The Resurrection of the Body

This fresco left a deep and lasting impression on me since I saw it in a book as a boy.

Here is a detail:

The Village and Borat

Cogshifter Terse Reviews #319 “The Village”: Tedious and predictable, over long, but redeemed by the entrancing Bryce Dallas Howard.

She is a vegan, but that’s not the only thing I’d like to hold against her ::groan::

Cogshifter Terse Reviews #320 “Borat”: Cringe making in the extreme, the natural reaction while watching this is to curl into a ball and whimper in a corner. What is remarkable is the almost universal kindness shown to Borat as he travels across the country being outrageous, for example even when he appears at the dining table holding a small sack of his own poo.

The Cogshifter Guide To Painters, Part IV

Salvador Dalí
Woman at the Window (Muchacha en la ventana)
oil on board
1925

Dali was a funny chap with a weird moustache. He often appeared in short film documentary clips wearing a large hat, and standing outside a curvy white building somewhere in the Mediterranean. Apparently he was very attractive to women, although they tended to want to keep their backs to him, as typified in the above painting “Woman at the Window” … otherwise known as “Munching Ventanas While Waiting For Rain”. Dali grew up in a poor neighbourhood of Nottingham, but moved to Spain when he was seventeen. He then spent months drawing on the pavements outside the Prado in Madrid, before being admitted to a painting class in mistake for a paid up student. He never looked back.

What is Dali trying to tell us in this painting of a woman standing at a window, looking out across the Sea? The clues are obvious: the discarded table knapkin on the windowsill, the reflected image of a small house in the third pane of the casement window. Based on exhaustive investigation, we can identify the woman as Carmen Buttacha. Dali had been having a tempestuous affair with her poodle, and had gone around to Carmen’s house to beg its paw in marriage. They had dined heavily on plump olives from trees in the garden of Dali’s house, which can be seen reflected in the casement. At the moment that Carmen fully apprised what it was that Dali asked of her, she had jumped up from the table, and run to the window to vomit. Dali was so moved by this scene that he insisted on painting it, there and then.

Dali died a while back.

A Man Ray Moment

“The Gift”, 1921

Presumably a gift for his mother-in-law?

“Ingres Violin”, 1924

My main question is: what is up with her butt-crack?

Anyway, I was actually searching around for a picture that is in one of my folks’ art books, showing a rough table top with an uneaten can of sardines (I think), a rusty knife and fork, and various other aged paraphernalia. That’s all I can remember about it. It impressed me, as a kid, and I would love to see it again. But I can’t seem to find anything like it on the Web.

Fiancée of Dracula

If you haven’t seen this film, then rush out to your nearest Blockbuster, hunt around on the horror shelves for half an hour, then come back and read this post, because they wont have it.

It’s a “I must have been crazy to order this from Netflix but will watch it anyway” movie. More details
here, and a pic of the cover:

Some memorable scenes that haunted me as I dropped off last night after watching it:

• A nubile girl wearing a see-through nighty wandering around a damp old French chateaux, with a gaping bloody wound in her chest, holding her own heart
• A nun with a funnel on her head
• A French youth who looked like he’d be more at home in Café de Paris with a glass of Pastis and a Gauloise, rather than dicking around with a crusty old hypnotist who looked like Jason Robards
• Another nubile girl who seemed intent on fishing out her left tit at any available opportunity

You get the idea …