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I get so tired, it's like I'm another man
1. Thank God, brain. I dreamed last night that since childhood I had owned a biography of Lloyd Alexander with hand-colored photographs of the author and his wife Janine for endpapers. The dust jacket matched the original hardcover editions of the Prydain Chronicles. I feel much better about my subconscious now.
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strange_selkie's latest project is reminding me that I never got around to putting together a dinner menu of things named entirely after the Napoleonic Wars. If I ever turn into Kate Beaton or Sydney Padua and draw cartoons of Nelson, he will be wearing a T-shirt which reads, "I died at the Battle of Trafalgar and all I got named after me was an obscure cultivar of apple." Seriously, even Talleyrand gets a complicated flaming dessert.
3. Late this morning I found myself on a subway car whose route map hadn't been altered since, I believe, 1983: Downtown Crossing was Washington, JFK/UMass was Columbia, and the Red Line terminated at Harvard and Quincy Center. I remember when the line was extended out to Alewife. I didn't know until just now that there's an actual, artist-chosen title for what I've always thought of as the caterpillar benches.
4. Goodbye, Edward Hardwicke. You were never my definitive Watson—I imprinted on David Burke—but I have family and friends in mourning for you.
5. It's one of those days when I despair of being art.
Here, movies, records, concerts, novels, poems, paintings, can seem to vibrate with an energy repressed but not stolen by time. You begin to discover what it is you truly love. Like David Thomas with the walls of his skull decorated with pictures of Ghoulardi, Captain Beefheart, Sky Saxon of the Seeds, Alfred Jarry, and a hundred more, you begin to create a personal culture of maps and talismans, locks and keys, within the greater culture of which you are a part whether you want to be or not. When you approach the greater culture with a personal culture, you do so with the knowledge that the greater culture can never satisfy you, and the knowledge of what an earthquake it would be if it did: if the greater culture could, even for an instant, truly satisfy anyone, and then nearly everyone, as, on occasion, as with the emergence of Charlie Chaplin or the Beatles, it has. Look at it this way, and the music Rocket from the Tombs left behind might begin to speak.
—Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice (2006)
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strange_selkie's latest project is reminding me that I never got around to putting together a dinner menu of things named entirely after the Napoleonic Wars. If I ever turn into Kate Beaton or Sydney Padua and draw cartoons of Nelson, he will be wearing a T-shirt which reads, "I died at the Battle of Trafalgar and all I got named after me was an obscure cultivar of apple." Seriously, even Talleyrand gets a complicated flaming dessert.3. Late this morning I found myself on a subway car whose route map hadn't been altered since, I believe, 1983: Downtown Crossing was Washington, JFK/UMass was Columbia, and the Red Line terminated at Harvard and Quincy Center. I remember when the line was extended out to Alewife. I didn't know until just now that there's an actual, artist-chosen title for what I've always thought of as the caterpillar benches.
4. Goodbye, Edward Hardwicke. You were never my definitive Watson—I imprinted on David Burke—but I have family and friends in mourning for you.
5. It's one of those days when I despair of being art.
Here, movies, records, concerts, novels, poems, paintings, can seem to vibrate with an energy repressed but not stolen by time. You begin to discover what it is you truly love. Like David Thomas with the walls of his skull decorated with pictures of Ghoulardi, Captain Beefheart, Sky Saxon of the Seeds, Alfred Jarry, and a hundred more, you begin to create a personal culture of maps and talismans, locks and keys, within the greater culture of which you are a part whether you want to be or not. When you approach the greater culture with a personal culture, you do so with the knowledge that the greater culture can never satisfy you, and the knowledge of what an earthquake it would be if it did: if the greater culture could, even for an instant, truly satisfy anyone, and then nearly everyone, as, on occasion, as with the emergence of Charlie Chaplin or the Beatles, it has. Look at it this way, and the music Rocket from the Tombs left behind might begin to speak.
—Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice (2006)
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Some guys are just Beef Wellington, and others (thank heavens) are flaming desserts.
"Cedric ... was once told by George Bernard Shaw that he was the playwright's fifth favourite actor – the first four being the Marx Brothers."
Nine
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Well, it's not like I got to keep the book when I woke up . . .
Some guys are just Beef Wellington, and others (thank heavens) are flaming desserts.
Hey, I made beef Wellington last January; it was fun.
On the other hand, I do like things on fire.
"Cedric ... was once told by George Bernard Shaw that he was the playwright's fifth favourite actor - the first four being the Marx Brothers."
That may be the only thing I know George Bernard Shaw and Salvador Dalí could have agreed on.
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It's one of those days when I despair of being art.
Take comfort in this:
Every Emily Dickinson poem ever written can be read aloud to the tune of "Gilligan's Island."
(reposted from FB)
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. . . I only knew about "The Yellow Rose of Texas."
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Try "Because I could not stop for death ..."
p.s. Kiernan didn't post today on LJ all day. It was like the sun stopping in its tracks. Then I realized she was out of town ...
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*collapses in a howling heap of laughter*
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I think my head hurts now.
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Oh, I hadn't made that connection . . .
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I'd seen the art scattered across various stations on the Red Line, but I hadn't realized they were all part of the same program. And yes, I'd also thought they were just the benches at Alewife.
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I don't think I can write it . . .
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I dream a lot of objects that don't exist; also cities and people. When I'm healthy, I have densely narrative, imagistic dreams, and am always annoyed that I cannot bring them out of sleep entire.
This is the sort of thing I dream about when my brain is in working order.
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I won't die of it.
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That's good. A) because I'd be distinctly annoyed and really rather put out if you did, and B) because if such a thing were fatal, I'd be a goner. I might be parody, or comic relief, but I'm fairly well sure I'm not anything that could be legitimately called art.
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He's one of the actors I've almost never seen in anything else, but it doesn't matter: I'll be fond of him forever.
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At the Congress of Vienna, where he was representing the Bourbons, he was asked if he needed anything sent from Paris: "I have more than enough secretaries, but send saucepans!"
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That's awesome. I'm glad to know he would have appreciated his complicated flaming dessert.
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H is for my alma mater, Harvard,
C is Central, next stop on the line,
K is for the cosy Kendall Station,
C is Charles, across the foamy brine,
P is Park Street, Boston's busy center,
W is Washington, you see,
Put them all together, they spell HCKC PW, [sung with great emphasis]
And that's just what dear old Boston means to me.
Nine
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I think I learned that in elementary school from Rise Up Singing.
wavy benches
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Interesting. The Wikipedia writeup looked like a title, but you may be correct. I wonder how the artist thought of them.
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That seems unfair!