Friday, September 30, 2022

NOPE
____________________

Jordan Peele
USA, 2022
Art Porn
____________________

Photographer unknown to me.
Coming in November ... Again
NÖEL COWARD IN NEW YORK
____________________

Nöel Coward

NÖEL COWARD
"I Went to a Marvelous Party"
____________________

Quite for no reason
I'm here for the Season
And high as a kite
Living in error
With Maud at Cap Ferrat
Which couldn't be right
Everyone's here and frightfully gay
Nobody cares what people say
Though the Riviera
Seems really much queerer
Than Rome at its height
Yesterday night

I went to a marvelous party
With Nounou and Nada and Nell
It was in the fresh air
And we went as we were
And we stayed as we were
Which was Hell
Poor Grace started singing at midnight
And didn't stop singing till four
We knew the excitement was bound to begin
When Laura got blind on Dubonnet and gin
And scratched her veneer with a Cartier pin
I couldn't have liked it more

I went to a marvelous party
I must say the fun was intense
We all had to do
What the people we knew
Would be doing a hundred years hence
Dear Cecil arrived wearing armor
Some shells and a black feather boa
Poor Millicent wore a surrealist comb
Made of bits of mosaic from St. Peter's in Rome
But the weight was so great that she had to go home
I couldn't have liked it more

People's behavior
Away from Belgravia
Would make you aghast
So much variety
Watching society
Scampering past
If you have any mind at all
Gibbon's divine Decline and Fall
Seems pretty flimsy
No more than a whimsy
By way of contrast
On Saturday last

I went to a marvelous party
We didn't start dinner till ten
And young Bobbie Carr
Did a stunt at the bar
With a lot of extraordinary men
Dear Baba arrived with a turtle
Which shattered us all to the core
The Grand Duke was dancing a foxtrot with me
When suddenly Cyril screamed "Fiddl-de-dee"
And ripped off his trousers and jumped in the sea
I couldn't have liked it more

I went to a marvelous party
Elise made an entrance with May
You'd never have guessed
From her fisherman's vest
That her bust had been whittled away
Poor Lulu got fried on Chianti
And talked about esprit de corps
Maurice made a couple of passes at Gus
And Freddie, who hates any kind of a fuss
Did half the Big Apple and twisted his truss
I couldn't have liked it more

I went to a marvelous party
We played the most wonderful game
Maureen disappeared
And came back in a beard
And we all had to guess at her name
We talked about growing old gracefully
And Elsie who's seventy-four
Said, "A, it's a question of being sincere
And be, if you're supple you've nothing to fear
Then she swung upside down from a glass chandelier
I couldn't have liked it more


Thursday, September 29, 2022

PANIC IN YEAR ZERO
____________________

Ray Milland
USA, 1962
Emö Dohnányi
SYMPHONY NO. 2
[Premiere Recording]
____________________
Matthias Bamert
BBC Philharmonic

CARL VAN DOREN
"Why I Am an Unbeliever"
____________________

 As to gods, they have been, I find, countless, but even the names of most of them lie in the deep compost which is known as civilization, and the memories of few of them are green. There does not seem to me to be good reason for holding that some of them are false and some of them, or one of them, true. Each was created by the imaginations and wishes of men who could not account for the behavior of the universe ~ in any other satisfactory way. 

No god has satisfied his worshipers forever. Sooner or later they have realized that the attributes once ascribed to him, such as selfishness or lustfulness or vengefulness, are unworthy of the moral systems which men have evolved among them­selves. Thereupon follows the gradual doom of the god, however long certain of the faithful may cling to his cult. 

In the case of the god who still survives in the loyalty of men after centuries of scrutiny, it can always be noted that little besides his name has endured. His attributes will have been so revised that he is really another god. Nor is this objec­tion met by the argument that the concept of the god has been purified while the essence of him survived. In the concept alone can he be studied; the essence eludes the grasp of the human mind. 

I may prefer among the various gods that god who seems to me most thoroughly purged of what I regard as undivine elements, but I make my choice, obviously, upon principles which come from observation of the con­duct of men. Whether a god has been created in the image of gross desires or of pure desires does not greatly matter. The difference proves merely that different men have desired gods and have furnished them­selves with the gods they were able to conceive.


Wednesday, September 28, 2022

VERSION 2.0
____________________

Garbage

MIRCEA ELIADE
Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet
____________________

The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.

