Thursday, October 10, 2024

Watching

STOPMOTION
Robert Morgan
UK, 2024

America First?

Playing

Johannes Brahms
PIANO QUINTET IN F MINOR, OP. 34
STRING QUARTET NO. 1 IN C MINOR, OP. 51
STRING QUARTET NO. 3 IN B FLAT MAJOR, OP. 67

Takács Quartet
András Schiff

 

WILHELM RÖPKE
The German Question

Whether in Bolshevism, Fascism, or Nazism, we meet continually with the forcible and ruthless usurpation of the power of the State by a minority drawn from the masses, resting on their support, flattering them and threatening them at the same time; a minority led by a charismatic leader and brazenly identifying itself with the State.

It is a tyranny that does away with all the guarantees of the constitutional State, constituting as the only party the minority that has created it, furnishing that party with far-reaching judicial and administrative functions, and permitting within the whole life of the nation no groups, no activities, no opinions, no associations or religions, no publications, no educational institutions, no business transactions, that are not dependent on the will of the Government.

Daily Painting

Jakub Schikaneder
SYMBOLICKÝ VÝJEV [SYMBOLLIC SCENE} (1895-97)

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Watching

THIRST
[박쥐]

Park Chan-wook
Korea, 2009

Of course. 

MAGAts wouldn't buy their blasphemy from anywhere else.

More here.



Playing

FACCE D'AMORE

Jakub Józef Orlinski
Il Pomo d'Oro

Théâtre du Capitole Toulouse
July 21, 2021

-

Arias by Nicola Matteis, Giovanni Antonio Boretti, Giovanni Bononcini, Francesco Bartolomeo Conti, Luca Antonio Predieri, Pietro Antonio Locatelli, Giuseppe Maria Orlandini, Nicola Fago, George Frideric Handel


SAMUEL BECKETT
Malone Dies

Let us say before I go any further, that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life in the fires of icy hell and in the execrable generations to come.



Daily Painting

Júlio Pomar
LUSITÂNIA NO BAIRRO LATINO (1985)
[LUSITANIA IN THE LATIN QUARTER]

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Watching

IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH
Sergio Bergonzelli
Italy-Spain, 1970

Absolute lunatic. 

The very best the State of Georgia has to offer.

Playing

PJ Harvey
THE HOPE SIX DEMOLITION PROJECT


EDNA O'BRIEN
The Light of Evening

Never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature’s assiduousness and human cruelty.



Daily Painting

Helen Frankenthaler
CRUSADES (1976)

Monday, October 7, 2024

Watching

IL DEMONIO
Brunello Rondi
Italy, 1963

Playing

Dinosaur Jr.
WHERE YOU BEEN


ALICE CORBIN HENDERSON
“From the Stone Age”

Long ago some one carved me in the semblance of a god.
I have forgot now what god I was meant to represent.
I have no consciousness now but of stone, sunlight, and rain;
The sun baking my skin of stone, the wind lifting my hair;
The sun’s light is hot upon me,
The moon’s light is cool,
Casting a silver-laced pattern of light and dark
Over the planes of my body:
My thoughts now are the thoughts of a stone,
My substance now is the substance of life itself;
I have sunk deep into life as one sinks into sleep;
Life is above me, below me, around me,
Moving through my pores of stone—
It does not matter how small the space you pack life in,
That space is as big as the universe—
Space, volume, and the overtone of volume
Move through me like chords of music,
Like the taste of happiness in the throat,
Which you fear to lose, though it may choke you—
(In the cities this is not known,
For space there is emptiness,
And time is torment) . . . . .
Since I became a stone
I have no need to remember anything—
Everything is remembered for me;
I live and I think and I dream as a stone,
In the warm sunlight, in the grey rain;
All my surfaces are touched to softness
By the light fingers of the wind,
The slow dripping of rain:
My body retains only faintly the image
It was meant to represent,
I am more beautiful and less rigid,
I am a part of space,
Time has entered into me,
Life has passed through me—
What matter the name of the god I was meant to represent?



Daily Painting

Ralph Steadman
PORTRAIT OF GEORGE ORWELL (1995)

Sunday, October 6, 2024

Watching

MONOLITH
Matt Vesely
Australia, 2022

Reading

Susan Sontag
ON PHOTOGRAPHY

Playing

Bonnie "Prince" Billy
KEEPING SECRETS WILL DESTROY YOU


SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography

For [Diane] Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring--and boring--in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. What is safe no long monopolizes public imagery. The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.



Daily Painting

Joan Miró
WOMEN, BIRDS, AND A STAR (1949)

Saturday, October 5, 2024

Watching

THIRST
[ÞORSTI]

Björn Leó Brynjarsson
Iceland, 2019

Playing

CLUB MOD on allclassical.org

Hosted by Andrea Murray

Playing

Cindy Wilson
CHANGE


SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.



