Wounds my heart with a monotonous languor...

Henry Rollins "Music cannot be mastered"

"Music cannot be mastered. What they think is control and mastery is not only hubris but even worse, it is Music’s great indifference. Simply put, Music no longer plays them. Music has moved on to more worthy combatants. Thankfully, Music is but one of myriad beasts with which to tangle, and in this kind of conflict, age is meaningless. Life is short. When one beast dumps you, summon the guts to find another. If it tries to kill you, the party has definitely started. Otherwise, life is a slow retirement.To each their own. This is how I am running my show."

-- Henry Rollins 2013

Spiritually Muscular

"What might only be a simple point on the workday cycle . . . becomes a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more intense than high-barometer daylight can ever allow. Everything changes. There’s that clean, rained-on smell. The traffic noise gets liquefied. Reflections from the street into the windows of city buses fill the bus interiors with unreadable 3-D images, as surface unaccountably transforms to volume. Average pushy Manhattan schmucks crowding the sidewalks also pick up some depth, some purpose — they smile, they slow down, even with a cellular phone stuck in their ear they are more apt to be singing to somebody than yakking. Some are observed taking houseplants for walks in the rain. Even the lightest umbrella-to-umbrella contact can be erotic.”  

Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge.

Prescience

Ypres. Cloth Hall. Circa 1915.

“Ten million lives were lost to the world in the last war, and they say that 70 million pounds was spent in the preliminary bombardment in the Battle of Ypres; before any infantry had left their trenches.
The weight of ammunition fired in the first few weeks of that battle amounted to 480 thousand tons…
I do not believe that represents the best use the world can be expected to make of its brains and its resources.
I prefer to believe that the majority of people in the world in these days think that war hurts everybody and benefits nobody —except the profiteers—and it settles nothing.
As one who has passed pretty well half a century in the study and practice of war; I suggest to you that you should give your support to Disarmament and so do your best to ensure the promotion of peace.”

— British Field-Marshall Sir William Robertson speaking at Albert Hall, London 11^th July 1931.

Cratered landscape of Verdun

Mount St Helens

Photos by John V. Christiansen taken from Mount Adams looking out on Mount St Helens at the moment that she erupted.  These photos originally featured in the January 1981 edition of National Geographic. It took me ages to find these pictures. It was surprisingly tough considering how spellbinding they are. A kindly chap via the Mount St Helens FB page eventually put me onto them. Words that come to mind here: Shock wave, awe and timing...oh and love...for some reason.

Write Club

After writing, everything else in your life has the volume turned down.

I am, you are, we are Agar

Lorum Ipsum Dolor

Rosa Celeste: Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven, The Empyrean by Gustave Dore.


This is simply dummy interesting,
because occasionally circumstances occur
in which toil and pain can procure a great
sum--
To take a trivial example, which of us exercise,
untrammeled and when nothing physical from the selection below.

We currently have in the train,
find fault with pleasure to be,
that produces no resultant online application,
It so account of the system,
they are at fault to leave,
We will definitely change.

The Secret History of Our Enemies

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility"

 - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Mit Flügeln, die gewohnt Singe.

In the haze in the gloom and in every other room 

there's a blue central maze 
from the War and its days. 

Makes me want to cry and watch you go get high. 

Makes us want to fly off buildings in the sky -- 

With wings that wont singe. 

The Capriciousness of Youth

Ok wow...gonna assume youve elected to ignore my email. That being the case let me cease to darken your virtual door with this Paris: I dont know what it is that I did to you, beyond the cavalier or capricious behaviour of youth, and Ive heard that you hold some kind of grudge...well I'm sorry dude...it's over 20 years ago....is it a life sentence I'm serving? Anyway I can't really speak to what it is that you think I'm guilty of because apart from maybe my being a floored and naive kid I cant imagine what it is that you think I've done to you. Life is far too short dude. If I'm reading the rumours and your silence correctly....geez man...get some frickin' perspective.
I wont bother you again so feel free to slot me back into whatever villainous historical role you've been supping on these many years.
Peace

Rabbits Made of Cake

Poem by Amanda Collins

one gritty grotty Maundy Thursday
the rakehell road warrior shoulders on  through
taking advantage of pretty side streets
never remembering their names, only the shape of their intersections
ready to find beauty in a pair of wings
wringing solutions from insoluble problems
bearing a burden of his own devising
then
for a moment in the blighted sunshine
he basks

 - Amanda Collins

Epson Printers Must Die!

The Epson Stylus NX130 printer was a lousy piece of shit from the get-go. So it came to pass one afternoon the Epson Stylus NX 130 pushed me too far. It met my axe in the backyard. The experience was everything I thought it could be.

Song: You're the Best by Joe Esposito.

Night in the Gardens of Port of Spain

Night, the black summer, simplifies her smells into a village; she assumes the impenetrable

musk of the negro, grows secret as sweat, her alleys odorous with shucked oyster shells,

coals of gold oranges, braziers of melon. Commerce and tambourines increase her heat.

Hellfire or the whorehouse: crossing Park Street, a surf of sailor's faces crest, is gone

with the sea's phosphoresence; the boites-de-nuit tinkle like fireflies in her thick hair.

Blinded by headlamps, deaf to taxi klaxons, she lifts her face from the cheap, pitch oil flare

toward white stars, like cities, flashing neon, burning to be the bitch she must become.

As daylight breaks the coolie turns his tumbril of hacked, beheaded coconuts towards home.

-Derek Walcott

Confusion Say

Feeling curiously out of sync with everything at the moment and it’s not just because I’ve decided to lay off the heroin. Hearing THE THE in my head like a message from the greater mind of subpop…errr I mean subconscious. Afray-afrock…mental illness everywhere and not merely my own— hovering over my travels in the USA. Inability to communicate, inability to connect…try avoiding the disconnect when you're confused and not sure you really understand people anymore. I languorous sub-torpor followed by cloud clearing moments of suspect clarity where I wonder if maybe my capacity to understand has in fact grown and what that has revealed is of course that I understand less than ever and then… I experience a little chill. I am disrobed. The warm frothy bath of self assurance and pride has evaporated. Standing here naked is colder than I thought it would be. I'm trying to warm my hands on the coals of my renewed wisdom but if they generate any heat it’s on a frequency that I don't sense.

Warmth, as it turns out, is not a colour.

“This man, on one hand, believes that he knows something, while not knowing anything. On the other hand, I – equally ignorant – do not believe that I know anything”    Plato- Apology  

 I'm trying to be a better person. I want to question my assumptions about things. Question my assumptions about people. But oft I just fall back -- Instead second guessing, retracting and rewriting….keeping my fuckin’ mouth shut…

The benefit of the doubt it seems is, well, more doubt.