monty forever

let me devote my last blog entry for two weeks to two of my favourite people...

le duc..who i wish was with me..in a non biblical sense
and monty...who i also wish was with me..in that other way

fanny & alexander

bergman
1918-2007

the "unibomber"

after 4 days of excesses
had to slip on the hood and big shades
and move incognito.
was found napping under a tree
dazed
and
confused

tots dress alike

tots looking worse for...

nothing to see...move it along...
grace.poise.understated.

alberto, just for you...

assuming that when you meant seventh seal, naturally you were referring to this.

band of horses slash harry potter

a musical discovery, courtesy of oats (who else?)

while attempting to sift through 800 pages of harry potter
yes i've read the ending
but my lips are sealed

unlike that bitch's on NYT

gay pride in tulsa, oklahoma

touching images from our dedicated sicilian reporting, live, from from the battle-field.

jamjars

a pair of groupies

lots of live footage to come...

things to do

the tick-off list:

1. read

la comedie humaine - balzac
all of proust - without cheating
ulysses - without cheating

2. listened to
wagner at bayreuth

3. paid the ultimate homage to the seventh art art (film)

4. galloped across the gobi desert and steppes mountains of mongolia

old crushes die hard

ok apart from the fact that
her surname is HO
source of infinite comic value

i do love josie, who comes a close second to maggie cheung, in top hong kong totty ranking stakes. infinitely resourceful. incredibly talented. stunning beautiful. erudite. spontaneous.
ok. am stopping right there.

http://josieho.com

enough said.

ballata del amore cieco...

Gli disse "Amor, se mi vuoi bene"

gli disse "Amor se mi vuoi bene

tagliati dei polsi le quattro vene".

le vene ai polsi lui si taglio'

e come il sangue ne sgorgo'

correndo come un pazzo da lei torno'

Gli disse lei ridendo forte

gli disse lei ridendo forte

"L'ultima tua prova sara' la morte".

E mentre il sangue lento usciva

e ormai cambiava il suo colore

la vanita' fredda gioiva

un uomo s'era ucciso per il suo amore.

Fuori soffiava dolce il vento

ma lei fu presa da sgomento

quando lo vide morir contento.

Morir contento e innamorato

quando a lei niente era restato

non il suo amore, non il suo bene

ma solo il sangue secco delle sue vene.

an introspective sunday afternoon

The Knife - Marble House

if it looks familiar it's because Chris Hopewell also directed the radiohead video for There There from Hail to the Thief.
he also directed in the words of Channel Four:
"the wildly inventive The Day Of The Subgenius, a 7-minute mixed media animation inspired by the legendary 'anti-cult cult', The Church Of The Subgenius."

check it out here:
eerie

the sure thing

possibly my favourite teen crudder from the 80s. the era of vintage.

more literary discoveries

from cult cargo:

Anna Kavan was born Helen Woods in Cannes on April 10th 1901 to wealthy expatriate British parents. Her life was haunted by a remote, selfish and glamorous mother, upon whom she regularly revenged herself in her books. After completing her education in England, she married and for a time lived in Burma. The marriage failed but it was during this period that she began writing.
She became a heroin addict around 1926. Her intermittent mental illness, and the change of style in her work coincided with a change in her appearance and life-style after a breakdown. It was also at that time that she adopted the name of Anna Kavan, taken from a character in her novel Let Me Alone. She went through detox many times before her death, but always returned to what she called her "bazooka". She continued to write, even during periods of mental illness/depression which she spent in clinics in Switzerland and in England. Her experiences there provided material for Asylum Piece, a collection of short stories published in 1940.
At first she wrote traditional books, but later achieved a unique and sophisticated style, becoming that most rare of species: an english symbolist. She was a difficult personality all her life, but towards the end was even more anti-social and reclusive. She had a small collection of friends whose devotion overlooked her problems and eccentricities. Ironically, after a life of suicide attempts and heroin addiction, she died of natural causes in London on December 5th, 1968.

She remained a prolific writer throughout her life
Ice, her final novel, is a surrealist, sado-masochistic chase in a frozen world doomed to be crushed between walls of ice. The cold war is telescoped into the indignities suffered by a woman objectified, humiliated and abused by two men. Kavan's obsessions become universalised. It is more effective for being told in a cold, matter of fact, nouveau romain style. Ice is definitely a chid of the sixties. Kavan's writing has glaring similarities with Kafka's...the alienation, desire thwarted, destination forever out of reach. There is also a curious analogy of other claustrophobic cold war artefacts such as The Prisoner and the whole sixties spy thrilller thing. The story, of course has a forseeably tragic non-ending, but the detached and spare lyricism of Kavan's prose raises it above any genre or era.

the summer contents of f's fridge

red bull
watermelon
latte di mandorle (almond milk)
orzata (almond syrup)

yes...i live for almonds..

and the half empty bottle of bubbly

a wonderfully balanced and nutritious diet.

new discovery

Robert Walser (1878-1956)
left school at fourteen and led a wandering, precarious existence while producing poems, essays, stories, and novels. In 1933 he entered an insane asylum—he remained there for the rest of his life—and quit writing.
"I am not here to write," he said, "but to be mad."

