"The king was deeply moved and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept. And thus he said as he walked, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!""

"...he was, says Grafton, 'a tightrope performer of self-creation'. Spring and autumn made him melancholy, he said, beccause all those flowers and fruits made him feel how little he had produced in his life - 'Battista', he would tell himself, 'now it's your turn to promise some sort of fruits to the human race'. Leonardo too would have this haunting sense of non-achievement which is the downside of the expansionist Renaissance mood. If the possibilities are endless, the realization of them can only ever be partial."

-Charles Nicholl, regarding the strata of self-doubt inherent in the Renaissance psyche

"You ever drunk Bailey's from a shoe?"

My Favorite Stuff This Week

IT IS AS IF THE MILKY WAY ENTERED UPON SOME COSMIC DANCE. SWIFTLY THE BRAIN BECOMES AN ENCHANTED LOOM, WHERE MILLIONS OF FLASHING SHUTTLES WEAVE A DISSOLVING PATTERN, ALWAYS A MEANINGFUL PATTERN THOUGH NEVER AN ABIDING ONE; A SHIFTING HARMONY OF SUBPATTERNS.

Fall on your knees; Oh, hear the angel voices!

THE MAN WHO'S TEACHING ME TO BE MORE CURIOUS.

AND THEN THIS GUY. HEY, AT LEAST ONE OF YOU ACHIEVED HUMAN FLIGHT.

"Thought about what you said to me the other day, about my painting. Stayed up half the night thinking about it. Something occurred to me... fell into a deep peaceful sleep, and haven't thought about you since. Do you know what occurred to me?"

"No."

"You're just a kid, you don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about."

"Why thank you."

"It's alright. You've never been out of Boston."

"Nope."

"So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. And I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, "once more unto the breach dear friends." But you've never been near one."

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

If They Mated-

+









equals

The Ark.

You win, Kurosawa.

Congratulations. I was teetering on a precipice of fanhood, but Seven Samurai just wasn't enough to push me over. I guess I'll need to move Yojimbo to the top of my Netflix.


I went in to Throne of Blood knowing absolutely nothing about it, which in retrospect, seems to be the best way I could have been introduced to it. I didn't know that it was his adaptation of Macbeth, set in feudal Japan and featuring Japanese myths and cultural values. But that was my overriding (positive) criticism of the movie; that it drew up that same deep seated consciousness of the ethereal hand of fate I always feel when I read Shakespeare. If I had known that from the start, I think I might have had trouble simply enjoying the story, rather than focusing on the influences, or acknowledging the variations.


I thought about mentioning a few particular scenes which I enjoyed that come readily to mind, but I think I'd have to recount the entire movie. Spider's Web Forest, the evil spirit, pretty much any scene with his snake of a wife, the murders themselves, the guards at the gate, his awful prolonged death, even just one brief moment when he's alerted that his enemies are coming for him, and that the other fortresses have fallen, when he runs towards the camera. The only thing that sets itself apart from the rest is this awful scene at the beginning of the movie, where Washizu and Miki have just met the evil spirit in the forest, and are trying to find their way out to Spider's Web Castle. I'm sure that it's tough to film guys riding lost in a forest, but they choose instead to do it in a smoky field, with the actors just riding in circles for over a minute, looking far too confused considering they never even leave line of sight with the camera. I was incredibly tempted to fast-forward. It's unfair that nothing in the movie can stand out, because it's all so damn good. But if that makes brevity in review hard to come by, it makes watching well worth it. This is the kind of movie you should watch when you want to be thinking about it for weeks afterwards.

Steak, whiskey, conversation. Good Monday night.

Glad I can't get this out of my head.

Justice rules.

"There was never any doubt that the local jury would return a guilty verdict. "In due time, gentlemen of the jury," Seward concluded, "when I shall have paid the debt of nature, my remains will rest here in your midst, with those of my kindred and neighbors. It is very possible they may be unhonored, neglected, spurned! But, perhaps years hence, when the passion and excitement which now agitate this community shall have passed away, some wandering stranger, some lone exile, some Indian, some negro, may erect over them a humble stone, and thereon this epitaph, 'He was Faithful!' " More than a century afterward, visitors to Seward's grave at the Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn would find those very words engraved on his tombstone."

Respect me as a voice amongst scholars who speak deep to thee, move the sleep from your eyelids, make your lungs flutter... Get it right, my inner light casts shadows on the sun, brother. I stand and sing from atop Mount Ararat; I am a king, just ain't got my kingdom yet.



Also, this. Do something, Steve.

"I tried to fold this letter into an elegant yacht, but I got it totally wrong. You know how useless I am at origami."

Loved Dark City. These certain flaws just make it that much better.

Rather than savoring his progress, he excoriated himself for not achieving enough. "I feel humbled and mortified," he wrote in his diary, as the year 1829 drew to a close, "by the conviction that the Creator has gifted me with intelligence almost in vain. I am almost twenty two and have as yet attained but the threshold of knowledge... The night has seldom found me much advanced beyond the station I occupied in the morning... I almost despair of ever making any figure in the world."

-Doris Kearns Goodwin, regarding Salmon P. Chase

It sounds absurd from the mouth of Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury. But then, he had thirty years to go.

Ever have one of those dreams that are so vivid, they seem real? And the people in them, aren't people that you know, but amalgams of many people, or simple pure fiction; maybe idyllic people that can't really exist. And at the end there's always this sudden realization that you're dreaming, or more importantly that you're waking up, and this short struggle between the dream and reality ensues, like trying to stay underwater with a life vest on. In the end you just lie awake, wondering if it's wrong to wish you could go back, curl up in the dream that was so much like reality and stay there forever. Good morning world. What's for breakfast?

Hello blogger.