What's in the News

geolarson2 · 03-27-2009, 01:53 PM

I was surfing the 'net this AM and came across some odd news stories that made me smile, or made me frown. Without commenting on the particulars, I thought maybe a thread where we could post links to various stories directly rather than the blogs which can be biased might be okay (WhyYou, if you or Laranger, Rob or Ms D think this is a bad idea, please yank it down).

A PA prosecutor threatens to charge teen students with child porn
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/us...ref=technology

***** down, Wangs Up!
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-26040,00.html

The Spirit of San Francisco
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/around_tow...-Peepshow.html

GhostNet
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...52R2HQ20090328

They didn't show movies like this when I was in college (at least, not outside the dorms!)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...=moreheadlines

Turn-coat? Naw.
http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2...5032009/463388

geolarson2 · 10-02-2009, 01:12 PM

Study: Fellatio may significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer in women

http://tinyurl.com/z77so

(AP) -- Women who perform the act of fellatio and swallow semen on a regular basis, one to two times a week, may reduce their risk of breast cancer by up to 40 percent, a North Carolina State University study found.

T-bone Thomas · 10-02-2009, 06:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by geolarson2

Study: Fellatio may significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer in women

http://tinyurl.com/z77so

(AP) -- Women who perform the act of fellatio and swallow semen on a regular basis, one to two times a week, may reduce their risk of breast cancer by up to 40 percent, a North Carolina State University study found.

I wonder how they found those 15,000!! participants for their study. Did they go through the streets of Charlotte and ask women if they had swallowed semen recently? Oh no, that’s no offence, ma’am. It’s for a medical stu....SMACK! Too late.

mart · 10-04-2009, 03:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by T-bone Thomas

I wonder how they found those 15,000!! participants for their study. Did they go through the streets of Charlotte and ask women if they had swallowed semen recently? Oh no, that’s no offence, ma’am. It’s for a medical stu....SMACK! Too late.

Your right, how on earth would you ask a woman a question like that!.

It is amazing what some Universities research nowadays.

DWM222 · 10-04-2009, 08:11 PM

Gutsy study...Bet the person asking the questions was wearing their "*** for a hat" more than a few times..lol

Anoree · 10-04-2009, 08:53 PM

I think a man couldn't have asked those questions without being hit or accused of sexual harrasment ... but a woman could.

I bet the best chances to go through such a study is having women at a breast cancer screening fill out a questionnaire, handed out by females, and link those to the results of the screening.
I bet that university has an attached hospital where the study could have been carried out.

dxhound2003 · 10-04-2009, 10:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by geolarson2

Study: Fellatio may significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer in women

http://tinyurl.com/z77so

(AP) -- Women who perform the act of fellatio and swallow semen on a regular basis, one to two times a week, may reduce their risk of breast cancer by up to 40 percent, a North Carolina State University study found.

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/fellatio.asp

Anoree · 10-04-2009, 10:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dxhound2003

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/fellatio.asp

Ah, a spoof ... but a good one.

Natal · 10-05-2009, 06:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by geolarson2

A PA prosecutor threatens to charge teen students with child porn
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/us...ref=technology

I decided to look this up because they have been talking a lot about this sort of activity on CNN lately. In this particular case the girls successfully obtained an injunction against the DA. http://howappealing.law.com/MillerVs...kTRO033009.pdf

Some more words of wisdom from this nutjob (source: http://www.deletepredators.com/news....ticle_id=132):

Quote:

Marissa and her parents joined a group of about 50 others at the courthouse. Before showing the photos, Mr. Skumanick explained his offer to the crowd, answering one father's question affirmatively, that -- yes -- a girl in a bathing suit could be subjected to criminal charges because she was posed "provocatively."

Quote:

He then told the parents and teens to line up if they wanted to view the photos, which were printed out onto index cards. As the 17-year-old who took semi-nude self-portraits waited in line, she realized that Mr. Skumanick and other investigators had viewed the pictures. When the adults began to crowd around Mr. Skumanick, the 17-year-old worried they could see her photo and recalls she said, "I think the worst punishment is knowing that all you old guys saw me naked. I just think you guys are all just perverts."

