Blondínky

Quote of the Week.
“Hirst will go down in history as peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth.”
—-“Spot On,” Peter Schjeldahl. New Yorker, January 23, 2012.

Quote of the Week.
“Any flights would be taken business class, since Roger thought that the whole point of having money, if it had to be summed up in a single point, which it couldn’t, but if you had to, the whole point of having a bit of money was not to have to fly scum class.”
—“Expectations,” John Lanchester, New Yorker, January 9, 2012.

I loved every perfect sentence of this short story so much I read it again a few days later. EVEN THOUGH I was profoundly deflated by the ending. Then I did a little research and lo, there’s an entire novel coming forth!

The wife is an especially revolting character. A piece of Damien Hirst “art” makes an appearance, though not the one shown above.

Also Now Scientifically Proven: I Am Indeed a Major Priss.
I went to a gun range Friday with a couple of dear extended-family members, the male half a CCW certification teacher. The wife half forewarned me: It’s going to be really noisy and unsettling, just FYI! The first shot I ever fired in my life was with her pistol and I actually hit the paper. But it completely freaked me out & my immediate reaction was, “Ohhhhhkay. I’m done.” But they had paid for an hour, so there I was, learning how to load, aim, fire, empty, etc. After that I had trouble hitting anything at all because when I tried to line up the sight I could see how badly my hands were shaking. My second piece was the Walther PPK, a.k.a. the James Bond gun, and I did a little better on this, as shown above. I think there was a third gun, but really it’s all a blur; for the rest of the day all I could hear were echoes of the close-up firecracker sound a Glock makes. Afterward we made a stop to roam around Leon & Lulu, which was awesome.

Imperia, 1993.
Lake Konstanz, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

This actually exists. What’s even better? It ROTATES. Can you imagine how terrifying this is if you’re like four years old?*
The short version, which is not really: statue based on Balzac tale, depicts courtesan holding a pope and an emperor in her palms and smirking about how slutty-powerful it all is. Statue, in that terrifically German not-funny way, designed to commemorate the 1414-18 Council of Constance, where Euro princes/church leaders met to resolve the whole Three Popes problem. And then burned Jan Hus at the stake.
Am spending the day in the 15th century, sorting out who translated what from Greek to Latin first.

*Ornithophobic since 1971 visit to this.

Quote of the Week.
“Aurochs were eaten at Neolithic feasts, which appear to have been a feature of Göbekli Tepe life,” writes Elif Batuman in the New Yorker. “‘They were having big parties,’ [archeologist Klaus] Schmidt says. He thinks they might have had beer, even ‘some kind of drugs.’”

Photo credit: Ardi Hoogendijk, Foto Natura/Minden Pictures.

Et la: Betty & François Catroux.
Am slightly behind on usual reading because am trying to finish this, which is really fantastic but am mostly weeping all the way through it. So this must suffice for this week’s QOTW.
Click through for WSJ article detailing the Catrouxs’ ultra-luxe domicile & make sure to do the slide show. Am fairly certain they were the inspiration for Bettina and Max in AbFab; go to the 5:24 point in this.

Photo credit: François Halard