaments. Those were the days. Glass hood ornaments all over the place, as far as the eye could see.
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