The Sunday Six: I Was Not There, I Am Not Here, Alas

Fig. 1. Anselm Kiefer - Erotik im Fernen Osten oder: Transition from cool to warm, 1977

Fig. 2. Beth Van Hoesen - Bay Boats, 1988

Fig. 3. Toshikatsu Endo - Allegory III, 1988

Fig. 4. Obras Escogidas Kcho - (Selected Works), 1994

Fig. 5. Ingrid Pollard - Untitled, Ceramic, 2008

Fig. 6. Sean Gutowski - Burning Ship, 2009

'My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.'

Truman Capote

Your Ears Will Orgasm #58: The Ship Song - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (MixPod Player)

The Sunday Six: Actually ... Caesar's Numinous Nine*

Fig. 1. Coming Undone

Fig. 2. Precious

Fig. 3. Roundabout

Fig. 4. Ebb Tide

Fig. 5. Monday's Child

Fig. 6. Metatron

Fig. 7. Blessed

Fig. 8. Distant Thunder

Fig. 9. Wallflowers

'One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead.'

Oscar Wilde

Your Ears Will Orgasm #57: Animental - Animal Collective Mix - (Mix) (MixPod Player)

* Ray Caesar's Website

The Art Of Leaving The Substance For The Shadow*

Fig. 1. Paola Pivi - I Wish I Am Fish, 2009


'There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace.'

John Ruskin

* 'Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.'

Andre Breton

Your Ears Will Orgasm #55: W. A. Mozart - Adagio in C major (for Glass Harmonica) (MixPod Player)

There's Always Light In Other People's Darkenesses

Fig. 1. Edgar Degas - Woman by a Fireplace, 1880-90

'There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.'

James Thurber

Your Ears Will Orgasm #54: Fever Ray - Mix (MixPod Player)

1. If I Had A Heart
2. When I Grow Up
3. Dry And Dusty
4. Seven
5. Triangle Walks
6. Concrete Walls
7. Now's The Only Time I Know
8. Keep The Streets Empty For Me

Home Is A Beauty Spot On The Face Of An Ugly Void

The Sunday Six: Edward Hopper

Fig. 1. Lighthouse Hill, 1927

Fig. 2. Corn Hill (Truro, Cape Cod), 1930

Fig. 3. Ryder's House, 1933

Fig. 4. Cape Cod Afternoon, 1936

Fig. 5. High Noon, 1949

Fig. 6. Second Story Sunlight, 1960

'In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.'

Gertrude Stein

Your Ears Will Orgasm #53: Antonin Dvorák - Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 ('From the New World') (MixPod Player)

Topic: No One Can Teach You How To Paint The Rain

Fig . 1. Vincent van Gogh - Rain, Auvers, 1890


'The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.'

Vincent van Gogh

Your Ears Will Orgasm #52: Singing The Rain - Mix (MixPod Player)

1. Rain - The Beatles
2. The Rain - K-Os
3. Tears In The Rain - Zomby
4. I'm Only Happy When It Rains - Garbage
5. The Rain Knows - The Wentletraps
6. No Rain - Blind Melon (THDP Remix)
7. Green Rain - Shugo Tokumaru
8. Singin' In The Rain - D.O.A.

Addendum: Katie and ESVM's poetry corner...

I've never seen this van Gogh; now I won't feel so bad that it's supposed to rain all weekend as I can look at this painting and be uplifted. Thanks for the soundtrack too!

Would van Gogh and ESVM have hit it off?

Eel-Grass

No matter what I say,
All that I really love
Is the rain that flattens on the bay,
And the eel-grass in the cove;
The jingle-shells that lie and bleach
At the tide-line, and the trace
Of higher tides along the beach:
Nothing in this place.

If You're A Loony And You Know It, Clap Your Hands!

