Architecture: I want this. I don't need it. But I want it.

Look! You're home!

One photograph, well take and well thought out, can tell a thousand stories.

  "Don't shoot what it is. Shoot what it fells like"

Remember this, and you'll be all set.

The Roman Empire at its height.

There was a time when being a print journalist meant you were the best of the best......

"The tech CEO found dismembered in his luxury New York City apartment this week suffered multiple stab wounds to the neck and body, the city's chief medical examiner said Thursday. "

....you mean his COMPLETE dismemberment wasn't suicide?

Ella Havelka photographed by Aaron Francis

American Folk. The Carter Family

The music of the Carter Family helped inspire folks like Bob Dylan. Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" melody was taken from an old Carter Family tune.

                                  

The formula.

In our country, we learn, wrongly, that success bring happiness. In fact, they’ll tell you, success is the very key to happiness. Well no, not at all. Success and happiness are only thinly related.  Happiness is the key to success. Let me say that again, happiness can make you successful. If you are doing something you absolutely love to do for a living, you will be successful.

I wasn't able to find out much about this wonderful, magnificent structure. It may have been in Venice California,

I would pay money to eat here.

Cesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese was an Italian novelist, poet, short story writer, translator, and literary critic. Just before the start of World War Two, Pavese took an antifascist stance, dangerous in the time of Mussolini and Hitler. Predictably, he was arrested and convicted for having letters from a political prisoner. He was tossed into a cell for several months and then sent into internal exile in Southern Italy. He returned to Turin about a year later and worked for the left-wing publisher Giulio Einaudi as editor and translator. When the Nazi’s arrived, he took to the hills with partisans, although he didn’t fight due to severe asthma.

 After the war, Pavese joined the Italian Communist Party and worked on the party's newspaper, L'Unità and at the same time turned to writing. In 1950 he won the Strega Prize for La Bella Estate, comprising three novellas: 'La tenda', written in 1940, 'Il diavolo sulle colline' (1948) and 'Tra donne sole' (1949). His last book was 'La Luna e i Falò', published in Italy in 1950 and translated into English as The Moon and the Bonfires by Louise Sinclair in 1952. Struck by chronic depression and a failed love affair with the actress Constance Dowling, he committed suicide by an overdose of barbiturates

Creation

I’m alive and at daybreak I’ve startled the stars.

My companion continues to sleep unaware.

All companions are sleeping. The day is a clear one

and stands sharper before me than faces in water.

In the distance an old man is walking to work

or enjoying the morning. We aren’t so different,

we both breathe the same faint glimmer of light

as we casually smoke, beguiling our hunger.

The old man, too, must have a body that’s pure

and vital—he ought to stand naked facing the morning.

Life this morning flows out over water

and in sunlight: around us the innocent splendor

of water, and all the bodies will soon be uncovered.

There’ll be a bright sun and the sharpness of sea air

and the harsh exhaustion that beats down in sunlight

and stillness. And my companion will be here—

a shared secret of bodies, each with its own voice.

There’s no voice to break the silence of water

at dawn. And neither is anything moving

beneath this sky. There’s only a star-melting warmth.

One shudders to feel the morning trembling

so virginally, as if none of us here were awake.

Imagine the worlds that are there....

Astronomers discover huge galactic wall hidden behind Milky Way

Scientists have discovered a celestial structure made of galaxies more than 1.4 billion light-years long and 600 million light-years deep in the skies over the South Pole.”The South Pole Wall” as it has been dubbed, is situated along the southern border of the cosmos (from the perspective of Earth) and consists of thousands of galaxies, hydrogen gas, dust and dark matter. It's one of the largest known structures in the universe.

The wall is among a number of structures that make up the cosmic web, including the Great Wall, the Bootes Void, the comparably sized Sloan Great Wall and the Hercules Corona-Borealis Great Wall, the largest known structure at 10 billion light-years wide. That’s about a tenth of the diameter of the observable universe

The South Pole Wall, however, is half the distance from the Earth to the Hercules Corona-Borealis Great Wall – 500 million light-years – and was hidden by the brightness of the Milky Way in an area called the Zone of Avoidance. It was discovered when scientists saw galaxies in different directions around it were affected by its gravitational pull.