Daily Painting

David Park
DAPHNE (1959)

Friday, October 4, 2024

Watching

GOOD BOY
Viljar Bøe
Norway, 2022


Playing

Pancho Vladigerov
STRING CONCERTOS
Capriccio Edition Vol. 3

Pancho Vladigerov

Georgi Badev, Dina Schneidermann, Emil Karmilarov, Ventseslav Nikolov, Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra

-

- Violin Concerto No. 1 in F minor, Op. 11
- Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 61
- Burlesque, Op. 14
- Bulgarian Paraphrases, Op. 18
- Rhapsody Vardar, Op. 16
- Bulgarian Dances, Op. 23
- Concert Fantasy for Cello & Orchestra, Op. 35


MARGARET ATWOOD
“Frogless”

The sore trees cast their leaves
too early. Each twig pinching
shut like a jabbed clam.
Soon there will be a hot gauze of snow
searing the roots.

Booze in the spring runoff,
pure antifreeze;
the stream worms drunk and burning.
Tadpoles wrecked in the puddles.

Here comes an eel with a dead eye
grown from its cheek.
Would you cook it?
You would if.

The people eat sick fish
because there are no others.
Then they get born wrong.

This is not sport, sir.
This is not good weather.
This is not blue and green.

This is home.
Travel anywhere in a year, five years,
and you’ll end up here.



Daily Painting

Ibrahim El-Salahi
ALPHABET NO. 2 (1962/1968)

Thursday, October 3, 2024

Watching

RONGGENG KEMATIAN
Verdi Solaiman
Indonesia, 2024


Reading

Maria Popova
THE UNIVERSE IN VERSE
15 Portals to Wonder Through Science and Poetry

Illustrations by Ofra Amit

Daily Painting

Helen Frankenthaler
SUMMER PICTURE (1959)

Playing

Pearl Jam
TEN


SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.



Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Watching

SPEAK NO EVIL
Christian Tafdrup
Denmark/Netherlands, 2022




Playing

Nick Drake
FIVE LEAVES LEFT


SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

-

SUSAN SONTAG
On Photography

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.



Daily Painting

Palmer Hayden
THE JANITOR WHO PAINTS (1937)

Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Watching

DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY
[DESAPARECER POR COMPLETO]

Luis Javier Henaine
Mexico, 2022

Playing

Alberto Nepomuceno
SYMPHONY IN G MINOR


STEFAN ZWEIG
The World of Yesterday

Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never—and I say so not with pride but with shame—has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths.



Daily Painting

Luís Liberato
THE THREAD (2023)

Monday, September 30, 2024

Currently watching

QUEEN OF THE STARDUST BALLROOM
Sam O'Steen
USA, 1975



Playing

Blondie
AUTOAMERICAN


VOLTAIRE

Il est défendu de tuer; tout meurtrier est puni, à moins qu’il n’ait tué en grande compagnie, et au son des trompettes.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished, unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.


Daily Painting

Júlio Pomar
VINCENNES (2004)

Sunday, September 29, 2024

Currently Watching

SKINAMARINK
Kyle Edward Ball
USA, 2023

Watching

B'TWIXT NOW AND SUNRISE
Francis Ford Coppola
USA, 2022

"He's off the chain."

Playing

BRITISH CLARINET QUINTETS

Stephan Siegenthaler
Leipziger Streichquartett

-

- Sir Arthur Somervell - Clarinet Quintet in G Major
- Samuel Coleridge-Taylor - Clarinet Quintet in F-sharp minor
- Richard Walthew - A Short Quintet in E-flat Major


WILLIAM FAULKNER
[The ringèd moon sits eerily]

The ringèd moon sits eerily
Like a mad woman in the sky,
Dropping flat hands to caress
The far world’s shaggy flanks and breast,
Plunging white hands in the glade
Elbow deep in leafy shade
Where birds sleep in each silent brake
Silverly, there to wake
The quivering loud nightingales
Whose cries like scattered silver sails
Spread across the azure sea.
Her hands also caress me:
My keen heart also does she dare;
While turning always through the skies
Her white feet mirrored in my eyes
Weave a snare about my brain
Unbreakable by surge or strain,
For the moon is mad, for she is old,
And many’s the bead of a life she’s told;
And many’s the fair one she’s seen wither:
They pass, they pass, and know not whither.

The hushèd earth, so calm, so old,
Dreams beneath its heath and wold—
And heavy scent from thorny hedge
Paused and snowy on the edge
Of some dark ravine, from where
Mists as soft and thick as hair
Float silver in the moon.

Stars sweep down—or are they stars?—
Against the pines’ dark etchèd bars.
Along a brooding moon-wet hill
Dogwood shine so cool and still,
Like hands that, palm up, rigid lie
In invocation to the sky
As they spread there, frozen white,
Upon the velvet of the night.


Daily Painting

Stephan Martiniere
ENGINE CITY (2002)

Saturday, September 28, 2024