Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Currently Watching
[101 Shorts Edition]

43. GRAFFITI
Lluís Quílez
Spain and Ukraine, 2015

42. KITCHEN SINK
Alison Maclean
New Zealand, 1989

41. CODA
Alan Holly
Ireland, 2013

40. FERAL
Daniel Sousa
USA, 2012

39. HUMAN NATURE
Sverre Fredriksen
Netherlands, 2019

38. ORBIT AFTER EVER
Jamie Magnus Stone
Ireland, 2013

37. LAST DOOR SOUTH
[DERNIÈRE PORTE AU SUD]

Sacha Feiner
Belgium, 2015

36. UNDER COVERS
Michaela Olsen
USA, 2019

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.

Currently Playing

Dino Saluzzi and Anja Lechner
OJOS NEGROS


WILFRED OWEN
"The Send-Off"


Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.

Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.

Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.

Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.

Daily Painting

James Ensor
SKELETONS TRYING TO WARM THEMSELVES (1891)

Monday, April 29, 2024

Currently Reading

Ronald Blythe
AKENFIELD - PORTRAIT OF AN ENGLISH VILLAGE




Why so grumpy?
Pineapple, papaya, plantain, pistachio ... And the pungency of self-loathing.

Also bedecked in Trump 2024 hat

Keep it classy, WinCo.

Currently Playing

Etta James
THE CHESS BOX (1960-1974)


SAM SHEPARD

There's some hidden, deeply rooted thing in the Anglo male American that has to do with inferiority, that has to do with not being a man, and always, continually having to act out some idea of manhood that is invariably violent. This sense of failure runs very deep. Maybe it has to do with the frontier being systematically taken away, with the guilt of having gotten this country by wiping out a native race of people, with the whole Protestant work ethic. I can't put my finger on it, but it's the source of a lot of intrigue for me.


Daily Painting

Nathan Oliveira
SPRING NUDE (1962)

Sunday, April 28, 2024

Currently Watching

ALICE IN BORDERLAND - SEASON 2
[今際の国のアリス]

Shinsuke Sato
Japan, 2022

Currently Playing

MONUMENTAL WORKS FOR WINDS

Michael J. Colburn
The President's Own United States Marine Band

- Giuseppe Verdi - Aida - "Triumphal March"
- Igor Stravinsky - Symphonies of Wind Instruments
- Vincent Persichetti - Symphony for Band, Op. 69
- Aaron Copland - Emblems
- Percy Grainger - Over the Hills and Far Away
- William Walton - Crown Imperial


SAM SHEPARD

I don’t know what the American Dream is. I do know it doesn’t work. Not only doesn’t it work, the myth of the American Dream has created extraordinary havoc, and it’s going to be our demise

This notion that not only were we given this land by God somehow, but that we’re entitled to do whatever we wanted with it, regardless of the consequences, and reap all the fortunes out of the land, much to the detriment of everyone else

This rampant puritanical class of European colonialism behind the whole thing is land hungry Europeans wanting to dominate. The move westward was promoted by advertising with words like “Free Land,” “Manifest Destiny." 

We always prefer the fantasy over the reality.


Daily Painting

Eòin David Harris
2010/066 (2010)

Saturday, April 27, 2024

Currently Playing

CLUB MOD on allclassical.org

Hosted by Andrea Murray

Currently Playing

Jelly Roll Morton
THE PEARLS


STEPHEN JAY GOULD

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.



Daily Painting

Toshihiko Okuya
STUDY NO. 87 (2016)

Friday, April 26, 2024

Currently Reading

Tlotlo Tsamaase
WOMB CITY

Currently Playing

Josef Holbrooke
CLARINET CHAMBER MUSIC

Robert Plane, Lucy Gould, Mia Cooper, Scott Dickinson, David Adams, Alice Neary, Sophia Rahman

- Clarinet Quintet No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 27 "Ligeia"
- Cyrene, Op. 88b
- Phryne, Op. 98b
- Cavatina and Variations, Op. 15b "Clarinet Quintet No. 1"
- Nocturne, Op. 57 "Fairyland"
- Eilean Shona, Op. 74


MARGARET ATWOOD
Surfacing


Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.


