An amazing incident of retrofuturism

Cubism is not dead and I'm ready to testify—I've just seen a chair descending a staircase, 95 years after Mr. Marcel Duchamp saw a nude doing the exact same thing. History repeating¹!

¹ "History Repeating" is a totally addictive arrangement performed by Propellerheads and Shirley Bassey. Watch the video.

My friend Bogdan Dumitrache showed me an impressive "Henri Cartier-Bresson visits Romania"¹ photo retrospective right off his iPhone yesterday—a fine opportunity to drift into a rather lengthy discussion about Leica rangefinders (Bogdan collects Leicas, affectionately naming them "musical sculptures").

That's why today I find appropriate to post a photo of Prizzi posing with/in homage to Cartier-Bresson's Manhattan shot from his 1947² American series, a work that I love and I was lucky enough to see in Amsterdam a couple of years ago.

¹ I wrote about his 1975 visit to Romania a while back.

² The year when together with his friend and colleague Robert Capa and David Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson founded Magnum Photos agency.

People are clueless. Here is an excerpt from Monday entry on Wikipedia:

Monday (pron. IPA: /ˈmʌndeɪ, ˈmʌndi/) is the day of the week between Sunday and Tuesday. It gets its name from the Moon, which in turn gets its name from Mani (Old English Mona), the Germanic Moon god.

"Monday" means "unsatisfactory day" or "disagreeable day".

Absolutely clueless¹. Blind. Oblivious. Here is the correct definition:

Monday (pron. IPA: /ˈmʌndeɪ, ˈmʌndi/) is the day of the week between Sunday and Tuesday. "Monday" is a is a contraction of "Lemon Day" (via Old French limon—in modern French denoting a lime), where "lemon" stands for "unsatisfactory, disappointing, or feeble."

Thus "Monday" can be read as "unsatisfactory day" or "disagreeable day".

Mondays are often seen as a misfortune.

At least they get the connotations right:

Modern culture usually looks at Monday as the beginning of the workweek, as it is typically Monday when adults go back to work and children back to school after the weekend. Thus, Mondays are often seen as a misfortune.

"A misfortune." Apt description. Good word.

¹ However, I do agree with the proposed etymology in case Wikipedia author refers to moon as a verb.

I walk through the narrow underpass of an unfamiliar town—uncomplicated people hurry to attend their first lives¹—when it bursts out with overwhelming clarity: the watercolor beauty of the real world.

¹ "First Life is a 3D analog world where server lag does not exist." Darren Barefoot, Vancouver web geek, getafirstlife.com.

Planes where business class is exactly the same as coach, seats dwarfed by the dimensions of real human beings, inedible in-flight meals and fare prices that obliviously feed armies of leech companies buying more political support than aviation gasoline.

Refurbished communist hotels run by lazy managers, italian-looking hotels built upon stolen concepts, plain vanilla hotels decorated by blind interior designers and a posh hotel designed by Gustave Eiffel himself were awful music harms the human soul.

Cheap wines, expensive wines, sleepwalking waiters with neon-reflecting eyes, cotton-padded brains and not even the distant memory of a smile.

I love walking. A lot. Walking back home from my office at night, for instance. And then—I hate autumn, really, I do, and winter even more. You see the conundrum?

I like writing correctly. Well, as correctly as I can. Okay, okay, I'm trying, at least! But then—I like inventing words, like "murkery," "wiredissmo" and "balltopia," which are absolutely abhorred by dictionaries and spellcheckers. Quite a conundrum, this, too.

Hi, Rock! Hello Mr. Hard Place! Have you met these two guys?