Monday, December 15, 2014

The Dog & The Magpie

This is a better note to potentially end this blog's year. I've said it before and I'll say it again, best video ever!

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoaEBb4IN4Q



With thanks to Animals Australia and Bonnie Thompson. (Vid via:Bonnie Thomson - youtube)

Friday, December 12, 2014

December, December the 12th of Never



So the year ticks away again like the one before it and the one before that and like the many since they began to tick-by via proportional age vs. time sensibility (or so I'm told anyway) and I haven’t written as much as I should this year -- but have read and learnt much, of which I will share this: People can't be trusted. You can love them but probably best to not trust them. For every individual is a psyche-mess of worms crawling slow holes through the boring hubris of their own confusions and projections and desperate bids to mark time, to award recently past epochs with medals in a vainglorious attempt to stem the flow of time, but it’s unknowing really and soldiers-on within or without you as I and George Harrison have often said. But that’s a bit harsh don’t you think Denski? 

Well, perhaps...but here's what Father Bob Maguire might say on the subject: 

"You don’t have to like people you just have to love them". 

Nice one Bob. Melbourne would almost certainly be a nicer more humanistic experience if you were in charge, even allowing his ongoing belief in imaginary friend's trinity.

You’re being a bit obtuse Den.
Yes, perhaps so.

I guess I’m out for a spontaneous bit of self-aggrandizing...to bounce my intellectual ball off the wall and see how many times I can catch it. I've not had a good day. My confidence in people has lost a five round split-decision, the referee's eyes were painted on...

C'mon digger People easily won that fight.
Yes, perhaps 

-- but historically it shall appear as an "L" in the result column. And now I’m just peppering up the next plateful of slightly overcooked hubris because if Floorstar were still alive he'd agree and he'd say something akin to: those other people are all morons, well-meaning morons who cannot be trusted because you cannot successfully reason with them and as I said to a living friend this morning via text, often times I feel like I'm on an intellectual island by myself and that worldview aint gonna win me too many new friends now is it?

Your being a wanker Den.
Yes, perhaps

-- but I'm just trying to amuse myself. Get some revs on the ball...dig? Impart some spin...bowl the bastards out.
Charlotte: Why do they switch the r's and the l's here?
Bob: Uh... for yuks. You know? Just to mix it up...
They have to amuse themselves, 'cause we're not making them laugh.

I should end this obscurist blurt on something of a more positive note and that is this: I did learn a lot this year. I learnt that people can love you and still fuck you over. I learnt that life is amazing; despite it best efforts to be shithouse. "With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world".
I learnt that it doesn’t pay to repeatedly broadcast in private cant, secret personalia dripping with private in-jokes (See Bob & Charlotte above)...no wait I already knew that, but I re-learnt it. I learnt that I am constantly relearning things that I thought I already knew, or I learnt them and forgot them only to be reminded again.

Isn’t that just remembering something Den?
Perhaps, yes.

And finally I learnt this: "Son, six wardens have been through here in my tenure,and I've learned one immutable, universal truth: Not one of them born whose asshole wouldn't pucker up tighter than a snare drum when you ask them for funds." 

No! Wait that's my favourite movie.-- Sorry I'm fatiguing. (I haven’t done enough Brechtian dips or Kerouacian burpees this year) So finally,…finally I learnt this: I'm more at peace with sham and drudgery, I still dream like a youth who dreams long long dreams, I still hope...I still pray to the Universe like Nanna taught me to do and I am surer now, than at any other time in my brief sojourn through this world, about what is right...or rather what the correct way to live might actually look like. No doubt the correct or good life takes many forms and none of them are money-grubbing, BMW SUV polishing, stepping on people, taking advantage of the weaker, or stupider or nearly anything that the modern corporate world would have you believe to be the correct path. This might be the last thing I post here, you just never know....but more likely it will be the last thing I post here this year. I wish you all the best for 2015, nice looking number right?

I love you, but I don’t like you.

I love you too Den.
Perhaps, yes.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Thursday, October 09, 2014

Wyrmwood (Den the Letter Writing Pest Rides Again)

You may wish to click on this photo to read the letter.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Five Years Florstar

It's been five years Florstar. Where have the years gone my old friend? Somewhere you might know? I don’t doubt. Something you are privy to now but can't shout through the curtain can't make down the line. No sight, no reception just memories and the eternal eddy of dust that curls upon itself where you last trod and the dread waves that smashed upon that same floor and rolled out the door and in ever widening circles, till everyone knew...and diminishing returns. But enough of this writer feeling sorry for himself and say something in celebration Den. Well...Maxie's team got smashed last night and he had a reasonable shocker, as did his young colleague Dane. Typical Max, annoyed at being dead I suppose. Although I'm sure he'd be bigger than that now and admonish me for such small thinking, whilst patting me on the back for burning him for a joke and year of years of personal script, secret hidden meanings and private jokes that he tried to take mainstream, but never could wax the rubicon...you just weren’t meant for these times old son and yet you made them better and more fun whilst you were.
Love Always,
Den

Monday, August 11, 2014

Brief Brawling Day


"The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about, was happiness enough to get his work done. Not "I can’t eat!" but, "I can’t work!"--that was the burden of all wise complaining among men. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man--that he cannot work,--that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the day is passing swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly away, and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,--it is all abolished, vanished, clean gone; a thing that has been: "not of the slightest consequence" whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical meat-jack with hard labour and rust. But our work,behold, that is not abolished, that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the want of it remains--for endless times and eternities, remains; and that is now the sole question with us for evermore! Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns tinsel-light, is gone, and divine everlasting Night, with her star diadems, with her silence and her veracities, is come!

Thomas Carlyle

(With thanks to Sebastian Marshall)

Photo Copyright 2014 R.Denham Carr

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Angel of History

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

 Walter Benjamin -- "On the Concept of History"


Sunday, March 02, 2014

Saturday, March 01, 2014

Problems For Elementary Physics


This Edition published in Sydney, Australia in 1958.

Friday, February 28, 2014

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

42.8 Degrees Celsius.

Click to view photos at Picasa
42.8C.


"42.8C" Was a spontaneous idea I had whilst living in Brunswick during the first and most intense heat wave of Melbourne's 2013-2014 Summer. I thought I'd go for a 30 minute walk around Brunswick, near Sydney road, and photo anything I saw that might feed into my visual essay of the heatwave. It was 42.8 degrees circa 6pm on 14-1-14. The order the photos appear is the order that I came across them whilst walking,(Except the two photo/images that I added from the newspapers of course). 42.8C is 109.04F for my American peoples.