Rather than fixating on the clothing or obsessing over the figure, the French fashion photographer Marwane Pallas places a special emphasis on the external objects within the frame. Props within the scene that would normally serve a supporting role are given equivalent degrees of attention to the standard “centerpieces” of the fashion photos.
You can see much more of Marwane Pallas’s work, and read more at The Creators Project, Marwane Pallas’s website, or instagram.
A new profile on Steve Bannon published yesterday by New York Magazine reveals that the White House Chief Strategist and former executive chair of Breitbart News was gifted his own version of Jacques-Louis David’s famous portrait, The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries (1812), by British Politician and known Trump supporter, Nigel Farage.
David painted two versions of this famed neoclassical painting. One currently hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the other is at Versailles. The hunt is now on to find an image of Bannon’s version. Green took to Twitter to call onWashington Post reporter and CNN contributor David Fahrenthold to help him find a copy of this masterpiece. Fahrenthold posted a tweet challenging his 434,000 followers to find the painting and Green offered a free copy of his new book, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. News of Bannon’s portrait is spreading like wildfire across Twitter, with imaginative Photoshopped versions coming in every hour.
Via The Creators Project.
Today sees a need to hunt for a refrigerator, to replace my beloved early 1950s Philco, which is far from dead, but the latch is failing, and I’ve recently had to turn it up to ‘2’, which used to freeze everything solid. Ours is one of the odd ones, with the latch on the right, opening to the left. Almost all the Philcos had their latches on the left, unless it was the marvelous V version, which opened from either side.
I won’t be able to part with it; I’ll set it up in my studio as art supply storage. As it’s metal, the rats will leave it be. All the inside racks and such are a translucent aqua blue, kinda spectacular. So, off to find a small, absolutely no frills fridge, I’m hoping to be able to find one without a freezer, as we have a late 1940s Zenith chest freezer which is unbelievably huge.
From rq: You can find this in the middle of the Courland forest on the west coast of Latvia – formerly the west coast of the USSR. It’s now half radio astronomy research centre and half military site, but it’s in the middle of an abandoned former top secret military town. One of the largest such satellite dishes in Europe of its time. About a half-k to the left is the Baltic Sea. Click for full size!
© rq, all rights reserved.
:D Click for full size.
© C. Ford.
Our solitary young lady was back again. Click for full size.
© C. Ford.
ESPN has been producing a body issue since 2009. I don’t care for sports, but it’s always nice looking at happy naked people, and the photography is spectacular, and all kinds of body types grace the issues. On the cover of this years issue is a woman who happens to be an amputee. There are no naughty bits on view, as that would be too much for the prudery of Americans. Apparently, some conservatives have just now figured this out, and are most outraged.
ESPN’s latest controversy has nothing to do with politics or sports performance. The sports network is now resorting to nudity for magazine sales and internet clicks to lead the world in entertainment. ESPN magazine’s “The Body Issue” presents 23 male and female athletes not only out of uniform but completely out of clothing. If your business is flagging, as ESPN’s is, just resort to the lowest common denominator.
Now resorting? They’ve been doing this 8 years. Where was your outrage eight years ago? Obviously, ESPN is not doing this to shore up flagging business.
Putting the anti-Trump and LGBT agendas aside for the time being, ESPN’s website is promoting the athletes-turned-exhibitionists in shocking athletic poses. Each is portrayed taking athletic stances or actions corresponding to their respective sport. Rear ends are completely exposed in several photos. Men and women hide their fronts, and women cover their breasts with their hands or arms. Very little is left to the imagination.
Oh my oh my. There is nothing in the least bit shocking about their poses. They are fantastic, and I give them all the credit in the world for pulling off what has to be a difficult shoot, often outdoors, in mid-athletics while having to keep the naughty bits hidden. All kudos to the photographers, too, for an incredible job. Goodness, butts! Whatever will we do, having been exposed to some rather magnificent arses? Me, I’ll enjoy them. Actually, a fair amount is left to the imagination, and I expect that’s more of a problem for you fuckwits.
ESPN.com posted a photo and cutline about the nudity. ESPNW is displaying stories and videos on some of the participating nudists.
Oh the drama! They aren’t nudists, you idiot. Are you a nudist because you take off your clothing to bathe, assuming you do so? Are you a nudist if you remove your clothing to make love to your partner, assuming you do? No. Taking your clothes off for a photo shoot doesn’t make anyone a nudist. I’m more of a nudist than any of the people featured over the last eight years, I often don’t bother dressing, especially if I’m going to be painting. It’s easier washing paint off skin than clothing. Even that doesn’t make me a nudist, though.
This isn’t ESPN magazine’s first body issue; it’s the ninth. It seems this crass outfit is intent on shocking people and distracting sports’ fans attention away actual sports. Now when families attend a sporting event, their children may remark about the athlete that actually has his clothes on.
