A new house...ruby glass, pocket doors, only two previous owners.

Untitled page from the "Princess Alexandra Album," 1866/69

Alexandra, Princess of Wales

Verses

excerpt from Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That (1929)—

Bavarian food had a richness and spiciness that we always missed on our return to England. We loved the rye bread, the dark pine honey, the huge ice-cream puddings made with fresh raspberry juice and the help of snow stored during the winter in an ice-house, my grandfather's venison, the honey cakes, the pastries, and particularly the sauces rich with different kinds of mushrooms. Also the pretzels, the carrots cooked in sugar, and summer pudding of cranberries and blueberries. In the orchard, close to the house, we could eat as many apples, pears, and greengages as we liked. There were also rows of black-currant and gooseberry bushes in the garden. The estate, despite the recency of my grandfather's tenure, his liberalism, and his experiments in modern agricultural methods, remained feudalistic. The poor, sweaty, savage-looking farm servants, who talked a dialect we could not understand, frightened us. They ranked lower even than the servants at home; and as for the colony of Italians, settled about half a mile from the house, whom my grandfather had imported as cheap labour for his brick factory—we associated them in our minds with 'the gipsies of the wood' of the song. My grandfather took us over the factory one day and made me taste a lump of Italian polenta. My mother told us afterwards—when milk pudding at Wimbledon came to table burned, and we complained—'Those poor Italians in your grandfather's brick yard used to burn there polenta on purpose, sometimes, just for a change of flavour.'

Album Cover for Thursday

Oh my Lord, and how about this?!
Angels walk among us.

Installation for Thursday

Frederic Edwin Church's The Heart of the Andes (1859) exhibited at the "Metropolitan Fair in Aid of the Sanitary Commission," New York, April, 1864.

Michail Pirgelis. Aerovatis (2010). Sprüth Magers Berlin.

news

From NYRblog---

Conspicuously absent from the debate, in France and in Britain, is any consideration of the Islamic veil’s historic dimensions. It seems clear from earliest sources that the first Muslim women went about unveiled; and some of Muhammad’s female followers fought courageously alongside his men. The custom of veiling appears to have developed later as a reaction to the institution of slavery. As the Islamic state expanded, a growing flood of slaves were captured as booty, and sold in the slave markets. Many of these were young women who were incorporated into Muslim households as concubines. Slave women were required to expose the head, arms, legs, and upper parts of the chest, and to enhance their value slave merchants ensured that they were well versed in singing, dancing, music and poetry—necessary skills for the arts of seduction and love.

In the face of this challenge the supposedly respectable women retreated into the sanctity of the home. By the twelfth century Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1149-1209), one of the most renowned and influential of Quranic commentators was arguing that “a free woman’s entire body is a shameful nakedness in itself” and must be fully covered. Razi’s reasoning was commercial: Quranic writings on modesty did not apply to slaves because they were items of property whose purchase or sale required “an investigative and careful inspection.”

The long-term social consequences are hardly surprising, given that in parts of the Muslim world slavery was only formally abolished in the middle of the last century. Veiling and sexual apartheid, though not universal, became the hallmark of urban Muslim societies from Indonesia to Morocco. With colonial administrators regarding female seclusion as barriers to the “civilizing mission” of empire, wearing the veil inevitably became a form of resistance to foreign conquest. In the West, its symbolic charge is far from being depleted. It may justly be regarded as a symbol of patriarchal oppression, but like punk and other urban styles, it can also mean a deliberate rejection of the current cultural norms imposed on women of every age, shape, appearance and size.

