Father Divine, also known as Reverend M.J. Divine, was an African American spiritual leader from about 1907 until his death. His full self-given name was Reverend Major Jealous Divine, and he was also known as “the Messenger” and George Baker early in his life. He founded the International Peace Mission movement, formulated its doctrine, and oversaw its growth from a small and predominantly black congregation into a multiracial and international church. Controversially, Father Divine claimed to be God. Some contemporary critics also claimed he was a charlatan, and some suppose him to be one of the first modern cult leaders. However, Father Divine made numerous contributions toward his followers’ economic independence and racial equality.

It took me this photo of David Hockney, that I was convinced was shot by Juergen Teller (it is), to make me realize that all Juergen Teller is basically the photographic equivalent of David Hockney. Especially in terms of color. Why did it take me so long to realize?

From July 25 to September 23, 2001, red rain sporadically fell on the southern Indian state of Kerala. Heavy downpours occurred in which the rain was colored red, staining clothes pink. Yellow, green, and black rain was also reported. Colored rain had been reported in Kerala in as early as 1896 and several times since then.

Klerksdorp spheres are small objects, often spherical to disc-shaped, that have been collected by miners and rockhounds from 3-billion-year-old pyrophyllite deposits mined by Wonderstone Ltd., near Ottosdal, South Africa. Geologists agree that the Klerksdorp spheres originated as concretions, which formed in volcanic sediments, ash, or both, after they accumulated 3.0 billion years ago.

Ada Blackjack was an Inuit woman who lived for two years as a castaway on uninhabited Wrangel Island in northern Siberia.

Great auction at Pierre Bergé & associés

In 1994, Cindy Sherman produced a series of photographs for the clothing company Comme des Garçons that break virtually every rule of fashion photography.
As philosopher Roland Barthes has observed, fashion photography is generally governed by a garment-photograph-caption formulation, an apt description that cannot, however, be applied to Shermans interpretation of Comme des Garçons clothes. Her photographs center on disjointed mannequins and bizarre characters, forcing the clothing itself into the background. The lithe, physically ideal fashion model, so integral to the pages of Vogue, Glamour, and Elle, is nowhere to be seen. In her place are a menagerie of confrontationally unpretty surrogates, like the garishly made-up mannequin in Shermans Untitled (#302).
The models excessive makeup, hair in wild disarray, and bruised flesh recall the sex-and-violence? saturated fashion photography of the 1970s. The figure is further complicated by the hollowed chest in which another vacant representation of the painted female face resides. At an unnatural interval, the legs appear wearing … what, exactly? Are the pants Comme des Garçons? Or is it the backdrop fabric that was designed by Kawakubo and misappropriated by Sherman? In Untitled (# 304) is the masked mannequin wearing a Comme des Garçons dress as originally designed by Kawakubo, or as altered by Sherman? And which are the Comme des Garçons clothes in Untitled (#300)? And why has Sherman has donned a gloomy, battered mask in place of the model’s traditional bright smile (or look of icy disdain, depending on the current style)? Even the pretty picture of the series, Untitled (#296), which features Sherman resplendent with well-lit feathers artfully arranged in her hair as she contemplates a mirror ball, is not about the clothes it purportedly features. They are instead a minor element in the overall atmosphere of the photograph.

These anti-fashion photographs effects are shocking and discombobulating, particularly when viewed in the light of conventional fashion photography. They are not, however, out of place in the context of Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubos approach to the business of fashion design, which is strongly inspired by the values of the contemporary art world. Her first big success in the West came in 1981 with her inaugural Paris show, which made her an overnight sensation and unapologetically illustrated her resolutely modernist philosophy of clothing design. She claimed she wanted to start from zero,reexamining clothes as if the entire history of costume did not exist. The garments in the initial Paris show seemingly accomplished that goal. With her deconstructed and shapeless dresses in infinite shades of black, Kawakubo questioned all the conventional assumptions of Western fashion, in particular, that clothes should conform to or reshape the body. She simply refused to pander to the usual drama of concealing or revealing the body. In turn, Kawakubo and her intellectuality-imbued schmattes were enthusiastically embraced by devotees of the avant-garde, especially in the New York art community.