Tutelage

The Latin verb tueri means "to look at" or "to guard." When tutelage first began appearing in print in the early 1600s, it was used mainly in the protective sense of tueri, as writers described serfs and peasants of earlier eras as being "under the tutelage of their lord." Over time, however, the word's meaning shifted away from guardianship and toward instruction.

Kafka and the lost doll

At 40, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, walked through the park in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favorite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully.
Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back to look for her.
The next day, when they had not yet found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter "written" by the doll saying "please don't cry. I took a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures."
Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka's life.
During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll carefully written with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable.
Finally, Kafka brought back the doll (he bought one) that had returned to Berlin.
"It doesn't look like my doll at all," said the girl.
Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: "my travels have changed me." the little girl hugged the new doll and brought her happy home.
A year later Kafka died.
Many years later, the now-adult girl found a letter inside the doll. In the tiny letter signed by Kafka it was written:
"Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way."

Antonín Dvořák – Slavonic Dance No. 2, Op. 72

The Slavonic Dances are a series of 16 orchestral pieces composed by Antonín Dvořák in 1878 and 1886 and published in two sets as Op. 46 and Op. 72.  The Slavonic Dances were inspired by Johannes Brahms's own Hungarian Dances, are  lively and full of national character, were well received at the time and today are considered among the composer's most memorable works, occasionally making appearances in popular culture.

The Alamanac Singers

 The Almanacs were  the first folk music supergroup and spun off into successful careers for Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Josh White and Burl Ives.

The Almanac Singers were a New York City-based folk music group, active between 1940 and 1943, founded by Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie. The group specialized in topical songs, mostly songs advocating an anti-war, anti-racism and pro-union philosophy. They were part of the Popular Front, an alliance of liberals and leftists, including the Communist Party USA.

Almanac members Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie began playing together informally in 1940 or 1941. Pete Seeger and Guthrie had met at Will Geer's Grapes of Wrath Evening, a benefit for displaced migrant workers, in March 1940. That year, Seeger joined Guthrie on a trip to Texas and California to visit Guthrie's relatives. Hays and Lampell had rented a New York City apartment together in October 1940, and on his return Seeger moved in with them. They called their apartment Almanac House, and it became a center for leftist intellectuals as well as crash pad for folksingers, including (in 1942) Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.

The Almanacs' first record release, an album of three 78s called Songs for John Doe, written to protest the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, the first peacetime draft in U.S. history.

Songs for John Doe attacked big American corporations (such as J.P. Morgan and DuPont), repeating the Party's line that they had supported German rearmament, and during the period of re-armament in 1941, were now vying for government contracts to build up the defenses of the U.S. Besides being anti-union, these corporations were a focus of progressive and black activist anger because they barred blacks from employment in defense work. The album also criticized President Roosevelt's unprecedented peacetime draft, insinuating that he was going to war for J.P. Morgan.

The Almanac's second album, Talking Union, also produced by Bernay, was a collection of six labor songs: "Union Maid", "I Don't Want Your Millions Mister", "Get Thee Behind Me Satan", "Union Train", "Which Side Are You On?", and the eponymous "Talking Union

In 1942, Army intelligence and the FBI determined that the Almanacs and their former anti-draft message were  a seditious threat to recruitment and the morale of the war effort among blacks and youth. The group disbanded in late 1942 or early 1943.

The Three Graces with Cupid

Faith, hope and charity

Purpose

One of my goals this year and for the years to follow is to pay attention, observe, the beauty of architecture.

The Eight - Cyril Power.

koto ishihara

Italian sculptor, Marino Marini, in his studio on one of his horses. Milan Italy 1952.

Marini developed several themes in sculpture: equestrian, Pomonas (nudes), portraits, and circus figures and drew on traditions of Etruscan and Northern European sculpture in developing these themes with the aim was to develop mythical images by interpreting classical themes in light of modern concerns and techniques. Marini is particularly famous for his series of stylized equestrian statues, which feature a man with outstretched arms on a horse.

Charles Robert Gatewood

Charles Robert Gatewood (November 8, 1942 – April 28, 2016) was a San Francisco based photographer, writer, videographer, artist, and educator. On April 29, 1966, Gatewood photographed a Bob Dylan press conference and concert. One photograph, "Dylan With Sunglasses and Cigarette," was syndicated and received worldwide publication. It was Gatewood's first sale. Other celebrity photos followed including Martin Luther King, Jr., Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Joan Baez, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald.

