From Leonard Cohen’s Final Letter To His Dying Muse, Marianne Ihlen

by Juergen Teller

ideal ways for me to die

1. old age, peacefully in my sleep

2. after a long and illustrious career i am at a rooftop gala hosted in my honor. i am wearing a beautiful gown, holding a glass of red wine, standing by the railing. a scorned lover approaches and, after a passionate spat, they push me over the edge of the building. the wine glass goes flying, splattering their outfit in red as a visual metaphor for the blood on their hands. as i descend my gown flies around me like two beautiful wings, a bird in flight. a photographer on the street manages to take a photo before i hit the ground and that photo wins the pulitzer. a new york times think piece is released regarding whether or not it's moral to profit off a photo of someone's death. the think piece also wins a pulitzer.

3. sex accident.

Alex Dimitrov, "Time", Love and Other Poems

Yoshitomo Nara, The Mini Puff Marshies 迷你泡芙 (in 5 parts) , 1986–2008

Beetlebum - Blur

Sofia Coppola at the Venice Film Festival in 2003 and 2023.

Joan Didion photographed in her Corvette Stingray at her ramshackle mansion just at the base of Runyon Canyon in the Hollywood Hills in 1968.

Photographer Julian Wasser was commissioned by Time Magazine to take photos of Didion upon the release of her first book of essays, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” that captured some of her experiences living in LA during the 1960s.

Speaking to Vogue magazine in 2014, Wasser described the photoshoot as “a big event in my life” as he was an admirer of Didion’s earlier fiction. “It was very LA. She didn’t miss a thing. She was such a heavyweight person.” In the same Vogue article Didion recalled her own memories of the day. “What do I remember? I had a baby. I was living in a rented house in Hollywood. It was kind of a wonderful period of my life actually. Not because I was in a rented house in Hollywood. But just in general,” she said. Didion didn’t remember why they took photos of her with her car, thinking it must have been “a whim of Julian’s. Wasser however refuted that claim, “You don’t tell a woman like that what to do.”

Didion did however remember the car. “I very definitely remember buying the Stingray because it was a crazy thing to do. I bought it in Hollywood,” she said. “The Stingray was Daytona yellow. Which was a yellow so bright, you could never mistake it for anything other than Daytona yellow.”

You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming-in fact not at all a warming-yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the colour blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day "I'heure bleue." To the English it was "the gloaming." The very word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour-carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.

Joan Didion, Blue Nights

patti smith throwing sandwiches at a journalist after he criticized her lengthy songs