Merry Christmas

 
A Christmas postcard from HOUSE OF SIN, done through AI art.

Imtemporal beauty

She appears onscreen for just fleeting moments in Robert Redford’s QUIZ SHOW (1994). She has no name, and I don’t recall if she utters a single line of dialogue. She’s just there. There with the brevity of a breath, forever immortal on the perennial celluloid strip, morphed into bytes in digital support, like an aesthetic infection wanting to live for eternity, a virus of beauty spreading throughout the culture, throughout time.

Her bejeweled glamour speaks to us as if from the deep millennia of History. Hers is Nefertiti’s beauty, Cleopatra’s devouring allure, Circe’s timeless spell. In the context of the film (if we can so broadly frame her presence onscreen) she seems at the same time to contrast and to absorb the two wives of the married men in the triangle of male protagonists: she seems to be the very opposite of shrill Toby Stemple (Johann Carlo), and a more posh, and yet less intelligent version of middle-class beauty Sandra Goodwin (Mira Sorvino). Halfway between those two, she resonates with contingent possibilities, a Schrödinger’s box of yet undecayed realities. She's at the same time all possible women and a sole vision of desire, burning for a few frames, and then disappearing into the river of unrealized eternal beauty, leaving behind her, seared into the viewers’s retina, just one instance of that realized potential.

First day of Spring

I don’t like winter. There’s no other way to put it. The cold numbs my brain. The grayness outside, the low leaden clouds, the cold rain, as cold as if the sky was melting ice, falling to earth bit by icy bit, drains my will. Winter is a great annual unwanted parenthesis in my life.

But springtime…well, that’s a whole other thing. A realm of different colors, smells and tastes. It is a time of activity. Just as in soon to come summer, even idleness is an activity in itself. The brain synapses begin firing like out-of-control neural bombs, authentic fireworks of ideas daring me to give them form. In rest, inner restlessness.

The image above, culled from a well known image bank, has been used for several ends. If I remember correctly, I saw it in an advertisement for an insurance company. But that is irrelevant. For it speaks of springtime, inner calm, sublime beauty, quite eroticism.

Today is the first day when the weather outside is really hot, with a balmy breeze gently rocking the cradle of this newborn Spring. And I feel like that image draws me into the inner realm where the gentle erotic ghosts of springtimes past still roam. And I am there, dancing among them, while the sun shines down on a pair of beautiful legs.