The First Kiss

Did you know that the cover of the album 'The First of A Million Kisses' (1988) is from Elliott Erwitt? And was made in 1955?

 

The original of this picture is even more beautiful.

P.S. Here the original can be found as picture 23 of 23.

Written Over (Not Erased)

What a beautiful book: Edmund de Waal, ‘The Hare With Amber Eyes. A Hidden Inheritance’ (Vintage, 2011). Art, family history, history of the world, and wealth acquired and taken away woven together. With taste. A book that hurts. Just read it.

Page 258-259:

"So, on 12th August 1938, Ephrussi and Co. is taken off the business register [in Vienna, Austria]. In the records it says, singularly, ERASED. Three months later the name is changed to Bankhaus CA Steinhausser. Under its new name it is revalued, and under its new Gentile ownership is worth six times as much as under Jewish ownership.
There is no longer a Palais Ephrussi and there is no longer an Ephrussi Bank in Vienna. The Ephrussi family has been cleansed from the city.
It is on this visit that I go to the Jewish archive in Vienna, the one seized by Eichmann, to check up on the details of a marriage. I look through a ledger to find Viktor, and there is an official red stamp cross his first name. It reads 'Israel'. An edict decreed that all Jews had to take new names. Someone has gone through every single name in the lists of Viennese Jews and stamped them: 'Israel' for the men, 'Sara' for the women.
I am wrong. The family is not erased, but written over. And, finally, it is this that makes me cry."

Page 347:

"There are the places in memory you do not wish to go with others. In the 1960s, my grandmother Elisabeth, (...), burnt the hundreds of letters and notes she had received from her poetic grandmother Evelina.
Not 'Who would be interested? 'But 'Don't come near this. This is private.'
(...) There is something about that burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiralling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can sometimes gain you a space in which to live."

P.S. There is an exhibition of The Ephrussis at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, Austria. Review from the pinklookbook: here.

Trinity

 

Summer Letter

 Another poem from Salome Benidze (source: here):

When an octopus is such a creature of the sea. The taste of salt.

As One Who Had to Come

"Vieste do fim do mundo
Num barco vagabundo
Vieste como quem tinha que vir
Para contar histórias e verdades
Vontades e carinhos
Promessas e mentiras
De quem de porto em porto
Amar se faz
Vieste de repente
De olhar tão meigo e quente
Bebeste a celebrar
À volta tua
Tomaste-me em teus braços
Em marinheiros laços
Tocaste no meu corpo
Uma canção que em vil magia
Me fez tua"

P.S. Part of the song 'Vieste Do Fim Do Mundo' from Gisela João. I love this video (here): the movements, the play with light and shades, and its lyrics.