inkbluesky

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No one even looks at these little photography/Photoshop experiments, but I keep putting them up because I like them. If I was running a commercial blog I guess it would behove me to at least try and please most visitors most of the time, but this isn’t a commercial blog. Anyway the photo was originally in color and I used the paper tone filter in Nik Color Effects to give it a midnight effect.

From a book review, The Private Lives of the Impressionists  by Sue Roe 

Manet was an elegant, handsome, dandified boulevardier whose father the judge naturally kept a mistress but would not permit his son to marry his own life-long mistress. When a son was born to Manet and Suzanne he had to be given a neutral surname. Manet also had an affair with the demi-mondaine Méry Laurent, the maîtresse en titre of the American dentist Thomas Evans who had once smuggled the Empress Eugénie out of danger in Paris to the safety of England. Manet died of tertiary syphilis but not before he had had a gangrenous leg amputated in his own house.

His brother Eugène married Berthe Morisot. Sisley had his parental allowance stopped when he moved into his mistress’s flat. Pissarro set up house with one of his mother’s maids, and had several children by her, but was not allowed to marry her. Monet was, for a time, kept moderately solvent by his principal patron Ernest Hoschedé. He also conducted a long affair with Hoschedé’s wife, and there are doubts about the paternity of the last Hoschedé child. Hoschedé went bankrupt, thus effectively ruining Monet whose wife died leaving him free to marry Alice Hoschedé, but he could not do so till Hoschedé died.

Only Degas seems not to have had a typically Bohemian personal life, seeing women only as the vital ingredients of his paintings, as models but not as companions: “What would I want a wife for? Imagine someone who at the end of a gruelling day in the studio said ‘that’s a nice painting dear’.”

Cézanne also was always under threat of losing the paternal allowance, and he too lived in secret with Hortense and their son marrying only after the death of his uncomprehending father.

There are occasional charming serendipities. Bazille, like Berlioz, was a continually failing medical student whose letters to his distraught father, while not as literate as those of Berlioz, offer similar excuses. We know that Manet’s Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe caused scandals but the worst scandal was his painting of the shooting of the Emperor of Mexico, Maximillian. So great was the political, as opposed to sexual, outrage that the censor ordered the picture to be confiscated and had it torn into three pieces. That we can still see this wonderful painting is due to Degas, who not only salvaged it, but painstakingly put it back together.

I’m not sure of the deep seeded psychological reasons, but for the last couple of years I’ve wondered if there isn’t some deal that the creative psyche makes i wth the universe. The universe says that yes you can be talented, so talented that you influence art for centuries, but in return your personal life or even your personality will be screwy, if not screwed up. Though as a southerner I look around and see quite a few people that have nothing like earth shattering talent whose lives are  not exactly a shining example to all. So maybe when it comes to the lives and personal demons of artists they are no more cursed then the average person, only that the lives of the gifted are under more scrutiny then everyone else. One thing I just can’t comprehend is the influence these great artists fathers had over their personal lives. Wonder why Freud focused on women with all the paternal obsession going on in the late 19th century.

Its turned into a visual arts posts, Picture History. This photo of president Martin Van Buren is just funny, a few more inches and he could have achieved flight with those mutton chop sideburns. A whole portfolio of dignified photos of American Indians.

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One of rare instances where someone became famous in a very short time and it was based on talent rather then wealth or getting thrown out of a succession of night clubs. If you can handle the violence the movie that really started the buzz for M’s Miller, Layer Cake (2004). I thought it was excellent and Daniel Craig was charming and tough enough in Cake that he was probably chosen to be the new Bond based on his performance.

Even though you can still go out and buy a pizza and some cheap beer, yesterday America’s freedoms took a cheap right hook to the jaw. There are plenty of good news reports and blog posts out there so I thought I’d post a brief story off the beaten track that explains some of the basics of what happened, Tortured Justice 

“This provision would perpetuate the indefinite detention of hundreds of individuals against whom the government has brought no charges and presented no evidence, without any recourse to justice whatsoever,” Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy declared at the start of Wednesday’s Senate debate. “This is un-American. It is unconstitutional and it is contrary to American interests.” Congressional critics argued that, coupled with an expanded definition of “enemy combatant,” the legislation would permit the government to indefinitely imprison any non-citizen – including a long-time resident of the United States who holds a green card — without review by the courts

If you have the time this is also well worth a read, Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 - 2006) by Molly Ivins

 With a smug stroke of his pen, President Bush is set to wipe out a safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta.

I’ve been through the mid-west though the closest that I have lived there is west Tennessee. So in some ways it is still a little bit of a mystery. Garrison Keillor explains some things about his current corner of the mid-west in this interview, THE MIDWESTERNER’S ALMANAC: GARRISON KEILLOR (UNABRIDGED)

Stop Smiling:  Schoolteachers will always be thankful for Minnesota, which produced the stapler, Scotch tape and F. Scott Fitzgerald. What must your home state do to assure a continued excellence in education and a thriving interest in the humanities?

