Tag: art
Dancing is basically the sublimation of a male and a female fucking. There’s no point in it. Just fuck each other already.
Andrew McIntosh – The Point of Pointlessness (Ineffectual Whinging)
[…] that whole insane “get up and go” mentality, starting with the obscenity of the work ethic, squirming as it did like soft stool out of the arsehole of Christianity, condemning us to mindless labour and activity simply for its own sake. Work for its own sake – what kind of fucking numpty thought that was a good idea? Read the full page
Someone titled a release Calming Regularity of Electric Pylons.
Well, there’s nothing to say. Just applauses.
(On the romanticization of suffering)
[…] And it’s all beautiful and captivating, but sadly, it’s also true.
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Artists are expensive because they do drugs and have to deal with costly divorces.
Natalino Balasso, YouTube, Redbox, episode 1
Why “We Are the Flesh” has a deeper twist ending than “The Sixth Sense”
filmcolossus.com, review by Jordan C. Johnson Continue reading
Every singer, poet, or writer has ninety-nine “love” at their disposal, after which they die.
Astutillo Smeriglia in his blog “In coma è meglio” (“Being in a Coma is Better”) – Proposte per un mondo migliore (“Proposals for a Better World”)
– No one really likes what they do.
– Then why do we do it?
– Because we’re driven. Maybe a bit insecure. We get into things when we’re young and because we think they mean something.
– And then we find out that they don’t.
– Oh, Susan, enjoy the absurdity of our world (ed. contemporary art business). It’s a lot less painful. And believe me, our world is a lot less painful than the real world.
“Nocturnal Animals”, the gay husband
Music is my friend. Understanding, empathic. Forgiving, comforter. A towel to dry tears of sadness. A source for tears of happiness. Liberation and flight. But also a painful thorn. In flesh and soul.
Arvo Pärt – Even if I lose everything (2015)
About the movie “Melancholia” – Florin Flueras
All other sorrow in comparison with this is a travesty of the real thing. For he experiences true sorrow, who knows and feels not only what he is, but that he is. Read the full page
Fritz Maisenbacher on YouTube commenting Feinberg’s transcription of Bach’s “Organ Triosonata in C major BWV 529, mvt. II. Largo” played by Feinberg himself.
For me, the greatest Bach player of all time. He works only on the total sadness of Bach. Bringing in full light the absolute despair of Bach. And with such elegance! Strange and mourning voices in the darkness. Inviting you to their dark evening.
âś»
No “thumb down” and so goes further this holy way to express Bach, and further the ultimate singing of Feinberg, oh the nightly climax between 2:24 and 2:44… this is beyond my own possible emotional capacity… and the last lights at about 5:33… ade… ade… and the last chord at 6:36, not to be commented…
âś»
Last week, I was in the hospital for another surgery.
Upon me, before and after the operation, I saw faces. I heard voices. Looking at me, talking to me.
And this evening, listening to this music, I understand all of it.
Ill or not, young or old, all these persons, kind nurses, charming anesthetist, competent doctors, royal surgeon, all of them, all of them, with no exception, faced also their terrible destiny, on the Titanic of earthly life… Their eyes are full of love and anguish, in a pathetic mix between life and death.
I came home now, bleeding and suffering, in the tiny hope of a good convalescence, and I listen to Feinberg’s Bach.
He is not an Angel, but he speaks for all of us.
In his hands, our destinies. Pain and sorrow, love, kisses, incandescent lips of desire, and always these dark evenings, and sudden lights, all together.
A complete life.
Bach knew it, Feinberg knows it, all these faces, these smiles, these eyes full of sadness and hope, all of us… all of us…
The Crazy Woman Next Door – Conversation with Alda Merini
Unfortunately, the soul, which by the way is what then writes and survives […], is the part that flies over matter and is the one that’s the most attentive and the most painful: namely, seeing the deterioration of the body, this soul distress itself, it… above all, it loses its way. Continue reading
To this question, as kids, my friends always gave the same answer: “Pussy.” Whereas I answered “The smell of old people’s houses.” The question was “What do you really like the most in life?” I was destined for sensibility. I was destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella.
