This October, 1943, cover, was Penn's first work for Vogue. He had only recently begun to work as an assistant to Alex Liberman, after failing to find himself as a painter. (Women's Wear Daily reports that when Penn gave up on his artist dreams, he "washed the paint from his canvases and kept them as table linens.") Liberman liked Penn, despite his lack of photographic experience, so he asked him to start suggesting cover concepts; Penn shot this with borrowed equipment. It's almost impossible to imagine a Vogue cover of today coming out of such spontaneity of talent.

Penn's best photographs have a timeless quality. There is a deep stillness in this 1949 image, "Summer Sleep," and an abstracted intimacy. Some of the photographer's best work was only published decades after he shot it.

His nude series is a perfect example. Penn wanted to step away from fashion, so in 1949, he went to Port-au-Prince, and started taking pictures of artists' models, instead of fashion models. "Nude 70" was shot during this period, and exhibited at the Met in 2002. Penn's work was, more than anything else, always about light and space, which he used as uncanny tools for describing the relationships between things.

Whereas Newton was raunchy and dark, and Avedon was frothy and light, Penn was more intensely interested in his subjects; he could even humanize the gaze of a dismembered turkey's eye. You can trace a fairly direct line of influence from Helmut Newton to Steven Klein, and from Richard Avedon to Stephen Meisel. If you're looking for echoes of Penn in contemporary fashion photography, you can often find the same sense of stillness, of precision, and of beauty rather than prettiness, in the work of Paolo Roversi and Sarah Moon.

And unlike a lot of artists, Irving Penn kept producing good work into his old age. This still life was published in 1999; while his exacting photos were seen less and less frequently in the pages of Vogue over the last few years, the ones that were published — like that anthropomorphized bird — were stop-in-your-tracks beautiful.

He may never have made it as a painter. But he did become an artist.

Photos:

Photography Now [Official Site]
Metropolitan Musem of Art [Official Site]
UK Vogue Cover Archive [Official Site]
Style.com [Official Site]

Lopez started blogging from her seaside home in Galicia, Spain, two and a half years ago on her 95th brithday, according to the Telegraph. "Today it's my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog," she wrote on December 23, 2006, in her first post on her Spanish-language blog, amis95.blogspot.com.

She posted once a week and sometimes daily, and had to dictate to her grandson because cataracts impaired her vision. In the past few months she had been posting video messages instead of written posts. "It's like having a conversation, and those who read what I say become my friends," she told the International Herald Tribune in a 2007 profile.

Lopez's posts on international and Spanish politics, and her memories of life during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, eventually attracted more than 1.5 million visitors. The popularity of her political commentary led to a visit last year from Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. However, she wrote about many topics, including her health problems and old age, often using humor to share her personal insights into aging with her readers. She said:

Elderly people like me - and there are a lot of old people who are younger than I am - should all have someone who shows them how to use the Internet... You have to stay informed.

She even commented on fashion from time to time, writing in January that she wondered how girls in church stayed warm with "their little knickers showing and their hips all bare." But, she did like some modern fashions. "A miniskirt with a pretty pair of legs - that, I love," she wrote. "But you really need to have good legs."

Lopez's grandson was inspired to set up the blog because she had been asking him about the internet and said, "I want to understand your culture. I want to be on top of things." In a 2007 interview with Reuters, she said:

No one pays any attention to old women any more. Not many people love us. But I was surprised by the internet, because young people who were 18 years of age, or 14 or 15, tell me about their lives and what they think and ask my advice.

In one of her final posts in February, she wrote: "When I'm on the internet, I forget about my illness. The distraction is good for you - being able to communicate with people. It wakes up the brain, and gives you great strength."

CNN reports that her family left a final post on her blog, thanking readers for their support.

"[There were] 880 days when her blog made her happy... the support she needed to enjoy her last days of life," they wrote.

"When somebody leaves after 97 years, living with joy from the beginning to the end, we can't be sad.

"Wherever you are, grandmother, you will read these comments, all of them without doubt. She will laugh at some, will learn with others, she might get annoyed at the specific 'language' used in some ... but she will be happy reading all of them."

Readers have already left more than 600 comments mourning the woman they affectionately called, "the blogging granny."

