Saffie Monsoon: Major motion pictures are made, huge concerts are put on in stadiums. I mean, five hundred thousand troops were mobilized in the Gulf, and a war fought and won in less time, and without everyone included having a nervous breakdown and being sent flowers! It cannot be that difficult!
Edina Monsoon: Darling, every troop didn’t have to contain Yasmine Le Bon, the generals didn’t require big hugs after every maneuver, and the whole operation did not have to be co-ordinated to rap and Japanese avant-garde pipe music because, you know, Darling, I think if it had, the outcome might have been rather different, don’t you?
Many have paid homage to Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La belle et la bête—from Philip Glass’s “Cocteau Trilogy,” to Tony Kushner’s dream sequences in “Angels in America,” to Disney’s aptly titled cartoon musical version, Beauty and the Beast—while the film itself, starring Josette Day and Jean Morais, draws on many influences. Below is a gallery of some still images from Cocteau’s work, interspersed with engravings by Gustave Doré and paintings by Johannes Vermeer. Keep reading →
With coursework completed in Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, Egyptology, Creative Writing, Ceramics, Behavioral Biology, and Archeology, it seems that I’ve created the perfect storm of over-education, thereby allowing me to figure out the ending to the show. This is not a joke. What Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry was to William Blake’s poetry, or John Irwin’s Doubling and Incest, Repetition and Revenge was to William Faulkner’s oeuvre, I’m certain these posts will be to the popular television series Lost.
For instance, though some may be able to tell you that the clock from Lost (pictured above) resets to the Middle Egyptian verb “to cause death” by looking in the cloth-bolt section of Raymond Faulkner’s useful though rather basic Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, how many people would be able to tell you that this s-causative verb swd3, written with a stick-determinative at the end, adds the nuance, “to cause the death of one’s enemy/nemesis”, or would be able to provide a specific reference to this interpretation in the Wörterbuch der Aegyptischen Sprache (of Doom!) (IV Band, p. 78-81, for those who wish to examine this information more closely)? Or that the i comes before the e in hieroglyphs? Or that hieroglyph is, in fact, the correct noun form, not hieroglyphics? Not many, I can tell you that. Keep reading →
On Thursdays from 8 AM-12 PM, the five undergraduates studying Egyptology at Johns Hopkins would gather in the Near Eastern Studies room—nicknamed “the Fish Bowl”—of Gilman Library’s basement for four rollicking hours of uninterrupted Middle Egyptian text reading. Presented here, in a fairly regular manner, will be some of my favorites from that class.
Above are some pictures I took of the black siltstone obelisk of Nectanebo II, originally placed in the doorway at the Temple of Thoth at Hermopolis and now located in the Great Court of the British Museum. For the ancient Egyptians, obelisks were very heavy versions of the modern day political poster, their symbolism operating as a proclamation of the glory, power, and dedication of the pharaoh (truth be told, it didn’t really matter which pharaoh, because very few Egyptians knew how to read hieroglyphs); many obelisks contained inscriptions declaring that their permanence would ensure the might of their ruler. In Nectanebo’s case, this can be found in a passage that contains the s-causative verb/subject/object construction s‘h‘.n.f thn (Detail 1), my very loose translation being:
‘h‘ = verb “to set up,” therefore:
s + verb = “to cause to set up” or “to erect”
+ n = past tense
+ f = subject “he” ≈ ref. to Nectanebo II.
+ thn = the noun “obelisk,” operating as an object
≈ … He erected the obelisk [beside his house of ...] Keep reading →
While writing my last Gent o’ Leis column, the very same one I’ve shamelessly hyperlinked here, I wanted to confirm that tobacconalian was the adjective form of tobacco. And so, I turned to your philological friend and mine, the Oxford English Dictionary, where I discovered the following citation for tobacco’s colloquial form, tobaccy:
1989 R. BARR Roseanne (1990) I. i. 6 She wore overalls and chewed tobacky, which in the early 1950’s in Salt Lake City meant that she was something of a social misfit.
And here I thought that the scholars in charge of the English language’s most comprehensive compendium were lexicographers of the Full House/Caroline in the City variety! Thank you, online OED’s quotations box, for clearing this matter up!
Yesterday, I discovered what may prove to be the greatest candy find of this new decade: Fresh Cola Mentos. With all the fresh-making joy of Mentos, all the flavor of those Haribo Gummy Happy-Colas, it seems as though the treacly bonbon deities are finally smiling down upon us from their Good Ship Lollipop—though by us, I definitely mean those intrepid sojourners who tend to get stuck in very foreign Duty Free shops for two hours or more (e.g., me).
In rareity, seconded only by sightings of the Energy Mentos (one roll provides two-cups-o’-Joe’s worth of caffeine), I wondered, late last night, if anyone else has happened upon these veritable unicorns of the confectionary world.
Gentleman of Leisure is writer, erstwhile lecturer and notionally overeducated Martin Marks’s PAPERMAG column on the things he likes and why.
Ah, January! A new year, fresh beginnings, resolute resolutions (not all the adjectives can be good), and, of course, the start of National Sobering Up Month here at the Gentleman of Leisure Institute for Higher Learning of Useless Things and Various Other Even More Useless Things (Dynasty XII Middle Egyptian, for instance, or perhaps Post-Amarna representations of sun deities; I wish I was joking). And so, I thought January might be the perfect time to write a column dedicated to my continued, firmly held belief that my computer should be armed with a breathalyzer, especially when it pertains to online purchases. Read more at PAPERMag.com.
Complaints meant to self-aggrandize; transportation delays, work schedule, lines outside parties, &c.
Geographical locations meant to impress; usually tropical.
