Source: youtube.com
Dean & Britta - Incandescent innocent by Most beautiful: songs for Andy Warhol’s screen tests.
The Dickensian Bookshop
Each time I pass through this small town I try to spend some time at the Dickensian Bookshop, one of my favourite second hand booksellers.
As I approached the store I saw an old man (not the guy in my photo) clinging to a Give Way sign across the street.
I browsed the shop window display and didn’t need to look to know that he would be closing in on me. I’m a magnet for the unusual.
When I did look up he was a metre away and intense with energy. I looked into him but I didn’t sense any malice, at least not for me.
“I’m looking for HOODS!” he said. He pronounced the word hoods with considerably more emphasis than the rest of the sentence, and that was interesting.
In this once English colony, the word hood is easily recognised as a variant of hoodlum. It’s just that we stopped using the words hood and hoodlum a long time ago.
Anyway, I’ve found from my experience with interesting people that mirroring is comforting for them.
“HOODS?” I yelled back at him.
“Yes, HOODS! I’m looking to rough me up some HOODS!”
“Rough me up” of course means to hit and otherwise treat roughly, people in need of ill treatment. In this context, HOODS.
“Well I’m sure you’ll find plenty of HOODS in this town.” I said.
I could see that this was new information for him and also, that I was probably the most agreeable person he’d met recently.
He considered this for a moment, his clenched fists churning in a low ready posture, as if remembering what it was like to be a boxer from a long time ago, and then suddenly, he went blank.
With the right equipment I could probably have shown you the exact place in his brain where a tangle of malignant protein was blocking the vital connection to the spot where he had saved those memories of his youth as a boxing man.
I took his cerebral misfire as an opportunity to gracefully slip into the bookstore and I closed the door deliberately behind me. I didn’t want to discover, upon his reanimation, that I now looked like a hoodlum to him.
“He’s looking for hoods.” I said to the lovely person behind the little desk by the door.
“Oh dear. I saw him hanging onto a sign over there.” and they motioned vaguely with their head. “I hope he’s okay.”
“Yes, I think he has dementia. He’s quite hunched and kind of shuffles when he walks but it doesn’t feel too bad yet. I mean, I don’t think he’s lost or anything and ... I didn’t sense any fear in him.”
I spent 20 minutes in this wonderful bookstore, in the midst of this wonderful life and grateful that it was not yet my turn to cling to signs.
I bought a biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor, a book of photographs by the painter Alphonse Mucha and the graphic novel/anthology American Splendor - The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar.
Of course, none of this ends well for us. I watched one of my best friends die in mortal fear. My father suffered panic attacks as his end drew near. I hope to be brave, I hope to laugh in the face of death and, if given the opportunity, I hope also to cling to many signs, in particular, those that instruct me to Give Way and to Yield.
- One Kindred Spirit
Silver Print
Questo è il terzo movimento del Concerto n.8 per Violino e Archi in Si minore. Il primo movimento era stato pubblicato il 29 aprile.
- Come sempre, per un migliore ascolto suggerisco l'uso di una cuffia.
- Sarebbe bello se il simbolo del "Like" divenisse visibile solo alla fine di un ascolto…
Photo by Alfio Samà
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This is the third movement of the Concerto n.8 for Violin and Strings in B minor. The first movement had been published on April 29.
- As always, for better listening I suggest the use of headphones
- It would be nice if the "Like" symbol became visible only at the end of a listening…
- Photo by Alfio Samà
*The Tree is a Lighthouse for the Soul*
Polaroid
RICH RAISED DOUGHNUTS
(With Yeast)
1915 Edition of the Five Roses Cook Book
Lake of the Woods Milling Company Limited
Montreal
Or
“What I Did on my Holidays ...”
dianaofarcadia
“The subjective thinker is not a man of science, but an artist. Existing is an art. The subjective thinker is aesthetic enough to give his life aesthetic content, ethical enough to regulate it, and dialectical enough to penetrate it with thought.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript
from Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (2023)
I first became aware of Mary Frank through this photo and shortly after came the idea that I should build a time machine.
Mary Frank, a renowned beauty, was photographed by many famous photographers. It turns out that is not a terribly useful thing as most people are more interested in famous photographers. But most people are boring so we shouldn’t worry too much.
Mary is an Artist and has been making art since the 1950′s, and still does today.
Mary is also a time traveler and I think I have come across her more than once in the last 1000 years.
Untitled (Prone Man, Two Trees) touches me. The Prone Man is as charcoal black and burnt as the Two Trees. Does he lie in the blue stream in an attempt (although too late) to quell the fire of his ambition?
The land the man and trees occupy is small but appears to be part of a larger continent.
The outline to the East is familiar. It is a map of a coast I have seen in a dream, of a land where time travelers come ashore.
- One Kindred Spirit
Photograph by Robert Frank - Mary with Large Daisy in her Hair (1953)
Painting by Mary Frank - Untitled (Prone Man, Two Trees) 2002