Bathing Machines of The 19th Century

Back in the 18th and 19th century, the ladies just couldn't strip to their swimwear and run towards the waves on the beach. There are certain sea-side etiquettes that needed to be observed and decorum to be maintained. Getting oneself seen in their bathing costumes by the members of the opposite sex was certainly not one of them.

- Amusing Planet

 

Curious Photos Of Cynthia, A Superstar Mannequin In The ‘30s

In 1932, a life-like mannequin named Cynthia was created by Lester Gaba. After several shoots around New York City for Life Magazine in 1937, her career was launched, and for a matter of months, Cynthia became a household name.

- Design you Trust

 

The story behind the Christmas pickle tradition

If you’ve wondered about this lesser-known holiday tradition, you’re not alone.

Yes, you’ve already heard Nat King Cole sing about those chestnuts and that fire 50 times before mid-December even rolls around. But traditions, no matter how hackneyed they’ve become, are what keep us grounded during this stressful time of year.

For some people, those Yuletide rituals include having the little ones hunt for a pickle that’s hidden on the tree on Christmas morning.

- Seattle pi

 

The Humble Beginnings of Today’s Culinary Delicacies

Many of our most revered dishes were perfected by those in need, then co-opted by the affluent. Is that populism at play, or just the abuse of power?

Throughout history, foods that were once a marker of precarity and a lack of resources — dishes eked from scraps; tough cuts of meat; seafood too abundant to be of value to those who treasure rarity; wild roots scraped out of the earth with hardened hands — have gradually been co-opted by the upper classes, sometimes to the point that they’re no longer accessible to the people who once relied on them. For deliciousness has never been a fixed quality, wholly measurable by sensors on the tongue; it’s an invocation and reflection of memory, history and prevailing hierarchies. To have taste, in the cultural sense of showing discernment and an awareness of higher aesthetics, is to defeat taste in the physical sense: the animal instinct to simply eat what pleases us.

- NY Times

 

Photographer Richard Kern on nudity, selfies and his 59 portraits of women

He’s been shockin’, repulsin’ and pissin’ people off since his late ’70s beginnings as a subversive filmmaker. Now he’s back with a new photo book, Baron.

Richard Kern knows he’s pissing people off. At 66-years-old, the filmmaker turned photographer has just released his seventh instalment of Baron. Featuring 59 portraits of women, including photographer Petra Collins and actress Dasha Nekrasova, the photo series explores the dichotomy between girl and woman, nude and clothed, playful and deadly fucking serious.

The topless photos explore the power dynamic between the photographer (an old man) and the subject (a young woman), as well as the male gaze that comes with it. But also the subjects having total agency over their bodies.

- The Face

 

Prostitution In Ancient Greece And Rome

The oldest profession had a strong presence in ancient Greece and Rome. Here is everything you need to know about professional courtesans in the classical world.

Although the so-called oldest profession has long been a taboo subject, and is only recently beginning to emerge into open conversation, intercourse has always been for sale in human societies. It is a hugely complex issue, with a wide range of social, personal, political and even economic repercussions. Could looking at the carnal practices of the ancient Greeks and Romans help to open our eyes to new perspectives on the oldest profession?

- The Collector

 

Incursion dans le monde de l'Opus Dei

Un homme qui se présente sous une fausse identité contacte l’équipe d’Enquête. Il veut dénoncer ce qu’il a vécu au sein de l’Opus Dei pendant 30 ans, mais il est craintif. Une peur irrationnelle, un peu paranoïaque, admet-il, qui lui vient de ces années dans cette organisation catholique.

L’Opus Dei veut dire l’œuvre de Dieu. Le groupe est fondé par Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer en 1928 en Espagne. Il a séduit le Vatican par son côté novateur, par cette idée que des laïcs peuvent atteindre la sainteté dans le travail et la vie de tous les jours.

- Radio Canada

 

Fear not

You might think that horror movies are a delicious, trashy pleasure. But watching them has surprisingly wholesome effects. 