Mr. Skumanick dismisses the criticism, saying that no one could see photos of teens who weren't their own children.

captnjack · 10-05-2009, 11:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anoree

Ah, a spoof ... but a good one.

You know the old saying...If it is too good to be true then it probably isn't true.

geolarson2 · 10-31-2009, 12:36 AM

Huh, now why didn't I think to check snopes first? They, like factcheck, politifact & taxpolicycenter are my go-to's to double-check, well, the veracity of something. I wonder if the person I got the link from, a Princeton prof., knew the page was faked or whether she was taken in too? Oh well, ce'st la vie, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice I'll bust your lip (or something like that

). At least I don't have to worry about trying to figure out how they actually proved a benefit (that's been nagging at me for nearly a month now, dog gone it!). Phew!

Anoree · 10-31-2009, 01:06 AM

I just saw this in the news and couldn't believe it:

Man arrested for being naked in is own kitchen
http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle..._own_home.html

CK1 · 10-31-2009, 02:52 AM

what i had heard in a radio show (don't know if its 100% accurate) is that it was 5-6am and he made coffee and was drinking his coffee in his kitchen when the mom and son walking by noticed him. was he doing something (other than being naked) that could have been obscene? otherwise what gives? strange story.

laranger · 10-31-2009, 03:49 AM

Also, why were they walking through his front lawn???

captnjack · 10-31-2009, 06:20 AM

awh I see it is in Virigina that explains a lot! Va is the only state that I know of where radar detectors are illegal!

Anoree · 10-31-2009, 07:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by captnjack

awh I see it is in Virigina that explains a lot! Va is the only state that I know of where radar detectors are illegal!

Radar detectors and other tools to avoid speed cameras are illegal in Germany, too, but I don't think an arrest like that would ever be possible here.

Natal · 10-31-2009, 10:12 AM

Why would you have speed cameras when there are no speed limits? To catch people driving too slow?

Anoree · 10-31-2009, 09:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Natal

Why would you have speed cameras when there are no speed limits? To catch people driving too slow?

We do have speed limits. Only on our highways, the "Autobahn" you are free to drive as fast as you want - in theory. In fact, almost half of the network has speed limits. Trucks and cars with trailers have general speed limits, too. The growing traffic does it's own to slow you down.

On the other hand, you are only allowed to enter the Autobahn with vehicles which can drive faster than 60 km/h (37 mph). So, yes, you can drive too slow.

geolarson2 · 11-18-2009, 09:39 PM

If you followed Ms du Jour's blog, or caught the dramatization of her experiences as a call girl on Showtime (played so ably by Ms Billie Paul Piper), we now know who she is: Dr. Brooke Magnanti

Per The Telegraph (http://bit.ly/AlT7z):
Belle de Jour's mother proud of 'brilliant' daughter Brooke Magnanti
Susan Levy, the mother of Brooke Magnanti, the research scientist unmasked as the former call girl Belle de Jour, said she was proud of her "brilliant" daughter for "standing up for herself".
By Tom Leonard in New York
Published: 6:30AM GMT 18 Nov 2009

Wearing nursing scrubs and puffing on a cigarette outside her modest farmhouse home near Syracuse in New York state, Miss Levy, 64, admitted she had been a "little shocked" to learn that her only child had supplemented her academic earnings as a prostitute.

"I know that my daughter has a very good head on her shoulders and I support her 100 per cent in what she has done and what ever she will do," she said. "I can't give her any more than that."

Pointedly preferring to talk about her daughter's writing acumen rather than her actual subject matter, Miss Levy said she was now looking forward to getting an autographed copy her best-selling book about her career as a high class call girl.

Miss Magnanti, 34, revealed at the weekend that she was the former prostitute who wrote a best-selling diary, later turned into a television series.

Educated at a Catholic school in Florida, she moved to Britain to study for a doctorate at Sheffield University. She said she turned to prostitution after moving to London and finding she could not afford the rent.

The American-born scientist, who works for Bristol University, said she had rung her mother to break the news but had left her estranged father to read about it in the newspapers.

Miss Levy said that her daughter had phoned her last week to break the news.

She said: "I knew that her ex-boyfriend Owen was apparently going to out her, and she wanted to do some damage control.

Miss Levy said she always knew her daughter was a "fantastic writer", adding: "She has been writing stories since she was a kid, so that part did not surprise me."