Garrison Keillor:  We are saddled with a charming idiot of a governor and a fleet of assistant idiots in the legislature who are killing education in this state, simply slicing its throat. We are on our way to becoming the Mississippi of the North. A high school teacher told me the other day that 10 years ago, his largest class was 29 students. Now his smallest is 34, of whom 8 have special needs and for whom he must draw up individual lesson plans. The starting pay for a teacher — once you subtract taxes, Social Security and health plan payments — is around $14,000 a year. This is a scandal. The state is in the hands of rednecks who want to bring back capital punishment and kill off public education. If there is excellence in education, it’s no thanks to Republicans.

Garrison has a reputation for his wit, with this piece he may also get a reputation for being blunt and to the point.

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“Damaged Goods, One Moment of Ecstasy - A Lifetime of Sorrow” vintage STD advertisements. Shocking , just shocking.

Do you stay up at night, fingers stained with nicotine, empty cans of Redbull littering the floor and fingernails bitten down to the nub wondering what they’re reading down at the NSA besides those torrid e-mail exchanges between you and your latest crush? Wonder no more, NSA Bibliographies

 This page contains indexes of four periodicals published by the National Security Agency, plus a listing of publications from the NSA’s Center for Cryptologic History. These indexes haven’t been publicly released until now, and many of the Cryptologic History publications weren’t previously known to the public. Researcher Michael Ravnitzky has discovered a huge cache of information about the NSA, intelligence, and cryptography

Just a list of some of my favorite titles:

The BS Attitudes: How Things Work in Bureaucracies

Influence of U.S. Cryptologic Organizations on the Digital Computer Industry

Meteor Burst Communications: An Ignored Phenomenon?

NSA in the Cyberpunk Future

Translating by the Seat of Your Pants

Cranks, Nuts, and Screwballs - Just a guess, this one is about Bill O’Reilly, Dick Cheney, or Mel Gibson.

Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages 

I’m pissed now, those conversations between me and that Martian were strickly confidential.

This last article is encoded so only the readers of inkbluesky can read it, or maybe not - Lake Punawai, Hualalai Resort, the Big Island, Hawaii 

 The lake is built on the “living machines” principle. Living machines are contained, manmade ecosystems made up of thousands of species of living organisms specifically chosen to perform certain functions. A good, working living machine, like Lake Punawai, digests sediments, manages nutrients, and uses little energy—it is an example of phytoremediation, the treatment of environmental problems using plants.

It seems that in the southeast city planners and developers have done a terrible job of replacing wetlands and creating artificial lakes so hopefully some of this knowledge will spread out that way.

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I might be wrong, but when people think of the environment for the most part they seem to think of saving our wetlands or endangered species. There are other environmental problems and they affect our urban environments and as usual those problems have the biggest impact on people that cannot afford to do something about it, move away or stop the degradation of their environment in the first place, Harlem’s Hazards, A ‘toxic tour’ gave me an up-close look at environmental racism 

When people in positions of power intentionally build something that’s dangerous to the environment and the health of residents in a low-income and minority neighborhood, that’s environmental racism, Cadore told us. “We all have prejudices,” she said. “But once you attach power to your prejudice, it becomes racism.”

One place you can see the effects of environmental racism is in Harlem, a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood in Manhattan.

Now, there are beauties in Harlem that mustn’t be overlooked-the Apollo Theater, historic homes and countless other landmarks. Even on the tour, Cadore pointed out treasures like the Madame Alexander Doll Factory and the abandoned piers on the Hudson River that are being turned into Harlem’s first waterfront park.

But there are also several hazardous sites in Harlem within 10 blocks of each other. WE ACT’s full “Toxics and Treasures Tour” shows participants 15 sites above 96th Street.

The Right to Clean Air

Cadore said that there’s a myth that people of color don’t care about the environment. But they just live in a different environment, she said-not one with lots of trees and bald eagles, but an urban one where they live, work and breathe.

She encouraged us to pay attention to what’s put in our environment, and to fight against environmental racism. “It’s a right, not a privilege, to breathe clean air,” she said.

We took an abbreviated tour of the West Harlem sites to see for ourselves how environmental racism affected the community.

Odd how a sewer in Harlem was built to handle the waste from half of Manhattan and part of the Bronx, especially when doing so required special engineering to handle pumping sewerage up hill. Wonder how Westside residents off Central Park would have felt about a large sewer plant built there. Harlem residents at the grassroots have had some success, they organized and stopped a garbage transfer station from reopening in 2002.