George Antheil's Violin Sonata n. 2 (Vahid Khadem-Missagh and Gottlieb Wallisch/2015, Youtube);
"Pure experience is an animated state with maximum freedom in which there is not the least gap between the will's demand and its fulfilment."
Kitaro Nishida
"La main se crispe dans une sorte de contraction impudique..."
Canteloube (Grand Journal, 21 mai)
"Eine lange lateinische Abhandlung in Einer Nachtwache niederzuschreiben und auch noch ab-zuschreiben, mit dem Ehrgeiz in der Feder, es meinem Vorbilde Sallust in Strenge und Gedrängtheit nachzuthun, und einigen Grog von schwerstem Kaliber über mein Latein zu gießen, dies stand schon, als ich Schüler der ehrwürdigen Schulpforta war, durchaus nicht im Widerspruch zu meiner Physiologie, noch vielleicht auch zu der des Sallust—wiesehr auch immer zur ehrwürdigen Schulpforta..."
Nietzsche
"... e, uma vez, apaguei de repente, caí com a cabeça em cima dos pratos e elas me ajudaram, com massagens, estímulos e mais drogas, é lógico."
Júpiter Maçã, A Odisséia
"Ultrasonic sounds on records to cause frontal lobotomies."
"Rock & Roll is so great, people should start dying for it. You don't understand. The music gave you back your beat so you could dream."
Lou Reed (Please Kill Me)
"Then of course Nico walked out with this gorgeous face and voice and stood absolutely motionless."
"Lou was a double-faced, insincere, grasping type."
Paul Morrissey (Please Kill Me)
"Nico was really odd. She was very icy and reserved on one level, and then annoyingly insecure on another... Beautiful, but a weirdo. You didn't have a relationship with Nico."
Ronnie Cutrone (Please Kill Me)
"I just thought Richard Hell was incredible. Here was a guy all deconstructed, torn down, looking like he'd just crawled out of a drain hole, looking like he was covered in slime, looking like he hadn't slept in years, looking like he hadn't washed in years, and looking like no one gave a fuck about him. And looking like he didn't really give a fuck about you!"
Malcolm McLaren (Please Kill Me)
"I liked Malcolm because he liked me... There weren't that many people who gave us any respect, you know?"
Richard Hell (Please Kill Me)
"The first song that the Sex Pistols played was I Wanna Be Your Dog, the greatest punk song ever written to this day."
Danny Field (Please Kill Me)
"The profanity hooked me first (I was fourteen), Johnny Rotten's 'fuck this and fuck that/Fuck it all and fuck her fucking brat.' More than the naughty words themselves, it was the vehemence and virulence of Rotten's delivery—those percussive 'fucks,' the demonic glee of the rolled rs in 'brrrrrrrat.'"
"From that point onward, McLaren decided that Rotten was at heart 'a constructive sissy rather than a destructive lunatic,' and focused his energy on molding the more suggestible Sid Vicious into the Pistol's true star, a cartoon psychopath, wanton and self-destructive."
"Although they found nothing, Lydon was taken to the local police station and had to walk home in his pijamas."
Simon Reynolds
"Andy said to me, 'Don't... don't... don't make me laugh. I hurts too much."
Billy Name (Please Kill Me)
"In a desperate plea for the attention of her idol, she snatched Andy Warhol's wig."
James St. James (Party Monster)
"... et du chaos d'un sommeil plein de songes tu évoques à la lumière du soleil les visages des beautés depuis longtemps ensevelies, et les physionomies familières et bénies, nettoyées des outrages de la tombe. Toi seul, tu donnes à l'homme ces trésors, et tu possèdes les clefs du paradis, ô juste, subtil et puissant opium!"
Baudelaire/De Quincey (Les Paradis artificiels)
"... virei mentor dum garoto judeu e gay... Eu dizia, você não acredita em nada? Marilyn Monroe? Elvis Presley, George Harrison?"
Júpiter Maçã, A Odisséia
"What's wrong with tits? The queen's got'em."
Geri Miller (Please Kill Me)
"After the gig we were visited in our dressing room by none other than Lady Helen Windsor, a minor royal and great-granddaughter of King George V. Seems she was a mad Cure fan, too! Truth is stranger than fiction, truly."
