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What we can learn from procrastination : The New Yorker
Things I was never told at university.
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Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.
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I have just started taking classes to refresh my Irish. I have no idea why, but considering I had no idea there were masculine and feminine nouns in Irish this is probably a good idea.
2010/10/30
159 notes
159 notes
Snowstorm, China
Photograph by Michael Yamashita, National Geographic
Another great picture made better by bad weather. Michael Yamashita has used a telephoto lens in this situation to compress the snowflakes into patterns of white. He has wisely focused on a plane of snow, leaving the background figures slightly soft. All these photographic choices pull the viewer into the storm. We can practically feel the snowflakes on our tongues. —Annie Griffiths
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When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that famous line of his, “L’enfer c’est les autres” (“Hell is other people”), it was obvious that he had never been to the Chateau Marmont.
Hell, after all, has far more in common with Hollywood’s most notorious hotel, built in 1927 as an apartment complex, but quickly transformed during the Great Depression into a flophouse for the rich, petulant and morbidly overindulged — which it remains to this day, almost a century later.
The Chateau isn’t so much a place to stay in Los Angeles as a holding facility; a stopover on the fast track to eternal damnation. It even looks evil: modelled after the Château d’Amboise in the Loire Valley in France — with touches of medieval Gothic — its narrow turrets and black spires rise out of the exotic foliage above the Sunset Strip like some diabolical vampire’s lair. Which, in a way, it is.
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Hell, after all, has far more in common with Hollywood’s most notorious hotel, built in 1927 as an apartment complex, but quickly transformed during the Great Depression into a flophouse for the rich, petulant and morbidly overindulged — which it remains to this day, almost a century later.
The Chateau isn’t so much a place to stay in Los Angeles as a holding facility; a stopover on the fast track to eternal damnation. It even looks evil: modelled after the Château d’Amboise in the Loire Valley in France — with touches of medieval Gothic — its narrow turrets and black spires rise out of the exotic foliage above the Sunset Strip like some diabolical vampire’s lair. Which, in a way, it is.
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Chateau Marmont: the home of hedonism | The Times
(Gotta pay Murdoch for The Times, but still, Halloween reading, kinda)