"Come & see. come & see. The amazing Glamorous karaoke"

Early-ish Photograph for Tuesday

Torah Ark in a Synagogue, Starokonstantinov
S. An-sky
1912

happy birthday gucci mane

Observe the first day of spring with Brigid of the Gael whose special province is

babies; blacksmiths; boatmen; cattle; chicken farmers; children whose parents are not married; children whose mothers are mistreated by the children's fathers; dairymaids; dairy workers; fugitives; infants; Ireland; Leinster, mariners; midwives; milk maids; nuns; poets; poor; poultry farmers; poultry raisers; printing presses; sailors; scholars; travellers; watermen

but who as "fiery arrow" guides everyone into the new and the renewed. Special love to our children, watermen, dairies, poets, readers and scholars, and travelers. As Lady Gregory transcribed:

Now as to Brigit she was born at sunrise on the first day of the spring, of a bondwoman of Connacht. And it was angels that baptized her and that gave her the name of Brigit, that is a Fiery Arrow. She grew up to be a serving girl the same as her mother. And all the food she used was the milk of a white red-eared cow that was set apart for her by a druid. And everything she put her hand to used to increase, and it was she wove the first piece of cloth in Ireland, and she put the white threads in the loom that have a power of healing in them to this day. She bettered the sheep and she satisfied the birds and she fed the poor.

Here's a blog. The title involves a misuse of the word hipster (though maybe not?...the meaning's surely expanded, maybe a hipster is...fuck it), but otherwise, it's pretty quick and delectable. Can you stand these houses?!

Why can't Fiona finish the line, 'so much I wanna ooh ooh ooh...'? Considering how sharp the track is, a word, rather than an 'ooh,' would elevate or sum or something. But, regardless, I haven't been able to get it out of my head since New Year---church!

You don't have to say you're sorry.

We love Rex Ryan and his storied 7,000 calories a day; and why does anybody have to apologize for acting up at a mixed martial arts event in Florida?

Saturday Morning Notes---

—These maps.

—This house in Palm (a rental, and possibly decorated by Billy Baldwin?).

—Peter Watkins' Edvard Munch, which I started two weeks ago and, watching in fits and starts, finally finished late yesterday. Here is a small segment, the only one I could find.

Okay Aquarius

I'm pretty slow and non-invested about the blogosphere. I like writing here, but I make no effort to promote (the shame of it!). And I don't read very many blogs consistently; beyond the links Ma and Pa send me and some of the usual (and awful) suspects, there is really only ever Michael K's Dlisted, playground for the English language. We're always stealing from him, or trying hard not to. Today I can't help it...a list of January 29th birthdays, like whoa:

Oprah Winfrey (56)
Athina Onassis (25)
Isabel Lucas (25)
Adam Lambert (28)
Jonny Lang (29)
Andrew Keegan (31)
Sara Gilbert (35)
Kelly Packard (35)
Heather Graham (40)
Edward Burns (42)
Greg Louganis (50)
Ann Jillian (60)
Tommy Ramone (61)
Tom Selleck (65)
Katharine Ross (70)
John Forsythe (92)

But look! Here's Lee Goldberg's blog!

much dance 2001

Best Thing Going For Thursday at 5:30

This post about Italian physicality. Delicious.

Trial Time

So this is as pointless a venture as last week's lampooning of New York Magazine's Snooki-hating fashion blogger--

Today's New York Times travel section includes a feature (and mostly painful slideshow) on 'hip Memphis,' and I feel the need to address some probs-lems/the naff whole.

Times' staffer, Melena Ryzik, author of a Times' blog called--OH MY G-D--The Carpetbagger (it's about red carpets and people but still), flew down to Memphis to perform/report her awkward, condescending cultural carpetbagging. Yuck.

I am pleased that our friend Dwayne Butcher's blog is linked. And it's a damn trip to read about that warty troll who glares from behind her pitchers of PBR at The Lamplighter (which we call by its full name, btw) in any newspaper, let alone the "of-record" one (and, just to clarify my name-calling, she's only a troll to girls, actually smiles at boys, which might explain the pins at Goner, though really, who are we to guess at the motives of Goner employees [c'est impossible]).

