The Girl in the Gilded Cage

"Miss Joy Ching imparts an Oriental touch to an old American art form as The Girl in the Gilded Cage — a San Francisco Chinatown striptease."

Customers Love (!) Charlie Low's (!) Caged Honey (!)

more here

Why So "Cagey"?

There was absolutely no waiting until February for this one.

“It’s nice to be a devil when you’re one like me.”

Leila also played violin for Crowley's "Rites of Eleusis" in 1910.  

The names of the seven Rites are The Rite of "Saturn", "Jupiter", "Mars", "Sol", "Venus", "Mercury" and "Luna". Crowley claimed that the Rites were designed to inspire the audience with 'religious ecstasy', and that merely reading them would help people "cultivate their highest faculties". Some in the popular press thought otherwise, and considered the Rites an immoral display, riddled with 'blasphemy and erotic suggestion.'

a "self portrait"

Schiele Drawing a Nude Model before a Mirror, 1910

Germaine Krull, photographer

"Naked," 1935

L.A.Y.L.A.H.

Leila Waddell (magickal name LAYLAH or L.A.Y.L.A.H.), Aleister Crowley's lover/Scarlet Woman/Unlimited Lou

The Kiss

Screamin' "Jay" Hawkins

ladies and gentlemen

Charlotte Andler


unknown couple...wonderful photo.

Let's Misbehave

"t'would be the great event of 1928, dear!"

Down in the Willow Garden / Rose Connelly

Down in the willow garden
Where me and my love did meet
As we sat a-courting
My love fell off to sleep
I had a bottle of burgundy wine
My true love did not know
And there I poisoned that dear little girl
On the banks below

I drew my saber through her
It was a bloody knife
I threw her in the river
Which was an awful sight

My father often told me
That money would set me free
If I would murder that dear little girl
Whose name was Rose Connelly

Now he sits by his cabin door
Wiping his tear-brimmed eyes
For his only son soon shall walk
To yonder scaffold high

My race is run beneath the sun
The devil is waiting for me
For I did murder that dear little girl
Whose name was Rose Connelly

Apache dancing

hello, satan, how you feel?

Lee Morse
you're wicked and you're depraved / and you've all misbehaved...



The Boswell Sisters

Man Ray and Kiki's first date

"Meeting Kiki - for that was her name around the quarter, Marie told Man Ray - completed Man Ray's initiation.  After dinner at La Rotonde, they took in a movie Folies de femmes, by Eric von Stroheim, during which, like a smitten teenager, he furtively grasped her hand in the darkness."
-Man Ray, American Artist by Neil Baldwin

what about him?

Blind Beast - 1969

"A BITE"

"if your husband ever finds out"

"your skin is so beautiful... I just had to..."

skip to 3:00 mark

from "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters"

Toshio Saeki

in the museum

predecessors

the bench

"Take out your Swiss Army knife..."

That Old-Fashioned Remedy

Wonder Woman

Rabbit's Moon

Harry Rose - Frankfurter Sandwiches

two-headed beasts

Sebastian Droste; Claude Cahun; Elvis Presley

Prudence

A statue representing Prudence, from the tomb of Francois II in Nantes Cathedral.  It shows the figure of a young girl - with the face of a wise old man on the back of her head.  Fulcanelli believed the statue symbolised nature in all of her aspects, and also the final stage of the alchemical process, in which opposites combine to produce the perfect, androgynous being.

"don't try"

magic couple

Jack and Marjorie Cameron Parsons

William Burroughs, part 2

It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin-music, sculpture, writing, painting-and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Writing and painting were one in cave paintings, which were formulae to ensure good hunting. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formula is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally functional, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae. Take a porcelain stove and disconnect it and put it in your living room with ivy growing over it: it may be a good-looking corpse but it isn't functional anymore. Or take a voodoo doll full of pins-authentic West Africa, $500 on 57th Street-and hang it on the wall of your duplex loft. It isn't killing enemies anymore, and the same goes for a $5,000 shrunk-down head, which a fashionable shrink bought for his consultation room.
-William S. Burroughs

William Burroughs

"First of all, I recognized writing as a magical operation, and since such operations are designed to produce specific results, this leads us to an inquiry as to the purposes of writing. Remember that the written word is an image; that the first writing was pictorial, and so painting and writing were at one time a single operation. [...] The original invention from which writing developed was quite simply to create on a cave wall images and scenes: hunting, and often so-called pornographic drawings. The purpose was originally ceremonial or magical, and when the work is separated from its magical function, it loses vitality. That is, when some tribe starts making dolls for tourists, it's gone. And that is what bestsellers are doing - whole valleys of dolls and shark teeth for the tourists. It may make money but it isn't magical. I know Dali says the measure of genius is gold, and I agree that artists should be at least as well-paid as plumbers."
-William S. Burroughs, "Ten Years and a Billion Dollars"

Precious Thing

Why Change Your Wife?

Cecil B. DeMille, 1920

She's only a bird in a gilded cage

bicycle

kiss me, choke me

Aleister Crowley

"Adding to his scandals, at one point Crowley tried to make money selling 'Elixir of Life Pills' that were supposed to enhance virility. Those who took them probably never realized they were composed of a 'neutral base combined with Crowley's own semen.'"

-Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons, by John Carter

in the office 2

World War I