Office space

{ This last image is Sofia Coppola's office }

Be sure to wear some

Another hard drive dump.

Art | Lehel Kovács’s google street view series

Lehel Kovács is a Hungary-based freelance illustrator, and his recent Google Street View series of sketches is deservedly catching lots of internet attention lately. Some of my favorites appear below:

I strongly encourage you all to visit his website and Flickr stream for more.

Epic, just

{ Print by Tom Gauld }

Alfred Jarry Bicycle Club

‘All space is occupied by the enemy. We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops – the geometry’

Long before Copenhagen Cycle Chic et al., Alfred Jarry was the king of avant-garde cycling. He was notorious for his wild eccentricity and his outrageously unconventional cycling.  More recently, the Alfred Jarry Bicycle Club is homage to eco-friendly means of transport as well as a psychogeographical exploration of the cityscape.  The cyclist exploits the urban geography unconsciously on dérive exploits, stopping occasionally for an ice cream.

Alfred Jarry was a French writer and poet, who became famous for his play L'Ymagier while living in Paris in the late C19th.  This play paved the way for absurdist theatre as we know it today. A serious eccentric, he took very seriously the art of taking nothing seriously. Under five feet tall, he habitually dressed in black cycle-racing clothing, grooming himself like Mephisto in miniature, and ate his meals in reverse, desert first.

He spoke in a staccato, nasal vocal delivery, which emphasized each syllable (even the silent ones). He adopted a ridiculous and pedantic figures of speech; for example, he referred to himself using the royal we, and called the wind "that which blows" and the bicycle he rode everywhere "that which rolls". Often he would be seen, tearing in and out of Parisian bars and houses astride his bicycle, swilling absinthe and pointing his two pistols at anyone who questioned him. He often alternated between meticulous cleanliness and not washing.

In the meantime, the young Jarry floundered in his own pataphysical world, discovered the pleasures of alcohol, which he called "my sacred herb" or, when referring to absinthe, the "green goddess". A story is told that he once painted his face green and rode through town on his bicycle in its honour (and possibly under its influence).

He fell at the age of 34, mainly from his absinthe drinking and ether sniffing, and had himself photographed as a corpse, so that he could send postcards to his friends. Eventually, he was overcome by tubercular meningitis, and lapsed into a coma, waking momentarily before death to call for a toothpick.

His life mirrored his work, a particular favourite of mine is the wonderful The Passion Considered As An Uphill Bicycle Race, a short prose piece, with Barabbas scratched from the starting board, Pilate starts the race, and St. Matthew is the sports commentator. Jesus gets a good start, but a bed of thorns puncture his front tire, and ends up carrying his cross-shaped frame up the hill, while the two other competitors ('as thick as thieves') escape.

Jarry's influence has been considerable. Movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, Expressionism Cubism, Theatre of the Absurd - all owe debts to his works. Picasso, Flann O'Brien, The Marx Brothers, the Goons, Mad magazine, Robert Anton Wilson, Monty Python and their spawn were all influenced by Jarry, whether they knew it or not.

{ Sadismul Adevarului. Ilustratil de Victor Brauner, Marcel Iancu, Alfred Jarry, Kapralik, S. Perahim, Picasso, Man Ray, si Jacques Vaché }

But nothing's original, it's daft to think that he began it all - he himself owes much to Rabelais. But at the same time you can't help but think he just had an ultimate desire to be socially subversive.

There's more here - Alfred Jarry: a Cyclist on the Wild Side.

Poets ranked by beard weight

Apparently there is a strong correlation between the beard weight and poetry weight, making Whitman the lightest poet and Morse is the heaviest - makes sense as he was the first code poet.

This is how they stacked up with beard gravity increasing as we move from left to right and top to bottom:

{ Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sir Walter Raleigh, Henry David Thoreau, Lord Tennyson, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edwin Markham, Sidney Lanier, William Cullen Bryant, John Burroughs, William Ernest Henley, Joaquin Miller, Samuel Morse }

In 1913 Upton Uxbridge Underwood (1881–1937) published a book entitled Poets Ranked by Beard Weight, which ranked poets according to the gravity of their beards, assigning each one a “pogonometric index” score ... A score of 10, for example, was “very very weak,” whereas a score of 58 was “very very heavy.”  I discovered the above image on Right Reading, via A Journey Around My Skull who uncovered Upton Uxbridge Underwood's brilliant book.  He stated that in the book:

“Poets Ranked by Beard Weight is the centerpiece of Underwood’s estimable, if fetish-fueled treatise on pogonology, or the study of whiskers and associated lore…. This quaint publication takes the reader on a fascinating excursion through such topics as False Beards, Merkins, and Capillamenta (chin wigs); Effusions of the Scalp and Face; Celebrated Chaetognaths (chaetognathous = hairy-jawed); and even includes an affectionate mini-essay about the wooly mammoth!”