[Image via Flickr]

World's Oldest Blogger Dead Aged 97 [Telegraph]
95-Year-Old Spanish Blogger Gaining Fame [International Herald Tribune]
Spain's Blogging Gran A Hit With Surfers [Reuters]
Spanish Granny Dubbed 'World's Oldest Blogger' Dies [CNN]

While eating breakfast, Phair's grandfather, Falconer Madan, read in the newspaper that a new planet had been photographed for the first time, according the New York Times. "He wondered what it should be called," said Phair in the short documentary Naming Pluto, which was released last month. "We all wondered, and then I said, ‘Why not call it Pluto?' And the whole thing stemmed from that." She came up with Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld, because it was one of the few major Roman gods that hadn't already been used in astronomy. "Whether I thought about a dark, gloomy Hades, I'm not sure," she said.

Madan passed the name on to a friend who was a member of the Royal Astronomical Society. When the astronomers who discovered the planet decided to name it Pluto, Madan gave his granddaughter a five-pound note (which would be $350 today, according to The Associated Press). Phair went on to study at Cambridge University and became an accountant. She taught economics and math at two girls' schools in London. Her husband died in 2006 and she is survived by one son.

Phair said she was indifferent to Pluto being downgraded to a dwarf planet in 2006, "though I suppose I would prefer it to remain a planet." She was more disturbed by the myth that she had named the planet after the Disney character Pluto. "It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet, rather than the other way around," she said "So, one is vindicated."

Venetia Phair Dies at 90; As A Girl, She Named Pluto [The New York Times]
Venetia Phair Dies At 90; As A Girl, She Named Pluto [The Associated Press]

Earlier: The Internet Celebrates The Feminist Legacy Of Bea Arthur

Krug was born in Pittsburgh and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in political science. She in received her masters degree in library science from the University of Chicago and worked at the John Crerar Library in Hyde Park and at Northwestern University before starting with the American Library Association. In 1967, she became the first director of the American Library Association's newly-formed Office for Intellectual Freedom, and in 1982 she founded Banned Books Week to promote the right to read without censorship. "For more than four decades Judith Krug inspired librarians and educated government officials and others about everyone's inviolable right to read. Her leadership in defense of the First Amendment was always principled and unwavering. Judith's courage, intelligence, humor and passion will be much missed - but her spirit will inspire us always," said Jim Rettig, ALA president, and Keith Michael Fiels, ALA executive director, in a press release from the ALA's website.

Throughout her career, Krug fought for the freedom to read, even though many of the books she worked to keep on the shelves were not to her taste. A true supporter of free speech, Krug refused to allow conservative groups dictate what can and cannot be read. Trevor Jensen for the Chicago Tribute reports that in 1992, Madonna's erotic coffee table book Sex led to an outcry from those who found it too racy for libraries. Krug felt that libraries should be able to carry any printed material that was legal, and she told the Chicago Times, "the book is sleazy trash, but it should be in every medium-sized library in the United States."

Krug recently claimed that the significance of her work was made clear to her when she read the children's book, And Tango Makes Three, to her granddaughter's class. And Tango Makes Three is a picture book based on the true story of two male penguins from New York's Central Park Zoo,who successfully raised a healthy young chick together. According to the ALA, Tango was the most challenged book of 2006-2007. After she was finished reading to the class, one girl stood up and began clapping. Krug later learned that the enthusiastic student was being raised by two women.

Each year, the ALA puts out a list of America's most frequently challenged library books. Krug took comfort in the perennial appearance of classic works like Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men. "That means that censors, real and would-be, are not making the headway they think they are," she said. "Books that matter are still in libraries."

Krug believed that the role of the librarian was to bring people and information together, as she explained in a talk in 2002. In her editorial on Krug's life, Dorothy Samuels from the New York Times quotes Krug:

"We do this by making sure libraries have information and ideas across the spectrum of social and political thought, so people can choose what they want to read or view or listen to. Some users find materials in their local library collection to be untrue, offensive, harmful or even dangerous. But libraries serve the information needs of all of the people in the community - not just the loudest, not just the most powerful, not even just the majority. Libraries serve everyone."

