Mike
Klotz is a family of violin makers. Members of the Klotz family have made violins in Mittenwald, Germany from the mid-17th century to the present. The Klotz family taught other families of the village the violin trade, and Mittenwald prospered and became well known for its violins.
Marie Menken was an American experimental filmmaker and socialite. She appeared in Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls.
Moscow gold refers to the operation by which 510 tonnes of gold, corresponding to 72.6% of the total gold reserves of the Bank of Spain, were transferred from their original location in Madrid to the Soviet Union a few months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri is an Iranian refugee who lived in the departure lounge of Terminal One in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 8 August 1988 until July 2006, when he was hospitalized for an unspecified ailment. His autobiography has been published as a book and he may have been the basis for the movie The Terminal.
Motobécane was a French manufacturer of bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles, and other small vehicles, established in 1923.
Mark Buxton is the man behind many of the Comme des Garcons fragrances.
The mimic octopus is a species of octopus that has a strong ability to mimic other creatures. The octopus mimics the physical likeness and movements of more than fifteen different species, including sea snakes, lionfish, flatfish, brittle stars, giant crabs, sea shells, stingrays, flounders, jellyfish, sea anemones, and mantis shrimp. It accomplishes this by contorting its body and arms, and changing colour.
Minotaure, published between 1933 and 1939, was a Surrealist-oriented publication founded by Albert Skira in Paris. The editors were André Breton and Pierre Mabille. It was a luxurious publication, sporting original artworks on its cover by prestigious artists like Pablo Picasso. The magazine was sponsored and advised by Surrealist art patron Edward James, and is still one of the richest sources of information about the pre-war Surrealist world.
On November 5, 1872, the Mary Celeste left New York, loaded with raw alcohol, bound for Genoa. There were seven crew members aboard, as well as Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife and their two-year-old daughter. A month later, on December 4, the Celeste was found drifting near the Azores, an autonomous group of islands off the coast of Portugal. The sails were run down or blown away, the hatches open, the cabins full of water. There was a sword on the deck, as well as what appeared to be bloodstains. Nine of the barrels in the hold were empty. All that was left was a slate log, which is an hourly record of bearing, speed and wind. The last entry suggested that the ship was abandoned 10 days prior, near the island of Santa Maria.
Memoirs of a Public Baby is a book by Philip O'Connor. Seldom has a writer described his own chaotic boyhood and early manhood with so much self-flagellating mockery. Abandoned by his Irish mother, a "fallen gentlewoman," O'Connor grew up in a seedy hotel, in a brewery, in a cellar, in a French peasant woman's pastry shop. In London, he developed an intense dislike of English snobbery as he ran into "a wall of nervous, persnickety tabus" that stifled social interaction. His contempt for bourgeois values and conformity is reflected in wickedly mordant comments on himself, his friends and acquaintances. Like new suits of clothes, he dons and discards intellectual fashions - surrealism, communism, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence. He spends six months in a mental hospital, then has a sexually frustrating affair with a cultured, unbalanced woman who nearly axes him and is herself hospitalized. We leave him in 1945, "started . . . on a halting road to conformity."