Opus – Page 120 – Encyclopædia of the sublime

Paul Laffoley

Most of Laffoley's pieces are painted on large canvases and combine words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of explanation, tackling concepts like dimensionality, time travel through hacking relativity, connecting conceptual threads shared by philosophers through the millennia, and theories about the cosmic origins of mankind. As of 2004, Laffoley claims to have executed over 800 works. His work over the last forty years is a dizzying mix of precise architectural-quality painting and ideas (both societally accepted and far on the fringe) from ancient times to the present. Laffoley has called his work a blend of the purely rational, Apollonian impulse and the purely emotional, Dionysian impulse.

Andree Putman

The interior designer Andrée Putman had an outlook of radical simplicity that made her seem perpetually modern. She provided interiors in 1985 for the office in Paris of the French minister of culture, with its half-moon desk, still in service and loved; in 1990 for Bordeaux's contemporary art museum; and in 1994 for a revamp of the cabin of Concorde. She also designed the sets for Peter Greenaway's 1996 film The Pillow Book.

Rats of Shah Dola

Rats of Shah Dola are children or adults suffering from microcephaly, exploited as beggars at the shrine of Shah Dola. They have sloping foreheads, narrow faces which have a rodent quality.

Aghori

The Aghori are known for their extreme and outlandish violations of typical Indian and other social mores, as well as their unorthodox, taboo rituals which have caused many mainstream Hindus to condemn them as non-Hindu. They are, for instance, known to engage in post-mortem ritual cannibalism, urophagia and coprophagy; they also often dwell in charnel grounds, have been witnessed smearing cremation ashes on their bodies, and have been known to use bones from human corpses for crafting skull bowls (which Shiva and other Hindu deities are often iconically depicted holding or using) and jewellery.

Secretariat

Secretariat was an American Thoroughbred racehorse, who in 1973 became the first U.S. Triple Crown champion in twenty-five years, setting new race records in two of the three events in the Series – the Kentucky Derby, and the Belmont Stakes – records that still stand today.

Rai stones

Rai stones are large, circular stone disks carved out of limestone in the island of Yap, Micronesia. Locals have used these stones as a form of unusual currency.

Legendary Parties

Legendary Parties is a book by Jean-Louis De Faucigny-Lucinge. The author, who traces his family to the 11th century when they ruled the Barony of Faucigny in Savoie, and who was active in French political and banking circles, records details of certain rarefied fetes held in France between 1922 and 1972, which he hosted or attended as a guest. He recalls the lavish costume balls presided over by such glitterati as the Count Etienne de Beaumonts, the Viscount de Noailleses and the Baron Guy de Rothschilds. In 1928, the author and his first wife "Baba," now deceased (he describes her as "exotically beautiful" and "one of the most elegant women in Paris"), gave a soiree, based on the theme of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which ended at six in the morning under the Eiffel Tower. There are handsome photographs by Cecil Beaton and reproductions of drawings by Pablo Picasso and Yves Saint Laurent, and of Christian Berard's hand-painted screens.

Jacques Mesrine

Jacques Mesrine was a French criminal who was also briefly active in the United States and Canada. He was responsible for numerous bank robberies, burglaries, and kidnappings, and claimed in an autobiography he wrote from prison to have committed upwards of forty murders. He was adept at disguising himself (earning himself the moniker "The Man of a Hundred Faces") and making successful escapes from prison.

Zouave

Zouave was the title given to certain infantry regiments in the French Army, normally serving in French North Africa between 1831 and 1962.

Konrad Lorenz

Konrad Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist and founder of modern ethology, the study of animal behaviour by means of comparative zoological methods.