Referring to the prostitution, she said she was a "bit surprised" more than shocked.

Her daughter's critics should be "ashamed", she said. "The subject matter is her subject matter and it is what she has done in her life."

There's also a very good article/interview by India Knight with Dr. Magnanti at The Times: http://tinyurl.com/yzpotbx

shisync09 · 11-23-2009, 04:19 PM

I feel like Im hallucinating. the real player stream I linked to here replayed a segment from earlier in the show. The news came on before the top of the hour and now finally is going to Randi as I type.

geolarson2 · 11-29-2009, 06:02 PM

Charis Wilson, artist's model & muse to photographer Edward Wilson passed away on Nov 20, 2009. Where would the world of erotica of any sort be without great photographers like Weston, or the women who inspired him like Charis? Her obituary in The Guardian here (Text copied below): http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesi...ilson-obituary

Charis Wilson obituary

The photographer Edward Weston's great muse who inspired some of his finest work

by Amanda Hopkinson

Charis Wilson, whose name will always be linked to that of the renowned Californian photographer Edward Weston, has died aged 95. Most frequently described as Weston's great muse and the model of his middle/late years, she was also his driver, secretary, business manager and accountant, and wrote many of the texts that accompanied his photography books from the mid-1930s to 1940s.

Charis (her Greek name, meaning Grace, was pronounced rather like a caress) was born, like all four of Weston's great loves, into a humble family from which intelligence and beauty looked likely to raise her. Her father, Harry Leon Wilson, was a minor novelist – the best known of his works was a humorous serial called Ruggles of Red Gap, relating how a stuffy English valet made out in the American west. He was 45 when he married the 16-year-old Helen McGowan, daughter of another writer, Grace McGowan Cooke. Helen gave her first name to their daughter, who jettisoned it for Charis when she tired of being called "little Helen", and also provided a role model as an actor, a career Charis also briefly pursued.

Charis won a scholarship to study at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, but her chance for a real change of circumstances was overturned when her parents were unable to make up the shortfall to have her travel and live on the east coast. (Ruined by the Depression, Harry Leon Wilson deemed that "even the ancillary costs are too onerous"). Charis no doubt drew on this experience later in writing the application for Weston to be awarded the first Guggenheim Fellowship to go to a photographer. And to help him spend it, by taking to the road with him from 1937-38, during which time they made their first book together, containing close to 100 images, called California and the West (1940).

The couple had met at a concert early in 1934, when Charis was 19 and Weston 48, and were introduced by her older brother. According to Charis's daughter Rachel: "She was leading rather a dissolute life at the time. She basically said 'OK, I can't do what I want, so I'll live with abandon'." The attraction between them was instantaneous and mutual. According to Arthur Ollman, who described Charis at length in his 1999 book on artists and muses, The Model Wife, she was "the perfect model, lively, beautiful, uninhibited, playfully experimental and always at hand …" For her part, Charis had at once noted that the diminutive and whiskery older man in his brown corduroy suit was "twice as alive as anyone else in the room … his eyes most likely saw twice as much as anyone else's".

She first posed for him weeks later, and found it a transformative experience: "I knew I really didn't look that good, and that Edward had glorified me, but it was a very pleasant thing to be glorified and I couldn't wait to go back for more." While the initial session had featured isolated aspects of the nude in the form of apparently dismembered limbs, the second synthesised woman and body into a unitary identity.

An early work, Nude, 1934, follows Weston's earlier pattern of shooting the woman as he would one of his famous still lifes, a conch or a capsicum, for instance. Working with sensuality but also meticulous detachment, the blanched body emerges from pitch blackness, a tangle of long limbs, the face obliterated. As he worked more closely with her, Weston went from captioning the portraits Nude (plus, possibly, a location), to Charis Wilson, to simply Charis. The trajectory was swift, for, by the end of 1934, Weston noted that: "We are closer than ever. Perhaps Charis will be remembered as the great love of my life. Already I have reached certain heights reached with no other love."