Daily Painting

Liu Xiaodong
FAT WHITE BOY WITH HIS FATHER (2001)

Thursday, April 25, 2024

Currently Watching
[101 Shorts Edition]

50. SOMNIPHOBIA
Dillon Vibbart
USA, 2021

49. WOODS
Sean van Leijenhorst
Netherlands/Czech Republic, 2016

48. CHILDREN
Takuya Okada
Japan, 2011

47. LESS THAN HUMAN
Steffen Bang Lindholm
Denmark, 2017

46. FISHWIFE
Beth Park
Wales, 2022

45. THE CHAIR
Curry Barker
USA, 2022

44. ENIGMA
Curry Barker
USA, 2023

Currently Playing

Capital Cities
IN A TIDAL WAVE OF MYSTERY


PABLO NERUDA
"Friends on the Road"

Then I arrived at the capital, vaguely saturated
with fog and rain. What streets were those?
The garments of 1921 were breeding
in an ugly smell of gas, coffee, and bricks.
I walked among the students without understanding,
pulling the walls inside me, searching
each day into my poor poetry for the branches,
the drops of rain, and the moon, that had been lost.
I went deep into it for help, sinking
each evening into its waters, grasping
energies I could not touch, the seagulls of a deserted sea,
until I closed my eyes and was shipwrecked in the middle
of my own body.
Were these things dark shadows,
were they only hidden damp leaves stirred up from the soil?
What was the wounded substance from which death was pouring out
until it touched my arms and legs, controlled my smile,
and dug a well of pain in the streets?

I went out into life: I grew and was hardened,
I walked through the hideous back-alleys
without compassion, singing out on the frontiers
of delirium. The walls filled with faces:
eyes that did not look at light, twisted waters
lit up by a crime, legacies
of solitary pride, holes
filled with hearts that had been condemned and torn down.
I walked with them: it was only in that chorus
that my voice refound the solitudes
where it was born.

I finally became a man
singing among the flames, accepted
by friends who find their place in the night,
who sang with me in the taverns,
and who gave me more than a single kindness,
something they had defended with their fighting hands,
which was more than a spring,
a fire unknown elsewhere, the natural foliage
of the places slowly falling down at the city’s edge.

—Translated by James Wright and Robert Bly

Daily Painting

Fred Zeller
SOLEIL SUR LA RIVIÈRE

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Currently Watching

ALICE IN BORDERLAND - SEASON 1
[今際の国のアリス]

Shinsuke Sato
Japan, 2020

Currently Playing

Aphex Twin
SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS 85-92


ALBERT CAMUS
A Happy Death

I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.


Daily Painting

Lovis Corinth
EL GRAN MARTIRIO (1907)

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Currently Playing

Georg Philipp Telemann
CONCERTI PER MOLTI STROMENTI

Akademie für Alte Musik

- Concerto in D Major for 3 Trumpets and Timpani, TWV 54:D3
- Concerto in B minor for 2 Flutes and Calchedon, TWV 53:h1
- Concerto in B-Flat Major for 3 Oboes, 3 Violins, and Continuo, TWV 44:43
- Sonata in F Minor for 2 Violins, 2 Violas, cello and Continuo, TWV 44:32
- Concerto in F Major for Mandolin, Hammered Dulcimer, Harp and Continuo, TWV 53:F1
- Concerto in D minor for 2 Oboes, Bass, and Continuo, TWV 53:d1
- Concerto in D Major for 3 Horns, Violin, Strings, and Continuo, TWV 54:D2
- Quartet in G Major for Flute, Violin, Viola, and Continuo, TWV 43:G5


GABRIELLE GLANCY
"The Way the World Appears"