Fig. 1. William Hogarth - The Interior of Bedlam (from A Rake's Progress), 1763

MAD, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that themselves are sane. For illustration, this present (and illustrious) lexicographer is no firmer in the faith of his own sanity than is any inmate of any madhouse in the land; yet for aught he knows to the contrary, instead of the lofty occupation that seems to him to be engaging his powers he may really be beating his hands against the window bars of an asylum and declaring himself Noah Webster, to the innocent delight of many thoughtless spectators.

Ambrose Bierce

Your Ears Will Orgasm #51: Peter Maxwell Davies - Eight Songs for a Mad King (MixPod Player)

Let's All Take A Spin In Cinderella's Lellow Cadillac*

Fig. 1. Yayoi Kusama - Pumpkin, 2007


'Critics who treat "adult" as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adults themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. ... When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.'

C. S. Lewis

* As far as my nearly three-year-old niece is concerned, the word yellow is pronounced "lellow".

Your Ears Will Orgasm #50: Asobi Seksu (click to connect to official website) - Mix (MixPod Player)

1. Thursday
2. I'm Happy But You Don't Like Me
3. Let Them Wait
4. New Years
5. Sooner
6. Walk On The Moon
7. Mary & Me
8. Familiar Light

If You Stab Us, Do We Not Burst Into Mournful Arias?

Fig. 1. Palace Garnier (still known to many as the Paris Opera), 1875


'Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive.'

Moliere

* 'Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.' (Robert Burns)

Your Ears Will Orgasm #49: Peter Maxwell Davies - Miss Donnithorne's Maggot (MixPod Player)

Builders Of Ten-Fingered Bridges To Aural Fantasias

Fig. 1. Andreas Feininger - Brooklyn Bridge by Night, 1945


'The whole of visible universe is only a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination assigns a place and a relative value; it is a kind of nourishment that the imagination must digest and transform.'

Charles Baudelaire

Your Ears Will Orgasm #48c: Franz Liszt - Hungarian Rhapsodies 13-19, played by Michele Campanella (MixPod Player)

13. No.13 in A minor
14. No.14 in F minor
15. No.15 in A minor (Rákóczy March)
16. No.16 in A minor
17. No.17 in D minor
18. No.18 in F sharp minor
19. No.19 in D minor

Six More Flaming Rhapsodies In Red, White & Green

Fig. 1. On March 8th 2008, pianist Yosuke Yamashita donned a fireproof suit and played a burning piano on a beach in Ishikawa prefecture. The improvised jazz performance went for about 10 minutes until the flames rendered the piano silent. (With thanks to Pink Tentacle.)

'The key to the mystery of a great artist is that, for reasons unknown, he [sic] will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another ... [leaving] us with the feeling that something is right in the world.'

Leonard Bernstein

Your Ears Will Orgasm #48b: Franz Liszt - Hungarian Rhapsodies 7-12, played by Michele Campanella (MixPod Player)

7. No. 7 in D minor
8. No. 8 in F sharp minor
9. No. 9 in E flat (Pesther Carneval)
10. No. 10 in E (Preludio)
11. No. 11 in A minor
12. No. 12 in C sharp minor

Under The Right Hands, Black And White Are Colours

Fig. 1. Josef Danhauser - Liszt at the Piano, 1840

'I sat near [Liszt] so that I could see both his hands and face. For the first time in my life I beheld real inspiration - for the first time I heard the true tones of the piano. He played one of his own compositions - one of a series of religious fantasies. There was nothing strange or excessive about his manner. His manipulation of the instrument was quiet and easy, and his face was simply grand - the lips compressed and the head thrown a little backward. When the music expressed quiet rapture or devotion a sweet smile flitted over his features; when it was triumphant the nostrils dilated. There was nothing petty or egoistic to mar the picture.'