If she is remembered thus, that will be due to the photoportraits rather than to Weston's diary reminiscences, written in characteristically prissy style, and collected in The Daybooks of Edward Weston in 1981. One picture, again titled Nude, 1936, shows long limbs entwined in a yogic pose, a play of bright light and black shade in lines silhouetting the arms extended about the knees like a wreath. This time, the head is not cut, but bowed, so all we see is the gleam of hair bisected with the white line of a parting. The classicism of the pose contrasts with others Weston took of Charis around this time, including Charis Wilson, 1935, in which the model adopts the pose Christine Keeler was to make famous, straddling the rush seat of a heavy wooden chair, her petti- coat hitched waist-high, her tight dark top and jaunty beret framing a clear face in which the eyes engage the camera lens directly.

Equally famous, and surprisingly as sensual, is Charis, Lake Ediza, 1937, in which the model is entirely covered, wearing what resembles military fatigues and heavy laced boots, a scarf tying down her long hair. Yet her position, seated leaning against some striated rocks, her knees parted wide and her hands loosely crossed at her crotch, is just as challenging.

By 1934, Wilson and Weston were living together; in 1939 they married; and in 1945 they separated. During their 11 years together, according to the photographer Bruce Weber: "He photographed her clothed and unclothed, espied through a window and frolicking on sand dunes, floating in a pool … she was inspirational – elegant, simple, fiercely intimate and glowingly sensible." She was also immensely practical, working as a secretary, delivering mail or in a fish cannery when they needed funds, and handling his picture sales. A series of six prints of Charis tumbling down a sand dune in Oceano near Los Angeles, which sold for $7 apiece in the 1940s, are now priced at upwards of $1.5m. The one thing Charis did not do was follow in the path of Weston's previous love, the Italian film actor Tina Modotti. While Modotti had used the couple's journeys through Mexico to train and practise as a photographer, Wilson used their year-long road trip around California, with the Guggenheim grant she had won, in driving their Ford V8 and setting up the tarpaulin used to turn the back into the darkroom where she assisted the printing.

Other photographic luminaries, including Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, were among their friends, but Charis insisted her talent was not for photography, but for writing, even though many of the photographic articles she wrote appeared over Weston's byline. Latterly she wrote two part-ghosted memoirs, both of her years with Weston: Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston, co-written with Wendy Madar, appeared in 1999; and Eloquent Nude: the Love and Legacy of Edward Weston and Charis Wilson, in 2007.

The day after her divorce from Weston was made absolute in 1946, Charis married the labour activist Noel Harris, and spent the next 20 years working as a union secretary and a creative writing tutor and raising their two daughters. One, Anita, died in mysterious circumstances (believed murdered) in 1967 and Charis and Noel divorced in the same year. She is survived by Rachel. Weston died in 1958.

• Helen Charis Wilson , writer and photographer's model, born 5 May 1914; died 20 November 2009

geolarson2 · 05-08-2010, 12:51 AM

Lord Jesus Christ (his real name) hit by Mass. car

(AP) – 12 hours ago

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — The victim might have forgiven the woman who ran him down in a Massachusetts crosswalk, but police haven't.

Police say a Pittsfield woman has been cited for running down a man named Lord Jesus Christ as he crossed a street in Northampton on Tuesday.

The 50-year-old man is from Belchertown. Officers checked his ID and discovered that, indeed, his legal name is Lord Jesus Christ. He was taken to the hospital for treatment of minor facial injuries.

Police say 20-year-old Brittany Cantarella was cited for failing to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

03-27-2009, 01:53 PM	#1
geolarson2 Danielle's Imaginary Boyfriend Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 512	What's in the News I was surfing the 'net this AM and came across some odd news stories that made me smile, or made me frown. Without commenting on the particulars, I thought maybe a thread where we could post links to various stories directly rather than the blogs which can be biased might be okay (WhyYou, if you or Laranger, Rob or Ms D think this is a bad idea, please yank it down). A PA prosecutor threatens to charge teen students with child porn http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/us...ref=technology ***** down, Wangs Up! http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-26040,00.html The Spirit of San Francisco http://www.nbcbayarea.com/around_tow...-Peepshow.html GhostNet http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...52R2HQ20090328 They didn't show movies like this when I was in college (at least, not outside the dorms!) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...=moreheadlines Turn-coat? Naw. http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2...5032009/463388 Last edited by geolarson2; 05-03-2009 at 06:32 PM.

