photograph by Sean Wilsey

via

Diane Arbus, Untitled (Marcella Matthaei), 1969

“All families are creepy in a way,” Arbus wrote to a friend in 1968.

(Awesomely: "The only recollection I have of her is that I mistakenly thought she was Joan Baez," says Marcella, who lives in Florida now and describes herself as a part-time writer and part-time construction worker. "She was slender and pretty and my father had a Joan Baez album. I thought it was her.") 

(I don't know why I love this photo so much, really. It reminds me a bit of Munch's girl in "Puberty," altho the two artworks are really different. But that same gaze, that same no-bullshit engaging with the viewer.)

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

 

André Kertész, American, b. Austria-Hungary, 1894-1985
Pont des Arts, Paris (man reading between trees), 1963, gelatin silver print
Courtesy Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures 2007

Mark Gertler's former home (note blue plaque), 32 Elder Street, Spitalfields, London

the poet, the painter, the patrona

T.S. Eliot, Mark Gertler, and Ottoline Morrell

spotted in the wild

While we were buying a new toilet plunger at the big QFC down on Broadway (the things you tell the internet) I scoped out the book table, because I scope out book displays everywhere I go -- QFC, airport, drugstore, it doesn't matter. Walked out with a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed (I KNOW, MISTAKE, I KNOW) but more to the point, saw a stack of Middlemarch in among the "books" by Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck and Leslie Rule and crap like The Time Traveller's Wife and Revolutionary Road. I was so tickled I got T to take a picture for me.