October 07, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson, October 06, 2022

Trump’s continuing insistence that he won the 2020 election, and the Republican Party’s embrace of that lie despite the fact that Biden won by more than 7 million votes in the popular vote and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, says that they will never again consider the election of a Democrat legitimate.

“If you care about democracy and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand—we all have to understand—that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney said.

… the next two elections will be determinative about which way the country is going… democracy or authoritarianism… conservatives, don’t believe in democracy, haven’t believed in democracy for some time now… why?… because conservatism in this country is presently focused on the preservation of the power of the mostly white patriarchy and they can’t preserve their power if elections are free and fair… they are in desperate survival mode where any means justifies the end… thus, scandals like those of Herschel Walker, which would have taken down any politician just 10 years ago are no longer disqualifying… there is an absolute abasement in this desperation… the trouble is, it may prevail…

Want Lipstick That Actually Lasts? Rouge Dior Forever is the Answer

… i have a deep love of the feminine and what is more feminine than lipstick, or more important to lipstick than it be lasting?…

  1. Who should use it? Anyone who wants intense, pigment-rich matte lipstick that actually stays where it’s supposed to – there are no smears, smudges or fading here
  1. How long until I love it? Probably 16 hours after you first put it on, as one application promises to last that long
  2. How planet-/people-friendly is it? As part of Dior Beauty’s Responsible Formulation Charter, the brand aims to source all ingredients in the most socially and environmentally responsible way possible
  3. How do I use it? Make sure your lips are primed and moisturised with a good balm, then add a slick of Rouge Dior Forever and leave to dry for three minutes

Mushrooms: Cellist Zoe Keating Brings to Life Sylvia Plath’s Poem About the Tenacity of the Creative Spirit

They were the first to colonize the Earth. They will inherit it long after we are gone as a species. And when we go as individuals, it is they who return our borrowed stardust to the universe, feasting on our mortal flesh to turn it into oak and blackbird, grass and grasshopper. Fungi are the mightiest kingdom of life, and the least understood by our science, and the most everlasting. Without them, this planet would not be a world. Like everything vast and various, they shimmer with metaphors for life itself.

Viruses Are More Like Cone Snails Than Hijackers

… as i read this article, there is this growing sense of interconnectedness… that all things are connected to all other things and that the universe can only be understood as an incredibly wondrous tapestry of matter and energy and a byproduct, life… we can’t understand the parts without some comprehension of the whole… and we can never think that anything can be understood in isolation…

Viruses, like cone snails, evolve to be more like what sustains them. It is an uncomfortable form of relatedness, this predatory metabolic convergence, but it cannot be denied that it generates amazing patterns of likeness across biological kingdoms without everything having to be descended from the same line of direct genetic inheritance.

Even if something has evolved to get away from its mimic, it holds the imprint of that entity’s influence in its difference, like a shadow.

Immersing Yourself in the Works of Gustav Klimt #art #gustav-klimt #exhibitions

In the unlikely setting of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in Manhattan, seeping into the ceilings, floors, walls, and recesses of the hall, projections of Gustav Klimt’s paintings are now set on an hour-long loop. Built between 1909 and 1912, the bank’s interior retains many of its original decorative elements, which include elegant glass panels, patterned limestone carvings, and brass detailing. Contrary to what its facade seems to convey about what happens inside — mysterious and important affairs of the economy and the state — people inside are huddled and seated in clusters on the ground and on chairs in darkness, hushed and sedated by a carousing Johann Strauss waltz.

Wrightwood 659 Hosts Exhibitions on the “First Homosexuals” and Michiko Itatani

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Roberto Montenegro, “Retrato de un anticuario o Retrato de Chucho Reyes y autorretrato” (detail) (1926), oil on canvas, 102.5 x 102.5 cm, Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico

The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930 starts with the year 1869, when the word “homosexual” was first coined in Europe, inaugurating the idea of same-sex desire as the basis for a new identity category. More than 100 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and film clips from public and private collections around the world are on view, including works that have never before been allowed to travel outside their respective countries. This groundbreaking exhibition is the first multi-medium survey of early, determinedly queer art that explored what the “first homosexuals” understood themselves to be — and how the dominant culture, in turn, understood them. This is part one of a two-part exhibition (the second is planned for 2025 and will feature 250 masterworks) developed by a team of 23 international scholars led by distinguished art historian Jonathan D. Katz with associate curator Johnny Willis.

French author Annie Ernaux has won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature

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Annie Ernaux is the author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, winner of the Prix Renaudot for _A Man’s Place_, and of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work, and recently the winner of the International Strega Prize and the French-American Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for The Years.

Annie Ernaux on the “Infinite Lack” in Our Search for Love

Anyway, what does this sign really mean, the phone call from the Latin Quarter? That he’s thinking of me? But in what way? There’s nothing more impossible to imagine than the desire, the emotion, of the Other. And yet, only that is beautiful. All I dream of is this perfection, without yet being sure of attaining it—of being the “last woman,” the one who erases all the others, with her attentiveness, her skilled knowledge of his body: the “sublime affair.”

