Category Archives: Art

Pollice Verso by Jean-Leon Gerome

May 5, 2024 – 2:24 am

“He vows to endure to be burned, to be bound, to be beaten, and to be killed by the sword.” Petronius (Satyricon, 117)

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HERMAPHRODITE by Peter Nolan Smith

February 8, 2024 – 12:27 pm

Back in the early 1980s the construction of IM Pei’s pyramid blocked access to the Louvre Museum, leaving the ancient palace of the Bourbon kings mostly to art historians and a few wandering tourists, however I regularly wandered the museum’s desolate corridors to admire its vast collection. At that time I was employed as the Bains-Douches’ […]

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Better Than The Louvre

February 8, 2024 – 6:08 am

Helmut Newton – Genuis

By Peter | Also posted in PARIS, photos | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

An Artist’s Fast Fingers

November 21, 2023 – 11:26 pm

My boss Manny started selling jewelry on Canal Street in 1954. He says that he didn’t sell his first diamond until a year later. “Back then all diamonds were white. We didn’t know any better and better still neither did the Gs.” Manny’s speech is colored by hundreds of diamond selling terms interspersed with Yiddish. […]

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Pattaya’s 2nd World Tattoo Festival

September 23, 2023 – 1:18 pm

Written May 23, 2008 My 5th Grade teacher, a nun, instructed her students that any souls arriving at the Pearly Gates with a tattoo on their deceased body would be dispatched immediately to Hell. Tattoos were a mortal sin for Catholics and despite having abandoned my Catholic faith I have retained the fear that a […]

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