Tuesday, September 27, 2022

LOVE HAS COME FOR YOU
____________________

Steve Martin and Edie Brickell

ELIAS CANETTI
Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice
____________________

A large part of Kafka's work consists of tentative steps toward perpetually changing possibilities of future. He cannot acknowledge a single future, there are many; this multiplicity of futures paralyzes him and burdens his every step.


Monday, September 26, 2022

VICIOUS
Season One
____________________

Directed by Ed Bye
Written by Gary Janetti
1930s VIOLIN CONCERTOS, VOL I
____________________

Gil Shaham

David Robertson, Juanjo Mena, New York Philharmonic, Staatskapelle Dresden, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra

-

Samuel Barber
VIOLIN CONCERTO, OP. 14

Alban Berg
VIOLIN CONCERTO “TO THE MEMORY OF AN ANGEL”

Karl Amadeus Hartmann
CONCERTO FUNÈBRE FOR SOLO VIOLIN AND STRING ORCHESTRA

Igor Stravinsky
VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D MAJOR

Benjamin Britten
VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D MINOR, OP. 15 



JOHANNES V. JENSEN
"At Memphis Station"
____________________

Half-awake and half-dozing,
in an inward seawind of danaid dreams,
I stand and gnash my teeth
at Memphis Station, Tennessee.
It is raining.

The night is so barren, extinguished,
and the rain scourges the earth
with a dark, idiotic energy.
Everything is soggy and impassable.

Why are we held up, hour upon hour?
Why should my destiny be stopped here? 
Have I fled rain and soul-corrosion
in Denmark, India, and Japan,
to be rain-bound, to rot, in Memphis,
Tennessee, U. S. A.?

And now it dawns. Drearily light oozes
down over this damp jail.
The day uncovers mercilessly
the frigid rails and all the black mud,
the waiting-room with the slot-machine,
orange peels, cigar-and match-stumps.
The day grins through with spewing roof-gutters,
and the infinite palings of rain,
rain, say I, from heaven and to earth.

How deaf the world is, and immovable!
How banal the Creator!
And why do I go on paying dues
at this plebeian sanatorium of an existence!

Stillness. See how the engine,
the enormous machine, stands calmly and seethes;
shrouding itself in smoke, it is patient.
Light your pipe on a fasting heart,
damn God, and swallow your sorrow!

Yet go and stay in Memphis! 
Your life, after all, is nothing but
a sickening drift of rain, and your fate
was always to be belated
in some miserable waiting-room or other—
Stay in Memphis, Tennessee!

For within one of these bill-shouting houses,
happiness awaits you, happiness,
if you can only gulp down your impatience—
and here there is sleeping a buxom young girl
with one ear lost in her hair;
she will come to encounter you
some fine day on the street,
like a wave of fragrance,
looking as though she knew you.

Is it not spring?
Does the rain not fall richly?
Is there not the sound of an amorous murmur,
a long, subdued conversation of love
mouth to mouth
between the rain and the earth?
The day began so sadly,
but now, see the rainfall brighten!
Do you not allow the day its right of battle?
So now it is light. And there is a smell of mould
from between the rusted underpinning of the platform
mingled with the rain-dust’s rank breath—
a suggestion of spring—
is that no consolation?

And now see, see how the Mississippi
in its bed of flooded forest
wakes against the day!
See how the titanic river revels in its twisting!
How royally it dashes through its bends, and swings the rafts
of trees and torn planks in its whirls!
See how it twirls a huge stern-wheeler
in its deluge-arms
like a dancer, master of the floor!
See the sunken headland—oh, what immense, primeval peace
over the landscape of drowned forests!
Do you not see how the current’s dawn-waters
clothe themselves mile-broad in the day’s cheap light,
and wander healthily under the teeming clouds!

Pull yourself together, irreconcilable man!
Will you never forget that you have been promised Eternity?
Will you grudge the earth its due, your poor gratitude?
What would you do, with your heart of love?

Pull yourself together, and stay in Memphis;
announce yourself in the market as a citizen;
go in and insure yourself among the others; 
pay your premium of vulgarity,
so that they can know they are safe, as regards you,
and you will not be fired out of the club.
Court the damosel with roses and gold rings,
and begin your saw-mill, like other people.
Yank on your rubbers regularly . . .
Look about you, smoke your sapient pipe
in sphinx-deserted Memphis . . .

Ah! there comes that miserable freight-train
which has kept us waiting six hours.
It rolls in slowly—with smashed sides;
it pipes weakly; the cars limp on three wheels;
and the broken roof drips with clay and slime.
But in the tender, among the coals,
lie four still forms
covered with bloody coats.

