Con Art
John Lennon’s 85 year old widow Yoko Ono had a “conceptual art” exhibition at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto from February to June 2018 titled The Riverbed. The interactive exhibition has three parts.
Line Piece has tables with notebooks. You’re supposed to “draw a line to take me to the farthest place in our planet.” You can also also use hammers and nails to extend string across the gallery, “creating a web that will grow and evolve over the course of the exhibition.”
Mend Piece has fragments of broken ceramic cups and saucers for visitors to put back together with glue, string, and tape. “As you mend the cup, mending that is needed elsewhere in the Universe gets done as well. Be aware of it as you mend,” said Ono.
Stone Piece is a pile of waterworn river stones on some of which Ono has written with a sharpie words such as .”Dream”, “Wish”, and “Remember”. People are supposed to pick up a stone “concentrating on the word and letting go of their anger or fear,” said a museum press release, then put it back on the pile.
On March 12, an older woman wearing a red scarf and black hat didn’t put a stone back on the pile. She was caught on camera stealing one of the stones with “Love Yourself” written on it. The stolen rock was insured for $17,500.
Tell you what. I’ll sell you a rock with “You Can Fool Some of the People All of the Time” on it for $17.50. And for $175, one with “May You Walk in the Broad Sunlit Uplands of Your Soul”. Now that’s something to concentrate on! I stole the “Broad Sunlit Uplands” part from Winston Churchill’s Their Finest Hour speech to the House of Commons June 18, 1940.
By the way, Churchill did real art, not con art. His hobby was painting and he was pretty good at it. He made about 544 oil paintings, mainly landscapes, and wrote a book about it, Painting as a Pastime. In 1959 President Eisenhower arranged an exhibition of Churchill’s paintings that traveled across the country.
$175.00
French Kiss
“There is too much of kissing in the comedies of the time of Molière [1622-1673]. The valets are always requesting kisses from the waiting-women, which is exceedingly flat and disagreeable, especially when the actors are ugly and must necessarily exhibit against the grain.”
“In a chapter on kissing by John de la Casa, archbishop of Benevento, he says, that people may kiss from the head to the foot. He complains, however, of long noses, and recommends ladies who possess such to have lovers with short ones.”
— Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
The cover of the May 19, 1952 Life Magazine features an actress named Kerima with the caption “Her Marathon Kiss is a Movie Sensation.”
The movie is Outcasts of the Islands, a 1951 film adaptation of an 1896 Joseph Conrad novel. In the movie Kerima kisses British actor Trevor Howard for 112 seconds, a record at the time.
The film was set in Borneo and shot in Ceylon, although the kissing scene was done in an English studio and the film cuts back and forth to giggling kids supposedly watching who were actually filmed in Ceylon.
Miriam Charrière, an exotic looking French woman, was discovered in Paris by the movie’s director Carol Reed who gave her the name “Kerima”, Arabic for “noble”. Since she was not a professional actress her role was completely nonverbal. Movie publicity claimed that she had French father and an Arab mother from Algeria, but she was native French. With her exotic looks she was passed off as the daughter of a Borneo chief.
The kissing scene was quite a sensation. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette June 10, 1952 ran an article titled “Champion Kisser Due Here Today” heralding her visit for “a round of meetings, luncheons and interviews.”
Kerima married the assistant director of the film, Guy Hamilton. Kerima was in a number of films into the 1960s. She turned 95 in 2020. Guy Hamilton directed four James Bond movies. He died in April, 2016 at 93.
The first movie kiss was in 1896, an Edison kinetoscope reenactment of a kiss in the the New York musical The Widow Jones by its stars, May Irwin and John Rice. The film is called The Kiss and is only 18 seconds long. Nevertheless, the film caused an uproar with moral condemnation and calls for censorship.
May Irwin and John Rice in “The Kiss”
Kerima in 1952
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A Semi-High Muckety-Muck and a Fanfare for the Common Man
“Esquire” in the U.S. Is an honorific appended to a name, usually as the abbreviation “Esq.,“ To indicate an attorney.
But in England, it can mean a member of the English gentry ranking below a knight or an honorific sometimes placed after a man's name.
Jacob-Rees Mogg, leader of the House of Commons, issued a style guide to his staff upon taking office in 2019. Among the persnickety grammar, and punctuation rules was “All non-titled males — Esq.” This also applies to regular folks as well as M.P.s according to an Englishman I correspond with on a forum for the software that writes this newsletter that is headquartered in England.
In other words Esquire can be both a semi-high muckety-muck and a fanfare for the common man.
While we’re muckety-mucking about, the origin of that term is Chinook Jargon, pidgin trade language of the Pacific Northwest Indians in the 19th century.
Esquire magazine got its name when, after pondering various macho titles, the editor Arnold Gingrich got a letter from a friend facetiously addressing him as “Arnold Gingrich, Esquire.”
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