While Kawakubo was being embraced as an artists fashion designer, Cindy Sherman was made welcome in fashion industry circles. Her Untitled Film Stills series had established her as an able manipulator and interpreter of mass media icons of femininity. Shermans forays into fashion photography included a series of photographs for the Paris-based fashion house Dorothée Bis and another for Diane Benson, an American retail entrepreneur who later opened the first Comme des Garçons store in New York City. Sherman also created photographs for both Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Indeed, it was a Harpers Bazaar layout that precipitated her collaboration with Kawakubo. After seeing that layout in 1993, Kawakubo contacted Sherman and provided her with clothing from each of the Comme des Garçons collections, to be photographed however Sherman wished. The resulting images were then used in the direct-mail campaign for the Comme des Garçons autumn/winter 1994?95 collections and also displayed in the companys SoHo boutique. These photographs are less depictions of saleable product than challenges to the expectation of what a fashion photograph should be.

If Shermans take on Kawakubos designs is difficult to discuss as fashion photography, that difficulty is mirrored in the fashion press’s attempts to come to terms with Comme des Garçons clothes. Kawakubo has played both the creative genius and the saboteur in the fashion industry. She has rejected most traditional fashion conventions in the design of her clothes, in the decoration and layout of her shops, in her unorthodox advertising campaigns, and in her sometimes confrontational runway shows. In the Comme des Garçons fashion collections, Kawakubo has offered shirts with extra sleeves and neck holes, jackets cut to be misbuttoned, skirts and dresses with wildly irregular hemlines, jackets with slits up the length of the sleeve, jackets bearing only one shoulder, clothing with exposed seams, or asymmetrical padding in unconventional places, and knitwear with holes used to decorative effect: such clothes cannot be discussed in conventional fashion terms. In the early 1980s her stores broke every rule of merchandising, displaying clothing sparsely and under uninvitingly harsh fluorescent light; now this aesthetic has been appropriated or adapted by many others. Her latest shops in New York and Tokyo are the complete opposite?cluttered with wildly assymetrical and curved walls, they invoke carnival fun houses. This rejection of conventional fashion merchandising extends to Comme des Garçons advertising; Shermans photographs are only one of many examples. Kawakubos catalogues feature minimal fashion content, sometimes omitting the clothing altogether and instead employing an image meant, in an oblique way, to capture the meaning of the collection, such as a sunflower.

In the context of Kawakubos destabilizing approach to the established way of doing business in the fashion industry, her collaboration with Cindy Sherman, whose work also undermines the reality of particular images, seems almost predestined.
The two are well matched in the paradoxical nature of their endeavors. Sherman is a noncommercial artist whose work welcomes and converses with commercial appropriation. Kawakubo manages a financial empire in the most commercial of industries while rigorously impressing an artistically informed sensibility on all of her products. Both Kawakubo as a fashion designer and Sherman as an artist have used their work to question assumptions about what constitutes self-presentation. Though their mediums and the attendant demands of their work are vastly different, both women subvert traditional images of and ideas about femininity. This kinship renders the Sherman-Kawakubo collaboration a rare example of the successful bridging of the art-commerce divide.

Jessica Glasscock, M.A. Candidate, Costume Studies, Visual Culture Program, Department of Art and Art Professions, School of Education, New York University

Extracted from Lurve via Geometrie Variable

Foreword by the ubiquitous Glenn O’Brien.

No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980

Bernie Madoff is a former stock broker, investment adviser, non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, and the admitted operator of what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

Seven people have been so honored, four posthumously, and three, General Lafayette, Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa, during their lifetimes.

See it on YouTube.

Sidney Reilly, famously known as the Ace of Spies, was a Jewish Russian- or Ukrainian-born adventurer and secret agent employed by Scotland Yard, the British Secret Service Bureau and later the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). He is alleged to have spied for at least four nations. His notoriety during the 1920s was created in part by his friend, British diplomat and journalist Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, who sensationalised their thwarted operation to overthrow the Bolshevik government in 1918.

