Framing Fearful Symmetry

“Brutality to an animal is cruelty to mankind – it is only the difference in the victim.” ~ Alphonse de Lamartine

China announced a ban on animal circuses —all 300 state-owned ones of them. It’s a huge step for animals, considering how they’re treated at circuses—and in zoos—not only in China but around the world. [read full article]

MEANWHILE BACK AT THE RANCH:

Dying breed: One of the emaciated tigers in a cage at the Xiongshen Tiger and Bear Mountain Village in Guilin, China

Behind rusted bars, a skeletal male tiger lies panting on the filthy concrete floor of his cage, covered in sores and untreated wounds. His once-fearsome body is so emaciated it is little more than a pitiful pile of fur and bones.

Death is surely a matter of days away and can only come as a welcome release. Wardens at the wildlife park in southwest China say, indifferently, that they do not expect him to see the start of the Year of the Tiger which began last Sunday.

‘What can we do?’ a female park official asks a small huddle of visitors with a sigh and a casual shrug. ‘He’s dying”. [read full article]

Fisherman’s Daughter

Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion ~ Salvador Dali, 1930

Speaking of this picture, Dali has given a definition: “The double image (the example of which may be that of the image of the horse alone which is at the same time the image of a woman) can be prolonged, continuing the paranoiac process, the existence of another obsessive idea being then sufficient to make a third image appear (the image of a lion, for example) and so forth, until the concurrence of a number of images, limited only by the degree of the capacity for paranoiac thought.”

The violently erotic character of the group of fellateurs metamorphosed into the forelegs and the head of the horse is veiled by the immutable aspect of the ensemble, obtained with the help of an absence of dense shadows and violent colors, as well as by the geological character of the forms. Dali said of these models:

“They are always boats which seem to be drawn by exhausted fishermen, by fossil fishermen.”