Then our huge express-locomotive snorts;
advances a little; stops, sighing deeply;
and stands crouched for the leap. The track is clear.

And we travel onward
through the flooded forest
under the rain’s gaping sluices.


Translated from the Danish by S. Foster Damon


Sunday, September 25, 2022

INHABIT
A Permaculture Perspective
____________________

Costa Boutsikaris
USA, 2015
"I'm stuck birthing and raising two babies who should have been born to her but can't be because she's too selfish to have kids."

This is one of the most batshit crazy things I have ever seen in my life. Child Protective Services should have intervened 21 years ago. 

Thank the White Baby Jesus the daughter is refusing to take even a chance of repeating the pattern of cruelty and abuse.
Bedřich Smetana
PIANO TRIO IN G MINOR

Franz Liszt
ELEGIES
NO. 1, S 196
NO. 2, S 197
____________________

Trio Wanderer

JUSTICE POTTER STEWART
Concurring opinion in U.S. Supreme Court, Jacobellis v. Ohio [1964]
____________________

I shall not today attempt further to define [pornography]. But I know it when I see it and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

-

The film in question was Louis Malle's THE LOVERS.


Saturday, September 24, 2022

Currently Reading
____________________

SUSTAINABLE [R]EVOLUTION
Permaculture in Ecovillages, Urban Farms, and Communities Worldwide
____________________

Juliana Birnbaum and Louis Fox
Currently Playing

Sigur Rós
TAKK

WILLIAM MAXWELL EVARTS
____________________

The pious ones of Plymouth, who, reaching the Rock, first fell upon their own knees and then upon the aborigines.


Friday, September 23, 2022

THE FIVE SENSES
____________________

Jeremy Podeswa
Canada, 1999






HEARTLAND
____________________

Real Life

MIRCEA ELIADE
____________________

One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity.


Thursday, September 22, 2022

UNDERGROUND
____________________

Thelonious Monk

ALAN WATTS
____________________

If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you are connected to everything.


Wednesday, September 21, 2022

LE CORBEAU
____________________

Henri-Georges Clouzot
France, 1943
Henry Purcell
ROYAL WELCOME SONGS FOR KING JAMES II
____________________

HARRY CHRISTOPHERS
THE SISTEEN

ELIAS CANETTI
The Agony of Flies
____________________

People should not make a virtue out of their sensitivity. They may experience it and preserve it as it was experienced. But they should not adorn themselves with it. Sensitivity will make an addict out of anyone who displays its medals on his chest. He will require more and more objects to enable him to demonstrate his sensitivity, and if he runs out of them, he will simply make things up - and his sensitivity will then reveal itself for what it is: precious, brittle, and rotted through and through.


Tuesday, September 20, 2022

EXOTICA
____________________

Atom Egoyan
Canada, 1994
Art Porn
____________________

Photographer unknown to me.
Art Porn
____________________

Photographer unknown to me.
IN THE GARDEN
____________________

Eurythmics

EHSAN SEHGAL
"To Rule My Whole"
____________________

You know
I am your soul
The meaning
Of your love
The breath of affection
The essence
Of your heart and mind
My dedication is devotion
The dress and cover
Of your life
O my sweet destiny
Without me
You are not complete
You know that
Be open to me
And come, come
Throw all hesitations
To rule my whole.


Monday, September 19, 2022

Today would be a good day to charge this motherfucker with treason for espionage.

Yesterday would have been better.
COSMOGRAMMA
___________________

Flying Lotus

LAO TZU
____________________

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are going.


Sunday, September 18, 2022

Christianity 101
COMPLETE POP INSTRUMENTAL HITS OF THE SIXTIES
VOL 2 - 1961
____________________

Various Artists

MICHAEL ENDE
____________________

There are many kinds of delusion.


Saturday, September 17, 2022

GREATEST HITS
___________________

Bill Withers

MIRCEA ELIADE
The Sacred and The Profane
____________________

Through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an "escape from time" comparable to the "emergence from time" effected by myths. Reading projects him out if his personal duration and incorporates him into other rhythms, makes him live in another "history."