- Aeon

 

Weird And Wonderful Illustrated Letters From A 16th Century Songbook

The Songbook of Zeghere van Male contains local and international 500 year old songs and motets. Made in 1542, the 1200-page long book is rich in illuminations, depicting ornamental and historiated initials and interlinear drawings not necessarily related to its content.

Also known by its call number MS 125-128 in Cambrai’s Mediathèque Municipale, the late Medieval work consists of four complementary part-books: Superius, Altus, Tenor, & Bass. And each part features bizarre, amusing and scatological illustrated letters.

- Flashbak

 

Tout ce que vous avez toujours voulu savoir sur Sade (et plus encore)

Autant admiré que controversé, Sade est un personnage doublement sulfureux : par ses actes et par ses écrits, véritables catalogues de perversions sexuelles. Emprisonné au XVIIIe siècle, vilipendé, condamné aux éditions clandestines, "le divin marquis" est devenu synonyme d’une pratique sexuelle réprouvée : le sadisme. Sade sera pourtant partiellement réhabilité, influencera largement les intellectuels français et sera porté aux nues par les plus grands : de Baudelaire à Giacometti, de Pasolini à Simone de Beauvoir. Aujourd’hui, certains vont même jusqu’à faire de Sade une figure féministe. A l’occasion de l’entrée du manuscrit des "120 journées de Sodome" dans les collections de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, "Le Doc Stupéfiant" propose un portait inédit d’un libertin sans limite.

- PileFace.com

 

The Truck Stop Killer

He was methodical, he rode the highways, and he preyed on teenage girls. Girls who'd run away. Girls no one would miss. In the summer of 1985, the author was such a girl. One night on I-95, she hitched a ride from a stranger and endured the most terrifying moments of her life. Now, years later, she returns to the scenes of her fugitive youth looking for clues to that terror—and the girls who lost their lives to it.

- GQ

 

How to Deal With Living in a State of Perpetual Crisis

At this moment, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the state of the world. We are facing an unprecedented climate disaster, the impact of which is already causing droughts, famine, flooding, wildfires, and mass extinction events. The political situation on the national and global level feels perpetually tenuous. And we continue to suffer through a seemingly unending pandemic, one that has thus far killed more than 680,000 Americans and 4.5 million people across the globe. To put it mildly, things are not going great.

- lifehacker

 

The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Freediver

With only a single breath, Alexey Molchanov, history’s most daring freediver, is reaching improbable depths—and discovering a new kind of enlightenment as he conquers one of the world’s wildest sports.

For all the complex techniques required to succeed, the objective is remarkably simple: Go as deep as you can go on one breath and return to the surface without passing out or dying.

This is the point of freediving. At least the competitive point. And here in the Bahamas, 42 divers from around the world have gathered, like filings to a magnet, at a geological marvel called a blue hole, in this case a 660-foot elevator shaft of ocean water, to see how many stories they can plunge themselves down.

- GQ

Etienne Daho - If (duo avec Charlotte Gainsbourg) - Clip officiel

 

Des naturistes font les vendanges

Au Portugal, des adeptes du naturisme se sont essayés dimanche aux vendanges dans le plus simple appareil pour cueillir les raisins d’un domaine situé à une centaine de kilomètres au sud de Lisbonne.

- La Presse

 

The Last Glimpses of California's Vanishing Hippie Utopias

Half a century ago, a legion of idealists dropped out of society and went back to the land, creating a patchwork of utopian communes across Northern California. Here, the last of those rogue souls offer a glimpse of their otherworldly residences—and the tail end of a grand social experiment.

- GQ

 

Wet Hot Parisian Summer: A Lost 1930s Nudist Utopia

In Physiopolis, life was better in the buff. Or at least in a bikini, which was as close as one could legally get to public nudity in 1930s Paris. It was here, on an isolated sun-baked island on the Seine, that a titillating new naturiste-nudiste (naturalist and nude) movement sprang forth. Gone were the days of staying indoors to achieve a porcelain complexion like an Edwardian era prude. “The colour of health,” declared the founders of Physiopolis, was henceforth “found in shades of bronze,” and perfected through diet and exercise regimens to stimulate mind, body and soul…

- Messy Nessy Chic

When Americans Dreamed of Kitchen Computers

The ultimate appliance turned out to be expensive and impractical.

