tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55747282024-03-07T09:47:01.093+00:00The Grasshopper Lies HeavyA view of reality. Not necessarily a good view.Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.comBlogger500125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-54175408906788506882024-03-03T12:49:00.002+00:002024-03-03T12:49:29.802+00:00Revelations Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-64236638605799248452024-01-31T18:11:00.000+00:002024-01-31T18:11:21.877+00:00On PiratesThere's a fragment of Cicero's Republic from around 51 BC that recounts the story of a captured pirate captain who was brought before Alexander the Great. Alexander has one main question for the pirate, and the anecdote finishes like this: . . . for when he was asked what wickedness drove him to harass the sea with his one pirate galley, he replied, "The same wickedness that drives you to Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-75287819952486523002023-04-30T20:45:00.001+01:002023-04-30T20:45:18.055+01:00Burned CitiesThanks to my sister, I've been lucky enough over the last year or so to go to a couple of performances of the immersive production The Burnt City. It takes place in a Troy which is simultaneously Schliemann's excavation, the ancient city, and a Blade Runner-type Art Deco dystopia. As their own website says, "As night falls, Gods, mortals, dreamers and lovers come alive – one last time."So I was Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-35298918873082919112023-02-28T18:26:00.000+00:002023-02-28T18:26:09.200+00:00Big Gaps Before the 80sOne of the things Letterboxd lets you do is see what films you've watched by release year. Here's what my efforts so far look like.1988 seems to be the year I home in on, but I could do with watching more films from before the 80s in general.Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-18171108997388998372022-03-31T16:34:00.004+01:002022-04-02T15:08:47.149+01:00It's Literally a Spectre. It's Scary as Hell.*To what extent Marx and/or Engels encountered occultists or their literature is not known, and is certainly not a question that has interested any of their biographers. It cannot be said that the passing references to alchemy and the Philosophers' Stone in their writings indicate any familiarity with original hermetic sources. We do know, however, that they shared Hegel's high esteem for the Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-25673946087723941802022-02-18T15:59:00.002+00:002022-02-18T15:59:37.223+00:00Nom de guerreThat symbol on the green chest patch is a Wolfsangel, as used by the 2nd SS Panzer Division, so I suspect he knew what he was doing when he told them that his surname was "Friekorps".Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-85392409305775499452022-01-30T18:09:00.002+00:002022-01-30T18:09:24.356+00:00The Importance of ProcopiusThe historical King Arthur seems to have been a petty British King, a commander of allied cavalry, whom the Romans left to his fate
when their regular infantry were withdrawn from the garrison towns of Britain at the beginning of the fifth century. If a Procopius had been his chronicler, the ogres and fairy ships and magicians and questing beasts would not have figured in the story except perhapsStephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-91573465461355494052021-12-31T18:31:00.000+00:002021-12-31T18:31:11.651+00:00Films I Saw in 2021 Now that I've started using Letterboxd I can pull up neat statistics about what I saw this year. Here's a list of what I saw:and here's a world map of where they're from (Hong Kong not visible at this scale):Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-37733857222766513942021-09-25T17:04:00.001+01:002021-09-25T17:04:42.021+01:00HuemacFrom Camilla Townsend's Fifth Sun: A new history of the Aztecs (2019).Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-84182701225870218042021-08-31T19:56:00.005+01:002021-08-31T20:03:05.749+01:00Meditations Extract from Sean T. Collins' Pain Don't Hurt: Meditations on Road House (2020).Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-78315703606944276262021-07-30T15:31:00.000+01:002021-07-30T15:31:10.123+01:00MeetingsStephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-53773097648402755712021-03-31T17:03:00.002+01:002021-03-31T17:03:22.342+01:00Heavy Overhead"Heavy Overhead" by Jen Orpin.Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-37834077081608143542020-12-31T22:41:00.000+00:002020-12-31T22:41:23.747+00:00The British Way of Life...I swallow my dreams like my beer...The British Way of Life - The Chords (1980) Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-45016722776435783072020-11-22T15:49:00.003+00:002020-11-22T16:32:24.859+00:00 The Archaeology of Dealey Plaza (2)Photograph by Michael Parks.A bit of industrial stratigraphy. Some theories claim that the fatal shot fired at Kennedy came from the storm drain on Elm Street, at the foot of the grassy knoll, hence the potential importance of the differing street levels between 1963 and the present day in terms of determining whether or not such a shot would even have been possible. Given that theStephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-14295949322218780132020-10-31T23:58:00.001+00:002020-10-31T23:58:26.136+00:00Closing SpeechIt's not that it's not difficult to escape death, gentlemen, but it's much harder to escape wickedness, since it runs faster than death. And now, because I am a slow old man, I am being overtaken by the slower of the two, and my accusers, because they are clever and keen, by the swifter, by evil. And I am going away now, having been condemned to death by you, while they have been condemned by theStephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-91809416611067982562020-09-29T18:46:00.004+01:002020-09-29T18:46:51.293+01:00The Central Problem of All Interpretation- Mary Douglas, "The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception" (1968)Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-59662606626248659182020-08-14T17:25:00.002+01:002020-08-14T17:25:52.761+01:00Out of Time
I stopped laughing, crying, eating, sleeping…I just stopped. I was like a ghost, haunting my own life, going through the motions, but living even less than I had before. I became hyper-obsessed with the past—back when I was still happy and unperturbed by these thoughts and still had time left; the past also became a concept I loathed because it housed all of the mistakes that led me here, to Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-40624689816094888662020-08-03T16:13:00.000+01:002020-08-08T16:42:22.851+01:00Some Mistakes You Never Forgive Yourself For
'A long time ago,' the driver said. 'He made a mistake a long time ago.' 'He made two mistakes,' Cogan said. 'The second mistake was making the first mistake, like it always is.'
- George V. Higgins, Cogan's Trade (1974)Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-9938854633701824022020-06-30T17:11:00.000+01:002020-06-30T17:11:34.801+01:00Lost in Youtube
You are scrolling through Youtube when a video catches your eye. You open it. In the video, a woman reads out a text largely derived from a Wikipedia article you wrote five years ago, about an unsolved murder in which the victim's body was dismembered and left in suitcases. She whispers her way through the text because she is doing this as an ASMR.
She pauses a couple of times to apologise thatStephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-66364488713165643652020-05-20T15:54:00.001+01:002020-05-20T15:54:31.839+01:00Pimlico
Down by the river, where I went to get a breather, I stood beside the big new high blocks of glass-built flats, like an X-ray of a stack of buildings with their skins peeled off, and watched the traffic floating down the Thames below them, very slow and sure (chug, chug) and oily, underneath the electric railway bridge (rattle, rattle), and past the power station like a super-cinema with Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-86422665384899768762020-04-10T15:36:00.003+01:002020-04-10T20:40:27.794+01:00Ten Years
As though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
- Raymond Chandler, The High Window (1942)
Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-29451763305127945432020-03-17T10:14:00.000+00:002020-03-17T10:14:39.260+00:00St. Patrick's Day (2)
It all started in the late 1960s when Brendan Clifford, an unemployed Jesuit-trained gravedigger was whiling away the time in the library of Trinity College Dublin. Tiring of waiting in the long queue of clerics desirous of studying Gaelic erotic poetry, Clifford asked to see some of the works of the revered fathers of Irish republicanism, which were in no great demand. Having blown off the Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-24831768223248806052020-02-29T23:31:00.000+00:002020-02-29T23:31:10.438+00:00I Can't Forget Your Lonely Face
Earlier this month Andy Gill, the guitarist and - in the band’s own words - “supreme leader” of Gang of Four died. I’ve been trying to write this blog post ever since. I couldn’t really come up with a good ending for it. I’ve also always wanted to be able to write like Greil Marcus, and while this had usually resulted in me writing things that I don’t properly understand, it also puts the Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-14156153539799010912020-01-29T18:20:00.000+00:002020-01-29T18:20:00.883+00:00The Last Comic
One of the last Peanuts strips drawn by Charles Shulz, January 2nd 2000. Shultz died a month later.
Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5574728.post-61359954126244606662019-12-31T23:02:00.002+00:002019-12-31T23:02:49.207+00:00And After All This...
Sign at the exit to the display “The Clash: London Calling” at the Museum of London.
Stephenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03185607466557136654noreply@blogger.com0