If all God’s creatures were to be nurtured in the arms of a Cancer (especially Sun or Moon), we would all be spoiled rotten with love. Overfed, dazed, and incapacitated in a swaddle. This is the sign that attunes like no other, provides the safety and room to feel anything you want to feel. They beg to be needed, and love to make you cry (with sincerity). Our sweethearts can be capricious, though. Look, the validity of what I’m about to say is laughable, but I once read a statistic that said Cancers commit the most murders. With moods as temporal and fleeting as the phases of the melancholy, full-on watery moon that rules them, they wax and wane between archetypal mother and baby, and back to mother . . .and back to baby. We’ll just assume said murders were crimes of passion. Someone was probably being very mean!
A Venus in Cancer knows the unique power of girlish, lolita-esque, Betty Boop femininity, and how to subvert it. She steps out adorned in feelings, however romantic, nostalgic, or grotesque. She’ll even make ugly look chic, because it touches on something soulful. She just cares so much. Even at its most saccharine, it’s undeniably oozing with love. This Venus creates to be connected, to be affectionate, to be comfortable, to collect (sometimes hoard), and to calm. Capricorn, the sign opposite of Cancer, is Big Daddy. The sign who works hard for material $ecurity. Cancers get dismissed as being cheap, but I would say they just don’t have the same cold, hard values in outward achievment. Venus in Cancer especially so. She takes us off the upwardly-mobile grind and pulls us gently into the domestic, the rooted, and the fully fleshed feelings of home. She may puff up her toughness at times while her own shell seems fragile - but for you? She’ll protect you with such ferocity you’ll forget all about the harshness of the world outside.
Jenny Holzer, Forty-Second Street Art Project, 1993
Alice Coltrane, with her kids Egon Schiele, Mother and Child, 1912Amadeo Modigliani, Seated Woman with Child (Motherhood), 1919Andre 3000 loves babies, but especially his son (right), Seven Sirius Benjamin. Sirius is the name of the brightest star in the Cancer constellation.Max Fleischer, Minding the Baby with Betty Boop, 1931Henri Rousseau, The Girl With a Doll, 1904-5MFK Fisher, The Gastronomical Me, 1943 & sitting in her kitchen at “Last House,” Glen Ellen, CA. Fisher was a food writer who was wistfully historical, nostalgic, and sincerely funny about food. In her book How to Cook a Wolf, 1942, she wrote about how to cook with less during WWII, “Perhaps this war will make it simpler for us to go back to some of the old ways we knew before we came over to this land and made the Big Money. Perhaps, even, we will remember how to make good bread again. It does not cost much. It is pleasant: one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with peace, and the house filled with one of the world's sweetest smells. But it takes a lot of time. If you can find that, the rest is easy. And if you cannot rightly find it, make it, for probably there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel, that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.” James Baldwin. at his home in Provençal, France (1971-1984)Vincent Price, like a proper Gemini Sun, was an outrageously prolific and comically scary character actor and wrote a lot of books– but the subject matter of those books is so very Venus in Cancer. Dear to his heart and his home. He wrote 6 cookbooks, narrated cooking tutorials, and even demonstrated how to poach fish in a dishwasher on Johnny Carson. He was Sears-Roebuck’s resident consultant on home decor (including kitchen carpeting). He wrote books on art history. He established, and donated 2,000 artworks to, the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College, the first "teaching art collection" owned by a community college in the United States. He even wrote a book about his dog, Joe (pictured above) of which he said, “This is a tale of how I went to the dogs or, to be numerically correct, to the dog. Now please do not expect this book to end with a glorious proclamation of rehabilitation. Not a chance. After fourteen years I’m incurably hooked on, intoxicated by, and addicted to - my dog Joe.”Dario Argento, Suspiria, 1977Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987Raymond Pettibon, No Title (You Didn’t Love . . .), 1981Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Rose and Teardrop, design for textile, 1915-23Charles Rennie Mackintosh, music room in House for an Art Lover (designed one 1901; built in 1990)
Judy Garland
Lauryn Hill Debi Mazar + her list of favorite things is so old-fashioned and nostalgic, I love itLana Wachowski - Bound, 1996 (Lana wrote and directed (like all their movies) with Lily Wachowski adds the Scorpio Venus flavor)
Rosie Perez
Valentina Valentino SS 1994Valentino SS 1993 coutureChristian Lacroix, on Shalom Harlow in Vogue, 1995Stevie Nicks (who has a temperature-controlled vault of thousands of shawls)
Robert Plant Todd Rundgren and lyrics from his 1971 song Be Nice to MeGene Wilder (Gilda Radner was a Cancer Sun)Twyla Tharp, Sinatra Suite (w/ Pisces Venus, Baryshnikov), 1983Kate Bush, on the cover of her album Hounds of Love, 1985, with her own dogs, Bonnie and ClydeJosephine Baker, with her pet pig, Albert, and pet Cheetah, Chiquita Miuccia Prada, Prada SS 2011, inspired by Josephine BakerMiuccia Prada, Miu Miu Club teeMiuccia Prada, Prada SS 1996, Miu Miu FW 2015, Prada SS 1996Sonia Rykiel, FW 1996
Wim Wenders, Paris, TX, 1984
