Monday, October 28, 2024

Playing

Tomás Luis de Victoria
NORDIC VOICES SING VICTORIA


WALTER M. MILLER
A Canticle for Leibowitz

Simpletons! Yes, yes! I'm a simpleton! Are you a simpleton? We'll build a town and we'll name it Simple Town, because by then all the smart bastards that caused all this, they'll be dead! Simpletons! Let's go! This ought to show 'em! Anybody here not a simpleton? Get the bastard, if there is!



Daily Painting

Edwaert Kolier
VANITAS (1663)

Sunday, October 27, 2024

Watching
HorrorFest 2020

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
Jonathan Demme
USA, 1991


Playing

CocoRosie
LA MAISON DE MON RÊVE


Currently Playing

PJ Harvey
I INSIDE THE OLD YEAR DRYING

WALTER M. MILLER
A Canticle for Leibowitz

If you try to save wisdom until the world is wise, the world will never have it.



Daily Painting

Antonín Procházka
PROMETHEUS (1911)

Saturday, October 26, 2024

Watching
HorrorFest 2024

TERRIFIER 3
Damien Leone
USA, 2024

Playing

NOT OUR FIRST GOAT RODEO

Yo-Yo Ma
Stuart Duncan
Edgar Meyer
Chris Thile


WALTER M. MILLER
A Canticle for Leibowitz

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow.

When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.



Daily Painting

Jan Jansz
VANITAS (1648)

Friday, October 25, 2024

Watching
HorrorFest 2024

MAD GOD
Phil Tippett
USA, 2021

Reading

Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ

Playing

Evgueni Galperine
THEORY OF BECOMING

Evgueni Galperine
Masha Vasyukova, Sergei Nakariakov, Sebastien Hurtaud


CHRISTINE STOCKTON

I am not sure if we are numbed to the reality of rape, but here's the sad irony. While the word rape can add an edginess to your language, talking about actual rape is taboo. I didn't know this until one of my friends was raped. Then I knew this, because I didn't want to tell anyone. If she were mugged, I would have told everyone and raged.



Daily Painting

Georg von Rosen
THE SPHINX (1907)

Thursday, October 24, 2024

Watching
HorrorFest 2024

LAKE MUNGO
Joel Anderson
Australia, 2008

Playing

Lankum
FALSE LANKUM


PAOL KEINEG
"D"

Down from the web in the thorns glides a spider
with fur the color of weeds. Here I am. Desire
to please to which one adds desire to die. All
that comes from above makes things obscure.
All that, obscure, is tied up in a motion which
wrenches the heart. To take it is to pervert
it. This is why the entire poem is for another
day. I have not taken hold: the wild broom
flames near the telephone booth, a woman
talks crushing the receiver against her ear,
I remain incapable of high thought. To grow
old does not snuff out the scruples.



Daily Painting

John Byrne
SELF-PORTRAIT (2018)

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Watching
HorrorFest 2024

TERRIFIER 2
Damien Leone
USA, 2022

Watching
HorrorFest 2024

THE SUBSTANCE
Coralie Fargeat
USA, 2024



Reading

Sophie Strand
FLOWERING WAND
Rewilding the Sacred Masculine
Lunar Kings, Trans-species Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists

What people don't seem to understand is that Trump actually does speak for his cult on this topic, especially the white christians in his cult, want Nazi generals. I interact with these people every day. They, and (again) especially the white christians in his cult, are absolutely ravenous to see a "final solution" in the US.

Playing

Grian Chatten
CHAOS FOR THE FLY


JIMMIE DAVIS
"You Are My Sunshine"

The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping,
I dreamed I held you in my arms,
But when I awoke, dear, I was mistaken,
So I hung my head and cried.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,
You make me happy when skies are gray,
You'll never know, dear, how much I love you,
Please don't take my sunshine away.

I'll always love you and make you happy,
If you will only say the same,
But if you leave me to love another,
You'll regret it all some day.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,
You make me happy when skies are gray,
You'll never know, dear, how much I love you,
Please don't take my sunshine away.




 Playing

The Dead South
"You Are My Sunshine"

Daily Painting

Philippe de Champaigne
REPENTANT MAGDALENE (1648)

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Watching
HorrorFest 2024

PEEPING TOM
Michael Powell
UK, 1960



Daily Painting

Pieter Claesz
VANITAS STILL LIFE WITH A BOOK, A GLASS ROEMER, A SKULL, A LUTE, A PACK OF CARDS, AND PIECE OF PARCHMENT (1620s)

Playing

Cage the Elephant
NEON PILL


CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Hitch 22: A Memoir

Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner, rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.



Monday, October 21, 2024

Watching
HorrorFest 2024

NOSFERATU IN VENICE
[NOSFERATU A VENEZIA]

Augusto Caminito
Italy, 1988

Watching
HorrorFest 2024

THE LIVING SKELETON
[吸血髑髏船]

Hiroki Matsuno
Japan, 1968



Playing

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
WEATHERVANES


CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Love, Poverty, and War: Journey and Essays

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.