George Eliot

Your Ears Will Orgasm #48a: Franz Liszt - Hungarian Rhapsodies 1-6, played by Michele Campanella (MixPod Player)

1. No. 1 in C sharp minor
2. No. 2 in C sharp minor
3. No. 3 in B flat
4. No. 4 in E flat
5. No. 5 in E minor (Héroide Elégiaque)
6. No. 6 in D flat

Addendum #1: My friend Jana - bless her heart - has corrected my embarrassing slackness-cum-ignorance with respect to the personages depicted in Josef Danhauser's painting of Liszt at the piano: and, since the information is so relevant to the quote from George Eliot, here it is, with a basketful of thanks:

Funny you should not know. This painting is featured more prominently in the history of music than the history of art, since it's a curious document: more an aesthetic manifesto than visual art.

The painting features Romanticism itself: a trio of musicians represented by Liszt on the piano, and Paganini and Rossini in the back. Then a trio of writers, from George Sand (drawing a line of attention from Liszt to the left, prominently stretching in the armchair), to Alexandre Dumas Sr on her left, and Victor Hugo leaning over the chair. But note the importance given to two major romantic artists: the bust of Beethoven on the piano, and the painting of Byron at the back wall.

The feminine-lookin' lady on the floor is the mother of Liszt's daughter, who married Richard Wagner. Wife? I wouldn't know. She is obviously not one of the compadres here.

PS: Folks, if you want to see a truly great mind at work, check out Jana's blog, guerrilla semiotics. (This is not a paid advertisement).

Addendum #2: Some More (And This May Bore) On Metaphor*

Fig. 2. Giuseppe Arcimboldo - Portrait with Vegetables (The Greengrocer), c. 1590

* Extract from Siri Hustvedt's Charles Dickens and the Morbid Fragment as a downloadable PDF.

When Metaphor Is The Child Of Motion And Meaning

Fig. 1. Gérard Uféras - Charlotte Ranson in Orphée et Eurydice by Pina Bausch, Ballet de l'Opéra National de Paris, 2005


'Muscular capacity is the physical means by which dances are made. But the means became available to the choreographic imagination only through the operation of a metaphor by which a moving in the muscular sense takes on the character of a doing or goings on ... Strictly speaking, then, dances are not made out of but upon movement, movement being the poetic bearer, the persistent metaphor, by which muscular material is made available for the enhanced, meaningful, and designed goings on that are dance.'

George Beiswanger

Your Ears Will Orgasm #47: Nicolai Gedda - 'J'ai Perdu Mon Eurydice', Orphée et Eurydice by Christoph Willibald Gluck (MixPod Player)

Don't Build Your House Of Cards In A House Of Glass

Fig. 1. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin - The House of Cards, 1736-7


'Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.'

Susan Sontag

Your Ears Will Orgasm #46: David Bowie - Breaking Glass (MixPod Player)

It Is Said That Above Oblivion’s Tide There Is A Pier*

Fig. 1. James Ensor - Masks Confronting Death, 1888


'This is the valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens: where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke, and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.'

F. Scott Fitzgerald (from The Great Gatsby)

* Above Oblivion's Tide there is a Pier by Emily Dickinson

Your Ears Will Orgasm #45: Luciano Berio - Ekphrasis (MixPod Player)

There Is A Dark That Only Inner Light Can Illuminate

Fig. 1. Max Burchartz - Lotte's Eye, c. 1928

'The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.'

Nikos Kazantzakis

Your Ears Will Orgasm #44: A Better Version Of Me (MixPod Player)

1. T-Bird & The Breaks - Take Time
2. Fiona Apple - A Better Version Of Me
3. Nina Simone - Feeling Good
4. Ian Dury & The Blockheads - Reasons To Be Cheerful
5. The Young Punx - The Clapping Song
6. Goldfrapp - Happiness

Ladies And Gents - Allow Me To Style Your Cramps

Fig. 1. The late Lux Interior (Erick Purkhiser) of The Cramps


Mouth

The mouth is the beginning or, if one prefers, the prow of animals; in the most characteristic cases, it is the most living part, in other words, the most terrifying for neighbouring animals. But man does not have a simple architecture like beasts, and it is not even possible to say where he begins. He possibly starts at the top of the skull, but the top of the skull is an insignificant part, incapable of catching one's attention; it is the eyes or forehead that play the meaningful role of an animal's jaws.

