Screw off the top of a bottle of wine…

[Photo Credit: James K. Lowe via MPD]

Herge.

Tarako Spaghetti? Yes, please. [Photo Credit: Andre Baranowski]

“Central Park” By George Bellows (1905)

Marc Myers on the making of “Whole Lotta Love.” 

Ah-hem:

[Painting by Antoine Renault]

Dig this post over at Cinephilia and Beyond. It hips us to a great BBC 4 radio show, Desert Island Discs. Check out interviews with Michael Caine, Stephen Frears, Mel Brooks, John Huston, Elia Kazan, Bob Hoskins and many more.

Poster by Günther Kieser (1968)

Over at GQ, Alan Richman gives us the 10 best bagels in town.

Monday Love:

[Photo Credit: Jim Colls via MPD]

Great rock n roll pictures found here.

Moebius.

She comes in colors everywhere…

[Picture by Marie-Esther]

Yes.

Get Carter is a movie I’ve been meaning to see for a long time and last week I watched it with a friend.

Nasty and grim, I enjoyed it.

Strawberry and Rhubarb: a Good Combination.

I tried to read The Hobbit when I was a kid but I thought it was boring and I didn’t make it too far. I never read J.R.R. Toilken’s famous Lord of the Rings triology. But I did enjoy Joan Acocella’s review of Toilken’s newly-published translation of Beowulf:

As an adult, Tolkien could read many languages—and he made up more, including Elvish—but the number is not the point. Even in secondary school, Carpenter says, “Tolkien had started to look for the bones, the elements that were common to them all.” Or, in the words of C. S. Lewis, his closest friend, for a time, in adulthood, he had been inside language. Perhaps he couldn’t come back out. By this I don’t mean that he couldn’t talk to his wife or his postman, but that Old English, or at least that of “Beowulf,” was where he was happiest. He knew how it worked, he loved its ways: how the words joined and separated, what came after what. Old English is where he spent most of the day, in his reading, writing, and teaching. He might have come to think that this language was better than our modern one. The sympathy may have gone even deeper. Like Beowulf, Tolkien was an orphan. (He was taken in by his grandparents.) He grew up in the West Midlands, and said that the “Beowulf” poet, too, was probably from there. He did not have difficulty living in a world of images and symbols. (He was a Catholic from childhood.) He liked golden treasure and coiled dragons. Perhaps, in the dark of night, he already knew what would happen: that he would never publish his beautiful “Beowulf,” and that his intimacy with the poem, more beautiful, would remain between him and the poet—a secret love.

[Picture by Jeffrey Alan Love]

[Photo Credit: George Byrne]

Dig this badass record:

[Photo Credit: Thomas Zhuang]

Blondies. 

Steve Martin (and Franz Kline) by Annie Leibovitz.