Stronger than me

Poor Amy. I heard this song outside an Irish pub on my street on my last night out in St. Petersburg. 

Beyond symbolic, beyond beautiful.

Seven Minutes in Heaven

There is only one queen . . .

. . . and she is Dinah Washington. There is always a Dinah for how I'm feeling:

Like when I have the blues.

Or when I don't.

And any man who can't be seduced by Dinah isn't worth seducing at all.

6ft 6in of Opportunity

WHY ISN'T MY LIFE LIKE THIS? Oh yeah, because Rock Hudson is gay.

Locks

Characters

      "CASSANDRA WHITESIDE enters at the door on the right. She is dark and strikingly beautiful, of a type rather peculiar to the South--physically delicate with clear translucent skin and luminous eyes as though burnt thin by her intensity of feeling. With people she has a rather disdainful ease, not deliberate or conscious, but rooted in her class origin and the cynical candor with which she recognizes herself and the social contradictions and tragic falsity of the world she lives in. SANDRA is the only woman of aristocratic extraction in the group. Her family is the oldest in this part of the Delta and was once the richest, but their plantation has dwindled with each successive generation. SANDRA has been "going out" for ten years and is still unmarried, which is enough in itself to destroy a girl's reputation."

     -character description from Tennessee Williams' Battle of Angels (1940)

    I'm compiling a list of Tennessee Williams' character descriptions, because they're often my favorite part of reading his scripts--so beautifully written and essential to the humanity of his characters.

l'enfer au purgatoire

Save Me The Waltz 2

     "Alabama could not read the letter. It was in French. She tore it in a hundred little pieces and scattered it over the black water of the harbor beneath the masts of many fishing boats from Shanghai and Madrid, Colombia and Portugal. Though it broke her heart, she tore the picture too. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever owned in her life, that photograph. What was the use of keeping it? Jacques Chevre-Feuille had gone to China. There wasn't a way to hold on to the summer, no French phrase to preserve its rising broken harmonies, no hopes to be salvaged from a cheap French photograph. Whatever it was that she wanted from Jacques, Jacques took it with him to squander on the Chinese. You took what you wanted from life, if you could get it, and you did without the rest."   -Zelda Fitzgerald

Save Me The Waltz

     "Dancing with David, he smelled like new goods. Being close to him with her face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambrics and linen and luxury bound in bales. She was jealous of his pale aloofness. When she saw him leave the dance floor with other girls, the resentment she felt was not against any blending of his personality with theirs, but against his leading others than herself into those cooler detached regions which he inhabited alone." -Zelda Fitzgerald

The Absinthe Drinker

Pablo Picasso, 1901.

Street Art

Graffiti in Budapest

Nearest to My Heart

I dig this song almost as much as I dig the couch at 1:08, but I have a tendency to love furniture more than music.

A Cross

In a dream I saw a cross
one arm was short
and the other infinitely long
Some say
it's simple
All problems have already been solved
the burden is light and every tear
will be wiped away
it's enough
to live your life from start to finish
then simply awaken to eternity


But I keep carrying the other arm
the endless one
and I know that the light thing is a burden
that what must be wiped away is a tear
larger than the planet
there are days that drag on longer
than forever
And I can't imagine a death
that means awakening
a darkness
that is light
a moment
that is immortality
a love
that is not you
-Anna Kamieńska

The World's Gone Mad

Trench coat from Banana Republic's impending Mad Men-inspired line

This coat cannot exist unless I own it. Not buying any clothing the rest of the summer (ok, Goodwill and vintage clothing will probably make a liar out of me) so I can justify purchasing it.

In a Perfect Situation

There's the pitch, slow and straight.
All I have to do is swing
and I'm a hero, but I'm a zero.

Abelardo Morell

I ran across some Abelardo Morell works the other day, and I can't stop looking. Here are some of my favorite images from his Museums series:

The Philadelphia Museum of Art East Entrance in Gallery #171 with a DeChirico Painting, 2005

Early Sunday Morning By Hopper - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2007

Two Paintings by Zacarias Gonzalez Velasquez, Lazaro Galdiano Museum, Madrid, Spain, 2009

More M P

I'm dying to see this, but for the moment this is satisfactory. 

Mildred Pierce-Chapter 6

"But he looked so pitiful."

"Baby, they all do. That's what gets us."