Friday, September 16, 2022

GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES
____________________

Howard Hawks
USA, 1953
BLUE EYED BLACK BOY
___________________

Balkan Beat Box

CARL VAN DOREN
"Why I Am an Unbeliever"
____________________

When I say I am an unbeliever, I do not mean merely that I am no Mormon or no Methodist, or even that I am no Christian or no Buddhist. These seem to me relatively unimpor­tant divisions and subdivisions of belief. I mean that I do not believe in any god that has ever been devised, in any doctrine that has ever claimed to be revealed, in any scheme of immortality that has ever been expounded.


Thursday, September 15, 2022

THE REFLECTING SKIN
____________________

Philip Ridley
Canada, 1990
LIFE'S TOO GOOD
____________________

The Sugarcubes

THE SUGARCUBES
"Fucking in Rhythm and Sorrow"
____________________

A divorced lady arrives home from a bar
Guess, guess what she sees, sees there
There is a naked person in my flat!
He's got a weird expression on his face!

Oh my god and jesus as well!
W-what are you doing here?
Are you hurting your chest?
Offending yourself?

Forcing yourself into pain and sorrow like there is no tomorrow?
You should use the pain and sorrow
To fill you up with power
Life's both sweet and sour!
 
He looks at me hopeless with tears in his eyes
Goes out of the window and up on the roof
Naked man, naked man calm down!
I-I'll give you some strawberry cake

Don't act like there is no tomorrow
You should use the pain and the sorrow
To fill you up with power
Life's both sweet and sour!
Life's both sweet and sour!

Don't act
Like there's no tomorrow!
You should use the pain and sorrow
To fill you up with power
Life's both sweet and sour

Don't act, don't act like there is no tomorrow
You should use the pain and sorrow
To fill you up with power
Life's both sweet and sour


Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Currently Reading
____________________

UZUMAKI
____________________

Junji Ito
VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO

November 9, 2022
DANCE FEVER
____________________

Florence and the Machine

ELIAS CANETTI
Crowds and Power
____________________

There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic. Even clothes give insufficient security: it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the naked, smooth, defenceless flesh of the victim.


Tuesday, September 13, 2022

SMALL CHANGE
____________________

Tom Waits

ALAN WATTS
____________________

What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don't like it.


Monday, September 12, 2022

Currently Reading
____________________

TIME IS A MOTHER
____________________

Ocean Vuong
AGE OF APATHY
____________________

Aoife O'Donovan

TONI MORRISON
Song of Solomon
____________________

When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world? Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old.


Sunday, September 11, 2022

“9/11/2001” 
____________________

Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly
Leoš Janáček
PIANO MUSIC VOL 1
____________________

Thomas Hlawatsch


- Along An Overgrown Path
- Piano Sonata 1.X.1905 "From The Street"

ELIAS CANETTI
Crowds and Power
____________________

First there is the lying in wait for prey; the prey is marked down long before it is aware of our designs on it. With feelings of pleasure and approval it is contemplated, observed and kept watch over; it is seen as meat whilst it is still alive, and so intensely and irrevocably seen as meat that nothing can deflect the watcher's determination to get hold of it. Already while he is prowling round it he feels that it belongs to him. From the moment he selects it as his prey, he thinks of it as incorporated into himself.


Saturday, September 10, 2022

Johannes Brahms
CLARINET TRIO IN B MINOR, OP 115
____________________

David Shifrin
Emerson String Quartet

E. M. CIORAN
All Gall Is Divided
____________________

Models of style: The swearword, the telegram, the epitaph.


Friday, September 9, 2022

Art Porn
____________________

Photographer unknown to me.
Philip Glass
GLASSWORLDS 6 - AMERICA
____________________

Nicolas Horvath

DOROTHY PARKER
"The Danger of Writing Defiant Verse"
____________________

And now I have another lad!
No longer need you tell
How all my nights are slow and sad
For loving you too well.

His ways are not your wicked ways,
He's not the like of you.
He treads his path of reckoned days,
A sober man, and true.

They'll never see him in the town,
Another on his knee.
He'd cut his laden orchards down,
If that would pleasure me.

He'd give his blood to paint my lips
If I should wish them red.
He prays to touch my finger-tips
Or stroke my prideful head.

He never weaves a glinting lie,
Or brags the hearts he'll keep.
I have forgotten how to sigh-
Remembered how to sleep.

He's none to kiss away my mind-
A slower way is his.
Oh, Lord! On reading this, I find
A silly lot he is.

Thursday, September 8, 2022

Currently Reading
____________________

ORLAM
____________________

PJ Harvey
PACE E GUERRA
____________________

Terry Wey

Rubén Dubrovsky
Bach Consort Wien