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The Art Deco Lighter, from Smoking's Era of Toxic Glamor
The Art Deco style of the 1920s and '30s pervaded design, from the Chrysler Building in Manhattan to the Grand Rex in Paris, but it wasn't always on such a large scale.
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Reader’s Diary: Henry Miller's ‘The Colossus of Maroussi’
At some point in my teens I read a number of books by Henry Miller — though not as many as I read, at around the same time, by Hermann Hesse, despite the fact that Hesse’s books, in contrast to Miller’s, were not reputed to convey much information about sex.
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Sick of Being Human, a Designer Transformed Himself into a Goat
What if you could escape the pains of daily existence by transforming into a goat?
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Vladimir Nabokov's Scientific Butterfly Illustrations
At the end of Vladimir Nabokov's poem "Pale Fire," he describes how "White butterflies turn lavender as they / Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway / The phantom of my little daughter's swing."
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Reader’s Diary: ‘In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton’
When I wandered ingenuously onto the scene, Donald Britton was a young star, or so I considered him, just a few years older than me (actually a bit more than a few, it turns out — he always looked so boyish) yet somehow wiser.
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The Many Pleasures of Reading Donald Britton’s Poems
This slim volume of poetry might stir up the tears you have been keeping inside you, especially if, like me, you are old enough to remember the 1980s and the AIDS epidemic, the seemingly endless roll call of people you knew and didn’t know who died horribly.
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The Politics of Seeing, Being, and Visibility in Photography
It doesn’t seem right to call the latest issue of Aperture — its first issue dedicated to African American lives as represented by the medium of photography — a magazine. It is a powerhouse book; it does so much heavy lifting.
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Reader’s Diary: Man Ray's ‘Writings on Art’
Jennifer Mundy acknowledges in her Preface to Man Ray’s Writings on Art that, compared to his friends Duchamp and Picabia, he has come to be seen as something of a lightweight.
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The Artists and Activists Who’ve Aimed at the Roots of Injustice
A few years ago I was covering a panel discussion for Hyperallergic featuring members of Gran Fury, an ACT UP affinity group focused primarily on producing what group members themselves called “propaganda” against a government hellbent on isolating, vilifying, and smugly looking on as tens of thousa
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Reader’s Diary: ‘Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners'
What happens when you cross the perfervid emotionalism of Edna St. Vincent Millay, she of the candle burning at both ends, with Charles Olson’s idea, distilled out of William Carlos Williams, of a projective verse imbued with “the breathing of the man who writes” (and I suppose it is very emphatical
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Arthur Vogelsang Takes Us into Orbit
Being a poet in America is like being a submarine: you might be seen when you pop up, and, as a rule, people don’t go looking for you.
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See the Smithsonian Archive's Collection of Artists' Handwritten Letters
Whatever skeptics may say about the pseudoscience of graphology (handwriting analysis), it’s hard to deny that handwriting expresses feeling and style — especially, in many cases, when it’s the handwriting of an artist. Georgia O’Keeffe’s bold, squiggly lines and lack of punctuation ignored conventi