April 2009
4 posts
Dreaming at the Ballet
The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed. They will do anything it’s true. And the skin is beautifully cared for. But they have no sense of it. They are all manner and amazing technique. I lie with them thinking of your foolish excess, of you panting and sweating, and your eyes after.
- Jack Gilbert
The Remains
I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets, I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road. At night I turn back the clocks; I open the family album and look at myself as a boy. What good does it do? The hours have done their job. I say my own name. I say goodbye. The words follow each other downwind. I love my wife but send her away. My parents rise out of their thrones into the...
Mods and the like.
On Josef Goebbels
From Wikipedia:
Goebbels also discovered a talent for oratory, and was soon second in the Nazi movement only to Hitler as a public speaker. Where Hitler’s style was hoarse and passionate, Goebbels’s was cool, sarcastic and often humorous: he was a master of biting invective and insinuation, although he could whip himself into a rhetorical frenzy if the occasion demanded. Unlike Hitler, however,...
February 2009
2 posts
I knew he was an excellent director, but I hadn’t seen his photography. More Wim Wenders.
A Softer World
One of my favourites in a long while. The rest here.
January 2009
1 post
“We never could have any knowledge except that of the present instant. The moment...”
– James Mill
November 2008
1 post
“The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary...”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
October 2008
19 posts
500 Days of Summer
Could be a good film, could be a flop; more importantly, it has Joseph Gordon-Levitt in it. Ow!
For my own aesthetic pleasure, I’m also re-linking that Ellen von Unwerth photoshoot.
Valley Song
Your eyes and the valley are memories. Your eyes fire and the valley a bowl. It was here a moonrise crept over the timberline. It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down. And your eyes and the moon swept the valley. I will see you again to-morrow. I will see you again in a million years. I will never know your dark eyes again. These are three ghosts I keep. These are three sumach-red dogs I...
“Society is absolutely necessary for the well-being of men; and these are as...”
– David Hume
Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan’s Come On...
I Had Sex With My Brother But I Don’t Feel Guilty
Incest: An Age-Old Taboo
Two conflicting articles about incest, or rather, personal experience contrasted against objective reality. It’s interesting how something so commonplace in ancient civilisations grew so taboo that it now incites knee-jerk reactions.
“An ego thus educated has become reasonable; it no longer lets itself be governed...”
– Sigmund Freud
WatchSamuel Beckett’s Play on film, directed by Anthony Minghella and starring Alan Rickman.
You know those girls everyone talks about? The effortlessly thin, flippantly fashionable, casually beautiful sort? I avoid them, out of jealousy (and repress my fawning adoration), but she charms me.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
I watched Julian Schnabel’s film a few weeks ago, and was affected for days. Here is an extract from Jean-Dominique Bauby’s book, which I have not read.
Prologue
Through the frayed curtain at my window, a wan glow announces the break of day. My heels hurt, my head weighs a ton, and something like a giant invisible cocoon holds my whole body prisoner. My room emerges slowly from the...
“I’ve got to get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.”
– an obscure California columnist
Some stills from film noir classics on Moderntimes.com.
More Gilbert, this time reading The Forgotten...
Portrait Number Five: Against A New York Summer
I’d walk her home after work buying roses and talking of Bechsteins. She was full of soul. Her small room was gorged with heat and there were no windows. She’d take off everything but her pants and take the pins from her hair throwing them on the floor with a great noise. Like Crete. We wouldn’t make love. She’d get on the bed with those nipples and we’d lie sweating...
Jesus Dies
From up here in the crow’s nest I see a small crowd gather. Who do you gather, my townsmen? There is no news here. I am not a trapeze artist. I am busy with my dying. Three heads lolling, bobbing like bladders. No news, The soldiers down below laughing as soldiers have done for centuries. No news, We are the same men, you and I, the same sort of nostrils, the same sort of feet. My bones are...
As I learned from a conversation behind me, the lead singer of Cansei de Ser Sexy calls herself Lovefoxxx. I have to admire her brazenness. If I could, I’d be known as Sexxxwolf.
I’m really liking the look of tulip skirts. Actually, skirts in general are superb.
Death Valley, by Eric Moore. I’d love to say I was driving there.
“There’s a trilogy in my life, an equilateral triangle, shall we say, of...”
– Serge Gainsbourg
Hymn
I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth and go on out over the sea marshes and the brant in bays and over the hills of tall hickory and over the crater lakes and canyons and on up through the spheres of diminishing air past the blackset noctilucent clouds where one wants to stop and look way past all the light diffusions and bombardments up farther than the loss of sight into the...