Dali House

Found the inspiration for Nicolas Lampert’s grasshopper machine, as featured in a meaty post a couple of months back. Apparently people in the American midwest really did used to drive giant hoppers around on their trucks, and Lampert saw a photo.

Either that or Photoshop’s been around a lot longer than I thought.

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I haven’t been able to discover what was really going on when Jean-Léon Gérôme’s fleshy 1876 charmer “Pool in a Harem” was recovered last month, nor where it’s been since it was cut from its frame and whisked out of the Hermitage in St Petersburg six years ago. The museum was hosting an international UNESCO World Heritage conference and a Russian government official simply handed over “Piscine du Harem”, or what was left of it.

Apparently a man called a Communist Party office in Moscow saying he wanted to offer it as a gift to party boss Gennady Zyuganov. It had been knifed up pretty good, the perverts.

At any rate, somebody really ought to tell the FBI because they’ve still got it listed as missing.

The Hermitage was probably in strict no-questions-asked mode. It’s been sliced up a fair bit too recently. See the rest.

Ah, haven’t had a good old-fashioned optical illusion hanging on the wall of Dali House in a long time. So relaxing!

Twenty years ago today at 6.21 in the morning, in a private room, 1204, on the 12th floor of the Baker Pavilion at New York Hospital, the medical staff pulled a sheet over Andy Warhol’s famous face. He was 58. The silver wig on his bedside table was fairly new.

Warhol hated hospitals, especially after the furiously unpublishable wannabe-anything Valerie Solanas shot him three times in the chest the day before RFK was murdered in the summer of ‘68. That time he’d been pronounced clinically dead; he recovered in two months but always had problems because of the wounds (the girdle wasn’t for vanity). Solanas spent three years in prison. See the rest.

When I think of all the hours I spent in school twiddling pencils, the relevation that I could have instead been making fantastic sculptures out of them comes as quite a shock. Let this be a lesson to you kids out there.

Photos passed on by alert Dorseyland reader Terri in California, though where they originally came from I do not know.