Bunny

Easter




Animaux De Nuit




Blue Hour




The Rising




Shadow Bunny



colline étoilée




I spent almost everyday with my step grandmother from about 5 to 9 years old... She was a devout Catholic and brought me to services every week , unbeknownst to my very secular mother. My experience was entirely aesthetic instead of ''religious'' and i loved the ritual too. But the secular/folk traditions and catholic melded together in my young imagination. For years i believed the Easter bunny was resurrected in a graveyard at dawn, eventually forming fur only to then set out to distribute eggs and chocolate, then returning at midnight. This is my ''Easter'' Series.

-Darla Teagarden

Amass The Tears...

Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds

by Debora MacKenzie
A species of moth drinks tears from the eyes of sleeping birds using a fearsome proboscis shaped like a harpoon, scientists have revealed. The new discovery - spied in Madagascar - is the first time moths have been seen feeding on the tears of birds.

Roland Hilgartner at the German Primate Centre in Göttingen, Germany, and Mamisolo Raoilison Hilgartner at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar, witnessed the apparently unique sight in the island state's Kirindy forest.

Tear-feeding moths and butterflies are known to exist elsewhere in Africa, Asia and South America, but they mainly feed on large, placid animals, such as deer, antelope or crocodiles, which cannot readily brush them away. But there are no such large animals on Madagascar. The main mammals - lemurs and mongoose - have paws capable of shooing the moths. Birds can fly away.

But not when they are sleeping. The Madagascan moths were observed on the necks of sleeping magpie robins and Newtonia birds, with the tip of their proboscises inserted under the bird's eyelid, drinking avidly (scroll down for images). This was during the wet season, so the scientists think the insects wanted salt, as the local soils are low in sodium.

But sleeping birds have two eyelids, both closed. So instead of the soft, straw-like mouthparts found on tear-drinking moths elsewhere, the Madagascan moth has a proboscis with hooks and barbs "shaped like an ancient harpoon", Hilgartner says.

This can be inserted under the bird's eyelids, where the barbs anchor it, apparently without disturbing the bird. The team does not yet know whether the insect spits out an anaesthetic to dull the irritation. They also want to investigate whether, like their counterparts elsewhere, the Madagascan tear-drinkers are all males who get most of their nutrition from the tears.











Via

...Defective Flowers...

Dread, decay, disease; androgyny, artifice, anomie…Rachilde′s 1884 novel Monsieur Vénus seethes with Decadent enchantments, as the opening passage makes clear:

Mlle de Vénérande was groping for a door in the narrow passage that the concierge had pointed out.

This seventh floor was not lit at all, and she began to be afraid at suddenly finding herself in the midst of a hovel of ill repute, when she remembered her cigarette case, which contained the wherewithal to shed some light. By the glow of the match she discovered number 10 and read this sign:

Marie Silvert, flower maker, designer.

Then, as the key was in the door, she entered, but the smell of apples cooking choked her and stopped her short on the threshold. No smell was more odious to her than that of apples, and so it was with a shiver of disgust that she examined the garret before revealing her presence.

Seated at a table on which a lamp was smoking on a greasy pan, a man, apparently absorbed in very intricate work, sat with his back to the door. Around his body, over his loose smock, ran a spiraling garland of roses, very big roses of fleshy satin with velvety grenadine tracings. They slipped between his legs, threaded their way right up to his shoulders, and came curling around his neck. On his right stood a spray of wallflowers, and on his left a tuft of violets.

On a disorderly pallet in a corner of the room, paper lilies were piled up.

Some branches of defective flowers and some dirty plates, topped by an empty bottle, were strewn between two chairs with broken straw seats. A small cracked stove sent its pipe into a pane of a hinged skylight, and brooded over the apples spread before it, with one red eye.

The man felt the cold that the open door had let in; he pulled up the shade of the lamp and turned around.

“Am I mistaken, Monsieur?” asked the woman visitor, disagreeably surprised. “Marie Silvert, please?”

“You’re at the right place, Madame, and for the time being, I’m Marie Silvert…”

Raoule could not help smiling; coming from a male-sounding voice, this answer had something grotesque about it, something that the embarrassed pose of the boy, his roses in his hand, did nothing to change.

“You make flowers, you make them like a real flower maker?”

“Of course! I have to. My sister is ill. See, over there in that bed, she’s sleeping…Poor girl! Yes, very ill. A high fever that makes her fingers shake. She can’t supply anything decent…Me, I know how to paint, but I said to myself that if I worked in her place I’d make a better living than if I drew animals or copied photographs. Orders are not exactly pouring in,” he added by way of conclusion, “but I still manage to get through the month.”

He stretched his neck to check on the sleep of the sick woman. Nothing moved under the lilies. He offered the young woman one of the chairs. Raoule drew her seal-skin coat around her and sat down with the greatest repugnance. She was no longer smiling.

