Some of us make decisions, some of us fight for them, and the rest of us watch. I’ll let the politicos and the soldiers do my thinking about Russia, Georgia, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, The Sudan, et. al. (my, the list does ramble — let’s cut it short). I have excesses to indulge.

I’ve never had a favourite photographer (note my decadent “U”). Annie Leibovitz has assumed the role. Check her candidly-staged shots of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and her now-infamous portrait of Miley Cyrus.

Hanging around looking at her stuff I found some pinups. Back in the day Weeds convinced me that pinup-style photo-paintings are actually awesome. Here are a whole lot of reasonable ones, an annual collection called The Vanities (number two is the girl from Trainspotting).

All of this oversaturated lipstick and Ewan McGregor reminds me of Baz Luhrmann‘s Red Curtain movies, and those remind me of cabaret. The Dresden Dolls have a “new” album. New-in-quotes because No, Virginia is a bunch of newly-recorded unreleased B-sides from Yes, Virginia. Here’s a single, “Night Reconnaissance”:

The Punk Cabaret aesthetic is roughly based on 1920s Weimar Republic Romanticism. Bohemian Revelry over Foreign and Internal Affairs! They had excesses to indulge.

That subliminal masochism-and-castration novel I’m reading (the one based on Dante’s Inferno), The Gargoyle, has a crazy female artist in it. She talks about her process at one point, and it involves emptying her mind so God can speak to her. Amanda, being a good decadent Buddhist, like all of us rich white kids, wrote an article about her strikingly similar process.