Not to be outdone by Christy, Greg continues our cavalcade of poop with this "avant-garde" piece by the Shaggs.

Source: YouTube

Um, yeah. I don't really know what to say about this video. Thanks Christy Gurga(?)

Source: YouTube

While reading a review of a Mahler biography in Harper's yesterday, I discovered Mahler had a most fascinating and enchanting wife: Alma Schindler, the "most beautiful girl in Vienna." Interested, I did a little research on her and am presenting a few excerpts here. If these snippets cause you to become as enraptured by her as I, Klimt, Mahler, Gropius and Kokoschka did, there are a lot more photos and audio files of her available via the reference links below.

Alma Maria Mahler-Werfel (born Schindler) (August 31, 1879–December 11, 1964) was a Viennese-born socialite well known in her youth for her beauty and vivacity. She became the wife, successively, of composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, and novelist Franz Werfel, as well as the consort of several other prominent men. Musically active in her teens, she was the composer of at least seventeen songs. In later years her salon became an important feature of the artistic scene, first in Vienna, then in Los Angeles.¹

"Gustav Klimt entered my life as my first great love, but I was an innocent child, totally absorbed in my music and far removed from life in the real world. The more I suffered from this love, the more I sank into my own music, and so my unhappiness became a source of my greatest bliss."

Klimt pursued Alma as far as Italy during a holiday trip. They met secretly, and Alma was willing to swear eternal faithfulness to him. It was on this trip that Klimt stole a first kiss from Alma, the discovery of which led to a serious rift with Carl Moll. Moll discovered the scandalous flirtation and forced Klimt to leave and promise to keep away from Alma in future.²

…

A stormy love affair soon developed between Alma, an attractive and self-confident young woman, and the introverted Zemlinsky. She loved the "small, ugly gnome" and Zemlinsky returned these feelings: "I want you—with every atom of my feeling." Alma allowed herself to be kissed and caressed by him and allowed him every intimacy except the ultimate—thereby almost robbing him of his reason. He, for his part, understood how to awaken Alma's burgeoning sexuality with a passion, which meant she could never forget his "virtuoso hands." The relationship was a roller coaster of feelings, humiliations and torment on the part of Alma, mixed with passionate declarations of love and bizarre diary entries: "Alex—my Alex. I want to be your baptismal font. Pour your abundance into me!"²

…

As early as July 1912, Alma became pregnant by Kokoschka. In October however, she had the pregnancy terminated. In the hospital, he took the first blood-soaked cloth from her and carried it home. "That is my only child, he said, and will always be so." Later, he always carried this old, dried-up piece of cloth with him. Kokoschka never overcame his pain at the loss of their joint child, and made it the topic of numerous drawings.³

Interview with Jimmy Berg (New York)

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Mahler
2. http://www.alma-mahler.at/engl/almas_life/almas_life.html
3. http://www.alma-mahler.at/engl/almas_life/almas_life2.html

Picture from http://www.alma-mahler.at/engl/almas_life/almas_life.html. Audio from http://www.alma-mahler.at/engl/presscorner/soundfiles.html.

In case you missed it, yesterday was National Pigeon Day. There's still time to say a prayer for Cher Ami:

Cher Ami was a homing pigeon owned and flown by the U.S. Army Signal Corps in France during World War I. He helped save the Lost Battalion of the 77th Division in the battle of the Argonne, October 1918. In his last mission, he delivered a message despite having been shot through the breast, being blinded in one eye, covered in blood and having a leg hanging only by a tendon. The bird was awarded the Croix de Guerre for heroic service delivering 12 important messages in Verdun.

Thanks, Dave

Thanks Christy Gurga!

Source: YouTube

I used to be an internet quiz junky, and in 2006 I took OkCupid's Political Quiz. I was a socialist (just right of Hillary Clinton's wisdom tooth). I had forgotten all about this political quiz and my love of stupid internet quizzes until tonight, when I rediscovered it while in the process of moving some old MySpace posts to this blog.

Since it's been just over two years and I believe I've become more conservative since I moved to New York, I decided to take the quiz again and see how I'd fare:

You are a Social Liberal (70% permissive) and an… Economic Liberal (18% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

Huh. Not much has changed—I'm two percent more socially liberal and exactly the same when it comes to the economy. I guess I really don't change.

Dawn in New York has
four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.

Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.

Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.

Those who go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.

The light is buried under chains and noises
in the impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.

—Federico García Lorca

Thanks for reading this to me in Spanish, Greg.

My life wouldn't be complete without Alphabeat. Thanks Christy Gurga!

Source: YouTube

From "The Fall of Conservatism: Have the Republicans run out of ideas?" by George Packer. The New Yorker. 26 May 2008.

The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history. Having served as Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon had lost the Presidency by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and had been humiliated in a 1962 bid for the California governorship. But he saw that he could propel himself back to power on the strength of a new feeling among Americans who, appalled by the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young, and the insults to national pride in Vietnam, were ready to blame it all on the liberalism of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Right-wing populism was bubbling up from below; it needed to be guided by a leader who understood its resentments because he felt them, too.

“From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority,” Buchanan told me recently, sitting in the library of his Greek-revival house in McLean, Virginia, on a secluded lane bordering the fenced grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency. “What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.’s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives—what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South.” Buchanan grew up in Washington, D.C., among the first group—men like his father, an accountant and a father of nine, who had supported Roosevelt but also revered Joseph McCarthy. The Southerners were the kind of men whom Nixon whipped into a frenzy one night in the fall of 1966, at the Wade Hampton Hotel, in Columbia, South Carolina. Nixon, who was then a partner in a New York law firm, had travelled there with Buchanan on behalf of Republican congressional candidates. Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, “burned the paint off the walls.” As they left the hotel, Nixon said, “This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.”

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Plus sa vie est infâme, plus l'omme y tient; elle est alors une protestation, une vengeance de tous les instants.

—Honoré de Balzac

(The more contemptible his life, the more a man clings to it; it thus becomes a protest, a retribution for every moment.)