you can read their address by the moon ...

The Sisters Of Mercy were actually two young women that I met during a snow storm in Edmonton, Alberta. And they came to my hotel room and there was something oh, very agreeable about their company. And they had no place to stay and they fell asleep on my bed, and I stayed up and I remember there was a full moon. And I felt like having something to say to them when they woke up, and that was one of those rare and graceful occasions when I was able to write a song from beginning to end in the space of a few hours. And while they slept I worked on this song. And when they woke up I sang it to them. It was completely full and finished, and they liked it. Barbara and Lorraine were their names.

Leonard Cohen, from Diamonds in the Lines
via

And even the unhappiest life has its sunny moments and its little flowers of happiness between sand and stone. So it was then with the Steppenwolf too. It cannot be denied that he was generally very unhappy; and he could make others unhappy also, that is, when he loved them or they him. For all who got to love him saw always only the one side of him. Many loved him as a refined and clever and interesting man, and were horrified and disappointed when they had come upon the wolf in him. And they had to because Harry wished, as every sentient being does, to be loved as a whole and therefore it was just with those whose love he most valued that he could least of all conceal and belie the wolf. There were those, however, who loved precisely the wolf in him, the free, the savage, the untamable, the dangerous and strong, and these found it peculiarly disappointing and deplorable when suddenly the wild and wicked wolf was also a man, and had hankerings after goodness and refinement, and wanted to hear Mozart, to read poetry and to cherish human ideals. Usually these were the most disappointed and angry of all; and so it was that the Steppenwolf brought his own dual and divided nature into the destinies of others besides himself whenever he came into contact with them.

Hermann Hesse from 'Steppenwolf'

garage door, detail

Reflect, before thinking.
Stanislaw Lec

in denial
According to polls, 82% of Americans believe in heaven; 63% think they're going there; 77% believe Jesus was born to a virgin; 51% believe in ghosts; while a mere 28% believe in the theory of evolution. In other words, 72% of Americans refuse to accept the inescapable fact that we are descended from apes.

for more, see this excellent article

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

WB Yeats, from 'The Wind Among the Reeds'

I hesitated before I photographed this tramp, and I hesitated again before posting it here. Why? I suppose because I don't want to to appear to be exploiting someone else's misfortune for the sake of a photograph. But at the same time I know that he is just a part of the fabric of life, and that a camera is just a dispassionate means of capturing reality. Is it somehow worse to photograph a tramp than an elegant woman or a stockbroker who passes you on the street? I don't know. The strange thing is that I now realise I had not really been drawn to photograph the man, but his extraordinary coat.

Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases thay are prepared to kill and die for it without the need for further justification ... Faith is powerful enough to immunize people agains all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to iteself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.

Richard Dawkins, from 'The Selfish Gene'

evolution is cleverer than you are
I was having lunch yesterday and while flicking through the channels on the tv came across an excellent BBC Horizon programme examining the debate about Creationism (now cunningly renamed 'Intelligent Design') versus Darwinian Evolutionary theory. There is, in fact, no debate - it's an open-and-shut case against the Creationists - but the programme underlined the insane lengths fundamentalist Christians will go to in order to indoctrinate children with their loopy ideas.

I've read about it all before, but it was interesting to see a bunch of assorted nutters who support and promote Intelligent Design actually expounding on the subject. It reminded me of the quote I posted recently by Coleridge about Nature being the devil in a fancy waistcoat. This is what happens when you try to prove the existence of God by sleight of hand, you end up with the devil himself. And what a sad bunch the Creationists are - not one of them had a clue as to how misguided and just plain daft their theories appear to anyone able to grasp the basic tenets of scienctific investigation. Only in America, you may say. Well let's hope so.

There's a clear, and suitably scathing, explanation of why these lunatics (and George Bush is, unsurprisingly, numbered among them) must not be allowed to keep peddling their quasi-scientific twaddle here, and a plausible explanation for everything science doesn't yet understand here.

Intelligent design is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?
Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne

When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by
horses, horses, horses, horses
coming in in all directions
white shining silver studs with their nose in flames ...

Patti Smith

Videos
~ Antony & the Johnsons - Candy Says
~ Chuck Berry - You Can't Catch Me
~ John Cale - Venus in Furs

The whole world is you
yet you keep thinking there is something else.
Hsueh-Feng

Nature is the devil in a fancy waistcoat
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Nature is a storm trooper in a camouflage smock
Ian Hamilton Finlay

Tristram Shandy

There are three things in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.
Gustave Flaubert

It speaks! Just feed it your words ...
Mark Twain - a quip for every occasion ...
Because there is danger that it is involved in a dolphin ...

For everyone one has ever loved one has waited.
Graham Greene

I saw Ingmar Bergman's 'Saraband' on tv last night. Bergman, now in his eighties, says this is his last film, and to me it was every bit as good as the work he produced in his prime. It's chamber music rather than a symphony like, say, 'Fanny and Alexander', but, as with Beethoven, Bergman is an absolute master of either style. Afterwards I watched a short documentary,'The Making of Saraband', which gave some fascinating insights into both Bergman's personality and his working methods - particularly the ways in which he coerces performances from the actors. A remarkable man - or 'old goat' as Liv Ullman calls him - and one of the giants of the cinema.

Extracts from 'The Making of Saraband' I - II - III

'We’ll live out our core values, while the competition crawls!'
watch this and weep...

The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn't look for harmony but simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.
Andrei Tarkovsky

It was at this period [in 1826] that I composed my first large-scale piece of instrumental music, the overture to Les Francs Juges... At the time I was so ignorant of the mechanism of some instruments that after writing the solo in D flat for the trombones I was worried it might be immensely difficult to perform. I anxiously went to show it to one of trombone players at the Opéra. He looked at the passage and put my mind completely at rest, saying 'On the contrary, the key of D flat is one of those most suited to this instrument, and you can be sure that your passage will be extremely effective.' I was so overjoyed by this assurance that on returning home, lost in my thoughts, I did not pay attention to where I was stepping, and I sprained my ankle. As a result every time I hear that piece my foot hurts. Others perhaps get a headache.

from 'Memoirs', Hector Berlioz

Paris Photo 2006

And, staying in France, if you haven't seen the photographs of Ernesto Timor at irregular (linked on the sidebar), why not check them out?

Gratiano: You look not well, Signor Antonio;
You have too much respect upon the world:
They lose it that do buy it with much care:
Believe me, you are marvellously chang'd.
Antonio: I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.

Shakespeare, from 'The Merchant of Venice'

Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.
George Bernard Shaw, Candida

On this day in 1950 George Bernard Shaw died at the age of 94. Even in old age Shaw retained his sharp wit. A young journalist interviewing him on his 90th birthday said he hoped to interview him again on his 100th. 'I don't see why not,' said Shaw, 'you look healthy enough to me.'