Lol Tolhurst (Cured: the tale of two imaginary boys)
"The society ladies who appear to Bloom, Mrs. Yelverton Barry (a name modified from that of a suspected transvestist) and Mrs. Bellingham (an actual name) are as fond of wearing furs as Wanda."
Richard Ellmann
"Dr. Spock personalizes quantum psychology: 'Treat your kids as individuals, as singularities.' Here was the most radical, subversive social doctrine ever proposed, and it was directed to the only groups that can bring about enduring change: parents, pediatricians, teachers."
Timothy Leary
"In India, many people visit holy men and women for their darshan, literally their look, which is believed to confer great blessings. Perhaps an unconscious survival of the same kind of belief is involved in the popular desire to see in person the Queen of England, the President of the United Sates, the Pope, pop stars, or other luminaries."
Rupert Sheldrake
"When Queen Elizabeth came here and President Eisenhower bought her a hot dog I'm sure he felt confident that she couldn't have had delivered to Buckingham Palace a better hot dog than that one he bought her for maybe twenty cents at the ballpark... Not for a dollar, not for ten dollars, not for a hundred thousand dollars."
"Think rich. Look poor."
Andy Warhol
"Giving up Beethoven, the emotional climaxes and all, is fairly simple for an American. But giving Bach is more difficult. Bach's music suggest order and glorifies for those who hear it their regard for order, which in their lives is expressed by daily jobs nine to five and the appliances with which they surround themselves and which, when plugged in, God willing, work... Jazz is equivalent to Bach (steady beat, dependable motor), and the love of Bach is generally coupled with the love of jazz. Jazz is more seductive, less moralistic than Bach. It popularizes the pleasures and pains of the physical life, whereas Bach is close to church and all that. Knowing as we do that so many jazz musicians stay up to all hours and even take dope, we permit ourselves to become sympathetically at least, junkies and night owls ourselves: by participation mystique. Giving up Bach, jazz, and order is difficult. Patsy Davenport is right."
"Ten years ago the New York painters were for the most part poor as church mice. Did they then or do they now have a place in American society?"
John Cage (Indeterminacy)
"In Washington DC, we experienced the sharper side of American life. We were shocked when we pulled into town and realized it was divided into the haves and have-nots, ghettoized in a way we had not experienced before... In London it appeared to us that all the races mixed together..."
"In the United Kingdom, punk was more of a cultural/political movement—it had to be, given the circumstances—whereas in the United States it felt more like a social/fashion happening... this being New York, we had our first brush with the celebrity circuit. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie, along with David Johansen of The New York Dolls, turned up to our first-night gig at Hurrah's..."
Lol Tolhurst (Cured: the tale of two imaginary boys)
"Not that I'm especially patriotic or anything, but it's also striking how both the sixties and the postpunk movement were periods during which Britannia ruled the pop waves..."
"The No Wave scene in New York was virtually wall-to-wall painters, filmmakers, poets, and performance artists. Gang of Four, Cabaret Voltaire, Wire, and the Raincoats are just a handful of the U.K. bands that were started by fine-art or design graduates. Especially in Britain, art schools have long functioned as a state-subsidized bohemia, where working-class youths too unruly for a life of labor mingle with slumming bourgeois kids too wayward for a middle-management career."
"... it was a particular kind of 'art rock' that postpunk pledged allegiance to... the minimal-is-maximal lineage that runs from the Velvet Underground through Krautrock and the more intellectual Bowie/Roxy end of glam. For a certain breed of hipster, the music that sustained them through the 'wasteland' of the seventies was made by a cluster of kindred spirits—Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Brian Eno..."
"For those prepared to live somewhere that looked almost as bombed-out as Beirut, and where heroin was easier to buy than groceries, the Lower East Side was a paradise... 'We didn't have someone like Mayor Giuliani breathing down our necks. It was a very loose time. There wasn't much to fight against, except tradition, where you came from, what your parents were. It was like you'd been thrown into this adolescent adult fun fair and left to figure it out' [Lydia Lunch]."
