Motley Kamuka

I don't know if films are trying to make it more acceptable, or to talk about what is actually happening. I'm thinking of 2 movies and a falconer, and some stars. The Nazi Lazio falconer was dismissed after he got a penis implant. That's not fiction, that's real life. I'm not sure what a penis implant has to do with being fired, I would hope the Nazi bit would be what got him fired.  Nicole Holofcener has a man get plastic surgery in her last film You Hurt My Feelings (2023). Fellow gets the bags under his eyes taken care of. First time I've seen that in a movie.  Then I just saw The Materialist (2025) and the Pedro Pascal character got the heightening surgery. I can't unsee the horrible things they did to Val Kilmer's face. Not a fan of what they did to Mickey Rourke's face either. Or maybe I should say they chose to do to themselves. 

So I'm finishing up listening to The Woman Who Would Be King : Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt by Kara Cooney. What an amazing book! Enjoyed this book, because Cooney is good at saying, we don't really know, but with these circumstances we do know, they probably had some of these issues. Hatshepsut was a woman pharaoh and that was unusual. I like people who push the boundaries.  Went to the Met twice to see her statue, and the gallieries were closed! I looked through the Met book on her ( PDF online here ). Really enjoyed learning about Hatshepsut.  After I'm done with that, hopefully today, I'll start Yellowface for my book club. I went for a walk and listened to the first 4 chapters, and wow! I'm not sure I've enjoyed a novel like this before. It's amazing.  I feel quite a pressure to get through 3 books for my book club who have meetings early August. I've got to really crank and quit watching movies (my Letterboxd diary ) and Anime ...

I'm going to be reading The Cyberiad by  Stanisław Lem for my Sci-fi book club. I will write my thoughts as I get into this book here. My blogs are notes that are not finished on publication, I keep updating them, so don't be surprised if you come back to a post and it's been added too and edited, hopefully for the better. I should start a blog called Rough Drafts.  The introduction writes “ Soviet medicine was dominated by the eugenic theories of Trofim Lysenko,” Google writes, “  No, Soviet medicine was not dominated by eugenic theories, but rather by Lysenkoism, a discredited biological theory championed by Trofim Lysenko.  Lysenkoism, which focused on environmentally induced, heritable traits, had a detrimental impact on Soviet genetics and agriculture, but was not directly related to eugenics.  While eugenics did exist in the Soviet Union, it was not the dominant ideology in medicine, and Lysenkoism was a separate and distinct phenomenon.” So OK. No doubt...

All The Beauty In The World by Patrick Bingley  is the next book club book, and it's good it's short because I got it 13 days before we meet, and I had a day where I finished up another book for another book club.  I once did the NY Times challenge of looking at a painting for 10 minutes, so I look at the Greco painting for quite a while, while I notice a lot of things about it (See links below). The paintings kind of come alive when you take some time with them, and not just move on when they get boring. I'm often too interested in consuming everything, instead of really grokking one painting when I'm present at a museum. Moving forward I'm going to be more strategic.  He talks about being struck by the beauty, and having nowhere to put it.  He talks about windows into the world, Maria Theresa by Diego Velazquez . Of the 34 paintings by Vermeer , the Met has 5 of them. Frick has 3. Manhattan has 8 of the 34 Vermeers, 24%. You know, I think I'm going to create...