The Woodmans - Portrait of the Artist as a Suicide

The Woodmans (2010)
Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Suicide
Family dynamics examined through the prism of art: “The Woodmans,” C. Scott Willis’s compelling documentary study of an artistic clan whose comfortable life was shattered by the suicide of its youngest member, asks profound questions to which there really are no answers.

Brilliant piece of work

Asks, explores yet ulitimately does not answer several important questions

What caused Francesca Woodman, a prodigiously gifted 22-year-old photographer to throw herself out of a window in 1981?

My Future & Possibly 1967 Mercedes-Benz 230 SL

I know some of you are having a hard time 'gifting' me this year

Might I casually suggest....??

Merry XMas to all

While Your Heart Ran

While your heart ran from the twisted thread of truth
And the souls of my lanterns were torn into tiny fragments
All over the countryside
And the children's eyes of my family were covered
With the black blindfold of faith

When life came forth from the anxious depths of desire
When my love was not anything other than the chiming of a clock
I sensed that I must love
That I must love insanely.

Patricia Highsmith BIO - author of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY

Just started this - ohhhhh all of the complicated people!

Patricia Highsmith - author of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY - had more than her fair share of secrets. During her life, she felt uncomfortable about discussing the source of her fiction and refused to answer questions about her private life. Yet after her death in February 1995, Highsmith left behind a vast archive of personal documents - diaries, notebooks and letters - which detail the links between her life and her work. Drawing on these intimate papers, together with material gleaned from her closest friends and lovers, Andrew Wilson has written the first biography of an author described by Graham Greene as the 'poet of apprehension'. Wilson illuminates the dark corners of Highsmith's life, casts light on mysteries of the creative process and reveals the secrets that the writer chose to keep hidden until after her death.

Nicolette Scorsese - National Lampoon Christmas Vacation

Started out her career as a model, which is where she met her former boyfriend, actor/model Antonio Sabato Jr..
The grand-daddy of them all - she still rocks my world every XMas when this film is shown.
Kinda like a treat for the big boys - still gorgeous BTW

Bran Van 3000. The electronica collective from Montreal

I am obsessing over this when I need to be reading Sartre - Being and Nothingness

Bran Van 3000 Drinking in LA Video

The Oldest Name for Truth

The oldest name for truth is ALETHEIA
The root: LETHE: hiddenness, concealment, coveredness, veiledness.
The A has a privative function.
The whole word essentially can be rendered as:
un-hiddenness
un-concealment
dis-closure
dis-covery
re-velation
The elemental Greeks viewed truth as violent and uncanny spoliation
Things wrenched from hiddenness and exposed to the light
Show me what they really are
Our words for Truth are much more banal...
but the original Greek insight still lingers in our truth
No less than the Greek ALETHEIA

Sometimes just thinking about Nicomachean Ethics can make you smarter

Sometimes Less is More... Other Times - Not

Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind is bearing me across the sky.

Rimbaud - Une Saison en Enfer Part Deux - A Mouthful of Poison

Painting by Brett Whiteley - Oh Pen and Chose!

I come again to my favorite poet: Arthur Rimbaud
"You have to pass an exam, and the jobs that you get are either shining shoes, or herding cows, or tend to pigs. Thank God, I don't want any of that! Damn it! And besides that they smack you for a reward; they call you an animal and it's not true, a little kid, etc.... Oh! Damn Damn Damn Damn Damn!"

I am working on a new translation of Une Saison en Enfer - I know... Pretentious much??

An amazing work - completed in his LATE TEENS! What were you doing when you were 18?? lol

It reports his suffering and descent to madness... passing close to but not through the gates of death.... a grand and glorious failure to become a seer. He speaks of his delusions... his doubts... his fears.. but also.. his hopes and desires.

Let us pass a “Night in Hell”. The opening lines are powerful:

I have just swallowed a terrific mouthful of poison.
-- Blessed, blessed, blessed the advice I was given! --
My guts are on fire.
The power of the poison twists my arms and legs, cripples me, drives me to the ground.
I die of thirst, I suffocate, I cannot cry.
This is Hell, eternal torment!
See how the flames rise! I burn as I ought to.
Go on, Devil!

The poison represents the drugs and other methods he used to derange his senses in order to become a visionary. Despite being tortured by hallucinations, Rimbaud vaunts of his talent and his imagination:

I will tear the veils from every mystery: mysteries of religion or of nature, death, birth, the future, the past, cosmogony, and nothingness.
I am a master of phantasmagoria.

The night in hell is followed by two “Deliriums.” The first, “Delirium I” or “The Foolish Virgin -- The Infernal Bridegroom”, is a dialogue by the Foolish Virgin (Verlaine) describing the traits of the Infernal Bridegroom (Rimbaud). We get a hard look at the relationship of the two men, and Rimbaud does not spare himself. The Virgin at one point says “I go where he goes, I have to. And lots of times he gets mad at me, at me, poor sinner. That Devil! He really is a Devil, you know, and not a man.”

Existentialism Unbound - Sartre's Bad Faith Waiter - Que Sais-Je??

What is one to make of Sartre's treatment of his waiter in one of his famous analyses of bad faith?
The example is supposed to be an obvious one, but the more we examine it, the less obvious it becomes.
Let us remind ourselves of Sartre's example: Let us consider this waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid.

He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.
Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with a recklessness of a tight-rope walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand.

What is to be our reaction to the actions of this waiter? The sentences immediately following those I have quoted may mislead us about the answer Sartre would have us give to this question:
All his behaviour seems to us a game.

He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself.
But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe. There is nothing there to surprise us.

If we were to follow the suggestion which seems to be in these lines, Sartre's waiter would be seen as one who could be contrasted with a waiter of a more natural disposition. Some men, while waiting on tables in a cafe, play at being waiters. Others are waiters.

Sartre's description would not need much extending in order to be a depiction of a Uriah Heep-like waiter. Whether we say that he is consciously play-acting or not, we can say that Sartre's waiter is in danger of becoming a caricature of a waiter.

Shakespeare - SONNET 129 - The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

SONNET 129
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

This poem, as incisive an anatomy of erotic compulsion as exists in English, begins by evoking “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame” and cycles through the rages and frustrations of lust before collapsing in exhausted fatalism:

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.


This, one of the most famous sonnets, explores the reaction of the human psyche to the promptings of sexual urges. The folk wisdom of omne animal post coitum triste est, which is often quoted in connection with this sonnet, is banal in comparison to the ideas developed here. One has to look back to the ancient Greek world, and to the plays of Euripides, especially The Bacchae and Hippolytus, to find an equivalent. Particularly striking is the torrent of adjectives describing the build up of desire, and the imagery of the hooked fish which portrays the victim of lust as a frenzied animal expending its last vital energies in paroxysms of rage and futile struggle, even though it is inevitably doomed.

In relation to the sonnet sequence as a whole, it is worth noting that nothing like this is found in the series to the young man. The profound hatred of sexuality does not occur within that context, where the passions expressed are undying and lofty, although often intermingled with sexual humour and puns.