Hugh MacDiarmid: A Portrait by Margaret Tait (1964)

The Albertans - Megan OFFICIAL VIDEO ('New Age' available 03/08/11)

Norman Mailer's Lego City Of The Future

"If we are to avoid a megalopolis five hundred miles long, a city
without shape or exit, a nightmare of ranch houses, highways, suburbs
and industrial sludge," he wrote in a 1964 essay in Architectural Forum,
"then there is only one solution: the cities must climb, they must not
spread, they must build up, not by increments, but by leaps, up and up,
up to the heavens."

Spring Rain: Okwui Enwezor on Ai Weiwei and Sharjah Biennial

The universal cries of liberation heard on the streets of Cairo, Tunis,
Benghazi, Damascus, Sanaa, and elsewhere, have in no small measure
awakened the global art world to the intricacies of the transitional
politics of which it had studiously remained oblivious. These are
interesting times, in which artists, curators, and institutions may be
compelled to choose sides. The question is, Which side? To my mind, the
several petitions that have been circulated in the past months have
failed in one striking respect—namely, their inability to engage the
larger complexities of the geopolitics of art, much of which they seek
to smooth away. If the capacity for critique and defense of the ideals
of free thought is to remain the bedrock of all serious art, then we
must submit statements proffered on behalf of art themselves to
scrutiny. The paradox is that while the long Arab Spring continues
apace, setting off tremors that have terrified even China, something in
the opportunistic response of the art world to recent events feels
decidedly autumnal....

Erupción Volcán Puyehue

from Michael Szpakowski

this lovely Royal Canadian Air Force plate--the likes of which I dined off of at Father-son banquets in the 60's--& much more at Make It Old's Photostream

Pétroleuse Press

“For most Americans, the image of the pétroleuse setting
buildings and homes ablaze (either to delay the invasion of troops or
simply to gratify her ”love of riot”) confirmed the connection between
feminist agitation, political revolution, economic conflict, and
cultural catastrophe. “Pale, frenzied, … [and] fierce,” as a poet in
Harper’s Weekly described them, the pétroleuses presented a nightmarish
specter of women aggressively repudiating bourgeois norms of womanhood.
Many witnesses (and subsequent commentators) identified the arsonists as
prostitutes, morally dizzied by their distance from domestic life,
hystericized by their all-too-public vocation and their abandonment to
their bodies. Most commentators did not distinguish the pétroleuses from
other women of the [Paris] Commune, all of whom they saw as rowdy,
reckless affronts to nature. Given over to unfeminine theorizing and
public speaking, these woman formed clubs where they urged the
legalization of divorce and women’s sexual independence. (As historians
have subsequently detailed, they also smoked pipes, toted pistols, and
wore revolutionary garb, delighting audiences, male and female, who
thronged the clubs to see them.) These feminists led marches and fought
at the barricades. During the Bloody Week, they reportedly not only set
fire to homes and civic buildings but also plundered the city, gave
enemy soldiers poisoned wine, and murdered officers after they had
surrendered – atrocities recounted in dozens of histories, short
stories, novels, poems, and plays about the Paris Commune though the
turn of the century.”

- D.A. Zimmerman, Panic!: Markets, Crises, & Crowds in American Fiction (2006)

Les Pétroleuses were the sex-workers, witches, and lady proles of the
Paris Commune whose ‘love of riot’ burnt Paris to the ground.

Pétroleuse Press is based in Brooklyn.