first art post: paris, 1998

one of my first paintings. watercolor on white board, circa 1998

My favorite actress has given me a cameo: second to last line

Well Played: Scarlett Johansson

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"Yesterday, we expressed displeasure for Scarlett Johansson's choice of activewear at the Venice Film Festival. So we were delighted to see that when she changed for the premiere of her film The Black Dahlia, she went with something we were far less likely to be found between the covers of Land's End.

She's switched to a red lip, but it's a rich, dark one, rather than a bright, knock-you-backwards red that rarely works unless if a bunch of really hot firemen are adjacent to it.

And the dress is actually really interesting -- it's not something that would ever have attracted me personally, yet I think Scarlett looks smashing in it. The cut and the fit combine to create a very sleek and tall figure indeed; the cinched waist gives the illusion that her legs go on for days. And with her new hair and her healthy (and natural-looking, miracle of miracles) skin color and tone don't allow themselves to be washed out or overshadowed by the pale fabric hue. If, say, Nicole Kidman wore this, she'd disappear and/or risk looking sickly, but on ScarJo the gown isn't wearing her -- she is wearing the hell out of the gown.

In all, it's very old-movie chic, a welcome dash of Deborah Kerr in this day and age.

Now I need to go wash the good cheer off my hands."

MORE SCARLETT: STARRING IN BOB DYLAN'S NEW VIDEO

Fuel

http://indexed.blogspot.com/

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truth

sometimes i think i am an analyst because i would rather observe than participate with everyone in life.

Damage Control

We all go through life like bulls in a china shop. A chip here, a crack there. Doing damage to ourselves, to other people. The problem is trying to figure out how to control the damage we've done, or that's been done to us. Sometimes the damage catches us by surprise. Sometimes we think we can fix the damage. And sometimes the damage is something we can't even see.

Things I love today

Hummingbirds
The swirl of silk
on bare legs the smell of grass
Leaves
Dark clouds freckled with light

Wet noses
Fuzzy blankets
Wind
Laughing
Fall

Hard Fi -

From the dead boring outer ring of London's suburbs comes Hard-Fi. They merge disco, punk and dub until they sound like the late seventies post-punk scene having a fist fight with itself.

air

i am sick sick sick sick
of being the prodigy child
the charming host
the laughing
talented musician
the brooding artist
i just want to stretch out
my fingers and toes
on the grass
feel hot sun
nap
think about nothing
and everything
or nothing

there's no stature in it

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Bob Dylan says the quality of modern recordings is "atrocious," and even the songs on his new album sounded much better in the studio than on disc.

"I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really," the 65-year-old rocker said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

Dylan, who released eight studio albums in the past two decades, returns with his first recording in five years, "Modern Times," next Tuesday.

"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," he added. "There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like ... static."

Dylan said he does his best to fight technology, but it's a losing battle.

"Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it."

Orwellian Neuroscience

"Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment, the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom."

-George Orwell, 1984

WHY FAT IS BACK IN HOLLYWOOD
"In an industry rife with painfully thin stick figures, women with some meat on their bones are—lucky for us—rising to the top. PLUS: A visual smorgasbord of the sexiest plate-scrapers ever." Original article in Men's Style Magazine

“The curve,” Mae West observed, “is more powerful than the sword.” Measuring 38-24-38, the five-foot-one sex goddess spoke from experience—lots of it. West’s bodacious successors—women like Catherine Zeta-Jones, Drew Barrymore, Rachel Weisz, and Kate Winslet, who hold fast to their cushioned curves even as their peers downsize more aggressively than General Motors—understand that maxim. Their faminista sisters do not. Now, the bigger-(relatively speaking)-is-better argument could easily be made with logic. But a growing faction of actresses who appear to have a healthy relationship with carbohydrates are making the point better than any polemicizing ever could.