“Madame wishes…?”

Translati0n by Melanie Hawthorne; illustration by Majeska found at Gentress Myrrh-murings

Toy Joy

Nice Stems

You know... seeing this again made me realize how I think of McQueen's work ( an all encompassing word for what he did).

His clothes are an extension of a person. It makes them ...More. Stronger. Clearer. Animated..Beautiful prosthetics.

From here on out though, without him here, his label's new creations can only be lovely clothes.







“And you know, the fact is, nobody knew that they were prosthetic legs. They were the star of the show - these wooden boots peeking out from under this raffia dress - but in fact, they were actually legs made for me.”
Aimee Mullins, on her look in the Alexander McQueen S/S 1999 show.

Delight of unpleasant recollections...

"Reflection must be reserved for solitary hours; whenever she was alone, she gave way to it as the greatest relief; and not a day went by without a solitary walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of unpleasant recollections."
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

The Polar Prophet

I've been obsessing about this story. I have dreams about them. Some good, most pretty scary. I suppose it captures my imagination simply because I can't imagine doing what they did, when they did it and for how long they did it. It astounds me really. So I'll summarize, in case you don't know it....


Adolphus Greely watched his parents wither away from the unrelenting grime of an old Massachusetts mill town. He wanted to get as far away as he could as soon as he could. The country found itself in the midst of a bloody civil war and a 17 year old Greely after being rejected twice was finally awarded his opportunity. He had achieved the rank of brevet Major by the end of the Civil War then joined the regular Army in 1866 as a Second Lieutenant of Infantry; in 1873, Greely was promoted to First Lieutenant.

So many lost their lives in the blood soaked fields, yet soon after surviving, Greely found war was merely a warm up.
He was offered a job.


His purpose was to establish one of a chain of meteorological-observation stations as part of the First International Polar Year.. a scientific mission and a challenge to seek limits of the known world.

In 1881, First Lieutenant Greely was given command of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition on the ship Proteus.


Destiny.



After an unusually pleasant trip, the U.S. Army left Greely and his crew of 24 men to travel the miles along the coast of northwest Greenland. The expedition also crossed Ellesmere Island from east to west and crew members Lt. James B. Lockwood and David L. Brainard achieved a new "farthest north" record of 83°23'8". ( taking away the record from England).



Two relief parties failed to reach Greely's party encamped at Fort Conger on Ellesmere Island.

First one year...then another... and another




( Fort Conger where all the men had to live)

( Newspaper they made amongst themselves)

The army abandoned their men.






Yet Greely's wife, Henrietta, was persistent. After many cold and often nonexistent responses to her plea on behalf of her husband and crew , Capt. Winfield Scott Schley, the USRC Bear, a former whaler built in Greenock, Scotland, was sent to rescue the Greely party.-- an astounding THREE YEARS LATER in 1884.

Only six men survived, including Greenly at the desolate Cape Sabine. The others had died of starvation, drowning, and hypothermia, except for one member who was executed on Greely’s orders for insubordination ( i.e. stealing food) . Their suffering and friendships therein were monumental and incomprehensible.


( The scene at Cape Sabine at time of rescue. They were about 48 hours away from death in a flooded tent. Two members were straining water into a tin can. One man was living with no limbs... Greely was found on his hands and knees in a dressing gown... corpses were strewn around the tent's perimeter. The poor fellow with limbs lost to frostbite died en route home. )



Even though Greenly and crew were abandoned by the Army who'd sent them, had painstakingly recorded thousands of hours worth of priceless data ( on the hour) , achieved ''farthest north'' AND survived three years of 40 below- 6 months of no sun every year in brutal storms and starvation......Despite a moment of being hailed heroes by the masses, rumors of cannibalism were being perpetuated by the Army. The Army wanted to make sure that after the celebrations died down, the heat would remain off of their organization and onto the living rescued men.

They were successful as the rumor finally sullied the expedition's achievements soon after their return.




( Greely Expedition Survivors.... they'd ...seeeen things)


Strips of flesh were cut away from some of the corpses found at Cape Sabine, the harsh bit of land where they were found. Greely swore he didn't know who was responsible. The last days were a sickening and painful distortion of reality. There was no lucidly. No monitoring the lives surrounding them in thier advanced state of delirium and profound weakness from years of miniscule rations.

Upon returning home and years that followed, Greely dutifully tried his best to assist the descendants of the fallen crew members. He stayed close to the remaining men, finally moving away from the limelight with his dear wife and rescuer, Henrietta. He received the Medal of Honor in 1935.

Greely lived to age 91 and is buried next to Henrietta and fellow crew at Arlington National Cemetery.



The Polar Climate Data he dutifully collected is now being used by scientists as proof of climate changes- the effects of global warming.