10-02-2009, 01:12 PM	#2
geolarson2 Danielle's Imaginary Boyfriend Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 512	Who knew? & Ain't that a humdinger? Study: Fellatio may significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer in women http://tinyurl.com/z77so (AP) -- Women who perform the act of fellatio and swallow semen on a regular basis, one to two times a week, may reduce their risk of breast cancer by up to 40 percent, a North Carolina State University study found.

10-04-2009, 08:11 PM	#5
DWM222 Danielle's Biggest Fan Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: Colorado Posts: 478	Gutsy study...Bet the person asking the questions was wearing their "*** for a hat" more than a few times..lol __________________ Have I ever lied to you....That you know of?

10-04-2009, 08:53 PM	#6
Anoree Moderator Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Germany Posts: 2,015	I think a man couldn't have asked those questions without being hit or accused of sexual harrasment ... but a woman could. I bet the best chances to go through such a study is having women at a breast cancer screening fill out a questionnaire, handed out by females, and link those to the results of the screening. I bet that university has an attached hospital where the study could have been carried out. Last edited by Anoree; 10-04-2009 at 08:58 PM.

10-31-2009, 02:52 AM	#13
CK1 Danielle's Biggest Fan Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Near Orlando, Fl Posts: 468	what i had heard in a radio show (don't know if its 100% accurate) is that it was 5-6am and he made coffee and was drinking his coffee in his kitchen when the mom and son walking by noticed him. was he doing something (other than being naked) that could have been obscene? otherwise what gives? strange story. __________________ Once a king, always a king Once a knight is never enough

10-31-2009, 12:36 AM	#11
geolarson2 Danielle's Imaginary Boyfriend Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 512	Huh, now why didn't I think to check snopes first? They, like factcheck, politifact & taxpolicycenter are my go-to's to double-check, well, the veracity of something. I wonder if the person I got the link from, a Princeton prof., knew the page was faked or whether she was taken in too? Oh well, ce'st la vie, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice I'll bust your lip (or something like that ). At least I don't have to worry about trying to figure out how they actually proved a benefit (that's been nagging at me for nearly a month now, dog gone it!). Phew!

10-31-2009, 01:06 AM	#12
Anoree Moderator Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Germany Posts: 2,015	I just saw this in the news and couldn't believe it: Man arrested for being naked in is own kitchen http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle..._own_home.html

10-31-2009, 03:49 AM	#14
laranger Moderator Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: Colorado Posts: 604	Also, why were they walking through his front lawn??? __________________ Mediocrity shouldn't be a life goal.

10-31-2009, 06:20 AM	#15
captnjack Danielle's Imaginary Boyfriend Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: 3rd rock from the sun Posts: 818	awh I see it is in Virigina that explains a lot! Va is the only state that I know of where radar detectors are illegal! __________________ But in your dreams whatever they may be Dream a little dream of me

10-31-2009, 10:12 AM	#17
Natal Danielle's Imaginary Boyfriend Join Date: Jan 2009 Location: Vancouver Posts: 667	Why would you have speed cameras when there are no speed limits? To catch people driving too slow?

11-18-2009, 09:39 PM	#19
geolarson2 Danielle's Imaginary Boyfriend Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 512	Belle du Jour Revealed If you followed Ms du Jour's blog, or caught the dramatization of her experiences as a call girl on Showtime (played so ably by Ms Billie Paul Piper), we now know who she is: Dr. Brooke Magnanti Per The Telegraph (http://bit.ly/AlT7z): Belle de Jour's mother proud of 'brilliant' daughter Brooke Magnanti Susan Levy, the mother of Brooke Magnanti, the research scientist unmasked as the former call girl Belle de Jour, said she was proud of her "brilliant" daughter for "standing up for herself". By Tom Leonard in New York Published: 6:30AM GMT 18 Nov 2009 Wearing nursing scrubs and puffing on a cigarette outside her modest farmhouse home near Syracuse in New York state, Miss Levy, 64, admitted she had been a "little shocked" to learn that her only child had supplemented her academic earnings as a prostitute. "I know that my daughter has a very good head on her shoulders and I support her 100 per cent in what she has done and what ever she will do," she said. "I can't give her any more than that." Pointedly preferring to talk about her daughter's writing acumen rather than her actual subject matter, Miss Levy said she was now looking forward to getting an autographed copy her best-selling book about her career as a high class call girl. Miss Magnanti, 34, revealed at the weekend that she was the former prostitute who wrote a best-selling diary, later turned into a television series. Educated at a Catholic school in Florida, she moved to Britain to study for a doctorate at Sheffield University. She said she turned to prostitution after moving to London and finding she could not afford the rent. The American-born scientist, who works for Bristol University, said she had rung her mother to break the news but had left her estranged father to read about it in the newspapers. Miss Levy said that her daughter had phoned her last week to break the news. She said: "I knew that her ex-boyfriend Owen was apparently going to out her, and she wanted to do some damage control. Miss Levy said she always knew her daughter was a "fantastic writer", adding: "She has been writing stories since she was a kid, so that part did not surprise me." Referring to the prostitution, she said she was a "bit surprised" more than shocked. Her daughter's critics should be "ashamed", she said. "The subject matter is her subject matter and it is what she has done in her life." There's also a very good article/interview by India Knight with Dr. Magnanti at The Times: http://tinyurl.com/yzpotbx Last edited by geolarson2; 11-18-2009 at 09:56 PM.