In 1966, working from an apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side and rented part of a photography studio at 8 East 12th Street, and sold photos to textbooks, magazines, poster companies, and other editorial markets.

From 1970 to 1974 Gatewood worked as staff photographer for the Manhattan Tribune. He also photographed on assignment for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Harper's, Business Week, Time, and other magazines.

 In 1975, Sidetripping, Gatewood's first photography book, was published, with text by William S. Burroughs. From 1978 to 1987, Gatewood lived near Woodstock, New York, and worked in Manhattan. His photos from this period include one of social protests, rock festivals, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, body modification, outlaw bikers, and nature. The celebrities he captured images of include Larry Clark, Annie Sprinkle, Michael O'Donoghue, Ira Cohen and Quentin Crisp.

In 1984 the New York State Arts Council awarded Gatewood a grant to publish Wall Street photographs, and in 1985 the book Wall Street was awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence for Outstanding Humanistic Photojournalism.

From 1987, Gatewood lived and worked in San Francisco, California where he produced over thirty documentary videos about body modification, fetish fashion and other alternative interests.

On April 28, 2016, Gatewood, at age 73, tossed himself from a balcony and died from the injuries.

Tamara Łempicka

The following is largely edited from Wikipedia

"I was the first woman to make clear paintings, and that was the origin of my success. Among a hundred canvases, mine were always recognizable. The galleries tended to show my pictures in the best rooms because they attracted people. My work was clear and finished. I looked around me and could only see the total destruction of painting. The banality in which art had sunk gave me a feeling of disgust. I was searching for a craft that no longer existed; I worked quickly with a delicate brush. I was in search of technique, craft, simplicity and good taste. My goal: never copy. Create a new style, with luminous and brilliant colors, rediscover the elegance of my models."

Tamara Łempicka (May 1898 –  March 1980) was a Polish born painter who spent her working life in France and the United States. She is best known for her polished Art Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, and for her highly stylized paintings of nudes. Her style was a blend of late, refined cubism and the neoclassical style. In 1928 she became the mistress of Baron Raoul Kuffner, a wealthy art collector from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the death of his wife in 1933, the Baron married Lempicka in 1934, and thereafter she became known in the press as "The Baroness with a Brush".

Following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, she and her husband moved to the United States and she painted celebrity portraits, as well as still life’s and, in the 1960s, some abstract paintings.

She created a hedonistic lifestyle for herself, accompanied by intense love affairs within high society. Famous for her libido, Lempicka was bisexual. Her affairs with both men and women were conducted in ways that were considered scandalous at the time. In the 1920s, she became closely associated with lesbian and bisexual women in writing and artistic circles, among them Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, and Colette. She also became involved with Suzy Solidor, a nightclub singer at the Boîte de Nuit, whose portrait she later painted.

Her father was Boris Gurwik-Górski, a Russian Jewish attorney for a French trading company. Her mother was Malwina Dekler, a Polish socialite who had lived most of her life abroad and who met her husband at one of the European spas.

In 1911 she was sent her to a boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, but she was bored and she feigned illness to be permitted to leave the school. Instead, her grandmother took her on a tour of Italy, where she developed her interest in art.

After her parents divorced in 1912, she chose to spend the summer with her wealthy Aunt Stefa in Saint Petersburg. There, in 1915, she met and fell in love with a prominent Polish lawyer, Tadeusz Łempicki (1888–1951). Her family offered him a large dowry, and they were married in 1916 in the chapel of the Knights of Malta in St. Petersburg.

The Russian Revolution in November 1917,  her husband Tadeusz Łempicki was arrested in the middle of the night by the Cheka, the secret police. Tamara searched the prisons for him, and with the help of the Swedish consul, to whom she offered her favors, she secured his release.  They traveled to Copenhagen then to London and finally to Paris, where Tamara's family had also found refuge.

In Paris, the Łempickis lived for a while from the sale of family jewels. Tadeusz proved unwilling or unable to find suitable work. Their daughter, Maria Krystyna "Kizette", was born around 1919.

Lempicka decided to become a painter at her sister's suggestion and studied both at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts and Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She exhibited at the Salon d'automne for the first time in 1922. During this period, she signed her paintings "Lempitzki"—the masculine form of her name.