"By the late seventies, French thinkers of the sort Green [of Scritti Politti] had been devouring were flirting with the once unthinkable (for the Left) notion that American capitalism, despite its faults, offered a lot of space for doing it yourself and bending the law."
"Early MTV was a curious animal, almost inadvertently radical. Because videos from domestic major labels acts were scarce, the channel depended on promos from the U.K. and Europe, where the pop video was already well established. Artists such as Queen, David Bowie, Abba, and Boomtown Rats had specialized in striking promo clips."
Simon Reynolds (Rip It Up)
"When David said in Melody Maker that he was gay—then he changed it, and said he was bisexual, which was what he really meant—he never would have had the balls to do that unless he'd been hanging around with Iggy and Lou."
"... Iggy actually read, you know, Dostoevsky and all that kinda crap..."
Angela Bowie (Please Kill Me)
"Johnny Rotten asked me, 'If they don't like me will they beat me up?' He thought the Ramones were a real gang, ha ha ha."
Arturo Vega (Please Kill Me)
"I felt that what we had done as a joke in New York had been taken for real in England by a younger and more violent audience."
Mary Harron (Please Kill Me)
"By the end of the seventies, the philosophy was that you couldn't do anything without a lot of money... the anger was simply about money, that the culture had become corporate, that we no longer owned it and everybody was desperate to fucking get it back."
Malcolm McLaren
"Nous sommes invités, Rose et moi, à Boston, la semaine prochaine pour un banquet — nous commençons à en prendre l'habitude! et même je n'ai plus de trac quand il faut parler devant 200 personnes. C'est la vie américaine. J'aime ce pays de plus en plus: j'aurais d'ailleurs mauvaise grâce à ne pas m'y plaire car nous y avons été reçus avec chaleur et compréhension."
André Masson (Lettre à Daniel-Henry Kahnweilver, 2 December, 1941)
"Il fait un drôle de temps ici: le pays a l'air d'être retouché par Turner — brumes et brouillard, sans doute pour ne pas trop dépayser les Anglais qui sont ici."
André Masson (Lettre à Georges Bataille, 2 Juillet 1936)
"Pour ce qui est de l'Angleterre, je ne saurais vraiment rien vous dire, car il s'agit d'un pays cagot, livré aux femmes, ce qui signifie autant qu'une totale décadence."
Strindberg à Nietzsche (Klossowski's translation)
"En effet, je retrouve bien dans Hogarth ce je ne sais quoi de sinistre, de violent et de résolu, qui respire dans presque toutes les oeuvres du pays du spleen."
Baudelaire (Quelques caricaturistes étrangers)
"Lui et ses trois soeurs étaient fort jeunes quand leur père mourut, laissant à leur mère une abondante fortune, une véritable fortune de négociant anglais."
Baudelaire (Les Paradis artificiels)
"La marca de fábrica, en la culata, saltaba a la vista: Liverpool, 1891."
Mario Vargas Llosa (La guerra del fin del mundo)
"This danger was more real in London under the Blitz, which dominated everyday life in 1940-1, as Britain alone opposed Germany."
Matthew Gale
"É o sentimento que os ingleses chamam de spleen, e que não tem correspondente na língua portuguesa. Em noites assim, a nossa realidade interior se mistura à atmosfera que o fog torna ainda mais densa, apagando os contornos da vida. O silêncio ao redor de nós como que se materializa. Os movimentos se fazem em câmera lenta, de peixes no mundo das águas. Ectoplasmas de nós mesmos, flutuamos no ar, integrados à eternidade do nada."
Fernando Sabino (A Morte Vista de Perto)
"Now, Sir, if I conduct you home again into this warmer and more luxuriant island, where you perceive the spring tide of our blood and humours runs high,—where we have more ambition, and pride, and envy, and lechery, and other whoreson passions upon our hands to govern and subject to reason,—the height of our wit and the depth of our judgment, you see, are exactly proportioned to the length and breadth of our necessities,—and accordingly, we have them sent down amongst us in such a flowing kind of decent and creditable plenty, that no one thinks he has any cause to complain. It must however be confessed on this head, that, as our air blows hot and could,—wet and dry, ten times in a day, we have them in no regular and settled way;—so that sometimes for near half a century together, tehre shall be very little wit or judgment, either to be seen or heard of amongst us..."
