Maggie & Brick..

Paul and Liz, in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, of course. No reason, just beautiful is all. Look at these people.. did anyone ever look better than these two? Look at that room.. He’s an alcoholic recuperating from a broken leg… and look at his damn pyjamas. Hell, even the crutch looks cool..

(.. of course, nothing that’s posted here, however beautiful, is there for ‘no reason’, now, is it?..)

Jack’s back!..

”As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way.”

Jack Handey

A whole mess o’quotes..

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.”

—Milton, Paradise Lost

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”

—Theodore Roosevelt, from an address called “Citizenship in a Republic” given at the Sorbonne, April 23, 1910.

“There are far too many smart, educated, talented people operating at quarter speed, unsure of their place in the world, contributing far too little to the productive engine of modern civilization. There are far too many people who look like they have their act together but have yet to make an impact. You know who you are.”

—Po Bronson, What Should I Do With My Life?

“And finally the moment came when I pushed aside what I had done and started to begin again with the announcement that Jupiter himself had never existed; that man was alone in a world in which no voices were heard than his own, a world neither friendly nor unfriendly save he made it so…

How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, without guidance and without consolation he must create from his own vitals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives…”

—Julius Caesar, in Thornton Wilder’s novel The Ides of March

“I will act AS IF what I do makes a difference.”

—William James

“You cannot find yourself, only create yourself.”

—Anne B. Sekel

“Mental health is the process of trading one set of problems for a more interesting set of problems.”

—Nathaniel Brandon

“In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”

—Albert Camus

“Integrity has no need of rules.”

—Albert Camus

“I can’t promise that I’ll do it, and I can’t even promise that I’ll try. But I’ll try to try.”

—Bart Simpson

“What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

—Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

“Your work is to discover your work
and then to give yourself to it
with all your heart.”

—The Dhammapada

“We are never living, but only hoping to live; and, looking forward always to being happy, it is inevitable that we are never so.”

—Blaise Pascal

“Men are disturbed, not by things that happen, but by their opinion of things that happen.”

—Epictetus

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

—Winston Churchill

“What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?”

—Willa Cather

Tilt/shift Sunday..

Microdisney

(by Katherine Coble)

Psych session..

Jane Fonda in ‘Klute’..

Daydreamin’, and I’m thinkin’ of you..

Adam Phillips (again!), on Freud (again!!). ”Creative Writers and Daydreaming” (1908)..

“… In this paper Freud makes ‘the assumption that a piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood’. And the play of childhood, in Freud’s view by this time, like the dreams and symptoms he had newly described, was a disguised representation of infantile sexual wishes. There is.. ‘a path that leads from our discussion of phantasies to the problems of poetic effects’. What distinguishes the creative writer is that – like the dreamer and the playing child – he has found a way of rendering unacceptable desires into shareable form. ‘Such phantasies, when we learn them’, Freud writes, ‘repel us, or at least leave us cold. But when a creative writer … tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure’. In this imaginative alchemy, pleasure is wrested from aversion. To be a poet is to be able to make the apparently impossible thing into an acceptably pleasurable transgression.”

…”The arts of poetry for Freud are clearly highly charged. Through this aesthetic ‘altering and disguising’ of his day-dream, the creative writer ‘enables us thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame’. It is quite clear that, whether for Oedipal reasons – or what we might now call pre-Oedipal reasons – our day-dreams are guilty and shameful, and poetic techniques are required to perform the morally equivocal act of not merely making our desires acceptable to us but positively pleasurable. The art of poetry, in other words, is the art of being happily unacceptable in public, of making known one’s otherwise forbidden desires. The person referred to in this paper as the creative writer is an extraordinary double agent, a figure who doesn’t fit easily into either of Freud’s models of the mind… perhaps Freud’s figure of the creative writer is the ego in its best, or most satisfied, version. The poet is our last hope for happiness faced with the scarcity of the external world, the depredations of the super-ego and the voraciousness of the id. The poet is the person who can get away with it…”

…Hey, baby – let’s get away.. let’s go somewhere.. far…

 

Good day for the quote widget..

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

- Gustave Flaubert

To my embarrassment I was born in bed with a lady.

- Wilson Mizner

We’re off to see the wizard..

.. the wonderful wizard of cheech!

Because, because, because, because , because…

After a while..