The Great Beauty
This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life, hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise. Silence and sentiment. Emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity. All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world. Blah, blah, blah, blah… Beyond there is what lies beyond. I don’t deal with what lies beyond. Therefore, let this novel begin. After all, it’s just a trick. Yes, it’s just a trick.
Jep, “The Great Beauty”, ending
Let’s Talk About Music – Stefano Bollani
Ever since I was a child, I struggled with the idea that at some point you had to choose a specific path, in music as in life. Read the full page
Music is Art. Art is solace. But true Art must embrace the emptiness of everything, the bitterness of existence itself. The music must be as close as possible to Death, the ultimate salvation. Otherwise, it will just be entertainment, raw fun, ephemeral diversion.
Solace for the Vanity, album “Amaritia”, 2011[🡕]
You’d be surprised by how many people aspire to be completely normal. We’re a race apart. You have to fight to the teeth for not end up being one of them. Read the full page
When you’re walking down the hallway, or in class, how many of you have ever felt the weight pressing down on you? Hmm? I have. Everyone? Wow. Poe wrote about these things over a hundred years ago. So, as we read, we can see that “The House of Usher” is not merely an old decrepit castle in disrepair. It’s also a state of being.
«During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I looked upon the simple landscape of the domain – upon the bleak walls – upon the white trunks of decayed trees – with an utter depression of soul. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart.»
Detachment; Henry teaching “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
We have created so much material, so many movies, so many books. We have covered the Earth with works of hope, sadness, love. Today they mostly make garbage; the sirs of the past wrote about man’s pain; now men enjoys themselves in the middle of the manure and those texts are seen more like work rather than pleasure. Continue reading
We live in a decadent civilisation which robs us of our ability to shape and define our destiny and hence robs us of our spirit and identity. Western man has been gradually separated from his natural environment, his spirituality, his fellow man and finally from himself. Life has been reduced to an animalistic base as we drift from one empty satisfaction of technological convenience to another.
Art and culture no longer carry any grand or heroic ideals but rather seek to stimulate base emotions through ugly and abstract forms. Art and culture rarely serve as little more than distractions from the torment of perception – no longer seeking to order, interpret or explain the world around us but preferring instead to excuse it, replace it or deny it with an increasingly less interactive and more atomised and abstract alternative.
We were promised technological salvation but have been led to an air-conditioned hell by the false idols of progress who sought to remove the struggle from existence, not stopping to think what would be left. For life in essence is struggle and the will to participate in that struggle and make it one’s own is the most sacred characteristic of man.
The Harsh Noise Wall[🡕] is the soundtrack to our spiritually vacuous and culturally bankrupt age. There is no struggle here. There is no spirit. No personality. No society. There is nowhere else to go. Nowhere to progress. This is the end product. This is the end.
“A View From Nihil” in “Triumph of the Broken Will”
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race – A Contrivance of Horror – Thomas Ligotti
The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scandalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravings—the complete gamut of agitations—and finally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or simmer in the phantasmagorias that molest our dreaming minds. Read the full page
Often, journalists or even in casual conversations, I have been asked the question: why do you write? Normally, I answer, and it is the truth, that there are two reasons of great importance. The first has to do with the need not to have a boss. The second, not to get up early. I think everyone would agree that these are not only important things but also, in general, difficult to achieve.
Javier MarĂas
– That was amazing. I wish I could play.
– Take lessons. You’d enjoy playing. If you knew more, you wouldn’t have such a high opinion of my playing.
Elegy
The Elegance of the Hedgehog – Muriel Barbery
Lastly, teenagers think they’re adults when in fact they’re imitating adults who never really made it into adulthood and who are running away from life. It’s pathetic. Read the full page
Excerpts of interviews to Thomas Ligotti
Three interviews. Read the full page
Gavazzeni: “Music worsens the man”
Alberto Sinigaglia (“ttL”, La Stampa, insert) Continue reading
Civilization has no appeal to me. The Eastern Peoples seem to live their lives more sensibly. Because they don’t have such distant goals as us, the white brotherhood. The East is… «If you are moving, then you are on the right path.» While for us, the path doesn’t matter – only reaching the goal. I want to go to the East, because there I will feel well. I’ll be able to enter the Present time.
