Joanna Newsom, "Easy"

* Joanna Newsom sounds like an enigmatic robin trapped in the webs of a harp.

His mistress rubbed his forehead gently, fingers drenched with oil balm.
His exhausted body planked down before her like a long-rooted tree under defeat.
The sound of humming mantras swerved with the smoke of a burnt-out candle.
"Just lay down and relax, my lord," he heard her said, "just take it easy."
His eyes blurred.

She took an odyssey to a foreign land with a rumbling hope of meeting her long-lost father,
but hope dusted away.
Loitering aimlessly on a street packed with esoteric hurly-burly,
she tried to put up the easy-breeziness by forcing down the mingled, nondescript feeling
While stomach still churned.

Dismissing love before disillusioning the pain without love,
the thought tumbled in her head along with the punishment of her imprudence.
Drawing up the curtains unconventional for a heavy nightfall,
she perched on the sill and waited patiently for the lights to come.

Trouble, weariness, loneliness, dejection,
we all loathe you and jerk you off like disease.
You scrape through the sky with traces of your lilting waltz resembling the aeroplane clouds,
under the eyes of the wary you seek for the next person to spawn on.
The world of idiotic easiness, you sneer.

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

"Everybody has problems, but the thing is not to make a problem about your Problem."- Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

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

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

John Martin, the Great Day of His Wrath (1853)

The sky is ablaze with burning flames and the earth splits asunder- the image of an impending apocalypse looms. Those paintings are impregnated with forebodings of the demise of all living things, and can be served as memento mori- mostly cautionary tales that remind people of their mortality. Landscape paintings that depict the biblical scenes of eternal damnation (most often the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah) are sometimes reinterpreted as prophetic visions of the end of the world. Painters as early as one in the Romantic period, John Martin, conjured up images that continued to awe and frighten the viewers of today. In John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath (1853) a volcano erupts and its ashes and fire surge towards the air, rendering the sky an infernal red. One can easily establish himself into the painting and feel the quake rumble under his feet. The earth takes a topsy-turvydom, where the ground and sky suddenly become one. There are people in the paintin

Musings. Ex Libris

Search This Blog