Among civilised men, the mouth has even lost the relatively prominent character that it still has among primitive men. However, the violent meaning of the mouth is conserved in a latent state; it suddenly regains the upper hand with a literally cannibalistic expression such as mouth of fire [bouche à feu], applied to the cannons men use to kill each other. And on important occasions human life is still bestially concentrated in the mouth: rage makes men grind their teeth, while terror and atrocious suffering turn the mouth into the organ of rending screams. On this subject it is easy to observe that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck in such a way that the mouth becomes, as much as possible, an extension of the spinal column, in other words, in the position it normally occupies in the constitution of animals. As if explosive impulses were to spurt directly out of the body through the mouth, in the form of screams. This fact highlights both the importance of the mouth in animal physiology or even psychology, and the general importance of the superior or anterior extremity of the body, the orifice of profound physical impulses; one sees at the same time that a man can liberate these impulses in at least two different ways, in the brain or in the mouth, but that as soon as these impulses become violent, he is obliged to resort to the bestial way of liberating them. When the narrow constipation of a strictly human attitude, the material look of the face with a closed mouth, as beautiful as a safe.

Georges Bataille

Your Ears Will Orgasm #43: The Cramps - Tribute Mix (MixPod Player)

1. All Women Are Bad
2. Sunglasses After Dark
3. Lonesome Town
4. Goo Goo Muck
5. Aloha From Hell
6. Surfin' Bird
7. Miniskirt Blues
8. I Was A Teenage Werewolf
9. Bikini Girls With Machine Guns
10. Two-Headed Sex Change
11. Mystery Plane
12. Human Fly
13. Don't Eat Stuff Off The Sidewalk
14. The Way I Walk
15. New Kind Of Kick
16. I Can't Hardly Stand It
17. Garbageman
18. What's Inside A Girl?
19. Return Of The Living Dead
20. Daisies Up Your Butterfly
21. She Said
22. Zombie Dance
23. Saddle Up A Buzz Buzz
24. Drug Train

Obituary: The Last Of Blossom, Dearies (Telegraph, UK)

Fig. 2. Blossom Dearie (1926-2009) - The Adorable Blossom Dearie

The Limits Of The World Must Always Be Sought Out*

Fig. 1. John William Waterhouse - Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891

'The artist is meant to put the objects of this world together in such a way that through them you will experience that light, that radiance which is the light of our consciousness and which all things both hide and, when properly looked upon, reveal. The hero journey is one of the universal patterns through which that radiance shows brightly. What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There's always the possibility of a fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss.'

Joseph Campbell

* 'Everyone takes the limits of their own vision for the limits of the world.' (Arthur Schopenhauer)

Your Ears Will Orgasm #42a: Olivier Messiaen - Oraison (MixPod Player)

Your Ears Will Orgasm #42b: Gustav Mahler - Symphony No. 2 ("Resurrection") (MixPod Player)

Addendum: How wonderful! And how apt, too! You outdid yourselves last time, ladies: now, amazingly, you have outdone your outdoing!

I will set my sails to take full advantage of the breezes blown by your inspirational words.

Thank you, Katie (and Edna):

Today is as good as any other day (!) to set yourself free to embark on a hero journey. The possibility of bliss is definitely worth danger and fiasco.

ESVM also thinks it's time for you to test your limits:

On Thought in Harness

My falcon to my wrist
Returns
From no high air.
I sent her toward the sun that burns
Above the mist;
But she has not been there.

Her talons are not cold; her beak
Is closed upon no wonder;
Her head stinks of its hood, her feathers reek
Of me, that quake at the thunder.

Degraded bird, I give you back your eyes forever, ascent now wither you are tossed;
Forsake this wrist, forsake this rhyme;
Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost,
But climb.

Edna St. Vincent Millay