the dead can dance: 2010

December 29, 2010

"On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. "He is much better off without me ... I wouldn't make a good wife for anybody,"... Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale's death Wiles got this picture of death's violence and its composure.

At 10:40 A. M., Patrolman John Morrissey of Traffic C, directing traffic at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, noticed a swirling white scarf floating down from the upper floors of the Empire State. A moment later he heard a crash that sounded like an explosion. He saw a crowd converge in Thirty-third Street. Two hundred feet west of Fifth Avenue, Miss McHale's body landed atop the car. The impact stove in the metal roof and shattered the car's windows. The driver was in a near-by drug store, thereby escaping death or serious injury.

On the observation deck, Detective Frank Murray of the West Thirtieth Street station, found Miss McHale's gray cloth coat, her pocketbook with several dollars and the note, and a make-up kit filled with family pictures. The serenity of McHale's body amidst the crumpled wreckage it caused is astounding. Years later, Andy Warhol appropriated Wiles' photography for a print called Suicide (Fallen Body)."

December 28, 2010

December 23, 2010

December 12, 2010

Books & Sex

Egon Schiele, Liegende Frau Mit Roter Hose Und Stehend (Reclining Woman with Red Pants and standing) 1912.

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck are infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
Roberto Bolaño speaking of Stéphane Mallarmé’s quote The flesh is sad—and I’ve read every book.

Life Without Sex

Robert Heinecken, Cliche Vary/Autoeroticism, 1975.
(Photographic lithograph)
“Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.”
- Henry Louis Mencken

In The Hand of Dante

“Love at first sight. Life after death. We may eventually know if we experience the latter. But how are we ever truly to know if we experience the former? Can the depths of the sea be reached in a breath, without movement? Can the stars wed two souls that have never looked upon them together?

* * * *

Her pantyhose lay on the floor beside the bed. I took them and tossed them on my cheap green vinyl traveling-bag. She knew that I thus had claimed them as mine.

They are in the drawer to my right as I set down these words, sitting here, prepared to do, or to be undone, within whatever remains of this dream that we call time.

All there, in the drawer to my right.

A vial of morphine, a pistol, the false passports that I did not use when I went to Italy to boost the documents from the archives, a lot of money, and the beige carnation of her pantyhose.

I hold this carnation now to my face and inhale the scent of her and the scent of a garden of all that is untold and untellable.

I envision myself dying like this; alone, holding my face like an oxygen mask the bunched, perfumed flower of her pantyhose.”
-Nick Tosches, “In The Hand of Dante”