Last nite my internet server made the loading of anything, namely images, impossibly slow. So I neglected to post, sorry:(( ALSO in my defense, I discovered that I’d been stabbed in the back — institution-style. And while I’m now considering an intellectual property lawsuit, refusing to be defeated by anyone’s dirty tricks, it stunned me. Between that, the prospect of my apartment building being sold in the next few years, AND the fact that I unplugged my TV last night for the 1st time in 15 years, I was feeling a bit unmoored. Like I’m facing the abyss of yet another self-rebirth/re-invention.
“I am tired and I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years. A thousand dreams that would awake me, different colors made of tears…shiny shiny, shiny boots of leather”… I’ve just listened to Venus in Furs (Velvet Underground) 5x. I love the whole record. Always have, always will. Can’t believe I gave my brother a copy ages ago and he didn’t get it. I guess Nico can be hard to take. But amazingly you can listen for yourself in full on Youtube! Here it is!
Alright, here’s two images inspired by one of my students today, who gave the best presentation (of 3 classes) on Toulouse Lautrec. An artist of real fortitude considering all he endured. The woman in both look like I feel, dejected and ready to cast a spell. Knowing they were produced just after he secured his release from an asylum through work that proved his sanity (he was thought to have syphilis-related dementia) makes them more meaningful, somehow!
The Milliner, 1900
Messaline, 1900
(FYI, Messaline, according to this article, “was the great-granddaughter of Mark Antony, the great-grandniece of Augustus Caesar and a cousin of the Emperors Caligula, Claudius and Nero, but the high degree of inbreeding in her family appears to have created in Messalina the same sort of sadistic, hypersexual insanity as it did in her imperial cousins.” I guess Lautrec could relate, HA! The Empress who became a whore, indeed!