Tristram Shandy
"The fashions which Charles II brought with him and which were adopted by his Court were among the strangest male garments ever worn. Subsequent historians have regarded them with an unfavourable eye. 'Taste and elegance', says F. W. Fairholt, 'were abandoned for extravagance and folly.'"
"In essence the change consisted of a decreasing emphasis on the French Court style and an increasing adoption of English country clothes. There was, in short, a trend towards practicality and simplicity. Coats were plain, had narrower cuffs and the skirts were sometimes cut away in front for ease on horseback."
"This was due in no small degree to the superior skill of London tailors, trained to work in wool broadcloth. Such cloth, unlike light silk and other flimsy materials, can be stretched and moulded to the body. The clothes of the eighteenth-century aristocrat were in general very badly made and did not fit at all snugly to the body. Such snug fitting was the very essence of dandyism, and George Brummell prided himself on the fact that his clothes did not show a single wrinkle and that his breeches fitted his legs like a natural skin. Dandyism does not imply gorgeousness in male attire; the exact opposite is the case."
"The dandy was shown not only by the cut of his clothes and the snugness of his breeches but by the elaboration of his neckwear. The collar of the shirt was worn upright; the two points projected on to the cheeks and were kept in place by a neckcloth, either in the form of a cravat or a stock. Some dandies were alleged to spend a whole morning in the arrangement of their cravats... There is the well-known story of a caller visiting Brummell in the middle of the morning and finding his valet arranging his cravat. On the floor was a large heap of discarded cravats, and when the visitor inquired what they were, the valet replied, 'Sir, those are our failures.'"
"Of course the dandies, who still persisted into the 1840s, spent very much more than this. They were regarded as relics of a former, dissipated age. The dominant figure in English life was now a respectable bourgeois, who had no desire to make himself conspicuous but wished merely to present a gentlemanly appearance..."
"Like the King [Edward] himself it favoured the mature woman, cool and commanding with a rather heavy bust, the effect of which was further emphasized by the so-called 'health' corsets which, in a laudable effort to prevent a downward pressure on the abdomen, made the body rigidly straight in front by throwing forward the bust and throwing back the hips. This produced the peculiar S-shaped stance so characteristic of the period."
"As a commentator of the time remarked, 'the angular English woman, over whose lack of embonpoint papers like La Vie Parisienne have been making merry for two generations, now became accepted type of beauty."
"Young people around the globe danced to the new American rock 'n' roll music, and it was from this date that the fashion and music-industries became inextricably linked."
"The chief fashion story of the period was the miniskirt. Hemlines rose just above the knee in 1961 and had reached the upper thighs by 1966.... It was a style best suited to a skinny, pre-pubescent physique, epitomized by the schoolgirl model Lesley Hornby, known as Twiggy... The designer most often credited with introducing the 'mini' was Mary Quant..."
"The anarchic Punk style, which appeared on the streets of London during the mid-1970's, and which spread in diluted form throughout Europe and North America, was to have an enormous impact on both streetwear and high fashion. It was a style which consciously sought to shock, combining—for both sexes—black tight trousers and striped mohair sweaters with customized leather jackets and heavy-duty Doctor Marten boots. Some female Punks wore miniskirts, fishnet tights and high stiletto-heeled shoes. Fetishistic leather and rubber were an integral part of the Punk look, as were trousers with bondage straps from knee to knee, and bondage collars. Clothes were slashed and ripped, embellished with safety pins, zips and studs. T-shirts were printed with aggressive, anarchistic slogans. The most famous retail outlet for Punk garments and accessories was the shop Seditionaries in London's King's Road, run by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren..."
"American retailer The Gap, founded in San Francisco in 1969, universalized the popularity of garments such as the hooded sweatshirt and cargo pant (the latter contributing to a massive downsizing in teh denim market), making once-basic items a wardrobe staple for all generations."
