Big-bosomed, Blonde, Glamorous, Unattainable...Anita Ekberg@90

Shawn Levy, 'Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome', 2016.

"...(Anita) Ekberg was the very type of woman that Fellini was always drawn toward with an almost infantile eroticism: big-bosomed, blonde, glamorous, unattainable. She was, as he said, a creature from his imagination or from a movie screen, descended to Rome in mortal form: “healthy as a shark,” Fellini said of her, “emanating the heat of a summer day.” “Oh my God,” concurred Tullio Kezich, Fellini’s friend and biographer, who had permission to witness firsthand the gestation of the new movie, from the script stage through production and editing to the release, “her splendor was incredible, her outsized, totally exaggerated beauty!” To marshal a bona fide sex goddess into the film—with all the personal trappings and implications she bore—was, in many ways, the very point, as Kezich would later say, of what Fellini was doing: “The idea for the film is inseparable from the idea of Anita Ekberg.”..."

Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain scene of La Dolce Vita

Photo courtesy: ALAMY

Balloon Vision of Bullshit Job

sad corporate future

“I wanted a balloon puppy, not a balloon vision of my sad corporate future.”  

Artist: Farley Katz, The New Yorker, February 2016

What Did Sisyphus Say to Camus?

Albert Camus: 

"The struggle itself ... is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy"

 ('The Myth of Sisyphus', 1942)

Artist: Existential Comics

We Will Shut Out Nothing!...Charles Dickens and Saul Steinberg

Charles Dickens: 

“Lost friend, lost child, lost parent, sister, brother, husband, wife, we will not so discard you! You shall hold your cherished places in our Christmas hearts, and by our Christmas fires; and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday of immortal mercy, we will shut out Nothing!”

Artist: Saul Steinberg, The New Yorker, November 1968

Try Mongongo Nuts Before Inventing Agriculture

Jared Diamond, ‘The Third Chimpanzee for Young People: On the Evolution and Future of the Human Animal’, 2014:

“The progressive view tells us that agriculture brought us health, longer lives, security, leisure, and great art. This seems convincing, but it is hard to prove. How do you actually show that the lives of people ten thousand years ago got better when they abandoned hunting for farming?

One way is to study the spread of agriculture. if it were such a great idea, you’d expect it to have spread quickly. But archaeology shows that agriculture spread across Europe at a snail’s pace— barely a thousand yards per year! From its origins in the Middle east around 8000 BC, agriculture crept northwestward to reach Greece around 6000 BC, and Britain and Scandinavia 2,500 years later. That’s hardly what you’d call a wave of enthusiasm.

Another approach is to see whether modern hunter-gatherers are really worse off than farmers. Scattered throughout the world, mainly in areas not good for agriculture, groups such as the Bushmen of southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert have continued to live as hunter-gatherers into modern times. Astonishingly, it turns out that these hunter-gatherers generally have leisure time, sleep a lot, and work no harder than their farming neighbors. The average time spent finding food each week, for example, has been reported to be just twelve to nineteen hours for Bushmen. When asked why he had not adopted agriculture, as neighboring tribes had, one Bushman replied, “Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”...”

Artist: P C Vey, The New Yorker, June 2018

Walking Around To Hide a Permanent Erection

 Robert Gore-Langton writes in The Spectator in Jan 2019: 
"In 1950, Bette Davis had a string of recent flops behind her. She was 41, married to an embarrassing twerp (her third husband), and her career was spiralling above the plughole. She only got the lead part in All About Eve when Claudette Colbert — who was all signed up — ruptured a disc while doing a rape scene on another film. The story goes that with Colbert shrieking in traction, the producer Darryl Zanuck, who hadn’t spoken to Davis since using the words ‘You’ll never work in this town again’, was obliged to offer her the part. It didn’t take much. No sane actress could resist Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s fabulous script with its sophisticated wit and refreshing cynicism. Davis literally kissed the script and leapt at the part of the Broadway diva Margo Channing. It did her libido a power of good. She had a thing about men with hairy backs and immediately had an affair with her on-screen partner, the hirsute Gary Merrill, who later said he spent three days walking around the set trying to hide a permanent erection...."

Bette Davis and Gary Merrill

मर्ढेकरांच्या दान्ते यांच्या प्रेमाचे कदाचित आणखी एक कारण...Dante Alighieri 700th Death Anniversary

 #DanteAlighieri700

Today September 14 2021 is 700th death anniversary of Dante Alighieri. 

 बा सी मर्ढेकर:

"गेलों विदूषक जरी ठरूनी सुहास,

दान्ते-नि-शेक्सपिअर-संगत आसपास 

कोठें तरी स्वमरणोत्तर भाग्यकालीं ---!

हाही विचार न कमी मज शांतिदायी."

(१५, पृष्ठ १५, मर्ढेकरांची कविता)

Peter Hainsworth, TLS, February 19 2021: "...Apart from a dip in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Divine Comedy has continued to be seen as one of the greatest literary works ever written, to be compared, in the view of T. S. Eliot, only with the plays of Shakespeare. Modern English has been particularly receptive, with twenty-five complete translations appearing in the past fifty years alone, not to mention many other partial ones..."

मर्ढेकरांना इटालियन येत होते, आणि Dante हा तर त्या भाषेचा ज्ञानेश्वर. पण त्याशिवाय मर्ढेकरांना दान्ते बद्दल प्रेम वाटायचे आणखी कारण होते काय?

कदाचित दोघांवर झालेले खटले हे कारण असू शकते. 

JacobMuñoz, smithsonianmag.com, February 5, 2021:

 "... Along with his charges of corruption, Dante was fined 5,000 florins, banished from Florence for two years and barred from seeking office in the city for the rest of his life. (The death sentence followed his failure to present himself to authorities on these charges.) Though he received permission to return to Florence in 1315, the poet declined, as doing so would have required him to admit his guilt and pay a fine. This refusal led to a second death sentence, which changed his punishment from being burned at the stake to being beheaded and included the executions of his sons Pietro and Jacopo, according to Lapham’s Quarterly...."

  “Inferno”, Canto XVIII, by Sandro Botticelli, 1480s

 

 This 1465 fresco by Domenico di Michelino depicts Dante, holding a copy of The Divine Comedy, next to the entrance to hell.