Recognizing a good title when we see one, Fortune’s Pawn was thrilled to find this fascinating profile of Deborah Jackson, the Martini Girl. A series of unfortunate events lead her to Beirut, where she found herself a sex slave before being rescued by an admirer and ultimately fleeing:

During the hostilities of 1989, her family was forced to retreat to the basement of their house, having to survive for days without running water or electricity. On one occasion, she had to use a tank to rescue her daughter from school. Eventually, she escaped with two daughters on a hydrofoil driven by Dutch mercenaries and returned to Scotland to live in St Andrews near her mother. Her husband, Ayache, remained in Lebanon and they divorced….at a 1999 New Year’s Eve party, she met Neil Jackson, a professor of architecture who works at Liverpool University. “There were bonfires on the hills – and fireworks – and we’d been talking when she suddenly seized me by the arm, thrust me against the wall and said: ‘We are soulmates,'” he said. “The next day, we all had hangovers and I said to her: ‘What next?’ Ten months later, she left her husband. And in 2002 we married.”
On the Rocks – The Martini Girl sold in to sex slavery | the Mail online

Here’s hoping that book gets published some day…

Geoff MacCormack spent years on the road with David Bowie and The Spiders from Mars and tells all about it in a new book, From Station to Station: Travels with Bowie 1973 – 1976 (Mind the price of that volume, quite dear).

An excerpt from MacCormack’s column in The Independent

Bowie and I boarded the SS Canberra at the end of January 1973…
Cruising to New York took about a week. Nobody really took much notice of Bowie, apart from a couple of swooning gay hairdressers; they were far too old to know anything about him. The journey was long and languorous; suffice to say, after a while afternoon tea was an occasion to be looked forward to.
Station to station with Bowie – Independent Online Edition > Features

Pawn just watched The Night Porter, the 1974 film starring Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde as a concentration camp masochist and her tormentor cum lover.  Mysteriously, 24 minutes into the film, the monocle worn by Klaus:

moves from hist left eye to his right:

Upon further inspection, we weren’t alone in this witness.  Check out the Criterion Contraption for more reportage.

I imagine a lion, and I

can’t get it out of my mind, like a

annoying song, over and

over, the phrase “I imagine a lion”

(from I Imagine a Lion, by Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore)

Amy Winehouse, that tragically reckless, drunkenly compelling chanteuse from the UK is on her American tour. She played at the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan last night. Here is Jon Pareles’ take, from The New York TImes

Amy Winehouse is a tease. The songs on her second album, “Back to Black” (Universal Republic), revive the sound of 1960s and 1970s soul with tales of plunging into temptation and toughing out the consequences. She drinks, she cheats, she falls for the wrong guys, she cries; she refuses rehab with a magnificently simple refrain, “I said no, no, no.”
Amy Winehouse – Music – Review – New York Times

The most distressing part of this review is this line: “And a set that lasted less than an hour made her even more of a tease.”

From http://trouble.philadelphiaweekly.com/archives/2006/09/i_hear_ya_girlf.html

I’ve been to a couple of rehabilitation centres before, whether it be for not eating properly, or drinking – everyone there just wants to talk about themselves all the time. The fella in charge said, ‘Why are you here?’ and I said, ‘Well, I think I’ve come because I’m drinking a lot, but I’m in love, and the drinking is symptomatic of my depression. I’m not an alcoholic.’ Although now of course I sound like I am. Anyway, he says to me, ‘I’m a recovering alcoholic…’ and I thought , ‘You’re not going to stop now, are you?’ And he didn’t! He just kept talking about himself… it was so boring. He goes, ‘Do you want to just fill out this form and we’ll see how you feel?’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to waste your time, to be honest.’

Or this tidbit from The Daily Mail:

“This girl came up to me and said I was brilliant. Two seconds later, she turned to my boyfriend, pointed at me and said, `She f***** up.’ So I punched her right in the face – which she wasn’t expecting, because girls don’t do that.”
Amy then added that she kneed her boyfriend between the legs and punched him in the face when he tried to calm her down.
“When I’ve been on the booze recently, it’s turned me into a really nasty drunk,” she said.
But she also says that all the boozing has helped her shed the pounds.
“I drink a lot and sometimes forget to eat,” she said.

Wikipedia has entire section of shame on her:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Winehouse#Personal_life

Then there is this quote from The Sun:

The singer, whose new album Back To Black is out this month, said of her new tattoos of naked women: “I like pin-up girls. I’m more of a boy than a girl. I’m not a lesbian, though — not before a sambuca anyway.”

Pawn has found a new obsession…

Nam June Paik (1932 – 2006) crafted marvelous and monumental works of video and television as art and sculpture.  One of his last pieces, Ruin (2001) is currently on loan to Milwaukee Art Museum, from the Cincinnati Museum of Art, as MAM considers aquisition of the piece.  Pawn had the pleasure of viewing it, mostly alone and undisturbed, in a fine white empty gallery this evening.

This piece (shown here in lame camera phone splendor) is more than just a pile of TV and bathing glow of video.  Not to sound too much like Art School hopeless, but this truly important piece has much to teach us about ourselves.  As the images flicker by on the 32 separate screens, jarring us and calming us and leading the eye back and forth across the stack of vintage sets (with modern monitors inserted, artfully, into the shells) it is easy to find oneself mesmerised and yet still aware that this is a sculpture, a commentary, and not just another TV.

The room is soon flooded with young children and attentive parents, here at the museum to celebrate family achievements in literacy.  The children no doubt have a far different take pn Mr. Paik’s creation.  Pawn slinks off.

The photographer Barbara Abel has captured a stunning series of photos of antique wax mannequins from a dusty warehouse in Detroit Michigan. Here is just a sampling. You can find the whole set, for sale, at her website.