"On the 25th of December of 1956 he was found, dead of a heart attack, in a field of snow near the asylum. The photographs of the dead walker in the snow are almost eerily reminiscent of a similar image of a dead man in the snow in Walser's first novel, Geschwister Tanner."



**** thanks tiz! ****

f & oats 24-hour party people jaunt

well. hard to believe but it's taken 5 years for jackson and (captain esquire) oats to go on any kind of road trip together.
the result, ladies and gents, was a triumph.
respectful of each other's shared love for SILENCE they read on the train until f's sobbing sniffs/loud wailing on reading the closing passages of On Chesil Beach shook oats from her concentration and elicited an indulgent chortle.
i do like a good weep, i say....i knoooooooow, oats responds.

on a train. with a good book. what more can one ask for?
alas i finished the book too soon and started to be a pest.


on arrival to the rather charming ferrara, a city much loved by f who obsessed over it for years on seeing the vaguely incestuous giardino dei finzi contini, we peg it to our family-run b&b that was unexpectedly spacious, cheap, cheerful with charming details and beamed ceilings and run by a pair of distracted kooks that had to be gently reminded to charge us for the night.
on hearing the dialect of her native lands, flavia's accent mutates quite rapidly. much to the bemusement of oats.
there is, funnily enough, a reason we find ourselves in this one-horse town....

it's arcade fire's only gig in Italy and the setting couldn't be more stunning. the backdrop: a castle. the ground: cobblestones. the audience: scant and clueless. the band: rocking

i took dreadful photos. this short video was all i could muster before giving in, with reckless abandon, to the organ and the fiddles.




we rapidly gave up our plan A: stalk the band.
and instead conked out for 12 hours.

on awakening, i was a bit dozy and apparently moisturized my face with toothpaste not cream. mmm yes... nothing to see. moving it along..
we dashed for a quick coffee. the locals offered us an inviting absinthe brew instead. we also stuffed our faces with a variety of tortelli/tortelloni/tortellacci and (in my case) lard. delish.
on our return we had a quick stop-off in the city of my birth and f took oats on a neck-breaking speedy gonzalez tour of the city in under an hour while incoherently spouting irrelevant childhood reminisces. and slurping the obligatory gelato with added sound effects to mark the moment.
bologna has come under some harsh criticism of late. it's become a dump, they say. it's provincial, they say. well, while i wouldn't live there, but it's definitely not a dump and even if it was, it's still my dump, so back off. and as for provincial. well. the world is provincial. what are we going to do? move to mars? bowie said there's life there.



the hottest Neptune this side of the planet. gimme some...

July 22. out in canada, that great nation in the north.

Urban Word of the Day: Canadaphile


that would be ME: a non-Canadian person who is EXTREMELY fond of CANADIANS, Canadian culture, and/or Canada in general.

She is such a Canadaphile, she just had a maple leaf tattooed on her shoulder!

i was in fact thinking of another tat...er....

erm.......

saturday night
.........
sunday morning.
f wakes up.
not quite sure where she is.
she's not at home.
she's well.
in mina.
in a somewhat odd position in the back seat.
in some kind of dodgy parking lot.
in the eur.
yes. erm.

she drives off as if nothing was.

dog stew please

ok. am pegging it on a train back from florence.

am not in the best of moods.

a/ i dislike florence
b/ am fed up of central bankers ruining my weekend so they can have an all-expenses paid sejour in italy and waste my time

...and just as i thought i could kick back and enjoy my first-class return to ROME, am stuck with a YAPPY DOG that won't shut up.


right now am thinking of MAUDE (what tenderness...for that tube of love sitting at home for the past 36 hours alone and SILENT, waiting for her devoted mommy.) and then i look at this ugly YAPPY dog next to me and its equally repugnant paris-hilton-esque and say: ``ever tried dog stew? it's a korean delicacy...it's DELISH...''
the appalled owner flees, tripping up on her heels, to the carriage on the other side of the train. her yappy dog has not been seen or heard since.

hex

transatlantic conversations:

f: so hex?
p: well ella killed maya but leon couldn't cut off alex's head...so malachi is still powerful. and thelma is angry.
f: but can we dwell on ROXANNE.
p: yes. she is hot with her new holiness.


i rest my case.