During an Italian tour, she took a lover, the Marquis Sommi Picenardi.  In 1928 she  divorced Łempicki and became the mistress for t Raoul Kuffner, a baron of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and an art collector. (The title was granted by the second-to-last Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Franz-Joseph I, because Kuffner's family had been the supplier of beef and beer to the imperial court.) Still, Kuffner owned properties of considerable size in eastern Europe.

She traveled to the United States for the first time in 1929 to paint a portrait of the fiancée of the American oilman Rufus T. Bush and to arrange a show of her work at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The exposition was a success, but the money she earned was lost when the bank she used collapsed following the stock market crash of 1929.

The wife of Baron Kuffner died in 1933 and De Lempicka married him in 1934 in Zurich. She was alarmed by the rise of the Nazis and persuaded her husband to sell most of his properties in Hungary and to move his fortune and his belongings to Switzerland.[8]

In the winter of 1939, following the outbreak of World War II, Lempicka and her husband moved to the United States. They settled first in Los Angeles, and moved to Beverly Hills, settling into the former residence of the film director King Vidor.

In 1943, Baron Kuffner and de Lempicka relocated to New York City.

Her work was out of fashion after World War II, but made a comeback in the late 1960s, with the rediscovery of Art Deco.

When her last husband, Baron Kuffner, died of a heart attack on November 1961 on the ocean liner Liberté en route to New York, Lempicka sold many of her possessions and made three around-the-world trips by ship.

In 1963, Lempicka moved to Houston, Texas, to be with Kizette and her family and retired from her life as a professional artist. In 1974, she decided to move to Cuernavaca, Mexico. After the death of her husband in 1979, Kizette moved to Cuernavaca to take care of de Lempicka, whose health was declining. De Lempicka died in her sleep on March 18, 1980. Following her wishes, her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatépetl.

LE CORBUSIER, Weissenhof-Siedlung, Stuttgart Germany, 1927

Cosmic Age Lodge in Anaheim, California.

What an absolute shame I never went ther. The Space Age Lodge in Anaheim, California, open in 1965. One of five cosmic-themed motels created by industrialist Al Stovall, the Space Age Lodge was partnered with the Inn of Tomorrow, the Cosmic Inn, The Galaxy, another Space Age Lodge (all in Anaheim) and the Space Age in Gila Bend, Arizona. (“All at down to earth rates”) Stovall was inspired in the design by his affiliation with the newly formed Space program. He owned a copper mine and a plastic factory, which made his ability to create special designs and implement a variety of creative interior and exterior decorations a cinch. Many of the lamps, room dividers and exterior do-dads were made from materials from his mine and factory.

Space Age Lodge

ALEXANDRA SCOVILLE

 The year is 1965. The Space Age is in full swing in the United States following President John F. Kennedy’s promise three years earlier to land on the moon within the decade. While Buzz and Neil wouldn’t take their first steps on lunar soil for four more years, space exploration was in full force in Gila Bend. Al Stovall’s Best Western Space Age Lodge opened in the town, a natural stopping point for travelers on the way to or from California and Rocky Point. The retro hotel was one of five special “space age” destinations the late Stovall designed in the early to mid-’60s.

The lodge is now in the care of Bill O’Connell, who first began working with Al Stovall as a 21-year-old in the boss’ hotels in Anaheim, Calif. Every futuristic detail at the Space Age Lodge, from the lamps to room dividers, was hand-designed by Stovall, O’Connell says: “It was all his imagination and creativity that they used to build the hotel.”

Outer space was what “everyone was talking about” in the ‘60s, and the Space Age Lodge remains committed to the theme. In 1998, a fire sparked by a malfunctioning neon light destroyed parts of the lobby and restaurant; the owners took it in stride, stretching a banner outside the burned building that read, “Attacked by Aliens!”  A UFO on the lobby roof, and murals of shuttles, satellites and spacemen were added throughout the lobby and restaurant in the remodel. “When you’re standing in the lobby and you look up, it almost makes you feel like you’re in outer space,” O’Connell says.

The hotel is still doing good business and standing strong after 50 years. O’Connell sees the hotel staying open for years to come, especially as the Space Age Lodge becomes more nostalgic as it preserves the increasingly distant era of moon landings, space races and road trip attractions.