Krug worked bravely throughout her life for the realization of this democratic ideal. In December 1980, she observed that complaints about the content of books in public libraries had increased fivefold in the month since Ronald Reagan was elected president. In 1982, Krug started Banned Book Week to promote those books that the "Moral Majority" wanted to see go up in flames. More recently, Krug was a leader in the fight against internet censorship. Krug also was an outspoken opponent of the USA Patriot Act, which included a provision that allows federal investigators access to library records.

Krug's passion for free speech began at a rather young age, as the New York Time's Douglas Martin reports. Krug credited her parents as the inspiration for her life's work. She remembers reading a sex-education book under the covers when she was 12, only to be caught by her mother. "She said, ‘For God's sake, turn on your bedroom light so you don't hurt your eyes.' And that was that," Krug said.

Judith Krug, Who Fought Ban On Books, Dies at 69 [NY Times]
Judith Krug [NY Times]
Judith F. Krug, 1940-2009: Librarian Started Banned Books Week [Chicago Tribune]
Judith Krug, Librarian, Tireless Advocate For First Amendment Rights, Dies [ALA]

[Image via Jim Rittig's Flickr]

Suzman was a staunch critic of apartheid and often one of the few critics of the system among South Africa's ruling white minority. Born Helen Gavronsky in 1917, she married Moses Meyer Suzman in 1937. After returning to her studies in Witwatersand University, Suzman studied and became enraged by South Africa's racial laws. She eventually ran for Parliament under the United Party in Johannesburg's rich Houghton district and remained the district's legislator from 1953 to 1989. In 1959, impatient with her current party's tolerance for segregation, she created the liberal Progressive Party which later became known as the Progressive Federal Party. In Parliament, Suzman became a vocal critic of apartheid, often drawing criticisms for enjoying the the benefits of apartheid:

Diminutive, elegant and indefatigable, Mrs. Suzman confronted the forbidding Afrikaner prime ministers — Hendrik F. Verwoerd, John Vorster and P. W. Botha — who became synonymous with apartheid’s repression of the black and mixed-race populations. She was dismissive of the death threats she received by telephone and in the mail, and undaunted in her showdowns with the men she described as apartheid’s leading “bullies,” who in turn dismissed her as a “dangerous subversive” and a “sickly humanist.”

Shouts of “Go back to Moscow!” greeted her when she rose in Parliament, and, on at least one occasion, “Go back to Israel!” — a reference to her antecedents as the daughter of early 20th-century Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. After the 1976 Soweto riots, Mr. Vorster mocked her for beating with what he called her “pretty little pink hands” against apartheid, while secure in the knowledge, as he claimed, that she and other white opponents could continue to enjoy the privileged lives apartheid guaranteed without fear that their demands for an end to the racial laws would succeed.

“I am not frightened of you — I never have been, and I never will be,” she told Prime Minister Botha in a parliamentary exchange in the late 1970s. “I think nothing of you.”

For his part, Mr. Botha called her “a vicious little cat.” When a government minister once accused her of embarrassing South Africa with her parliamentary questions, she replied, “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers.”

Suzman also drew criticisms from international anti-apartheid activists because she favored a peaceful transition to black majority rule in South Africa and was against the use of sanctions to pressure South Africa to change their policies. However, Suzman befriended many black South African activists, including Nelson Mandela, whom she visited while he was imprisoned.

Helen Suzman, Relentless Challenger Of Apartheid System, Is Dead At 91 [NY Times]
South African Activist Helen Suzman Dies At 91 [MSNBC]

Starting in the 1940s, the South Carolina-born Kitt was a triple-threat sex symbol in a time when few women of color attracted mainstream success. Despite a famously soigne image, Kitt came from a hardscrabble background: the product of a black sharecropper mother and a white father whom she never knew, as a child Kitt worked in the fields, suffered abuse and later lived homeless in New York. She started as a dancer and quickly moved to a career as a cabaret singer and actress in movies and on TV. Dubbed “the most exciting woman alive” by a smitten Orson Welles, Kitt was known for an over-the-top, pragmatist persona in songs like "Monotonous," "Love For Sale," "C'est Si Bon" and "Santa Baby" - a persona reinforced by her numerous offstage love affairs. In the 60s, she played a memorable Catwoman on the Batman TV series.