THE LEITMOTIF

Who's in a bad mood, who's in a taxi?
Turning the clock back, avoiding a fight with this man he is meeting
Stands in the lobby, counting his questions in the neon light
Sinking under the river, sewer line touches the edge of the suburbs
back to the beach where a family is waiting on rumors of summer
lay out a blanket, bring something to feed the birds

With all the luck you've had
Why are your songs so sad?
Sing from a book you're reading in bed
and took to heart
All of your lives unled, reading in bed

never fails to move me

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera


amongst the most beautiful lines ever put to paper.

Sounds

f: i don't make noises
L: yes you do
f: er.
L: LISTEN

You make McSounds at these times:

When eating McIcecream
When watching McGreys
When McCrying
Sometimes when McSleeping

i love you

i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you


yes i do.
yipee dee dooo
i do.

you know who you are. all of you.




sometimes a goat and a cow make sense.

trippy dippy hippie.......cowboy psychedelia

Lee:
Some velvet morning when I'm straight
I'm gonna open up your gate
And maybe tell you 'bout Phaedra
and how she gave me life
and how she made it in
Some velvet morning when I'm straight

Nancy:
Flowers growing on the hill
Dragonflies and daffodils
Learn from us very much
Look at us but do not touch
Phaedra is my name



Even after thousands of listens, I still don't know quite what
to make of this bizarre, creepy song. A country-outlaw singer
drowning in a pool of reverb, constantly interrupted by
dazed-hippie interludes, and haunted by a storm cloud
orchestra. Sure, Phaedra is part of a Greek myth and all, but I
prefer to think of "Some Velvet Morning" as a LoveSong to drug
rehab, Hazlewood longing for a time when he'll be sober enough
to reminisce about his addiction (ephedra = amphetamine, natch)
and Sinatra in the role of the drug-personified siren calling
him back to her clutches. --Rob Mitchum (Pitchfork)

and for a fab little interview with the rather withdrawn

lee hazlewood




the great man, whose boots are done with walkin', wants to have on his epitaph:
``didn't he ramble''

i might take his good example, and have mine as: ``didn's she like to bang on''

errrrrr

am slightly traumatized yet also strangely invigorated by my weekend. i played my first calcetto tournament. i have a big professional looking bag with my full team uniform (slightly farcical in view of how completely crap we are), a couple of bruises and my eyes very much open to a reality very much different from my own.
in short i spent 3 days in close quarters in a parallel universe.
it was like going back to highschool. but with the white trash (of rome). there were the small-in crowds formed by the cuter, bitchier girls who thought their shit didn't stink and thought themselves so much cooler on pitch and off. there where the chubby girls who were the king's jester and crowd pleasers cracking gags. there was the unfortunate kid that got picked upon for having braces. looking weird and dressing weird and being an all-round loser who just kept making things worse by trying to ingratiate herself. there were the loners and mavericks who didn't give a fuck. there were the older kids who looked on and saw that there was was a life beyond high school.

our "tournament" was, it turned out, 4km from assisi (though no one apart from me and my new BFF on the team seemed to have any interest in going to see this little jewel of a place). the teams were of the highest calibre. nothing to do with us pathetic misfits. we had two teams. one, on the cards, the better one who actually got wiped off the face of the planet 17-0 with the goal keeper from the other camp coming in to humiliatingly score goals. then there was the team of the "pippe" where i was. and we fared rather better, i must say. maybe we had no expectations. we put our all in. we ran like loons. we attempted to pass balls. and i wasn't adverse to knocking the goal keeper down to score our single goal. yet we also lost, errr...8-1. we counted our "victories" by the margins of our losses. we managed a 3-0. YAY FOR US! GO TEAM! there was drama of course. rows broke out among the egos. then there was mutiny on board, there was a backlash against the management of the team. 18-year-olds got pissed on a drop of limoncello and threw up everywhere and stood like zombies on pitch. i and my roomie got locked into our rooms. we may have eaten cats for dinner at our one star hotel in the middle of nowhere.

anyway here are a couple of pictures.......am still trying to make sense of it all.





"the bitchy girls"







la frappa, warming up, with her 18-year-old team mate, who she was giving boyfriend advice to: (ERRRRRRRR) "listen you sound like a needy ball buster, cut the guy some slack and stop being such a pain in the arse." she liked my 2 cents so much she came back for seconds.




valiantly trying to do some "damage control" and stop the umptieth goal getting scored against us.....(ERRRRRRR)


YUP. that's us again trying to avoid getting the 3rd goal scored against us. yes, that's right. i think we failed.




"enough is enough:" the valiant blue team (spelt BLUTIME by the organizers....errr) shortly before scoring their first and only mercy goal which involved my kicking the ball somewhere and then ramming into a goal keeper full throttle).




things improved considerably when everyone decided to go to pool.






oh and i went to assisi too and contemplated nunhood.