la comtesse reclining in dark dress with chain around

la comtesse reclining in dark dress with chain around

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Procrastinating, procrastinating

I am most content when I am alone in my apartment with nothing but time to putter. Quite happy really to weave in and out of my private thoughts and daydream encounters while leafing through my culinary and photography books. I should be out and about, meeting and greeting to fulfill my duties as a resident of New York City. Instead, I am sitting on my couch writing to myself on a blog.

The Met had a photography exhibition in 2000 titled "La Divine Comtesse": Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione. I love photography exhibitions curated outside the themes of authorship or historical context but find it doesn't always work very well (i.e. MOMA's Into the West photography exhibit, some amazing and important photographs but thematically, it didn't line up so well).

The exhibition page states the photographs "stands out as the first historical encounter of photography and narcissism." But these photographs are also documentation of an encounter with photography and fantasy. How amazing it would to spend your days living within your own daydreams. To have the freedom to live fully in your own delusions as opposed to the delusions of others.

"In the old days they didn't even use tables and chairs. They sat on beer crates and ate off the tops of beer barrels. You'd be surprised how much fun that was. Somehow it made old men feel young again. And they'd drink beer out of cans, or growlers...The men ate with their fingers. They never served potatoes in those days. Too filling. They take up room that rightfully belongs to meat and beer." Joseph Mitchell, "All You Can Hold For Five Bucks."

Photograph is one of the best illustrations I have found of the type of beefsteak Mitchell describes. The photograph is titled "Beefsteak dinner at Reisenwebers to honour H.H. Rogers & Mark Twain" and dated April 1908. It is in the public domain.

lady ottoline morrell

lady ottoline morrell

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Lady Ottoline Morrell

A brief correspondence resulting in very little has come and gone. Maybe its still here but it lost its initial spark. To please more myself then the correspondent, I searched for photographs to illustrate our conversation about D.H. Lawrence and Balzac. The Met's database produced not one photograph of Balzac or D.H. Lawrence and all the Library of Congress could offer were caricatures of Balzac which wasn't what I was going for at all. Instead, I found a striking portrait by Aldolph de Meyer of the Lady Ottoline Morrell taken around 1912. I wanted to send this beauty to my pen pal but I felt it wasn't appropriate to our conversation. But I was wrong. A friend and potential patron of D.H. Lawrence, Lady Ottoline Morrell was the prototype for Lady Chatterley.