British Vogue, 1940

Nancy Buchanan Wolfwoman, 1977

Ink on b&w photo

Elizabeth Taylor channeling

Cleopatra 1963

The Peculiar Genius of Bjork

Inez and Vinoodh, who photographed Bjork for the cover of T’s Spring 2015 Women’s Fashion issue (and another 10 times over the past 16 years), say the artist is "the only person we know who has a direct line between heaven and earth." | Comme des Garçons coat, dress, boots, and socks, (212) 604-9200.Credit Photograph by Inez and Vinoodh. Styled by Mel Ottenberg

Similar but Different- internet find

danish vase eeliethel scandinavian design

Alexander McQueen S/S RTW 2007, Sarabande

marchesa luisa casati

Luisa Casati, born 134 years ago today, was a legend in her lifetime. She aspired to be a work of art, and was indeed immortalized by painters including Giovanni Boldini and Kees Van Dongen, yet she was famous for being “the most daring and extravagant woman in Europe,” per the 1930s press. Among her indulgences were fashion—she favored Fortuny and Poiret—and animals; in addition to her elegant borzois, she had parrots, a monkey, and pet cheetahs, which she was said to have walked on jeweled leads while wearing the emperor’s new clothes under her furs. Vogue

The Spirit of the Beehive

 "The Spirit of the Beehive," directed by Víctor Erice, takes place in a small, isolated Spanish town in 1940, shortly after the end of the civil war that inaugurated the long reign of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The film was made in 1973, near the end of Franco's dictatorship, at a time when Spanish cinema was just starting to reawaken, and to probe, carefully and hesitantly, the buried traumas of the recent past. Perhaps fittingly, one of Mr. Erice's themes is repression — not so much the stifling of thought by political authority as the willed avoidance of painful experience. The story that emerges from Mr. Erice's lovely, lovingly considered images is at once lucid and enigmatic, poised between adult longing and childlike eagerness, sorrowful knowledge and startled innocence. — A. O. Scott

Bette David 1963 Interview... Ahead of her time on gender.

New favorite find. Blank on Blank PBS animated interview series. So well done and so many voices to hear from first hand. Also love the Elliot Smith.

Pastelegram: We Belong Dead

Guest Artist: Margaret Meehan

ONGOING

Dualities of the monstrous and beautiful, stasis and change inform digital collages, poetry, experiments with found text and an art-historical essay. Visit often for updates and spend time here with the digital collages a collaboration between Meehan, Lauren Green and Eric Harvey.
Interview with Chelsea Weathers here.

Local Color

When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926. Oregon's founding is part of the forgotten history of racism in the American west. Full story here.

PBS documentary Local Color here.

Martha Graham

“You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is ever pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others." Martha Graham

PJ Harvey - When Under Ether

Japanese maps 1880

Love

85-year-old-woman-and-her-identical-marionette-twin-feed-a-squirrel-in-new-york-citys-washington-square-park.

Similar but different

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook-Pray, bless us with rice and curry our great moon., 2012
video

Human, part of the Pierre Huyghe retrospective in LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion.

Ibizan hound Anubis sculpture,  ancient Egypt

Oscar and Lucinda Glass Church

Abandoned Greenhouse

via messy nessy

James Lee Byars and Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor

James Lee Byars

Kader Attia

Pabellón Het Huis con la serie de Guele Casée, 2014

Robert Melton- That's fantastic

Sweet Dream (Fantastic Fest Bumper) from Robert Melton on Vimeo.

Joan Didion’s Céline campaign and Self Respect

Photo: Juergen Teller for Céline.

Full essay here.

we belong dead

flower

These 'Almost Famous Women' Won't Be Forgotten Again

In Almost Famous Women, writer Megan Mayhew Bergman takes us into the compelling lives of independent, inventive women at the margins of history. These are fictionalized accounts of real-life, risk-taking women who have largely been forgotten, and now are re-imagined by Bergman in her new book — a book she tells NPR's Eric Westervelt that she resisted writing at first. NPR Story here.

Thousands of wallpaper designs — from the early 18th century to the mid 20th — are now online.

This French wallpaper was manufactured by Zuber et Cie between 1830 and 1831. It was printed in gray, green, and white on a polished green background and features leaves framing floral medallions.

In the mid-1930s, a woman named Dorothy Waterhouse was scraping wallpaper from the interior of an old Cape Cod house when she developed an unusual obsession. “Suddenly I spotted beneath the drab looking top layers some beautiful colors,” she later told a newspaper. She soon opened her own wallpaper business, and throughout the rest of her life, she would take many trips into the countryside to expose and preserve the wonders hidden in other people’s walls.

Waterhouse isn’t alone in her fixation. Wallpaper has been the subject of exhibitions at institutions like New York’s International Print Center and Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery, and artists like Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst have even created their own designs. It surfaces throughout literature, too — in books like Crime and Punishment and short stories like The Yellow Wallpaper. 

Now all of us who share Waterhouse’s fascination with wallpaper can explore her 1,400-item-strong collection online. After her death, the archive was donated to Historic New England, which recently finished digitizing it along with 4,800 other wallpaper samples. “The collection is searchable by date, location, and manufacturer, and by keywords like color and type of pattern,” cataloguer Peggy Wishart said in a press release. “You can zoom in to see every detail.”

Margaret Atwood