Rap lyrics demonstrating street cred, with either implied or explicit dramatic irony.
Declarations, vague and indecipherable in nature, meant to express your definitive comprehension of the universe, but in a way so profound that only you will understand; usually directed towards exes.
A blog plug.
An @-mention, indicating that you are on Twitter.
Unpunctuated, poorly punctuated, or un-capitalized quasi-thoughts containing acronyms.
References to little known and oftentimes short-lived 1980s sitcoms, animated series, or musical acts.
Please note that this is only a working list. A fuller diagram may soon follow, given that I have enough drive to think/draw/scan one up. In the interim, feel free to use the comment box for any examples (be sure to include the appropriate category number), additions, or confessions.
I’ve often said that Palm Beach isn’t just any old island. It’s a place where 20 carat diamonds are termed “manageable,” where people spend an emperor’s ransom on beachfront estates and then never set foot on the beach, where, for some inexplicable reason, very few of its citizens wear socks. The island is also civilized to a fault (when somebody honks their horn at me, I’ve been known to get out of my car and discuss the situation with the other driver), and, as a rule, we do not—publicly, at least—talk about the misfortunes of our fellow islanders, no matter what country club that islander may belong to.
Thus, because it just didn’t seem polite, I’d never written about Bernie Madoff, instead leaving this task to intrepid, non-island reporters whose only ostensible sources seemed to be a shopkeeper, “chatty locals,” and a pair of pants. (Mind you, they were $2,000 pants.) But thanks to a real estate brochure given to me for Madoff’s Palm Beach home (above), I don’t have to discuss the man or his deeds. I can simply talk about his home. Keep reading →
The January 11, 2009 New Yorker, in 50 of my words, 13 of their words:
Some people in Chicago were wrong about most everything; indeed, everyone wants everything but nobody fully understands Shakespeare; we won’t know anything about Justice Sotomayor until we know something about her; art stopped existing after February 22, 1987; and fiction containing the phrase, “By the time the group assembles in the bar of the mountain hotel.”
I love Bert Stern’s film Jazz on a Summer’s Day, even writing about it here, and thought, what better way to close out a decade than with the last musical act from the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, Mahalia Jackson performing “Everybody Talkin’ ‘Bout Heaven” and ”Didn’t it Rain,” and then closing out the festival with the Lord’s Prayer. In many ways, her performance seems like a very appropriate close to 2009, and a wonderful way to ring in 2010.
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal’s Anthony Paletta, in his article “George W. Bush Is Out of the Picture,” made note of the fact that very few critics had latched onto the newly released film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for any references to the policies of the previous presidential administration.
“For eight [very, very long] years,” wrote Mr. Paletta (with just a smattering of my own words added), “reviewers could be relied upon to construe almost any mildly dark artistic output as a sure comment on the Bush-era cruelty, greed, or amorality.”
To a large extent, my esteemed colleague is right. For the better part of eight years, blue-staters did make it their job to litter conversations at hoity-toity cocktail parties (and then, fancy-shmancy unemployment lines) with jokes, references, and, yes, peculiarly extended film metaphors at the expense of our former president. Read more at The Huffington Post.
From one of the greatest concert films of all time, Martin Scorcese’s The Last Waltz, here is the studio rendition of The Band’s “The Weight,” performed with the Staple Singers.
Gentleman of Leisure is writer, erstwhile lecturer and notionally overeducated Martin Marks’s PAPERMAG column on the things he likes and why.
With the holiday season upon us, I am reminded that by familial disposition I am both a really lousy gift-giver and in a perpetual state of geographic dislocation. During the rest of the year, I suffer from an inordinate amount of seemingly good ideas that, through their implementation, tend to spiral out of control. And so, what follows is a tale, rambling in nature (if pressed for time, I would skip down to the third paragraph from the bottom), about the Goods 4 Good holiday e-card, why they are incredible, and why you should be sending them this December. Read more at PAPERMag.com.
I’M WRITING THIS not from my apartment in New York but from my parents’ South Florida living room overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Why? Because three days ago I needed to do laundry and wanted to go for a nice, long run on the beach.Read more at HEMISPHERES Magazine.
WHEN YOU’VE BEEN IN NEW YORK long enough, the city tends to become a constant of police sirens and spray paint and flimsy umbrellas and weird smells and men hawking coupons and taxi cabs that drive too fast and pedestrians that walk too slow and errant pieces of bubble gum that get stuck to your shoes. The city spends its weeks in offices, returns to its too small apartments at night, and then clogs its highways on weekends, just to get out, for a tree, a lawn, a bit of space and fresh air. For this and other reasons, New York has become divinely sensitive to its landscapes and monuments – sometimes, even when the objects in question aren’t monuments to begin with. Talk about realigning an old fountain, and you’ve got citizen-led action committees handing out petitions, holding protests and chaining themselves to park benches. Such were my initial thoughts when I first heard about the High Line, a string of abandoned railway stretching through the city’s west that, over the past several years, has been turned into a park. Keep reading →
When the Empire State Building was under construction, the governor wanted the top spire to be used as a zeppelin docking station, despite the fact that passengers would have to disembark a quarter of a mile above the ground, and wind shears at that height could slam the hydrogen-filled airships into any number of nearby buildings. In 1890, drug manufacturer Eugene Schieffelin thought New York should be home to all of Shakespeare’s songbirds, and so, smuggled 40 starlings from England and released them into the night sky. Today, the North American starling population numbers close to 200 million. This is to say that New York is a city historically filled with crazy ideas, though none tend to be as quixotic as those we have for our parks.
In the next few days, I’ll be posting an article I wrote with some extended thoughts on the High Line and its historical context within New York City’s park system.