Mata Hari was the stage name of Margaretha Geertruida “Grietje” Zelle, a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who was executed by firing squad for espionage during World War I.

Charles “Ches” McCartney, (1901?-1998) also known as the Goat Man, was a widely-seen itinerant wanderer who traveled up and down the eastern United States from 1930 to 1968 in a ramshackle wagon pulled by a team of goats. He claimed to have covered more than 100,000 miles and visited all states except Hawaii.

1200 page alert.

Hal Lipset, the most respected and also the sleaziest private detective in America.

Robert McGill Thomas, Jr. (May 9, 1939 – January 7, 2000) was an American journalist who worked for many years at The New York Times, and who has become particularly noted for the obituaries he wrote for that newspaper.

Rudolf Wanderone was an American professional pocket billiards player, best known as “Minnesota Fats”. As “Fats,” in spite of the fact that he never won a major pool tournament, he was perhaps the most publicly recognized pool player in the United States – not only as a player, but also as an entertainer.

Memoirs of a Public Baby. From Publishers Weekly: Seldom has a writer described his own chaotic boyhood and early manhood with so much self-flagellating mockery. Abandoned by his Irish mother, a “fallen gentlewoman,” O’Connor grew up in a seedy hotel, in a brewery, in a cellar, in a French peasant woman’s pastry shop. In London, he developed an intense dislike of English snobbery as he ran into “a wall of nervous, persnickety tabus” that stifled social interaction. His contempt for bourgeois values and conformity is reflected in wickedly mordant comments on himself, his friends and acquaintances. Like new suits of clothes, he dons and discards intellectual fashions–surrealism, communism, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence. He spends six months in a mental hospital, then has a sexually frustrating affair wth a cultured, unbalanced woman who nearly axes him and is herself hospitalized. We leave him in 1945, “started . . . on a halting road to conformity.” Published in Britain in 1958 and only now appearing in the U.S., this prickly, painfully funny autobiography still rings true.

Bobby Fischer‘s achievements are legendary. At 13, he won a brilliancy that became known as the Game of the Century. Starting at age 14, he played in eight United States Championships, winning each by at least a point. At 15½, he became both the youngest Grandmaster and the youngest Candidate for the World Championship up until that time. He won the 1963-64 US championship 11-0, the only perfect score in the history of the tournament.

The Desert Grassland Whiptail lizard is an all-female species. These reptiles reproduce by parthenogenesis; eggs undergo a chromosome doubling after meiosis and develop into lizards without being fertilized. However, ovulation is enhanced by female-female courtship and “mating” (pseudocopulation) rituals that resemble the behavior of closely related species that reproduce sexually.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A human heart was kept beating on its own outside a body Saturday during a test of a new medical device intended to aid in organ transplants.

Doctors at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center used the heart from an 80-year-old man to show how the Portable Organ Preservation System works. The machine had already been tested using a human kidney and animal organs.

“What we have in our hands today is a technology which allows the organ to be removed from the body and allows it to function,” said Robert Kormos, director of the center’s thoracic transplantation and artificial heart program.

Doctors say the technology could give surgeons more time to get potential recipients to a hospital where an organ can be transplanted, and more time to test for organ matches.

Organs are chilled after being removed from the donor, a process in which deterioration begins immediately. A heart can last about six hours after being removed.

The machine, which was developed by TransMedics Inc. of Woburn, Mass., pushes warm blood into the organ, keeping it functioning.

The heart used in Saturday’s demonstration was deemed unsuitable for transplant. Doctors would not release any information about the donor or how he died. They planned to keep the heart connected to the machine for 24 hours.

The first human organ to be connected to the machine was a kidney, which was kept functioning for almost 24 hours in a test this summer at the University of Chicago.

Waleed Hassanein, president and chief executive of TransMedics, said the company will submit its trials to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the fall and hopes to market its machine by the end of next year.

It has a transparent head!

Anthony Vaccarello

Water bears are microscopic, water-dwelling, segmented animals with eight legs.