Oh, how nice of you to notice. Now, now, don’t be projecting your shock all over the place, it isn’t polite. It doesn’t shock me in the slightest. I can appreciate bodies just fine. I hardly see how this directs peoples’ attention away from sports. It’s not as though most athletic uniforms are made for modesty. The children! Of course. Could it get more boring or stupid? So, a child might make a remark about an athlete with their clothing on. And?
I encourage all parents with children in the home to adjust their computer filters by adding ESPN.com and espn.com/espnw/ to their blocked lists to protect them from this.
ESPN postures itself as culturally enlightening, but the truth is this morally bankrupt media organization is contaminating our culture and taking it downward.
Hahahahahaha. Do fuck off. Not that I don’t have suspicions about copies of ESPN’s body issues being secreted someplace in your abode sir, most likely the lavatory. After all, you can’t get all properly outraged without a lengthy and minute examination of all those delicious bodies, right?
Link.
Fuel Rats. Eeeeeeeeeeeee. And a dread elder god of my very own. Many thanks to Marcus. Click for full size.
© C. Ford.
An assistant prepares ciboria of hosts for Communion before Pope Francis’s celebration of Mass marking the feast of Pentecost in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican June 4. ( Credit: Paul Haring/CNS.)
Pope Frank has ruled that gluten-free hosts are out of the question. Low gluten is okay, though. A call for eucharist oversight has been added, apparently there’s some distress about the wide availability of hosts, why you can even get them on the internets! *gasp*
Because bread and wine for the Eucharist are no longer supplied just by religious communities, but “are also sold in supermarkets and other stores and even over the internet,” bishops should set up guidelines, an oversight body and/or even a form of certification to help “remove any doubt about the validity of the matter for the Eucharist,” the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments said.
You really have to love the absolute silliness of the whole transubstantiation business. It’s so wonderfully contradictory, and well, just absurd. Here’s a bit of it:
The letter also reiterated norms already in place regarding Eucharistic matter:
– “The bread used in the celebration of the most holy Eucharistic sacrifice must be unleavened, purely of wheat, and recently made so that there is no danger of decomposition.”
I would have thought that Jesus, being a god and all, wouldn’t be subject to decomposition.
– Bread made from another substance, even grain or mixed with another substance so different from wheat that it would not commonly be considered wheat bread, “does not constitute valid matter.”
– The introduction of any other substances, “such as fruit or sugar or honey, into the bread for confecting the Eucharist,” it said, “is a grave abuse.”
Why? A tiny sliver of a pleasurable sensation would be that mortal [as in sin] in nature? Sugar is inimical to Jesus? Hmmm. So, Jehovah can be defeated with iron, or a chariot, if you have one handy, and Jesus can be handled with a liberal application of sugar, fruit, or honey. Good to know.
– Low-gluten hosts are valid matter for people who, “for varying and grave reasons, cannot consume bread made in the usual manner,” provided the hosts “contain a sufficient amount of gluten to obtain the confection of bread without the addition of foreign materials and without the use of procedures that would alter the nature of bread.”
– Completely gluten-free hosts continue to be “invalid matter for the celebration of the Eucharist.”
Who would have thought Jesus to be so darn complex?
– Eucharistic matter made with genetically modified organisms can be considered valid matter.
I think I’d like some details here.
The U.S. bishops’ Committee on Divine Worship has said Catholics who cannot receive Communion wafers at all, even under the species of low-gluten hosts, “may receive Holy Communion under the species of wine only.” The church teaches that “under either species of bread or wine, the whole Christ is received,” it said.
There, the whole matter of baked Jesus is now settled.
Steven Mnuchin testifies before a Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing on his nomination to be Treasury secretary in Washington, U.S., January 19, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts.
The Trump administration is not considering a plan to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans in order to pay for tax breaks for the middle class, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said on Sunday.
Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Mnuchin said the administration plans to release its tax plan in early September and is aiming for a vote on Congress on it by the end of this year.
Gee, I am so not surprised. Is anyone surprised that filthy rich assholes are not planning to pay one cent more than they are forced to do? I am seriously surprised than anyone might so much as surmise that the regime would consider raising taxes on the rich. Guillotines keep intruding on my thoughts whenever they center on the Regime show…
Via Raw Story.
Julie Anand and Damon Sauer, “Calibration Mark AD48 with Satellites,” from Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks (courtesy the artists).
Strange colossal shapes dot the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, x-shaped relics of a once top-secret Cold War spying project. Known as the Corona program, the surveillance initiative by the CIA and US Air Force involved using satellites to take aerial photographs of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. The cameras on these satellites were calibrated with concrete crosses 60 feet in diameter. Their exposed 70mm film was later jettisoned in space, the parachuting capsules caught in mid-air by plane. The calibration markers helped assure that the film was in focus, and that there was a landscape measure to accurately assess the size of pictured objects.
Approximately 256 of these markers were placed on a 16-square-mile grid in Arizona, spaced a mile apart. Long after Corona’s end and its declassification in 1995, around 100 remain. Phoenix-based artists Julie Anand and Damon Sauer have spent three years tracking them down for a project called Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks.
You can read all about this, and see more at Hyperallergic.