Found Photos: The Internet K-Hole

We love Found Photos, anonymous snapshots found in flea markets, skips, attics and auctions. Bronwyn, of the Internet K Hole, collects found photos from the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s.”

They are baldy focused and skew-whiff, seemingly taken by people most probably drunk, laughing or both. They are exactly the kind of pictures we love.

- Flashbak

TavíTavik Frantisek Šimon

Why Casanova Continues to Seduce Us

In 1763, the young James Boswell finished his “London Journal,” one of the frankest accounts of high and low life in the eighteenth century. The following year, he embarked on a Grand Tour. In a Berlin tavern, he encountered a certain Neuhaus. This voluble personage of thirty-nine, unusually tall, with a dark complexion and affected manners, was an Italian who “wanted to shine as a great philosopher,” Boswell wrote, “and accordingly doubted of his own existence and everything else. I thought him a blockhead.”

The “blockhead” had also been travelling around Europe, although not on a patrician’s leisurely inspection of art and ruins. Giacomo Casanova, whose surname means “new house,” practiced many trades—violinist, gambler, spy, Kabbalist, soldier, man of letters—but his main line of work, he later admitted, was deceiving fools. 

- The New Yorker

 

Love drugs are coming – but are we ready?

Are you racked with an overwhelming feeling of visceral repulsion at the mere sight of your partner, but cannot bear the thought of re-downloading Hinge just to end up in ‘talking stage’ purgatory for six months? Good news: a new drug that could help failing relationships could be made available in the next “three to five years”, according to an Oxford University academic.

- DAZED

 

Le langage des fesses

Que nous disent les fesses magnifiées dans l’art, depuis la sculpture antique jusqu’aux clips des stars d’aujourd’hui ?

Entre fascination érotique selon le regard masculin, féminité idéale, revendication anti-maigreur, promotion commerciale, ou même message théologique, les fesses, qu’elles soient féminines ou masculines, ont servi de support à bien des messages à travers les siècles.

- The Conversation

Anita Pallenberg

 

'Flesh of the Gods': The Trippy History of Magic Mushrooms

With magic mushrooms seemingly being used more widely than ever, it's high time we look at the ancient history of psychotropic fungi.

All roads lead to magic mushrooms in Huautla de Jiménez, a remote town in the mountains of northern Oaxaca, Mexico. Its cabs feature images of hallucinogenic fungi and they bring travellers through an official municipal arch decorated with mushrooms, to a taxi rank named after María Sabina, former resident and world famous Mazatec shaman, rumoured to have been visited by the likes of Bob Dylan and John Lennon.

- Vice

 

The high life: Doing drugs with ancient Greeks and Romans

Long before tobacco arrived from the Americas, ancient civilizations in the Old World were getting high off hemp smoke and opium.  

Substances are central to many New World cultures, but their role in the Old World is poorly understood. Archaeological research suggests that ancient civilizations, like the Greeks and Romans, consumed hemp and opium. Though drug dependency is a modern concept, sources describe Marcus Aurelius as an opium addict.

- Big Think

 

Control for Surrender: Henry Miller’s Stunning Letter to Anaïs Nin About the Value of and the Antidote to Despair

The paradox is that much of what we think is work at life — all the ways in which we try to bend reality to our will, all the ways in which we clutch at control (which only ever means the illusion of control) as an organizing principle — is in fact an escape from the true work, which is the work of letting go: letting go of the illusion, of the systems of belief and magical thinking by which we fancy ourselves in control.

The subtlety — sometimes devastating, sometimes deeply rewarding — lies in learning the difference between the false work and the true work of life: that elusive art of active surrender.

This is what Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980) explores with uncommon self-awareness and sensitivity in one of the many miniature masterpieces of insight into human nature collected in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller.

- The Marginalian

 

«Un été comme ça», au-delà de la sexualité

En l’espace de 26 jours, trois femmes, Geisha, Léonie et Eugénie, sont invitées en maison de repos pour explorer leur relation problématique ou conflictuelle avec la sexualité. Sous la supervision d’une thérapeute et d’un travailleur social eux aussi pétris de contradictions, elles tenteront d’apprivoiser leurs démons, de jeter un regard nouveau sur elles-mêmes et de considérer l’avenir.

Le film donne donc à voir les pensées, les souvenirs, les élans, les fantasmes de trois femmes à la fois fragiles et pleinement assumées, brisées et vivantes ; trois femmes extirpées de leur quotidien pour s’en inventer un nouveau, teinté d’introspection et de lâcher-prise.

- Le Devoir

 

Jules and Jim: The relationship that's still taboo

On the 60th anniversary of the French classic Jules and Jim, Gregory Wakeman looks at how the ménage à trois has been portrayed on screen.

- BBC

 

Heh-Heh. Huh-Huh. Mike Judge Brings Back ‘Beavis and Butt-Head.’

Judge, the creator and voice of the malevolent metalheads, explains why he’s reviving his emblematic 1990s cartoon series in 2022.There are certain sounds that will forever evoke the 1990s in our collective sense memory. The opening guitar riff of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The chimes of a dial-up modem. The persistent, grating laughter of Beavis and Butt-Head.

- NY Times

 

Secrets of the Voynich Manuscript

 

South East Asia's extraordinary freedivers

Scattered through Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, the Bajau are a semi-nomadic tribe of fishers with extraordinary freediving skills. Research has shown that their anatomy has evolved to help them remain underwater for a longer time. The Bajau’s traditional respect for their environment sets them as an example for ocean conservation.

- BBC