10-04-2022

HCR this morning mostly about the mounting trouble for various actors on the far right and the challenge to democracy… the noose closing around 45’s neck and the violence he seeks to sponsor to distract and prevent… it is a race to see if he becomes president before he is jailed, in which case he would never be jailed… the Oath Keepers go on trial… Moore v Harper was heard by SCOTUS… the conservative judges are flirting with giving states absolute rights to determine elections… the so called “independent state legislature” doctrine is being determined… 45 has been definitively tied to withholding documents from the government by a witness… Herschel Walker continues to melt down…

In an interview tonight, Trump accused the FBI or the archivists from the National Archives and Records Administration of planting or removing documents in order to frame him, saying that NARA is “largely radical-left run.”

… read with interest Zeba Blay’s review of Blonde… her main complaint is that it fetishize Monroe’s pain to no good purpose and that the movie was boring… H agreed with that assessment… i did not… i thought it effectively showed the appalling behavior of patriarchal males while not pandering to that behavior with highly erotic (to most people) scenes… to the extent that nudity and sex were in the film, and there was lots of both, it wasn’t very titillating, at least not to me… still, one needs to pay attention to women on the subject because they know things men will never know about being a woman in a patriarchal society…

Sidelined No More: Reading List of Fiercely Political Women… so many books one could read… so little time… the article makes an extensive argument that women still are not taken seriously when they write about politics seriously and offers up a selection of books by women authors past and present…

Among the Washington Post’s columnists, who mostly cover politics, 57 are men and 26 are women. In the last two months, the New York Times’s opinion pages published 77 political analyses by men and only 29 by women. Half of those women-authored pieces had a male co-author.

Male domination of writing on politics in America is most extreme in the conservative press. In the National Review, 90% of the recent political analyses were by men, and the quarterly Claremont Review of Books—which prides itself on being the intellectual heart of the American right—has gone two and a half entire years without publishing a single feature essay written by a woman.

The problem isn’t, or isn’t only, a moral one. Readers are denied something by this exclusion. Sometimes women have an especially intimate way of writing about politics that’s both close-up—examining the psychology and the erotics of power—and carries an interesting objectivity and distance, thanks, perhaps, to their own history of being distanced from the political sphere.

… relative to HCR’s post above is J. Michael Luttig’s piece in The Atlantic arguing that the “Independent State Legislature” theory is bunk…

If the Court concludes that there is such a doctrine, it would confer on state legislatures plenary, exclusive, and judicially unreviewable power both to redraw congressional districts for federal elections and to appoint state electors who quadrennially cast the votes for president and vice president on behalf of the voters of the states. It would mean that the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts by state legislatures would not be reviewable by the state courts—including the states’ highest court—under their state constitutions.

That as many as six justices on the Supreme Court have flirted with the independent-state-legislature theory over the past 20 years is baffling. There is literally no support in the Constitution, the pre-ratification debates, or the history from the time of our nation’s founding or the Constitution’s framing for a theory of an independent state legislature that would foreclose state judicial review of state legislatures’ redistricting decisions.

The state supreme court’s decision under the North Carolina constitution is conclusive under that constitution, and it is only reviewable by the federal courts and the Supreme Court of the United States thereafter for a determination of whether that decision violates the federal Constitution.

All of which goes to confirm that the Constitution neither contemplates nor permits federal constitutional commandeering of the states’ constitutions and their judicial processes. Rather, it contemplates and provides only for federal judicial review of the state supreme courts’ state constitutional decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court for consistency with the United States Constitution.

… we will know next summer how bad the current iteration of SCOTUS is… there is, unfortunately, reason to be concerned…

Beware the cloven hooved beast…

From yesterday’s walk…

Madonna and child.

Gay pride decorations on Block Island, RI, USA.

Shadow self with rock halo…

My Niece Shaina… if you live near or visit the Hudson Valley find your way to her restaurant… you won’t regret!

Clouds illusions…

A quick dinner, part recipe, part improvised: jalapeño sausage, fennel bulb and apple. The recipe called for sweet Italian sausage, fennel and orange. I rather liked my version.

🍸 olive, up close and personal.

Waiting to board the ferry. Two weeks on Block Island here we come!

Morning sun and shadow…

Good morning!

I am in awe of Nick Cave…

“What is the point of life?"

We reach out and find each other in the common darkness. By doing so we triumph over our collective and personal loss. Through kindness we slant, shockingly and miraculously, toward meaning.

“Sacred” geometry in the wild…

Good morning!

In the one term Trump’s three justices have… decimated the legal landscape we have lived under for generations, slashing power from the federal government, where Congress represents the majority, and returning it to states, where a Republican minority can impose its will.

September 6, 2022 - by Heather Cox Richardson

Just tonight we learned that FBI agents found a document detailing the military defenses of a foreign government, including its nuclear capabilities, during last month’s search of Mar-a-Lago.

“Mandala” series:

A new series is starting to establish itself… i call them modern mandalas, for lack of a better title. Maybe that will evolve. The idea is to channel spiritual circular diagrams using circular objects/stains found on the street and sidewalk.

Season one, episode one, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

Constellation, not sequencing, carries truth.

Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

Have to say, really enjoying Vero so far… thanks @maique. Anyone know what their plans for monitization are? No adds I know. Subscriptions?

Putting your money where your mouth isn’t?…

… from Required Reading on Hyperallergic…

… from the Official Development Assistance By Regime Context (2010-2019) report…