The article begins with Elvis, or a stated attempt to avoid him (which is probably why she never mentions that Elvis lost his virginity at Ernestine & Hazel's). The title of the piece starts: "Roll Over Elvis." This is nuts. And telling. Ryzik leads with the assertion that she is "cool" (in the most cloying, deaf Gen-Xer-y way) and down-with-locals because she wants to look beyond Elvis, or ignore him altogether. It's true that Elvis is "the lead" for most tourists to the Bluffs, the reaction most folks have to my volunteered hometown--

"Where are you from?"
"Memphis, Tennessee."
"Oh....Elvis!"

--For good reason. Elvis is the tops. She writes,

IT’S hard to shake Elvis in Memphis. His pompadoured, crooning visage peers out from all corners, from jukeboxes to diner counters. But the King was nowhere to be found at Electrocity, a semi-legal warehouse party that was recently held in an unheated garage in the city’s energetic Midtown neighborhood.

Jesus. I grew up in Midtown, a large swathe of the city that contains multiple neighborhoods, some quite sleepy. (And I can't touch that rave party. Y'all know how ridiculous its inclusion is. And Nocturnal [joke/hell]?! And Mollie Fontaine [yuppie downtown lifestylze mess]?! And Odessa [iffy amoeba of an art space that throws parties...I can't].)

Anyway, in Memphis, I saw Elvis everywhere. When I drove to and from the airport. When I, as stated, had a beer at Ernestine's second floor; I felt him most of all in one of their particularly creepy, cokey bathrooms (claw-footed tub rusting in the corner). When I went to school each morning in Overton Park. When I headed downtown past Baptist Memorial (now, regretfully, demolished). This list will get dull fast....the thing is, he permeates wonderfully, not through kitsch so much as ghostly imprint.
I've been to Graceland some 12 or 13 times, and cried too, in the Beautiful Meditation Garden or in front of Gladys' lavender poodle-motifed bedroom, cried for a folk hero whose story is so much about America (Egg got it).

And a lot of what Ryzik talks about, dives and juke joints, existed before Elvis, alongside Elvis. He might beef with a contemporary ambivalence toward sharp-dressing, but that's about it. He knew all about Memphis' soul and strangeness, its scrappy accessibility. Other stuff, The Cove and the Hi-Tone and Deli, new or newish spots, contain very little to provoke. They serve fried food and booze and bands play. What's this article about again?

The Bucc (opened a decade+ before Elvis passed), I've mentioned here before. It's my most favorite bar in the world, mine and Pillow's Friday afternoon office. It is incredibly loose and warm, uniquely so. And gross and rough too. What Melena Ryzik and her paper did not comprehend, beyond the peeling paint and torn up vinyl booths, is what a visiting friend once summed up with a buzzed, thrilling declaration, "There's no rules here!" It's a thing I've felt in New York as well, though NY's version is about a chilled carelessness, the BIG and LOST of the place. In Memphis, unbounded sensations spring from a dangerous slowness, a haze, a shared state of drunkeness and decrepitude and empty lots, plenty violence happening "someplace else" (preoccupying our law enforcement), death impending (no joke).

Of course, this is all selective, there are manicured blocks and nice schools, churches and shops too.

It's just that Memphis is my home of homes, home of hearts, and it is very beautiful and very difficult. I take it seriously, and nothing sounds as grave or complicated as it ought to in a foolish Times puff piece. I wish they wouldn't bother blundering all over stuff.

View of a Room

salon in the Palazzo Barbaro, Venice (decor. 1797)

From John Kent's Venice:

Ca' Barbaro. A parade of the famous passed through this house after the Curtis family of Boston acquired it in the 19thC. Monet and Sargent each had a studio here; Browning gave recitations; Henry James stayed to write 'The Aspern Papers' and used the house as a setting for 'The Wings of the Dove'; Cole Porter "opened in Venice" with a brief stay in 1923, before moving on to open what Diaghilev called "an idiotic nightclub on a boat moored outside the Salute." The house is really two buildings, the second added in 1694 to accommodate a ballroom - a pressing need.