Kate Upton

"Beauty is Only Skin Deep" as The Temptations sing, but a billboard can stop traffic and a magazine cover on a newsstand can be perused so frequently that it begins to look prematurely aged. Kate Upton is gracing the Swim Suit issue of Sport Illustrated for the second year in a row. But what is it that is so eye catching about her? Beauty is a reflection of sensibility. Of course at the furthest extreme is the famous Twilight Zone episode, "Eye of the Beholder,” in which a desperately deformed woman is operated on. The shocker comes when we look up at the faces of the medical team who inform her that the operation has failed. Beauty is also ephemeral. Take a look at the autopsy shot of Marilyn Monroe. Great beauty caught in its prime is like a rose blossoming in spring. It’s ineffable and magnetic and yet when it dies, when the flower fades, one wonders if the beauty were simply an illusion. Was it, in fact, only skin deep, epidermis and morphology, or was there some inner spirit that shone from underneath, something incandescent? We welcome beauty, just as we shun ugliness, yet we know nothing about it. We don’t know Kate Upton from Adam, or Eve as it were and yet she is the welcome guest in our imaginations. Not in everyone’s imagination. If beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder,  aren’t we, in one sense, simply talking about the segment of the population that thumbs those worn covers of Sports Illustrated? On the other hand there is the kind of immortal beauty Keats was talking about in Ode on a Grecian Urn. Of course, his example was crockery.

Screaming Pope in Bid for Papacy

 Study After Velasquez’s Portrait of Portrait of Pope Innocent X (l953) by Francis Bacon

The Times listed Peter Appiah Turkson of Ghana (“he suggested that condom use was worth considering for married couples in which one partner is H.I.V.-positive,” the Times remarked), Timothy Dolan (archbishop of New York, “When he was archbishop of Milwaukee, Cardinal Dolan authorized payments of as much as $20,000 to sexually abusive priests as an incentive for them to leave the priesthood,” the Times further commented), Marc Ouellet of Canada and six other as “early front-runners” for the papacy (“Successor to Benedict Will Lead a Church at a Crossroads," NYT, 2/11/13). Naturally The Screaming Pope himself has been thrown into the mix by numerous readers of the blog. The choice would be distinctly ecumenical to the extent that he would be the first Jewish fellow to be appointed to such a position. To the extent that he's a closet liberal and intellectual shock jock who supports the use of ribbed condoms to maximize sexual pleasure and, as a creature of habit, is definitely turned on by the idea of allowing women into the priesthood, the choice of The Screaming Pope would allow the church to extend its reach to a far wider audience. The Screaming Pope would, in addition, be the first Pope in modern times to have included Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom in his library (along with Salo, Pasolini’s filmed adaptation of the work). Recent news reports have emphasized the difficult nature of a job which entails so many duties, but let’s face facts. While Benedict recently got points for using Twitter, The Screaming Pope regularly uses Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and hundreds of apps. He is known as a multi-tasker who can be on the phone, on-line and on the treadmill as he goes about his Sisyphean routines. 

Employees' Entrance

A l933 movie called Employees' Entrance was playing a Film Forum recently, but it was being exhibited for one day only—a day on which a major blizzard was threatening the city. The depression era movie directed by Roy Del Ruth is about a ruthless department store manager, Kurt Anderson (Warren William), whose credo is “smash or be smashed.” Luckily there was a trailer for the movie on the TCM site. THOUSANDS OF LIVES IN THE PALM OF HIS HAND MERCILESSLY HE DRAGS THIS GIRL TO DISGRACE THIS BOY TO RUIN THIS GIRL TO SHAME TAKES YOU THROUGH THE BACK DOOR OF A GIGANTIC DEPARTMENT STORE AND REVEALS THE DRAMA THAT TRANSPIRES BEHIND THE SCENES. The titles roll over crowds of shoppers in a glamorous larger than life setting. Grand Hotel  released the year before is the obvious influence. Madeleine Walters West (Loretta Young) is the girl Anderson seduces. Martin West (Wallace Ford) is the man Madeleine really loves. The trailer seemed longer than some short movies. Not really, but it’s nice to say and in the interlude between the explosive looking graphic jeremiads (that had the urgency of the old Movietone News), bits and pieces of the movie were previewed. Some movies give you a peek a life through a crack in a door. In a trailer like this, you get not a slice of life, but a slice of film. The whole can be greater than the sum of the parts; the sum of the parts can be greater than the whole. But in this case, with the snow falling ever more intensely, the part was greater than the whole. It would have been nice to see the film, but in this case, it was enough to see the trailer, which was filled with a mood and mystery all its own--in the comfort of one’s home.

The Origin of "The Origin of the World"

Whistler’s “Symphony in White, Number  1: The White Girl

The 2/9/13 Arts, Briefly column of the Times cited Paris Match as reporting on a unique finding regarding Courbet’s famous and infamous “The Origin of the World” (“The Other Half of ‘The Origin of the World,’" NYT 2/8/13) According to the Times’s recap of the Paris Match story “a collector says he has discovered the top half of Courbet’s portrait.” In passing the Times piece mentions that the painting was “once owned by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.” Along with the notoriety of the painting’s wanton pose, Lacan was also notorious for the precocious way in which he terminated his patient’s sessions. Cutting short sessions would, one thinks, mean that Lacan was able to see more patients in one day than the average Freudian and this delicious tidbit might provide some insight into where all the additional money went. But the discovery of the model’s identity is also good news for lovers of an ideal of feminine beauty that is currently held in low esteem. While a truncated nude might be tantamount to the esthetic advantage of low definition (b&w in film, minimalism in art), the closing of the circle here strengthens a worthy cause. The sitter or spreader who, the Times remarked, was  “thought to have been Joanna Hiffernan, a model and muse not only to Courbet, but also Whistler,” can now can be a spokesman for the pubic hair and a posthumous protestor against Brazilian waxing, anorexic photography and other forms of pedophilia that have infected our culture. Were Anna Magnani, who sported hair in her armpits, still alive, she'd undoubtedly be pleased that the identity of  Courbet's model was uncovered.