This is a question many American families find themselves asking daily. It’s not a new question, either. Generations have debated the delegation of kitchen duties, often touching on class, race, and especially gender. Most frequently, women have taken on home cooking, which often means hard work for little or no pay. Proposed solutions have ranged from equitable sharing of household labor between all family members, buying pre-made foods, and even kitchen-less homes and communal cooking.

However, one solution to the cooking dilemma has remained in the American cultural imagination: a kitchen computer, one capable of preparing a family’s every meal. Though it might seem like something straight out of The Jetsons, there was a brief period where the kitchen computer was very real indeed.

- Atlas Obscura

 

Life, death and gabagool: how The Sopranos explains everything

Ahead of the release of prequel The Many Saints of Newark, a look at how David Chase’s classic mob drama saw the world in a grain of parmigiano.

In 1999, a 40-year old Italian-American man started a course of therapy and created a new template for prestige television. The Sopranos, David Chase’s smash-hit TV series, was about the nasty inner workings of the DiMeo crime family. It was also about a mafioso’s midlife crisis, his children and his marriage, his debilitating anxiety and lurid nightmares.

- The Guardian

 

One Day—and One Night—in the Kitchen at Les Halles

On Friday morning, I wake up at five-fifty-five. While I brush my teeth, and take my first aspirins of the day, I’m thinking about weekend specials. The grill station will be too busy for elaborate presentations, so I need things that are quick, simple, and easily plated. The people who will be coming tonight and tomorrow night to Les Halles, a restaurant on Park Avenue South where I work as the chef, aren’t like the people who come during the week. For the weekenders, a saddle of wild hare stuffed with foie gras is not a good special. Nor is any kind of fish with an exotic name.

Published in the print edition of the April 17, 2000, issue, with the headline “Hell’s Kitchen.”

- The New Yorker

 

Polaroid as a Popular Medium for Fine Art Nude Photography Today

A quick browse at #Polaroid on Instagram will show a mix of mostly random shots, but among the most eye-catching are the portraits with either a fashion slant or a more experimental look. Dig into the hashtags and accounts and you’ll begin to narrow down the posts to actual Polaroid photos, with even more interesting portraits popping up. Dig enough and you’ll eventually notice that Polaroid has become a popular medium not only for fashion photography and documenting youth culture but also for photographers exploring artful nude photography.

- The Phoblographer

 

The Female Gaze: Polaroid Nudes by Kirsten Thys van den Audenaerde

Not so long ago, we got in touch with Brussels-based freelance photographer Kirsten Thys van den Audenaerde to share with us her insights on Polaroid as a popular medium today for fine art nude photography. Since discovering Polaroid accidentally three years ago, she found it the perfect medium for nude photography, especially for the authenticity that it imparts into her work. 

- The Phoblographer

 

Ode to the Ice Man

From the late 19th century to mid-20th century, the ice man (and ice woman during wartime) was a common sight in cities and towns where he would make daily rounds delivering ice for iceboxes before the electric domestic refrigerator became commonplace. Today we need only reach into our refrigerator for our personal supply of homemade ice cubes, but depending on where you lived a century or so ago, your ice might have travelled across oceans and continents, surviving over a hundred days without melting, just to chill your drink on a hot summer’s day. 

- Messy Nessy Chic

 

I’m Obsessed With ‘Old.’ The Twist: I Won’t See It.

M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie has a trailer that eerily resonates with our strange times; and that’s enough for me.

Let me say up front that I do not expect to see M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, “Old,” which arrived in theaters last week, for no other reason than that I am traveling and haven’t set foot in a theater in almost two years. But in the past few weeks, I have watched its trailer over and over, enthralled by its combination of existential horror and unintended humor. The trailer introduces us to some people who become trapped on a remote beach, where they begin to age at an insanely accelerated pace. Naturally, they try to figure out what’s happening, floating theories and freaking out. 

- NY Times Magazine