Line Hollywood’s wispy players up next to the lush likes of Scarlett Johansson, Lost siren Evangeline Lilly, Liv Tyler, Big Love star Ginnifer Goodwin, and an increasingly curvy Mandy Moore. Who would you rather slow-dance with? Seriously, would you prefer to get a Grey’s Anatomy lesson from an hourglassed Katherine Heigl or a reedy Ellen Pompeo? Nicole Richie or Nicole Richie at 50 percent off? Madonna “Like a Virgin” or Madonna “Hung Up” on Yogilates? Here’s a one-woman argument for roundness: Gretchen Mol. After going virtually unnoticed in some 20 films, the cherubic starlet put on a few pounds, took off her clothes, and gave a breakout performance as the world’s most famous pinup in The Notorious Bettie Page.

“The pinups didn’t have ‘perfect’ bodies. They didn’t go to the gym. They did Jack LaLanne exercises, those lazy leg lifts,” says Mary Harron, the biopic’s cowriter and director. “It was a more forgiving era. I think constant dieting makes people crazy. It gives them this strained look.”

You see that look in the faces of formerly fleshy sexpots who have morphed into pinched, prematurely aged superwaifs. What do they do for fun? Food and sex are appetites inextricably linked in the human psyche. One could speculate that for those obsessed with not eating, even the boyfriend’s salami goes the way of the bread basket.

A certain young actress whose figure has been closely scrutinized by the tabloids recently came out in defense of padded bones. “You want to be called sexy, and you want to have tits and an ass,” she said. Perhaps those of her peers still busy whittling themselves down to a size zero should adopt that statement as a mantra.

“Curves are all good from where I stand,” says writer and director Neil LaBute, whose plays—The Shape of Things, Fat Pig—have occasionally been inspired by the subject of weight. “I’m working with Maura Tierney right now, and she’s a picture of what a great American girl looks like. It’s not even that she’s particularly curvy. But you get the sense she never spends time worrying about what anybody else thinks about her weight. She appears incredibly comfortable in her skin.” Which, as everyone knows, is sexy as hell.

“In Hollywood, there’s a domino effect of envy and competition among women,” says Adrienne Ressler, a body-image specialist with the Renfrew Center in Philadelphia who identifies the prevailing ethos as: The skinniest girl wins. And indeed, when so many actresses make millions, rake in designer clothes, and land modeling contracts, the thinnest of the thin always stand out from the pack. We just hope that the Goodwins, Moores, and Mols taking to the screen flip that paradigm on its head—and represent the shape of things to come.

Rose McGowan


Monica Bellucci


Katherine Heigl



Anita Ekberg (La Dolce Vita)


Elizabeth Taylor

tori amos

If you want inside her world, boy
You'd better make her raspberry swirl

Belief-O-Matic

What faith are you?
Even if YOU don't know what faith you are, Belief-O-Matic™ knows.
Warning: Belief-O-Matic™ assumes no legal liability for the ultimate fate of your soul.
My results

medulla

HUMAN BEHAVIOR what is it exactly that makes us tick. Bjorks new album is a smash.

mindfreak

hot mind. hot body. the perfect man: criss angel

tao de ginger

"Girls can do everything men can do....just backwards and in heels"
- Ginger Rogers

i am melancholy tonight. i miss something, but i don't know what it is. i am hungry, but there's nothing that i crave.

Construction

The night is covered with fireflies
buried in the humidity
like lightbulbs in a sauna,
threatening to burst.

I take my time with what I have,
I fly through minds,
I wear crazy things,
I am acting as multiple people do
on busses and trains
and in windows
when they don't know they're being watched.

I want to tear things.
Shirts.
Ties.
Boundary lines.
Muscles.
Push my body down the road
until my feet burn and my lungs ache.

Tomorrow is the day I change.
The day I give in to reality
The day I take your hands off my..
Common sense.
And take it back and use it.

For now I am lost on
I-90.
I am.
Dark and fast and under construction.

-Miss Zoe