The water tower poses a challenge. Against
the shadows of the sky are planes of light.
There seems to be no touching, but actually
opening before him there’s a narrowing,
the way the world appears. He thinks he sees a bridge—
cables, a dusty light crossing back and forth
between them. A great geometric pine, silver green,
stretched until its needles are as thin as mist,
millions of tiny dotted lines, connecting
the continents between them. Even the dimmest
contrast of this against that, a page turning,
i. s as sharp as clouds against the sky. But
how can clouds be sharp against the sky since
the sky falls infinitely backwards and clouds are
only the center of an edgeless thought? Still,
through their slow drifting, he can see, like the hour
hand on a clock, the movement of lips in waking,
what he wants always to get himself through.



Daily Painting

Frits Thaulow
TOWN BY MOONLIGHT (1897)

Monday, April 22, 2024

Currently Reading

Mark Wittman
ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Experiences Out of Time and Self

Translated from the German by Philippa Hurd

Currently Playing

Cowboy Junkies
200 MORE MILES
Live Performances 1985-1994


F. KEITH WAHLE
"Sonnet"

You realize, even as you start this
that it won’t end up as a sonnet—
and by “sonnet” I don’t mean just a poem
in fourteen lines—or all right, fourteen lines, if
you insist, and iambic pentameter,
with a couplet at the end, but that’s not
all it takes to make a sonnet;
a real sonnet has a certain movement
of ideas, a special way the argument
reveals itself, with a shift in the point
of view at the middle of the poem,
or just past the middle, at the end
of the eighth line. This goes for either the
Italian or Elizabethan form.
And at the library you can get those
anthologies from the twenties and thirties
of local poets, meaning amateurs,
and they all seem to be writing sonnets,
or what they thought were sonnets; sonnets
on every imaginable subject:
Abraham Lincoln, Dante, Italy,
the months, the holidays, Lake Erie, death
and the death of children, larks, cardinals,
seashells, insomnia, Elizabeth
Tudor, and Mary Stuart, everything.
They even wrote sonnets about writing
sonnets. I found one about why
Shakespearean sonnets are better than
Italian sonnets. But none of these sonnets
are any good. The rhymes are all in the
right place, but the people who wrote them
had no idea what a sonnet can do
or even what poetry can do.
So the hell with those assholes. They’re all dead
now anyway, or soon will be, thank goodness.
In more recent times the term sonnet
has been used very freely, and the form
has become extremely loose. But some
of the modern sonnets are very good,
such as Robert Lowell’s sonnet on
Harpo Marx or his sonnet on Ezra Pound.
But one keeps getting back to the question
of writing, how it is done, and whether
it is fun. Certainly there are other things
that are more fun—going to bed with
attractive men or women, or eating
Chinese food. One thinks of the T’ang Dynasty,
the golden age of Chinese poetry—
in three hundred years, some of the best
poets ever in any language.
Li Po is the best known in this country,
though Tu Fu was probably a better poet,
and Po Chu I was more versatile.
But even after these three were dead, there
were many great and beautiful poets;
like Han Shan, the Cold Mountain hermit,
and Li Ho, the demon poet; and we
must not forget the great landscape poet,
Wang Wei, who was contemporary with
Li Po. Ezra Pound’s translations of Li Po
are the most exciting in English,
though perhaps not the most exacting
from the sinologist’s point of view.
Li Po was an habitual drunkard,
and wrote in a style that was rather free,
at least by the standards of ancient China.
Tu Fu, on the other hand, wrote in
a style called “regulated verse” (lü-shih),
which is an eight-line form with even
stricter rules than our sonnet, and died,
according to the legend, from eating
Chinese food, or rather, too much Chinese food.
He was trapped in the mountains by a flash flood,
and after starving for several days
he overate at a banquet and died
when the rice swelled up and ruptured his
intestine. This story may not be true.
Li Po and Tu Fu were great friends in their
lifetimes, just as Pound and Yeats were great friends,
and went to Chinese restaurants together,
all of which leads one to ask oneself,
“Will I ever be a truly great poet,
or even the friend of a great poet?”
Not likely. But to be a good poet
may be quite within the reach of many people.
It seems to require initially
an ability to listen with trust
to the little voices you have inside,
the voices that tell you what to do,
and how to write, like the one right now that’s
saying, “This is no sonnet, you damn fool;
it doesn’t even look like a sonnet.”