Daily Painting

Norman Rockwell
WILLIE GILLIS IN COLLEGE (1946)

Sunday, October 20, 2024

Watching
HorrorFest 2024

SLEEP TIGHT
[MIENTRAS DUERMES]

Jaume Balagueró
Spain, 2011

Playing

Watazumi Doso Roshi
WATAZUMIDO NO SEKAI

Playing

Watazumi Doso Roshi
WATAZUMIDO


VLADIMIR NABOKOV
"Symbols and Signs"

For the fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind. Desires he had none. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world. After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line, for instance, was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle—a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.

That Friday, their son’s birthday, everything went wrong. The subway train lost its life current between two stations and for a quarter of an hour they could hear nothing but the dutiful beating of their hearts and the rustling of newspapers. The bus they had to take next was late and kept them waiting a long time on a street corner, and when it did come, it was crammed with garrulous high-school children.

It began to rain as they walked up the brown path leading to the sanitarium. There they waited again, and instead of their boy, shuffling into the room, as he usually did (his poor face sullen, confused, ill-shaven, and blotched with acne), a nurse they knew and did not care for appeared at last and brightly explained that he had again attempted to take his life. He was all right, she said, but a visit from his parents might disturb him. The place was so miserably understaffed, and things got mislaid or mixed up so easily, that they decided not to leave their present in the office but to bring it to him next time they came.



Daily Painting

Salvador Dali
Illustration from Essays of Michel de Montaigne (1947)

Saturday, October 19, 2024

Watching
HorrorFest 2024

THE ENTITY
Sidney J. Furie
USA, 1982

Playing

CLUB MOD on allclassical.org

Hosted by Andrea Murray

Playing

Scuzzlebutt
TROLDSKAB


CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Hitch 22: A Memoir

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?

Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts.

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.



Daily Painting

Nathan Oliveira
SEATED MAN WITH OBJECT (1957)

Friday, October 18, 2024

Watching
HorrorFest 2024

WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS?
[LA POLIZIA CHIEDE AIUTO]

Massimo Dallamano
Italy, 1974





Watching
HorrorFest 2024

DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT
[LA MORTE ACCAREZZA A MEZZANOTTE]

Luciano Ercoli
Italy, 1972




Playing

Camper van Beethoven
NEW ROMAN TIMES


KHALIL GIBRAN
"Youth and Age"

In my youth the heart of dawn was in my heart, and the songs of April were in my ears.

But my soul was sad unto death, and I knew not why. Even unto this day I know not why I was sad.

But now, though I am with eventide, my heart is still veiling dawn,

And though I am with autumn, my ears still echo the songs of spring.

But my sadness has turned into awe, and I stand in the presence of life and life’s daily miracles.

The difference between my youth which was my spring, and these forty years, and they are my autumn, is the very difference that exists between flower and fruit.

A flower is forever swayed with the wind and knows not why and wherefore.

But the fruit overladen with them honey of summer, knows that it is one of life’s home-comings, as a poet when his song is sung knows sweet content,

Though life has been bitter upon his lips.

In my youth I longed for the unknown, and for the unknown I am still longing.

But in the days of my youth longing embraced necessity that knows naught of patience.

Today I long not less, but my longing is friendly with patience, and even waiting.

And I know that all this desire that moves within me is one of those laws that turns universes around one another in quiet ecstasy, in swift passion which your eyes deem stillness, and your mind a mystery.

And in my youth I loved beauty and abhorred ugliness, for beauty was to me a world separated from all other worlds.

But now that the gracious years have lifted the veil of picking-and-choosing from over my eyes, I know that all I have deemed ugly in what I see and hear, is but a blinder upon my eyes, and wool in my ears;

And that our senses, like our neighbors, hate what they do not understand. 

And in my youth I loved the fragrance of flowers and their color. 

Now I know that their thorns are their innocent protection, and if it were not for that innocence they would disappear forevermore.

And in my youth, of all seasons I hated winter, for I said in my aloneness, “Winter is a thief who robs the earth of her sun-woven garment, and suffers her to stand naked in the wind.” 

But now I know that in winter there is re-birth and renewal, and that the wind tears the old raiment to cloak her with a new raiment woven by the spring. 

And in my youth I would gaze upon the sun of the day and the stars of the night, saying in my secret, “How small am I, and how small a circle my dream makes.”

But today when I stand before the sun or the stars I cry, “The sun is close to me, and the stars are upon me;” for all the distances of my youth have turned into the nearness of age; 

And the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great, has turned into a vision that weighs not nor does it measure. 

In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons. 

Today I stand at this shore and I rise not nor do I go down. 

Even my roots once every twenty-eight days would seek the heart of the earth.

And on the twenty-ninth day they would rise toward the throne of the sky. 

And on that very day the rivers in my veins would stop for a moment, and then would run again to the sea. 

Yes, in my youth I was a thing, sad and yielding, and all the seasons played with me and laughed in their hearts.

And life took a fancy to me and kissed my young lips, and slapped my cheeks. 

Today I play with the seasons. And I steal a kiss from life’s lips ere she kisses my lips. 

And I even hold her hands playfully that she may not strike my cheek. 

In my youth I was sad indeed, and all things seemed dark and distant. 

Today, all is radiant and near, and for this I would live my youth and the pain of my youth, again and yet again.



Daily Painting

Egon Schiele
FOUR TREES (1917)