11-23-2009, 04:19 PM	#20
shisync09 Banned Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: Germany Posts: 4	Whats in the News I feel like Im hallucinating. the real player stream I linked to here replayed a segment from earlier in the show. The news came on before the top of the hour and now finally is going to Randi as I type.

11-29-2009, 06:02 PM	#21
geolarson2 Danielle's Imaginary Boyfriend Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 512	REst in Peace Charis Wilson Charis Wilson, artist's model & muse to photographer Edward Wilson passed away on Nov 20, 2009. Where would the world of erotica of any sort be without great photographers like Weston, or the women who inspired him like Charis? Her obituary in The Guardian here (Text copied below): http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesi...ilson-obituary Charis Wilson obituary The photographer Edward Weston's great muse who inspired some of his finest work by Amanda Hopkinson Charis Wilson, whose name will always be linked to that of the renowned Californian photographer Edward Weston, has died aged 95. Most frequently described as Weston's great muse and the model of his middle/late years, she was also his driver, secretary, business manager and accountant, and wrote many of the texts that accompanied his photography books from the mid-1930s to 1940s. Charis (her Greek name, meaning Grace, was pronounced rather like a caress) was born, like all four of Weston's great loves, into a humble family from which intelligence and beauty looked likely to raise her. Her father, Harry Leon Wilson, was a minor novelist – the best known of his works was a humorous serial called Ruggles of Red Gap, relating how a stuffy English valet made out in the American west. He was 45 when he married the 16-year-old Helen McGowan, daughter of another writer, Grace McGowan Cooke. Helen gave her first name to their daughter, who jettisoned it for Charis when she tired of being called "little Helen", and also provided a role model as an actor, a career Charis also briefly pursued. Charis won a scholarship to study at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, but her chance for a real change of circumstances was overturned when her parents were unable to make up the shortfall to have her travel and live on the east coast. (Ruined by the Depression, Harry Leon Wilson deemed that "even the ancillary costs are too onerous"). Charis no doubt drew on this experience later in writing the application for Weston to be awarded the first Guggenheim Fellowship to go to a photographer. And to help him spend it, by taking to the road with him from 1937-38, during which time they made their first book together, containing close to 100 images, called California and the West (1940). The couple had met at a concert early in 1934, when Charis was 19 and Weston 48, and were introduced by her older brother. According to Charis's daughter Rachel: "She was leading rather a dissolute life at the time. She basically said 'OK, I can't do what I want, so I'll live with abandon'." The attraction between them was instantaneous and mutual. According to Arthur Ollman, who described Charis at length in his 1999 book on artists and muses, The Model Wife, she was "the perfect model, lively, beautiful, uninhibited, playfully experimental and always at hand …" For her part, Charis had at once noted that the diminutive and whiskery older man in his brown corduroy suit was "twice as alive as anyone else in the room … his eyes most likely saw twice as much as anyone else's". She first posed for him weeks later, and found it a transformative experience: "I knew I really didn't look that good, and that Edward had glorified me, but it was a very pleasant thing to be glorified and I couldn't wait to go back for more." While the initial session had featured isolated aspects of the nude in the form of apparently dismembered limbs, the second synthesised woman and body into a unitary identity. An early work, Nude, 1934, follows Weston's earlier pattern of shooting the woman as he would one of his famous still lifes, a conch or a capsicum, for instance. Working with sensuality but also meticulous detachment, the blanched body emerges from pitch blackness, a tangle of long limbs, the face obliterated. As he worked more closely with her, Weston went from captioning the portraits Nude (plus, possibly, a location), to Charis Wilson, to simply Charis. The trajectory was swift, for, by