Trockenbeerenauslese is a German language wine term for an intensely sweet dessert wine-style wine. Trockenbeerenauslese is the highest category in the Prädikatswein category of the Austrian and German wine classifications. Trockenbeerenauslese wines, often called “TBA” for short, are made from individually selected grapes affected by noble rot, i.e. “botrytized” grapes.

London International Vintners Exchange (Liv-ex) is an exchange for investment-grade wine.

The Tasaday were purportedly a group of uncontacted people living deep in the rainforest on the Philippine island of Mindanao. When the media reported they had been living in isolation since the Stone Age, the group gained international fame in the 1970s. The Tasaday received worldwide press and the attention of anthropologists and scholars throughout the 1970s, and then again in the 1980s, when Oswald Iten claimed that they were a hoax masterminded by Manuel Elizalde, Jr.

The Ireland Shakespeare forgeries were a cause célèbre in 1790s’ London, when author and engraver Samuel Ireland announced the discovery of a treasure-trove of Shakespearean manuscripts by his son William Henry. Among them were the manuscripts of four plays, two of them previously unknown. Such respected literary figures as Johnson biographer James Boswell and poet-laureate Henry James Pye pronounced them genuine, as did various antiquarian experts. Sheridan, the leading theater manager of his day, agreed to present one of the newly-discovered plays with John Philip Kemble in the starring rôle. Excitement over the biographical and literary significance of the find turned to acrimony when it was charged that the documents were forgeries. Edmond Malone, the greatest Shakespeare scholar of his time, showed conclusively that the language, orthography, and handwriting were not those of the times and persons to which they were credited, and William Henry Ireland, the supposed discoverer, confessed to the fraud.

Sir Thomas Phillipps was an English antiquary and book collector who amassed the largest collection of manuscript material in the 19th century, due to his severe condition of bibliomania. He was the illegitimate son of a textile manufacturer and inherited a substantial estate which he spent almost entirely on vellum manuscripts, and, when out of funds, borrowed heavily to buy manuscripts, thereby putting his family deep into debt. Phillipps recorded in an early catalogue that his collection was instigated by reading various accounts of the destruction of valuable manuscripts. Philipps began his collecting while still at Rugby School and continued at Oxford. Such was his devotion that he acquired some 40,000 printed books and 60,000 manuscripts, arguably the largest collection a single individual has created, and coined the term “vello-maniac”.

Paris 1962

As its name implies, the upside-down catfish will swim upside down. One theory accounts for this unusual behavior as a feeding strategy. In the wild, it often grazes on the underside of submerged branches and logs, and swimming upside down makes these areas more accessible.

Rocky Marciano was an Italian-American boxer and the heavyweight champion of the world from September 23, 1952, to April 27, 1956, when he retired as the only heavyweight champion in boxing history to retire having won every fight in his professional career.

Romanee-Conti

Folie à deux is a rare psychiatric syndrome in which a symptom of psychosis (particularly a paranoid or delusional belief) is transmitted from one individual to another.

In September 1979, a young guy stole a Porsche 911S Targa. He was driving crazy on Slavija, central square in Belgrade for 2 weeks. Every night he was there, to do at least one lap. Police was useless, they weren’t able to catch him with their Zastava 101′s and Fiat 1300. His name was Vladimir Vasiljevic, and his nickname was “Vlada Opel”. People liked him, and you could see 10 000 people on the street every night, waiting for him, and he never let them down. That was not just crazy night ride – some people say that he was protesting aganist Tito’s regime in his own way, but I think that more likely he was some kind of “Rebel With a Cause” One night police set him a trap on Slavija, and he crashed in one of the buses, but he managed to escape – crowd blocked the wreck until he got out. He was arrested later because someone snitched him. He vas sentenced to 3 or 5 years in prison (you can find various data on internet). He got killed in mid 80s – he crashed into a truck trailer on highway. He was driving an old Lada.

Saints Crispin and Crispinian are the Christian patron saints of cobblers, tanners, leather workers and, since it came into being, of the leather subculture.

GODSPEED 45/06 is a quarterly collection of photographs documenting various bike builders, their work, and their workspaces.