Karaoke

Karaoke (カラオケ, portmanteau of Japanese kara 空 "empty", and ōkesutora オーケストラ "orchestra"). 

The best thing, especially when you have no singing talent at all hahaha...
the photos are from one month ago when Elisa came to visit me :)

Belle de jour

A film by Luis Buñuel from 1967 with beautiful Catherine Deneuve. 
(The title refers to belle-de-jour, the French name of the daylily (Hemerocallis), meaning "beauty of the day", a flower that blooms only during the day). 

Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine, a bourgeois housewife unable to commit sexually to her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel). Instead she fulfils her sadomasochistic fantasies by becoming prostitute ‘Belle de jour’ at an intimately run brothel.

Catherine Deneuve’s costumes were designed by Yves Saint Laurent, shoes Roger Vivier ( how very surprising ). 

Belle de Jour would be a pro-feminist film were it not for the flashbacks indicating Séverine’s sexual abuse as a child. She does not enjoy her desires so much as exorcise them as a result of her childhood trauma.

Artistic interpretations I

                                                 the devil's trio - Azzazillo, Behemoth (the cat ) and Fagot

Yesterday I finished a book 'Master & Margarita' by Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov's complicated, censored, beloved novel was written mostly in the 1930s, but not published until decades after the author's death. So it made me think of all the different artistic interpretations of Satan we see, or how very different they can be from each other.
What counts as satanic? I can only assume Milton's Satan would give Marilyn Manson the side-eye and that the Satan of South Park would be horrified by Lars von Trier's Antichrist.South Park's Satan is a gentle red giant who dreams of experiencing the innocent joys of Earth like flowers, mountaineering, and gay cruises.

The Powerpuff Girls' Him is mysterious, malicious, and a badass. He's truly scary - with its stylized lines, bold color blocking, and quirkiness. Props to Cartoon Network for taking a chance by allowing a transvestite devil on TV.

' Sympathy for the Devil ' In this 1968 Rolling Stones masterpiece, Lucifer is stylish, over-scheduled, and thinks you suck at guessing games. ( Mick Jagger later on said he wrote the song after reading 'Master and Margarita' )

Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch painter who lived from 1450-1516, is known most for his extremely detailed, bizarre paintings. The most well known of these is his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, and the most well known panel of that triptych is the one depicting Hell. Basically anywhere you look on a Bosch is going to have some crazy stuff going on and nowhere is that more true than this piece. In all the insanity, it's easy to miss the figure in the foreground, generally thought to be the devil/Satan/Prince of Hell (scrawny bird-creature with a cauldron for a crown, eating humans and pooping them out ) . What's interesting about this portrayal of Satan is that while many artists and writers bestow upon him some power and semblance of his former angelic beauty, Bosch condemns him to the same humiliations and tortures as his subjects. This devil has no wry, bad-boy appeal, only misery.

In Doctor Faustus (1604), by the English dramatist Christopher Marlowe, Mephistopheles achieves tragic grandeur as a fallen angel, torn between satanic pride and dark despair. In the drama Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832), by J.W. von Goethe, he is cold-hearted, cynical, and witty—perhaps a more subtle but certainly a slighter creation. At the end of Goethe’s drama, Faust’s soul escapes from Mephistopheles while he is making improper advances to the angels that have come to rescue it.

There's a movie 'Master & Margarita ' made in 1972, and it was filmed on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia and Italy. I preferred the book though. 

when a tomboy grows up...

“I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.”

- Katharine Hepburn

And that explains everything:Love her style, love her movies, love her ( So much that it inspired me to cut my hair short)