Kitt was also known for being tough and outspoken. She caused a major scandal by telling First lady Ladybird Johnson, "You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot,” - an utterance that led Kitt to work for the next few years in Europe. Later she courted more criticism by touring South Africa under apartheid (for integrated audiences.) Despite a diagnosis of colon cancer, Kitt continued to perform until last year, launching a smoking show at the Cafe Carlyle which, let me tell you, was something to see for a woman of any age. Kitt was a true original: a tough, independent lady riffing on a sex kitten image, playing with sexual dynamics on her own terms. Her contradictions and her talent will be missed.



Eartha Kitt, a Seducer of Audiences, Dies at 81 [NYT]
Eartha Kitt: A sex symbol born to confront the world. [Obit]

Bernie Mac taught us the meaning of the word "motherfucker."

Dancer Cyd Charisse had the "world's most valuable legs," but ballerina Olga Lepeshinskaya charmed Russia with her view that "ballet should be imbued with life, not artificiality."

Newsman Tim Russert's death made all of NBC choke up.

Heath Ledger left behind ex-fiancee Michelle Williams, daughter Matilda, and a terrifyingly adept performance as the Joker.

Singer Yma Sumac was the only Peruvian on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

A black woman married to a white man, Mildred Loving challenged Virginia's anti-miscegenation law and won, invalidating such laws in 15 other states as well.

Golden Girl Estelle Getty explained that "a whore, a slut, a tramp, it's all the same."

Odetta wowed Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and America with her "liberation songs."

George Carlin pointed out that "pro-life is anti-woman" and his ghost told a psychic "what a bunch of bullshit religion is."

Majel Roddenberry was the voice of Star Trek's USS Enterprise, and Trek fan Joan Winston was almost as popular as Kirk himself.

Isaac Hayes lent his genius to both Chef and Shaft.

Pinup Bettie Page (link NSFW) turned America on with "a pride in her body unusual for the times."

David Foster Wallace wrote about depression, September 11, and cruise ships with both gravity and humor.

Paul Newman was "the thinking woman's sex symbol."

Lesbian activist Del Martin wed her longtime partner in the first legal gay marriage in California; the battle she helped wage goes on in her absence.

Remember Them Well [Newsweek]

Elizabeth Barry of the University of Warwick finds that widely-read obituaries were one of the first ways regular people attained celebrity — albeit posthumously. People's life stories were run as cautionary tales in the 17th century — showing the consequences of wicked or virtuous living — but quickly became a popular human interest read. Initially, the obits featured royalty and other public figures, but the genre grew to include all kinds of people who'd led interesting lives. Says Barry, "Different kinds of deaths came to be commemorated and you didn’t have to be something like a military hero or be a political player or be some sort of high person in society to get public commemoration on your death."

Eventually, the obit-mongers were criticized for catering to low-brow tastes hungry for scandal. But Barry feels the universality of death acted as an equalizer and created the sense of identification that characterizes the modern celeb-public relationship. Of course, by any standard this is a conveniently reductive definition of celebrity - weren't the "military heroes and political players" already kind of celebrities? - but the notion of a fleeting, arbitrary celebrity, manufactured for public entertainment and then discarded, is certainly a unique phenomenon. If Barry's theory holds any water, there's a pleasing neatness to the notion of a life, reduced to a few paragraphs for strangers' delectation, with the veneer of beneficence. Wholly public, yet completely selfish. When Rupert the Baby Deer died last month - only a day after we'd learned about his existence - our shared grief was overwhelming. A friend mused that in a sense this mini emotional roller-coaster was really our celebrity-obsessed age to scale: the emotion is no less real for its lack of depth, but as the stories end, so too does our interest. The tragedy is somehow a neat cap to the narrative. From death cars to autopsies, we feel a right to know how and why things ended - to know if the end was just or tragic. Maybe Barry's onto something.

Dead People In 1700s Were The First Celebrities[Live Science]

The New York Times:

Ms. Getty relished her late-in-life success, her son said. And she enjoyed reminiscing about more difficult times. In a 1990 interview she recalled one of her last secretarial jobs, at a company called Snap-Out Forms, where she kept her acting ambitions a secret for fear of being fired.

