The Daily Muse

“Wicked” came to the Landmark this week for 24 performances. See it — it’s sold out (Biggie K got tickets early), but there’s a daily ticket lottery. Awe-inspiring high-tech stage magic at its best, union all the way. Very challenging follow-spot work…

Above pics are from Richmond.com. More shots of the load-in, and some video.

slideshow at Slate (click image to advance to next slide)

“A year or so after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859), English ladies started cutting up photos of their friends and relations and pasting bits and pieces of them (particularly their heads) into alien landscapes and onto foreign bodies. Was it just a new pastime, like staging parties or playing the piano–yet another way for Victorian women to show off their class and their wits? Or was it more?

To judge from an exhibition called “Playing With Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage,” organized by Elizabeth Siegel for the Art Institute of Chicago and now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the answer is: It was more.”

Oskar Kokoschka: Self-Portrait with Doll (1921)

From BD’s link, Mannequins in the Marketplace:

“Lester Gaba, the inventor of the modern realistic mannequin, became involved emotionally with one of his mannequins, Cynthia. He took her in taxis to parties, to the opera, and even to the Stork Club.”

This calls to mind Oskar Kokoschka’s obsession with Alma Mahler, the great composer’s widow, former lover of Klimt, and the most desirable woman in Vienna. OK was painting her portrait in 1911 when he suddenly rushed to embrace her, exclaiming, “I must have you!” They had a stormy 3-year affair, then he went off to be wounded in WW I.

from Bonnie Roos – Oskar Kokoschka’s Sex Toy: The Women and the Doll Who Conceived the Artist (2005):

“Upon returning home from World War I, Oskar Kokoschka found that his lover, Alma Mahler, had married another man. In response, he commissioned the creation of a life-size doll to match Mahler’s exact proportions. Kokoschka provoked rumor and scandal as he escorted his doll to the opera, held parties in its honor, and hired a maid to dress and service it. This provocative public performance inspired rampant speculation about what else, exactly, Kokoschka did with the doll.

The doll met its “unnatural” demise when one of Kokoschka’s parties got out of hand. Police questioned Kokoschka in the morning about a murder; a beheaded and bloody body was reportedly seen outside his home. Evidently it was the naked, wine-splattered doll, which had somehow lost its head during the revelries of the previous evening. This was the story that Kokoschka and his critics, both then and now, loved to tell, embellishing racy details, speaking to fetishism, sex dolls, pranks, and occasional misogyny. “

Cultural figure Alma Mahler
Alma Mahler in the works of Kokoschka

NYT: Nude window display turns heads at NY gallery

“The truth is, even the cops like looking at naked people.”

A strangely SLOW sport. But hot.

For O3: a 1000-pixil desert scene with a gathering monsoon

© 2003 by corndoggie

Feb. 6, 2010


same tree on E. Seminary, Oct. 27, 2009