Frank Sinatra, "A Foggy Day"

* Frank Sinatra's songs are widely welcomed by any occasions. They are like puddings, with various different toppings.

Some become broody in their early teens,
I took it further by pining for a life as a hermit.
As my age progressed,
the hankering only got more severe instead of blurring away on a blotting paper.
How the social scene has steered to the vulgarity plays a crucial role in consolidating my dream.
It is as if the whole place was turned into a massive barhouse,
the most outlandish and unwelcomed ones belonged to those who steeled themselves on their sobriety.
The desperate measures those heartbroken ones took to leave their beloved home,

and transported themselves to another place where they still succumbed to supreme drunkenness.
Being hemmed in an overwhelming scale of grimness and solitude,
they sozzled.

I appreciate shirking the work of being a submissive recipient of news for a day or two,
but my equanimity can only withhold a short while before I pucker my nose again to snoop for fuzziness.
It is as if a furnace could never sustain its unlikely renovation into an icehouse.
It would squeak, or sometimes, implode with complaints.

The fire in my heart spurs me on;
it also terminates the surreptitious path to a flinching reclusive life.
The aforesaid is not some paragon for some self-edifying cause,
but a rather firm declaration:
that a cat can never exude her prowess,
until she catches a mouse and claim the victory.

Until then,
all the mice must watch their backs.

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"My tale is done. There runs a mouse: whoever catches her may make a great, great cap out of her fur."- Brothers Grimm, Hansel and Grethel

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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

Franz von Stuck, Two Dancers

Dancers can be like jousters. Fear and excitement wring their hearts so into tangled skein. Fluttered air brushes against their skins like chill. In anticipation of a good, likely interminable, fight both cannot be more well-prepared, grimacing to each other some distances afar as menacing demonstration of their unconquerable audacities. Everything is all so punctiliously rehearsed and choreographed. Even when darkness descends and everything is shrouded in utter invisibility, each dancer will know by heart when to put which foot forward, to which direction she will sway elegantly her supple bodice to duck narrowly from her opponent, and when the time is ripe, she will let her skirt billow like an arch of rainbow, the more fiery and colourful the rainbow the likelier the chance the dancer is going to claim the final victory. It is always something with Art Nouveau that, when beholding a piece that epitomises most substantially the essence of the said art mov

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

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