The point is – to stop thinking. These days, we have too much information about everything. Internet, TV, radio… You can find out what goes on in the States at any given point.
For me drugs aren’t a specific substance: they’re anything that you’re addicted to. When you lose what you’ve been addicted to, you have to accept something different. I’ve accepted that all these “gods” we have, they’re all teachers. There is one god – they all serve him! Like in Hinduism: Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva – they are one god, who creates in three different ways.
I think we are on this planet for too short a time to waste it. And so, I live every day. From beginning to end, I experience it. I try to do everything I possibly can, take every kind of drug I could, to…
WIth opiates you have the sense that you are wasting your life. Sleeping. Then you say to yourself: «I’m sleeping!» So you get up, and try to do other things, other drugs; I do all sort of drugs, but I remain active. That’s why I won’t quit until I find a steady girlfriend: otherwise I’ll die of boredom. But I don’t have a sense of security, stability, that I could have a lasting relationship, with a future. A junkie pays more attention to himself. All of us are little “Narcissi”, blooming here in this canal. Everything is always uncertain, you are always alone, so you say to yourself: «What’s the point?!» If you had a wife, kids, TV, a newspaper… It’s kind of idyllic. That’s why there are movies to experience another life. More or less, that’s why there is art.
Kamen Petrov in “Invisible”
Carmelo Bene – Four Moments on the Whole Nothing – 4°: Art
(Miserable) artists and relative (miserable) consumers. Read the full page
Waking Life – Richard Linklater
A thousand years is but an instant. Read the full page
– Would you still love me if I couldn’t play?
– What?
– Would you still love me if I couldn’t play?
– You wouldn’t be you, if you couldn’t play.
– No, I want to know.
– Our bodies sway to music. «Oh, brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?»
– But don’t you wish, sometimes, that you couldn’t play, that you could just be ordinary?
– Like what? Live in the country? Making bread? Feeding chickens? Playing once a year with a bunch of amateurs?
– How dare you insult my sister like that…
– I wasn’t insulting her.
– Well, at least she chose her life. Not like you and me. We’re just trained freaks.
Hilary and Jackie, the movie about Jacqueline du Pré
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Flaming, astonished souls When torn is the veil of blindness
[…]
Beauty appears, never intrusive nor lazy Languid when it’s time, strong, light, and austere The air serene, brimming with strength
C.S.I. – Brace (Ember)
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Already from our dusk of birth, begins a destiny. Ruthless, for most human beings: if you are not born a billionaire, you are doomed forever. You have to give in to the everyday, procure stimuli for the project; instead of de-projecting, you are damned to the drawing.
As it began, it was over already, as in all Lorenzaccesque misadventures. If I had been the billionaire Schopenhauer, I certainly would not have written “The World as Will and Representation”. I would have been careful not to: one is not born to work, to explain oneself, to think; one is not even born to un-think, because even that is engaging with thought. One is not born to manage, to act-suffer: all this is inflicted upon us by circumstances.
Just as we passively endure every prenatal perception, we will also endure the signifier. In the recurrence of life, discourse will never belong to the speaking being.
The registry office, the studying to survive, condemn us to in-forming ourselves, to form ourselves, deform ourselves, to become hunchbacked like Leopardi, just to have a part, when we would want nothing more than to put aside art, and life itself too. A true curse.
Carmelo Bene, Autografia di un ritratto (“Autograph of a Portrait”)
As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience – Eugenio Borgna
“Confess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they once did with sorcerers and heretics, and in the end, I decided to let myself be classified within an illness defined by doctors and indiscriminately labeled in medical dictionaries as either theomania or demonomania. By relying on the inherent meanings of these two definitions, science grants itself the right to make disappear or silence all the prophets and seers foretold in the Apocalypse; and I took solace in being one of them.” Read the full page
The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig
I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it. Read the full page
Angels of the Universe – Einar Már Guðmundsson
No, this grave is not deep enough to accomodate the feelings of us all. Read the full page
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
For me, the fuller the [theatre] halls are, the emptier they are.