“At Snap-Out Forms, the first day I came to work, I had an audition, and I said, ‘Can I go for my lunch at 10 o’clock?’ ” she said. “The next day I had to go someplace else. I said. ‘Can I take my lunch at 2:30?’ The next day I asked if I could take lunch at 11 o’clock. The office manager said, ‘You have the strangest eating habits of any secretary we’ve ever had.’ ”

Associated Press:

Audiences particularly loved the verbal zingers Getty would hurl at the other three. When McClanahan's libidinous character Blanche once complained that her life was an open book, Sophia shot back, "Your life's an open blouse."

Getty had gained a knack for one-liners in her late teens when she did standup comedy at a Catskills hotel. Female comedians were rare in those days, however, and she bombed.

The Los Angeles Times:

Getty, a natural comedian famous for her one-liners even in private life, played Sophia for laughs, but she also brought depth to the character. It was her idea that Sophia would always carry a purse because, she said, older women are forced to shed so many possessions in their later years that everything they own ends up in their purses.

"Nobody puts down their life very easily," she explained in a 1992 interview with Newsday.

The Hollywood Reporter:

She requested that Fierstein write a part for her, which he did in "Torch Song Trilogy." The middle-aged Getty improbably became the toast of the town and was spotted by the "Golden Girls" producers who asked her to audition. Arriving in character — an oversized thrift shop polyester dress — she landed the part.

She was a vocal supporter of gay rights and active in fundraising for AIDS research. She retired in 2000 after revealing she was suffering from Parkinson's disease. Two years later, she announced she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

The National Post:

In a 1995 interview, the tiny Gettty — she was under five feet tall — admitted that many of her biggest fans were children.

"I think they look upon me as an old child, because I'm so little," she said.

Reuters:

Born Estelle Scher in New York City in 1923, Getty wanted to be an entertainer from an early age, despite her small size and the initial objections of her Polish immigrant parents.

She got her start as a comic at resorts in New York state's Catskill mountains and pursued her dream as an actress in regional theater and off-Broadway productions while raising two sons and working office jobs to make ends meet.

Entertainment Weekly:

Born Estelle Scher in New York City on July 25, 1923, Getty started out her career in the Yiddish theater, but her focus soon shifted to settling down and raising a family with Arthur Gettleman, whom she married in 1946. They remained together until Arthur's death in 2004.

Earlier: Estelle Getty, Thank You For Being A Friend

Included within the issue: Lady Jeanne Campbell, writer, journalist, and female companion to any number of powerful men, including Norman Mailer (to whom she was married) and John F. Kennedy; Brett Somers, actress, co-host of 70s game show Match Game and "average-looking menopausal" television star; Dr. Marian Radke-Yarrow, researcher on the effects of maternal depression on children; Gloria Connors, housewife, onetime tennis prodigy and mother/coach/number one fan to tennis star Jimmy Connors; Madeline Stern, rare-book dealer, scholar, and "utterly apolitical feminist in a world where feminists were bluestockings and then bra burners"; Mary Crisp, a housewife who became a powerful force in the Republican party and supporter of the ERA and abortion rights; Australian war correspondent and onetime prisoner of war Kate Webb (pictured above); Karen Hess, cook, food historian, and proponent of "pure" food; Andree De Jongh, the Belgian artist and nurse who played Harriet Tubman to numerous downed Allied pilots during WWII; Kathleen Khan, a Christian missionary in Pakistan; and reluctant kitchenista and author (The I Hate To Cook Book) Peg Bracken, who so famously wrote, "add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink."