James Laver (Costume and Fashion)
***To raise the dead— &/or evidence for the villainous affair, the tale of family disonour, Romish church's pact with the devil (considered the greatest outrage against sense and decency, to be plagued and pestered, though solemnly ratified, à Dieu rien n'est impossible, menteur avéré, nom d'un chien):
"Although Greek names were sometimes applied to the church modes and the principle of diatonic octave scales is found in both systems, certain significant discrepancies seem to belie any direct historical connection. Most conspicuous is the different meaning attributed to the names of the Greek octave species and of the church modes. Comparing the two systems provides a plausible explanation: medieval theorists apparently assumed wrongly that the Greek octave species were named in ascending rather than descending order. The Greek octave species Dorian (E–E), Phrygian (D–D), Lydian (C–C), and Mixolydian (B–B) thus appeared in the church modes as Dorian (D–D), Phrygian (E–E), Lydian (F–F), and Mixolydian (G–G)," (from
"Mode," entry in Brittanica, by Mieczyslaw Kolinski);
Excerpts from Aleister Crowley's Confessions:
"There is nothing to warn a fishmonger's wife that such sublime devotion to etiquette is in any way ridiculous. English society is impregnated from top to bottom with this spirit. The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbour, and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell."
"Adaptation to one's environment makes for a sort of survival; but after all, the supreme victory is only won by those who prove themselves of so much harder stuff than the rest that no power on earth is able to destroy them."
"[My father's] integrity was absolute... It was horrifying thought to him that he might be caught by the Second Advent at a moment when he was not actively and intensely engaged on the work which God had sent him into the world to do. This sense of the importance of the slightest act, of the value of every moment, has been a tragically intense factor in my life."
"My mother was naturally a rather sensual type of woman, and there is no doubt that sexual repression had driven her as nearly as possible to the borders of insanity."
"Men and women will never behave worthily as long as current morality interferes with the legitimate satisfaction of physiological needs. Nature always avenges herself on those who insult her... society is blowing up in larger or smaller spots all over the world, because it has failed to develop a system by which all its members can be adequately nourished without conflict, and the waste products eliminated without discomfort..."
"Milton was a great poet; and the subconscious artistic self of him was therefore bitterly antagonistic to Christianity. Not only is Satan the hero, but the triumphant hero... On the Christian theory, goodness is, in fact, nothing but absence of character, for it implies complete submission to God. Satan's original fault is not pride; that is secondary. It springs from the consciousness of separateness... this is, mystically speaking, sinful... Christian theology has not had sufficient logic to see..."
"The school had a long way to go. Bullying went on unchecked, the prefects being foremost offenders... concentrating on obscenity and petty tyranny. It annoyed them particularly that my conduct was irreproachable."
"The fact is that (as my brother-in-law, Gerald Kelly, once told me, with astounding insight), I was the most religious man that he had ever met. It is the inmost truth. The instinct was masked for a long time, firstly by the abominations of the Plymouth Brethren and the Evangelicals; secondly, by the normal world... and I was a Satanist... in the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi."
"It seems as if I clung to the idea of the wickedness of love, and the belief that it entailed divine retribution, partly perhaps because of my tendency to masochism... as adding actual value to sin. Pleasure as such has never attracted me."
"It is monstrous for a man to pretend to be devoted to securing his wife's happiness and yet to wish to deprive her of a woman's supreme joy: that of bearing a child to the man whom she desires sexually, and is therefore indicated by nature as the proper father, though he may be utterly unsuitable as a husband."
"We have abolished all kinds of injustice on our attention being called to them; but the result has been that we have created an artificial doctrinaire society... All classes are complaining. We are in the condition of a man whose nerves all talk at once instead of doing their work quietly."
"Material welfare is only important as assisting men towards a consciousness of satisfaction. From the nature of things, therefore, life is a sacrament; in other words, all our acts are Magical Acts."
"It is a remarkable fact that only very exceptional men retain their normal reasoning powers in presence of mountains... A high degree of spiritual development, a romantic temperament, and a profound knowledge based on experience of mountain conditions, are the best safeguards against the insane impulses and hysterical errors which overwhelm the average man."
"I had come across Von Krafft-Ebbings' Psychopathia Sexualis. The professor tries to prove that sexual aberrations are the result of disease. I did not agree."