Music | Music Go Music

{ Source: thanks Benoit }
I'm a fan. Blondie will never die.

Disco inferno

Or Dante's.

Story of an artist

"Day after day we seek an answer to the ageless question Aristotle posed in Ethics:

How should a human being lead his life?

Traditionally humankind has sought the answer to Aristotle’s question from the four wisdoms—philosophy, science, religion, art—taking insight from each to blot together a livable meaning. But today who reads Hegel or Kant without an exam to pass? Science, once the great explicator, garbles life with complexity and perplexity. Religion, for many, has become an empty ritual that masks hypocrisy. As our faith in the traditional ideology diminishes, we turn to the source we still believe in: the art of story.

The world now consumes films, novels theatre, and television in such quantities and with such ravenous hunger that the story arts have become humanity’s prime source of inspiration, as it seeks to order chaos and gain insight into life.

Some see this craving for story as simple entertainment, an escape from life rather than an exploration of it … To retreat behind the notion that the audience simply wants to dump its troubles at the door and escape reality is a cowardly abandonment of the artist’s responsibility. Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.”

- Robert McKee, from his book, Story.

For kicks, here's the excerpt from "Adaptation." with Nicholas Cage as Charlie Kaufman and Brian Cox as Robert McKee.

I care because you do

{ Thanks go to Miss Jessica McOmish }

Short film | L'homme qui plantait des arbres

Exquisite. "The Man Who Planted Trees".  By many considered to be the best short film of all time.  If you have a spare 30 minutes this week I encourage you to watch this, it's in four parts:

Empires

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

Assortment

Russian Cannibal Who Ate His Mother Gets a Lenient Sentence Because “He Just Was Hungry” - I don’t know what is more remarkable – the judge’s reasoning or the fact that 15 years in jail is all one normally gets in Russia for killing his mother for her pension money and eating her.

Smart Dolphins - the more we study them the smarter they turn out to be.

The Large Hadron Collider may be being Sabotaged by time travellers from the future - I’m dying to see what exactly got those future people so worried.

1940 Tour de France

Team Wehrmacht.

Music | Mussorgsky and friends

This is the first piece of classical music I can remember, and it remains my favourite.

My father told me about the piece, sitting up on his knee. I think I would have been four or five years old: “This is a piece that a man wrote to remember his friend after he died, because he liked him so much.”

I think the story went: Mussorgsky has a best friend, a fellow artist, who died suddenly. He was so heartbroken, he created these pieces for him, to be played during an exhibition.

Quite plainly: it's a touching story.

MUSSORGSKY | PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION: PROMENADE



Pictures at an Exhibition is a suite in ten movements composed for piano by Modest Mussorgsky in 1874.

No apologies that this isn't the perfect version. I think the more amateur the better. (The one on wikipedia is particularly lovely). Heartbreak isn't perfect. It's wavering and coarse. The perfect version of this piece feel fake.

If you want to hear pain, longing and platonic heartbreak in a short tune, listen to the Promenade (the first).

It starts with a solitary trumpet. Alone. Friendless. More brass join the tune, but act as a mere echo. The music builds in intensity, until finally the calmed by a chorus of violins, like a response from another side? Or sometime. Something nice.

And wouldn't this just be perfect for film?

"...the most sublime noise... ever to have penetrated the ear of man."

      — said in reference to Beethoven's 5th Symphony in Howards End (1992)

I think we all have (or should have?) a piece of music or art that just resonates with you in perfect unison. For my father it's Handel's Water Music - every time he listens he stops, his eyes stare into nothingness, lost in the beauty.  For Jessica, my sister, it's Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1. I asked my friend Chelsea, and she said that for her there's no equivalent to Tennyson's verse:

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.