..an English translation of a Borges poem, with musical accompaniment by the marvellous Astor Piazzolla. Yeah, I know, the graphics are a little mawkish in that self-help kind of way, but halfway through there’s a picture of a lion with its paw covering its face that’s so ..doh!.. as to make the whole thing worthwhile..

Self less face..

Jaco has an off day..

.. found this late last night, on a routine youtube-trawl. 30 seconds in, I already had beer coming out my nostrils, and may have done a little wee..

(Tim, our guitar player, is a big fan of these ’shreds’ and keeps exhorting me to watch the Clapton one, but it never seemed that funny an idea as I never thought him much of a player anyway. This Jaco one, on the other hand, is, for me at least, a perfectly executed work of twisted comedic genius..)

 

Borges on bad tangos..

“… One of my friends, a professor from Paraguay, took me to his home in Texas. He said he had tangos and asked if I wanted to hear them. I said, “Yes, of course.” He played all the tangos I loathe, actually. For instance, “Flaca fane y descangallada”, “La cumparsita”… I thought to myself, “What a disgrace; these aren’t tangos, how horrible this is!” And while I was thus judging them intellectually, I felt my own tears. I was crying with emotion. That is to say, I condemned that music intellectually and yet at the same time it had touched me and I was crying…”

Thrilla in Manila..

.. actually, contrary to the ad, my April has so far been rather more a case of ennui in Hacknee – although the SOS gig really was held in the very stadium where Ali fought Frazier on that famous night in 1975..

Anyway, less chatter – from now on, this is how I’d like my name to be announced, please..

I am big. It’s the pictures that got small..

Just got this. I think somebody’s algorithm needs a bit of serious tweaking…

Little Red Riding Hood – A Martian Perspective..

.. A deliciously cynical reading by Dr. Eric Berne, author of the wonderful ‘Games People Play‘ (1964).. And if you think this is a little caustic, you should see what he makes of Cinderella..

                           ———————–

“…To a Martian, this story raises interesting questions. He takes it at face value, including the talking wolf, even though he has never met one. But given what happens, he wonders what it is all about and what kind of people it happens to. Here, then, are his thoughts on the matter…”

“One day LRRH’s mother sent her through the woods to bring food to her grandmother, and on the way she met a wolf. What kind of a mother sends a little girl into a forest where there are wolves? Why didn’t her mother do it herself, or go along with LRRH? If grandmother was so helpless, why did mother leave her all by herself in a hut far away? But if LRRH had to go, how come her mother had never warned her never to stop and talk to wolves? The story makes it clear that LRRH had never been told that this was dangerous. No mother could really be that stupid, so it sounds as if her mother didn’t care much what happened to LRRH, or maybe evn wanted to get rid of her. No little girl is that stupid either. How could LRRH look at the wolf’s eyes, ears, hands and teeth and still think it was her grandmother? Why didn’t she get out of there as fast as she could?

Even the grandmother and the hunter aren’t above suspicion. If we now treat the dramatis personae of this story as real people, each with his or her own script, we see how neatly their personalities mesh from a Martian point of view.

!. The mother is evidently trying to lose her daughter ‘accidentally’, or at least she wants to end up saying: ‘Isn’t it awful, you can’t even walk through the park nowadays without some wolf…’ etc.

2. The wolf, instead of eating rabbits and such, is obviously overreaching himself, and he must know that he will come to a bad end that way, so he must want to invite trouble. He evidently read Nietzche or someone similar in his youth (if he can talk and tie on a bonnet, why shouldn’t he be able to read?), and his motto is something like ‘Live dangerously and die gloriously’.

3. Grandmother lives alone and leaves her door unlatched, so she may be hoping for something interesting to happen, something which couldn’t happen if she were living with her folks. Maybe that’s why she didn’t move in with them, or at least live next door. She was probably young enough to be ripe for adventure, since LRRH was still a little girl.

4. The hunter is obviously a rescuer who enjoys working over his vanquished opponents with sweet little maidens to help: quite clearly an adolescent script.

5. LRRH tells the wolf quite explicitly where he can meet her again, and even climbs into bed with him.

The truth of the matter is that everybody in the story is looking for action at almost any price. If the payoff at the end is taken at face value, then the whole thing was a plot to do in the poor wolf by making him think he was outsmarting everybody, using LRRH as bait. In that case, the moral of the story is not that innocent maidens should keep out of forests where there are wolves, but that wolves should keep away from innocent-looking maidens and their grandmothers; in short, a wolf should not walk through the forest alone. This also raises the interesting question of what the mother did after she got rid of LRRH for the day…”

Tilt/shift Sunday..

Tilttsburg…

..by David Hall

Glass half-empty?..

.. Not for this guy. I’ve witnessed some pretty stunning musical performances over the years, but I’ve honestly never seen anything quite like this. Must admit, I didn’t think it was real at first. Oh, and if you want to try it at home, you’ll need proper, expensive crystal wineglasses, apparently – not those ones you got free down at the petrol station..

Swapping stories..

..Had quite a vivid dream last night, entirely set in a some strange dentist’s office. Having consulted various oracles, I’m assured that “…to dream that you are at the dentist, signifies doubt over the sincerity and honor of some person. You may have some anxiety or fear of pain, but in the long run it will be for your own good..”

So, there you are – anyway, it’s a somewhat tenuous link, but the whole dream thing put me in mind of a nice little anecdote told by Richard Powers in an intriguing interview, to illustrate how we need the stories of others to complete our own..

“… there’s an old Dutch fairy tale called, in one variation, the Innkeeper’s Wife, which has always seemed to me the perfect illustration of that theory of interpenetrating complements. I’ve narrated the tale explicitly in one of my books, and it haunts the margins of at least two others. The wife of an innkeeper in Zeeland has a dream in which she finds a fortune outside the Bourse in Amsterdam. when she wakes, the dream is still so palpable that she feels it must be real. She tells her husband, who tries to discourage her from making the ruinous journey. But nothing can stop her, and she spends her savings on a ticket in to the city. All day long she walks up and down in front of the Bourse: no treasure. Finally, in despair, she prepares to go home empty-handed. A broker corning out of the Bourse sees her and asks her what the matter is. When she, weeping, tells him, he laughs. “You must never believe in such things. I, personally, have often dreamed that I’ve found treasure under the bed of a little inn in Zeeland where I’ve dreamed I’m staying.”

                                  —————————————–

     “Some versions of the story end there, and others have the woman rushing home, tearing up the floorboards, and coming into her inheritance. The force of the story, for me, is the fact that each dream only has use as the key to the other. We cannot understand our own narratives except as the ground for some other’s figure (or the figure for their ground)… “

 

Going back to my roots..

Somebody just drew my attention to this..

The Roots – Live, Toronto – March 30, 2008

done

Tickled me, anyway – gotta love the Roots..

Two from the heart..

Been struggling to dig myself out of a hole this morning, with limited success.. so, where to turn? Where else but the oft-maligned wonder that is the worldwide web. In the space of five minutes I’d found these two treasures, which I’m pretty sure I’ve never stumbled across before, by two of the artists I most revere. And, for the moment, life is good again..

———————————————————————————————————————

.. Not a song – a poem..

Browning Decides to Be a Poet

by Jorge Luis Borges

In these red labyrinths of London
I find that I have chosen
the strangest of all callings,
save that, in its way, any calling is strange.
Like the alchemist
who sought the philosopher’s stone
in quicksilver,
I shall make everyday words–
the gambler’s marked cards, the common coin–
give off the magic that was there
when Thor was both the god and the din,
the thunderclap and the prayer.
In today’s dialect
I shall say, in my fashion, eternal things:
I shall try to be worthy
of the great echo of Byron.
This dust that I am will be invulnerable.
If a woman shares my love
my verse will touch the tenth sphere of the concentric heavens;
if a woman turns my love aside
I will make of my sadness a music,
a full river to resound through time.
I shall live by forgetting myself.
I shall be the face I glimpse and forget,
I shall be Judas who takes on
the divine mission of being a betrayer,
I shall be Caliban in his bog,
I shall be a mercenary who dies
without fear and without faith,
I shall be Polycrates, who looks in awe
upon the seal returned by fate.
I will be the friend who hates me.
The Persian will give me the nightingale, and Rome the sword.
Masks, agonies, resurrections
will weave and unweave my life,
and in time I shall be Robert Browning.

———————————————————————————————————————-

.. Not a poem – a song..

The Windmills of Your Mind

By Michel Legrand