"Swinburne had taught me the doctrine of justification by sin. Every woman that I met enabled me to affirm magically that I had defied the tyranny of the Plymouth Brethren and the Evangelicals."
"Baudelaire and Swinburne, at their best, succeed in celebrating the victory of the human soul over its adversaries... Even James Thomson, ending with 'confirmation of the old despair,' somehow defeats that despair by the essential force of his genius. Keats, on the contrary, no matter how hard he endeavours to end on a note of optimism, always leaves an impression of failure. I well know how strangely perverse this criticism must sound, but I fell its truth in the marrow of my bones."
"Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter have been treated with the foulest injustice by ignorant and prejudiced people."
"Every particle of one's personality is a necessary factor in the equation, and every impulse must be turned to account in the Great Work... I had a thorough instinctive understanding of the theory of psychoanalysis. To this fact I attribute my extraordinary success in all my spiritual undertakings."
"I made a point of putting God on His honour, so to speak, to supply anything I might need by demonstrating to him that I would not keep back the least imaginable fraction of my resources."
"Acts of Will, performed by the proper person, never fall to the ground..."
"Eckenstein business in life was mathematics and science, and his one pleasure mountaineering. He was probably the best all-round man in England, but his achievements were little known because of his almost fanatical objection to publicity."
"... my limbs posses a consciousness of their own which is infallible. I am reminded of the Shetland ponies which can find their way through the most bewildering bogs and mist."
"It is useless to have strength if you don't know how to apply it."
"I must record one adventure, striking not only in itself but because it is of a type which seems almost as universal as the flying dream. It possesses the quality of the phantasmal. It strikes me as an adventure which occurs constantly in dreams and romances of the Stevensonian order... I cannot help believing that something of the kind has happened to me, though I can not say when, or remember the incidents..."
"I ask myself whether, after all, it is not conceivable that the immense number of facts which point to intelligent control of very various energies, which claim to be so, could not be in reality an accident in the true sense of the word..."
"Ireland has been badly treated, we all know; but her only salvation lay in forgetting her nonsense."
"I see no sense in violating conventions, still less in breaking laws... On the other hand, it is impossible to make positive progress by means of institutions which lead to one becoming Lord Chancellor, and Archbishop, an Admiral, or some other flower of futility."
"It seems to me no mere accident that Cambridge was able to tolerate Milton, Byron, Tennyson, and myself without turning a hair, while Oxford inevitably excreted Shelley and Swinburne. Per contra, she suited Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde perfectly. Had they been at Cambridge, the nonsense would have been knocked out of them."
"Fate familiarised me with this psychology in another form. It breaks out every time any man speaks or acts so as to awaken the frantic fear which is inherent in all but the rarest individuals, that anything new is a monstrous menace... whatever science may say, there is such a thing as moral superiority, a spiritual strength independent of material or calculable conditions."
"The majority of old Magical Rituals are either purposely unintelligible or actually puerile nonsense... But there is one startling exception to this rule. It is the Book of the Sacred Magick of Abramelin the Mage."
"... even the crudest Magick eludes consciousness altogether, so that when one is able to do it, one does it without conscious comprehension, very much as one makes a good stroke at cricket or billiards. One cannot give an intellectual explanation... as one can explain the steps in the solution of a quadratic equation... [it] is rather an art than a science."
"There is always occult opposition to the publication of any important document... This is one of the facts whose cumulative effect makes it impossible to doubt the existence of spiritual forces."
"Magick is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts... It is above all needful for the student to be armed with scientific knowledge, sympathetic apprehension, and common sense."
"Money grubbing does its best to blaspheme and destroy nature. It is useless to oppose the baseness of humanity; if one touches pitch one runs the risk of being defiled. I am perfectly content to know that the vileness of civilisation is rapidly destroying itself; that it stinks in my nostrils tells me it is rotting... wealth, the most dangerous of narcotic drugs. It creates a morbid craving..."
"I was bound up with the welfare of humanity, and could only satisfy my aspiration by becoming a perfect instrument for the regeneration of the world."
Frank Lebon's
Grafeeti:
GRAFEETI from
Frank Lebon on
Vimeo.
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