"Manifestation", with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley

Nothing compares to a nice female body: Paris vs. Malibu.

Keine Zeit fürs Internet

This is the story of a 26-year old German girl who has never been online and has no interest in doing so. I thought I was a maverick since I do not use cell phones, but am just amateurish...

Published yesterday on the FAS.

Jesse Prinz dixit

"Popular taste tends to be sentimental, saccharine, and overly concerned with prettiness".
Really Bad Taste, p.97

Harry Graf Kessler on revolution and violence

Last year I became an admirer of Harry Graf Kessler, the brilliant diarist, cosmopolitan leftist bohème. I am now reading his Berlin diaries, and cannot help myself but underlining almost every passage – it is such an outburst of perspicacity and brilliant observation.

This selection of diaries start with the Novemberrevolution of 1918 and the fall of the German Empire and ends with Kessler's death in 1937.

Since it is impossible to make a selection of phrases, I prefer to refer just to the last I have read so far regarding revolutions and use of violence, being it so actual for nowadays.

Sunday, 19 January 1919 – Berlin

Shooting is the worker's least effective weapon, amateurish and out-of-date, revolution in a romantic wrapper. [...]

Perhaps that gives a hint as to how wars, through the growth of more effective forms of pressure, will come to be eliminated from the international scene. One day mass slaughter and artillery barrages will seem just as simple-minded and old-fashioned in conflicts between nations ans machine-guns do in class warfare. Economics, not military superiority, decided the [I] World War. It can be objected that economic agencies must within certain limits bow to military sanctions when the latter is capable of being forced on them. The blockade, for instance, was a military means of coercion in the defeat of Germany. Nonetheless, it remains an open question whether in modern conditions military coercion would achieve its object for long in the face of united opposition inside a plant or inside a country.

Nabokov on authentic literary creation

Berlin trolley at Unter den Linden (1920s)

In 1976, The New Yorker published "A Guide to Berlin", written fifty years before by V. Nabokov in Russian.

As he is reflecting upon horse-drawn trams and motorized trolleys (whose extinction he falsely predicted), Nabokov writes about the authentic sense of literary creation: "to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right".

Think of Homer, of Caesar, of Dante, think of Shakespeare and Cervantes and Hugo... It fits perfectly. Now think of all those authors of our time writing bullshit –mostly in affected, cheesy Spanish– and wasting our time and trees and paper and ink and butt.

Read the whole passage, it is truly brilliant:

Long live the tram! Long live Nabokov! Long live REAL literature, threatened by fame and "the market"!

Ghislain Dussart's female Christs

Ghislain Dussart aka Jicky Dussart was a French photographer, best know because of his portraits of Brigitte Bardot.

He also has a collection of collages depicting female Christs, which is worth checking.

Kafka dixit

"Berlin tut mir von allen Seiten gut."

Mir erst, lieber Kafka!