the end of 1934, Weston noted that: "We are closer than ever. Perhaps Charis will be remembered as the great love of my life. Already I have reached certain heights reached with no other love." If she is remembered thus, that will be due to the photoportraits rather than to Weston's diary reminiscences, written in characteristically prissy style, and collected in The Daybooks of Edward Weston in 1981. One picture, again titled Nude, 1936, shows long limbs entwined in a yogic pose, a play of bright light and black shade in lines silhouetting the arms extended about the knees like a wreath. This time, the head is not cut, but bowed, so all we see is the gleam of hair bisected with the white line of a parting. The classicism of the pose contrasts with others Weston took of Charis around this time, including Charis Wilson, 1935, in which the model adopts the pose Christine Keeler was to make famous, straddling the rush seat of a heavy wooden chair, her petti- coat hitched waist-high, her tight dark top and jaunty beret framing a clear face in which the eyes engage the camera lens directly. Equally famous, and surprisingly as sensual, is Charis, Lake Ediza, 1937, in which the model is entirely covered, wearing what resembles military fatigues and heavy laced boots, a scarf tying down her long hair. Yet her position, seated leaning against some striated rocks, her knees parted wide and her hands loosely crossed at her crotch, is just as challenging. By 1934, Wilson and Weston were living together; in 1939 they married; and in 1945 they separated. During their 11 years together, according to the photographer Bruce Weber: "He photographed her clothed and unclothed, espied through a window and frolicking on sand dunes, floating in a pool … she was inspirational – elegant, simple, fiercely intimate and glowingly sensible." She was also immensely practical, working as a secretary, delivering mail or in a fish cannery when they needed funds, and handling his picture sales. A series of six prints of Charis tumbling down a sand dune in Oceano near Los Angeles, which sold for $7 apiece in the 1940s, are now priced at upwards of $1.5m. The one thing Charis did not do was follow in the path of Weston's previous love, the Italian film actor Tina Modotti. While Modotti had used the couple's journeys through Mexico to train and practise as a photographer, Wilson used their year-long road trip around California, with the Guggenheim grant she had won, in driving their Ford V8 and setting up the tarpaulin used to turn the back into the darkroom where she assisted the printing. Other photographic luminaries, including Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, were among their friends, but Charis insisted her talent was not for photography, but for writing, even though many of the photographic articles she wrote appeared over Weston's byline. Latterly she wrote two part-ghosted memoirs, both of her years with Weston: Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston, co-written with Wendy Madar, appeared in 1999; and Eloquent Nude: the Love and Legacy of Edward Weston and Charis Wilson, in 2007. The day after her divorce from Weston was made absolute in 1946, Charis married the labour activist Noel Harris, and spent the next 20 years working as a union secretary and a creative writing tutor and raising their two daughters. One, Anita, died in mysterious circumstances (believed murdered) in 1967 and Charis and Noel divorced in the same year. She is survived by Rachel. Weston died in 1958. • Helen Charis Wilson , writer and photographer's model, born 5 May 1914; died 20 November 2009

05-08-2010, 12:51 AM	#22
geolarson2 Danielle's Imaginary Boyfriend Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 512	Holy ...! Lord Jesus Christ (his real name) hit by Mass. car (AP) – 12 hours ago NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — The victim might have forgiven the woman who ran him down in a Massachusetts crosswalk, but police haven't. Police say a Pittsfield woman has been cited for running down a man named Lord Jesus Christ as he crossed a street in Northampton on Tuesday. The 50-year-old man is from Belchertown. Officers checked his ID and discovered that, indeed, his legal name is Lord Jesus Christ. He was taken to the hospital for treatment of minor facial injuries. Police say 20-year-old Brittany Cantarella was cited for failing to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.