shy glance outward and daring intimate pressure on the instrument that opens her to memory. It serves her as a speculum.
George Eastman, whose Eastman Kodak atelier fashioned the speculum for the hands of mezzo-soprano Ina Bourskaya, was born in 1854. Sigmund Freud was born in 1856. Because portraiture is an art of revealing the body, a new way of portraying will equip the eye with new, bodily ways of experiencing. Wielded a century ago under Eastman’s influence, this cable release was a newly seductive unbuttoner.
Eastman’s original advertising slogan was this. Consider it sung by Don Giovanni.
According to an article by Tad Walch in the August 8, 2017, Deseret News, a high-ranking member of the hierarchy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was recently excommunicated. The reason hasn’t been made public, but
The church also confirmed that Tuesday’s action was not due to disillusionment or apostasy.
To the waste land he goes, a scarlet thread tied to his horns. But his faith remains unsullied and his illusions still work their sleight of heart.
O Cigar, dispeller of holy Illusion in a cloud of smoke.
In the far distance, seen from the American side of the Atlantic Ocean, the squabble seems almost comical. Little, of course, did the New York Times know what was about to start happening in the neighborhood of the zeppelin hangars, and so the Times’s editors saw no need to drive home their point any further by illustrating it.
But the image of what was to come was already in place and already signifying as hard as it could. See, in the image, the forms hovering impatiently on the ceiling of their barn, already fledged in streamline and about to slip free and feral.
Translation: “The arrest of M. Clément in Germany. The hangar before which M. Clément was standing at the time of his arrest.”
In the image, all but a few of the men who do see have their backs to the camera. They are looking up toward those ridged cylinders as if they’re waiting for them to emerge, cast off, and mount. They understand the cylinders’ purport. They may even have been taught that they’ll love what is about to happen to them.
But the man they have sent away from the bed of ascension is understanding in a different way: actively. His traveling cap is ready to don, he is holding a writing tool in each hand, and his eyes are in the act of piercing.
Translation: “A scandalous arrest. M. Clément, the great industrialist, who has just been arrested in Germany for having stopped in front of a dirigible hangar.”
Without the beard that grows beneath, they would be only eyes in a face — say, a face fronting one of the derbied Germans who have so deeply failed to interest the camera in themselves. With the beard, M. Clément’s face becomes an emblem of the time before the dirigible and the Freudian reinterpretation of will. During that long but abruptly vanished prehistory, men didn’t just face the camera when they posed; they faced the camera down. With their sensitive mouths covered deep under layers of masculine muff, some men of the last moments before the Great War seem actually to have believed that the momentarily living self they showed to the finder could be a visage, hard and glittering as a face self-sculpted in stone.
1. In 1909, the heroine of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s Il segreto di Susanna sneaks away to her bedroom. In the orchestra, a flute figure ascends. Then the secret that Susanna keeps from her husband reveals itself:
2. In 1914, shortly before the Great War begins, a premonitory piece of literature asks men to consider how comforting it would be, under the circumstances, to suck and suck and suck, “natural like.”