The Lives They Lived [NY Times]

Earlier: New York Times Notable Deaths: Light On The Ladies, Heavy On The Mascara
Love To Cook? You're Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

• Italian women over the age of 40 are having more babies than similarly-aged women in any other western industrialized country. But the U.S. is not far behind! [Guardian]
  
• Speaking of wombs: A group of politicians in Ohio are pressing the state legislature to pass a bill that "would ban women from seeking an abortion without written consent from the father of the fetus. In cases where the identity of the father is unknown, women would be required to submit a list of possible fathers." [Feministing]
  
• A peace group is sponsoring a group of women in Afghanistan to train as boxers as symbols of women's independence and power, and as possible Olympic contenders. [BBC]
  
• Young women from China, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nepal and other countries who have been forced into sex slavery are not only highly likely to be infected with HIV but to spread the virus once they are freed and return home. [International Herald Tribune]

• Profit before health: Executives at pharmaceutical giant Wyeth are anxious to bypass the FDA's demand that the menopause drug Pristiq be tested further; they want it to be approved for treatment of depression. [MSNBC]
• Despite serious and incessant warnings over the fact that the acne drug Accutane causes severe birth defects, women continue to become pregnant while taking it. [MSNBC]
• One woman in the NY Times' obituaries section today: Norma Gabler, 84, who worked to rid Texas schools of content she considered "anti familiy, anti-American and anti-God". [NYTimes]

• Women between the ages of 50 and 70 are about to become the richest demographic in the United States, claims writer Marti Barletta. We'd see this as cause for celebration except that the inclusion of Oprah Winfrey probably skewed things a bit! [AdAge]
  
• Leaders of the Sikh community in Delhi are calling for an end to over-the-top wedding celebrations, claiming that such events cost so much money for the brides' families that they could contribute to female infanticide or the aborting of female fetuses. [Times Of London]
  
• The same researchers who developed the HPV/cervical cancer drug Gardisil are working on a drug found in tobacco (of all things!) that could be used to prevent cervical cancer among women in India. [USA Today]
  
• The heavier a woman is before she becomes pregnant, the higher her risk for complications such as pre-eclampsia, premature birth and high blood pressure. [Reuters]

• Talk about hearts of darkness: A United Nations expert is reporting that the atrocities being committed by rebel groups and armed forces against women in one province of the Congo include not only rape but genital injury via bullets or knives and the forced ingestion of feces or human flesh. [Washington Post]
• Girls who play sports in high school are more likely to get college diplomas than other girls, a new study from Brigham Young University has found. [WSJ]
• One woman in the NY Times' obituaries section today: Odile Crick, 86, whose sketch of the double helix of DNA "came to symbolize man's discovery of the biological basis of life and evolution." [NY Times]

• Motorcycle manufacturers like Harley-Davidson are attempting to appeal more to potential female customers by designing riding gear with rhinestones (ugh), creating motorcycles that sit lower to the ground, and hosting the cock-rocket equivalent of Tupperware parties. [NYTimes]
  
• What to eat and what not to eat (shellfish, Brie, hotdogs, herbal tea and (duh, alcohol!) when pregnant. [NYTimes]
  
• Close, but no cigar: The FDA did not fully approve Wyeth's menopause drug Pristiq because of "staff scientists want more information about the treatment." [NYTimes]
  
• The FDA did, however, agree that Eli Lilly's osteoporosis drug Evista can also be marketed as lowering the risk of breast cancer. [WSJ]

• One woman in the NY Times obituary section today: Teresa Stitch Randall, 79, American operatic soprano who made her name abroad in the opera houses of Austria, France and Switzerland. [NYTimes]

• It's like Lost, but with a female heroine instead of well, Jack. Or, er, maybe not. Anyway, a group of investigators is set to visit an uninhabited atoll in the South Pacific to answer question of what happened to Amelia Earhart once and for all. [CBSNews]
  
• Ugh. Is this what we've turned into? Some women detest their appearances so much that they're resorting to do-it-yourself, at-home "plastic surgery", including the ironing of wrinkles. [DailyMail]
  
• Got milk? Get milk! A pint a day can keep the doctor — plus strokes and heart disease — away. [Telegraph]

• Genetics may not affect breast-cancer survival rates after all: Researchers have found that the survival rates of those with two well-known genes linked to the disease are the same as those without. [WSJ]
• Hormone replacement therapy can pose serious risks to post-menopausal women, including risk of heart attack or stroke. [CBSNews]
• One woman in the NY Times' obituaries section today: Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, 68, bestselling romance novelist, and creator of many a "bloodthirsty little wench". [NYTimes]