Blooms of Gloom

Sam Mehran, a founding member of Test Icicles who went on to record as Outer Limits Recordings and Outer Limitz, among other aliases, has died … Born in America, Mehran co-founded Test Icicles with Rory Attwell in London in the mid-2000s. They enlisted Dev Hynes (who would later record as Blood 🍊) and 🌹 to prominence with For Screening Purposes Only, a sprawling dance-punk record that infiltrated the UK’s indie-rock-dominated scene.

Will Alsop proposed turning Barnsley into a Tuscan hill town, flooding the centre of Bradford with a huge lake and adorning Middlesbrough with towers in the shape of Prada skirts. The maverick British architect, who has died aged 70, shook the establishment with his wild and wacky visions, which were often too harebrained for reality to bear.

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“If I were a politician,” he said in an interview, “I would make a law in every city that everything from the ground to 10 metres and higher should float and not touch the ground … The ground should be given to people and gardens, not buildings.”

Adam Parfrey, who breached the boundaries of kooky but tolerable popular culture by publishing Joseph Goebbels’s only novel, screeds by the Unabomber and Charles Manson, and books on taboo topics like cannibals, Satanists, necrophiliacs and pedophiles, died on Thursday at a nursing facility in Seattle. He was 61.

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“Upsetting people is a beautiful thing,” Mr. Parfrey told The Los Angeles Times in 2012. “Because it gets people to think beyond their last visit to 7-Eleven.”

If a customer asked for a simple black panther, Mr. DeVita might add bright red scratch marks around the claws, or embellish an image of a rose with dark radiating spider webs. His tattoos were bold, stylishly crude, abstract. They are often replicated by tattoo artists today.

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Mr. DeVita was also known for layering tattoos — an effect that mimicked the ripped posters and overlaid graffiti common on buildings in the East Village. His flash was displayed not on sheets of white paper, but on fruit crates and milk crates and pieces of plywood he found in the street.

“His shop was a folk art environment, and was totally unique from other shops,” Mr. Harrison said. “It was like walking into an art museum.”

In August 1951, at a $1-a-night hotel in Florence, two American women came face to face in the hallway one morning.

One was Ruth Orkin, a promising 29-year-old photojournalist who was seeking a subject for a magazine photo spread about the experiences of women traveling abroad alone — a rare thing to do at the time.

The other was Ninalee Allen, a 23-year-old adventure-seeking graduate of Sarah Lawrence College who had been traveling solo for months through France, Spain and Italy. She went by “Jinx” because she thought it sounded “exciting.”

“She was beautiful, luminescent and, unlike me, very tall,” Orkin later told the New York Times. Ms. Allen agreed to the photo shoot as a lark, and off they went through the streets of Florence.

In his anthropological survey “The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-19th Century England” (1966), Professor Marcus likened pornographic fiction to utopian fantasy — “a world of grace abounding to the chief of sinners.” He called it “pornotopia.”

Some critics said “The Other Victorians” relied excessively on theory. But in The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Elizabeth Janeway called it “a critical as well as an historical tour de force.” She added, “To expose Victorian hypocrisy is commonplace; far less common is the ability of Marcus to dredge and refine social truth from a swamp of pornography.”

“Mr. dos Santos, who began making feature films in the 1950s, was among the founders of the Cinema Novo movement, which sought to transform Brazil’s filmmaking from low comedies and Hollywood imitations to something that reflected the realities of Brazilian life.

“His first major film, Rio 40 Graus (Rio 40 Degrees, also sometimes translated as Rio 100 Degrees), released in 1955, told the story of three boys who sell peanuts to survive, and emphasized the problem of poverty.

“‘It was a big moral and political success,’ Mr. dos Santos told The Los Angeles Times in 1985. ‘For four months it was banned by the police on the grounds that it was subversive and could make a revolution’.”

“Ms. Jeannette, who was also one of the first women to get a motorcycle license in New York, and who later overcame a speech impediment to become a Broadway, film and television actor as well as a playwright, producer and director, died on April 4 at her home in Harlem. She was 103.

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Ms. Jeannette began writing plays in 1950 in response to what she saw as an absence of authentic black characters on the stage.

‘I saw parts that I knew I wouldn’t play,’ she said in an interview in 1995. ‘And so I started writing about women, and strong women, that I knew that no one would be ashamed to play’.”

“Aguilar’s powerful, quietly beautiful photographs explored the lived realities of members of various marginalized groups, including women, lesbians, Latinas, the working class, overweight people, and those with learning disabilities. Long under-recognized by mainstream institutions, her work had a sudden resurgence in popularity last year thanks to her traveling retrospective and the inclusion of her work in several group exhibitions ...”

"Bone structure has always been important to me." 🥀💀