Daily Painting

Fritz Brandtner
HORSES AND RIDERS (1940)

Sunday, April 21, 2024

Currently Watching

THE BIG HEAT
Fritz Lang
USA, 1953



Currently Watching

HUMAN DESIRE
Fritz Lang
USA, 1954


You'd think by now Marjorie Taylor Greene would know what Putin does with his whores once they're no longer useful.

Currently Playing

David Murray Cuban Ensemble
DAVID MURRAY CUBAN ENSEMBLE PLAYS NAT KING COLE EN ESPAÑOL


ANITA BROOKNER
Hotel du Lac

And what is the most potent myth of all? The tortoise and the hare. In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. You could argue that the hare might be affected by the tortoise lobby’s propaganda, might become more prudent, circumspect, slower, in fact. But the hare is always convinced of his own superiority; he simply does not recognize the tortoise as a worthy adversary. That is why the hare wins.



Daily Painting

Charles Ephraim Burchfield
FOREST FIRE IN MOONLIGHT

Saturday, April 20, 2024

Currently Watching
[101 Shorts Edition]

55. FRENCH ROAST
Fabrice O. Joubert
France, 2008

54. THE PIANO TUNER
Olivier Treiner
France, 2010

53. INVERSES
Vincent Vandries and Jonathan Lempernesse
France, 2011

52. MEMO
Ines Scheiber, Jules Durand, Julien Becquer, Elena Dupressoir, Viviane Guimaraes
France, 2017

51. LE RETOUR DES VAGUES
Manon Cansell, Alejandra Guevara Cervera, Edward Kurchevsky, Francisco Moutinho De Magalhães, Hortense Mariano
France, 2020

Currently Playing

CLUB MOD on allclassical.org

Hosted by Andrea Murray

Well, it's a good thing the rapture happened during the eclipse or I might be doubting some of these lunatics.

Currently Playing

Shivkumar Sharma and Zakir Hussain
RĀG MADHUVANTĪ / RĀG MIŚRA TILANG


RICHARD ALDINGTON
The Colonel’s Daughter
(1931)

Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill.



Daily Painting

Egon Schiele
PORTRAIT OF ARNOLD SCHÖNBERG (1917)

Friday, April 19, 2024

Currently Reading

Harvey Sachs
SCHOENBERG - WHY HE MATTERS

What an unbelievable, I mean, it was so much and so interesting and so vicious and horrible, and it’s so beautiful in so many different ways. The cold shit in my diaper. Wow. It represents such a big portion of the success of this country. No one has ever seen anything like it. Wow.

Currently Playing

Cecilia Bartoli
SACRIFICIUM

Giovanni Antonini
Il Giardino Armonico


KURT VONNEGUT

There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books.

I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is. I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas.



Daily Painting

Francesco Tomassi
THE SOLDIER WITH GREEN EYES (1917)

Thursday, April 18, 2024

Currently Watching

Jimmy Carr
NATURAL BORN KILLER

Currently Watching

PARADISE
Boris Kunz
Germany, 2023

Currently Playing

Björk Guðmundsdóttir & tríó Guðmundar Ingólfssonar
GLING-GLÓ


OLAF STAPLEDON
Last and First Men

Somehow, then, I must help you to feel not only the vastness of time and space, but also the vast diversity of mind's possible modes. But this I can only hint to you, since so much lies wholly beyond the range of your imagination.




Daily Painting

Caesar van Everdingen
ALLEGORY OF THE BIRTH OF FREDERIK HENDRIK (1650)