Magda Cordell McHale***

"Society needs to know where it's been before it can know where its going."



Slim, striking and never at a loss for words -- delivered forcefully in a Hungarian accent -- Ms. McHale has been called called a futurist, sci-fi painter, designer and architect. All of which she dismissed with queenly bemusement to The News a few years ago. "People don't get things right," she announced, between theatrical drags on a cigarette. "They want to put artists in categories. I didn't always fit."


"I am interested in the human shape. I also know it is not only a shape: It can see, feel, talk, can be black or white. It is part of humanity. . . . These figures were always women and very large and often had no heads. Heads didn't matter -- what mattered was the bone, the skin, the viscera."

Said one critic in 1959:

"Her representation of women is not concerned with traditional notions of beauty of traditional cultural values. It is a fierce but controlled expression of the vital events and mysteries in the life of man; the mysteries to do with the role of the female, positive or negative, throughout the universe. The result may be monstrous and uncompromising, but in this age of corsets, cosmetics, automation, and celluloid sex, it might do us no harm to be shocked back into the realization that there is still latent in the human being a savage instinct, fecundity, and energy."

++new york times obit++

my heart among the stars.***

the *heart nebula*, a large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart. the nebula glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element: hydrogen. the red glow and the larger shape are all created by a small group of stars near the nebula's center. this open cluster of stars contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our sun, many dim stars only a fraction of the mass of our sun, and an absent microquasar that was expelled millions of years ago. the *heart nebula* is located about 7,500 light years away toward the constellation of cassiopeia.

krazy kat klub

Krazy Kat in 1920 was a "Bohemian joint in an old stable up near Thomas Circle ... (where) artists, musicians, atheists, professors" gathered. Miraculously the structure still stands, five blocks from the White House, as a gay bar called the Green Lantern. (link)








Washington Post / Saturday, February 22, 1919

ROW IN KRAZY KAT LANDS 14 IN JAIL

Carefree Bohemians Start Rough-House and Cop Raids Rendezvous.

Fourteen would-be Bohemians yesterday appeared in police court and demanded a jury trial on various charges preferred against them by Policeman Roberts, who, with the assistance of two night watchmen, raided the Krazy Kat, which is something like a Greenwich Village coffee house, in an alley near Thomas Circle.

Roberts, under orders to watch the rendezvous of the Bohemians, heard a shot fired in the Krazy Kat shortly after 1 o'clock yesterday morning. The watchmen were quickly pressed into service and a raiding party was organized.

When Roberts climbed the narrow stairway leading from a garage to the scene of trouble, he found himself in the dining room of the Krazy Kat, confronted with gaudy pictures evolved by futurists and impressionists and what appeared to the policeman to be a free-for-all fight.

At the Second Precinct police station 25 prisoners, including three women — self-styled artists, poets and actors, and some who worked for the government by day and masqueraded as Bohemians by night — were examined.

Those against whom charges were placed gave the following names:

John Don Allen, Cleon Throckmorton and John Stiffen, charged with keeping a disorderly house; Charles Flynn, drinking in public; J. Albion Blake, disorderly conduct; Walter Thomas, assault and disorderly conduct; Harry Rockelly, drinking in public; George Miltry, disorderly conduct; Mitchell McMahon, drinking in public; Joseph Ryon, disorderly; Anthony Hanley, drinking in public; Frank Moran, disorderly conduct, Leo Cohen, drinking in public and disorderly conduct, and Raymond Coombs, disorderly conduct.

Shorpy.com

(blog post about the krazy kat)

sendin' out a little love

dunt be skert++