Carmelo Bene, on various occasions
Tully: You know, in the guest house, you could write in peace.
Henry: Hey, Tully baby… Nobody who could write worth a damn could ever write in peace, Jesus…
Barfly
From the sketch to the work one travels on one’s knees.
Vladimir Holan; quoted by Kundera in “The art of the novel”
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on. Read the full page
There was a time when I was irritated by certain things that today make me smile. And one of those things, which I’m reminded of nearly every day, is the way men who are active in day-to-day life smile at poets and artists. They don’t always do it, as the intellectuals who write in newspapers suppose, with an air of superiority. Often they do it with affection. But it’s as if they were showing affection to a child, someone with no notion of life’s certainty and exactness.
This used to irritate me, because I naïvely assumed that this outward smile directed at dreaming and self-expression sprang from an inner conviction of superiority. In fact it’s only a reaction to something that’s different. While I once took this smile as an insult, because it seemed to imply a superior attitude, today I see it as the sign of an unconscious doubt. Just as adults often recognize in us, who are devoted to dreaming and expressing, something different that makes them suspicious, just because it’s unfamiliar. I like to think that the smartest among them sometimes detect our superiority, and then smile in a superior way to hide the fact.
But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.
Life being fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
Italo Calvino – If on a winter’s night a traveler
The Trouble With Being Born – Emil Cioran
No sooner are they [the eyes] open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much… Read the full page
Words ruin one’s thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one’s memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something. Paper can turn an enormity into a triviality, an absurdity. If you look at it this way, then whatever appears in the world, by way of the spiritual world so to speak, is always a ruined thing, a ridiculous thing, which means that everything in this world is ridiculous and ruined. Words were made to demean thought, I would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought, and one day they will succeed one hundred percent in so doing. In any case, words were bringing everything down, Konrad said. Depression derives from words, nothing else.
Thomas Bernhard, The Lime Works
Writing becomes not easier, but more difficult for me. Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
Samuel Beckett, 1969 Vogue interview
Competitions are for horses, not artists.
BĂ©la BartĂłk, posthumously reported by The New York Times
It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – Wind, Sand and Stars
As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
Emil Cioran – On the Heights of Despair
The Last Messiah – Peter Wessel Zapffe
«Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.» Read the full page
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
The old norms having collapsed, and the new ones not yet arisen or firmly established, it is natural that the concept of the relativity of everything has expanded in us to such a degree as to almost entirely make us lose our sense of evaluation. No one is any longer able to fix for themselves a firm and unshakable point of view.
Luigi Pirandello – Arte e scienza (“Art and Science”)
Nowadays it is not only a matter of habit for me, but also one of taste, a malicious taste perhaps? – To write nothing more that would not drive to despair every sort of person who is “in a hurry.” Philology is, namely, that venerable art that requires of its admirers one thing above all else: to go aside, to take time, to become still, become slow – as a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word, which has nothing but fine, cautious work to take care of and which achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for exactly this reason, philology is today more necessary than ever, by exactly this means, philology attracts and enchants us most powerfully in the midst of an age of “work,” that is to say, of precipitateness, of unseemly and sweating overhaste that wants at once to be over and done with everything, […]
Nietzsche – Dawn – Preface – 5
Genius is nothing more than an extraordinary capacity for patience.
Genius is nothing but a great aptitude for patience.
Genius is eternal patience.
A saying
O Julie, what a fatal present from heaven is a sensible soul! He who has received it must expect to know nothing but pain and suffering in this world. Lowly plaything of the air and seasons, his destiny will be regulated by sun or fog, fair or overcast weather, and he will be satisfied or sad at the whim of the winds. Victim of prejudice, he will find in absurd maxims an invincible obstacle to the just wishes of his heart. Men will punish him for having upright sentiments on every subject, and for judging by what is genuine rather than by what is conventional. Alone he would suffice to his own misery, by giving himself over indiscreetly to the divine attractions of honesty and beauty, whereas the weighty chains of necessity attach him to ignominy. He will seek supreme felicity without remembering that he is a man: his heart and his reason will be endlessly at war, and unbounded desires will set in store for him eternal deprivation.
Julie or the New Heloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau