Antony and the Johnsons, "Thank You For Your Love"

* Overload compliments will make the singer eventually reach into a crescendo of gobbledygook.

Victor Hugo once said that complimenting someone is like giving her a kiss on the veil.
Smug and flattered she might be,
but the kiss is merely stained on the veil, that damnable membrane.

Somebody has told you to rub those compliments into bundles of snowballs
and throw them all away when the monsoon came.
But your eyes are glazed over by the glistening beauty of the snowballs,
therefore you keep them, after much deliberation, and rather witness them inundating your corner.

Or people begin to complain to you that they can no longer see your face,
for the veil has lost its transparency with smears of kisses.
Little did they know, neither could you see clearly of your way.

Hold back your tears.
You should never let loose a drop.
Until you climb up that pinnacle,
and let the insurmountable altitude trigger your lachrymal gland-
you caress that little diamond drop gently in your cupped hands.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Maxine honey, whoever told you that you look good in tight pants was not a sincere friend of yours."- Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana

Comments

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke...

Felix Vallotton

"He was there or not there: not there if I didn't see him."- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw One sees immediately from Felix Vallotton’s paintings that he must had been a gifted raconteur. The painter was possessed of the natural aptitude of unfolding and withholding the narrative flow at the most propitious timing. Mysteriousness emerges. The viewers are bound to be tantalised. Whilst most of Vallotton’s paintings are about the quotidian, the domestic, beneath them their pent-up energy seethes and trembles, threatening to explode at any moment. It isn’t just the quotidian that he depicted, but the interior dramas. Any reader of Ibsen’s or Strindberg’s plays will know that interior drama can be the most frenetic. A woman leans towards a man, her hand entwines his body in show of sensuousness. She whispers into his ears something that the viewers are forbidden the right to privy to. But one has the eye to deduce, from the slightly wrinkled of the man’s nose and t...

Review: La Jetee (1962)

In Matter and Memory , French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement , an unending progression, there is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on, and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of the now , at the very moment in which it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past seems, therefore, the only reality we have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess. Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are ...

Musings. Ex Libris

Search This Blog