A dream to some, a nightmare to others: sex, magic and myth on the set of Excalibur https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/dream-nightmare-others-sex-magic-myth-set-excalibur/
Excalibur’s Ending. https://youtu.be/XwK90ecdrXg via @YouTube
The final scene is definitely in my TOP SEVEN movie endings.
Beethoven: Sonata No.16 in G Major, Op.31 No.1 (Kovacevich, Goode) https://youtu.be/q7LXQVxd6xA via @YouTube
The first Op.31 sonata is by far and away the funniest of all Beethoven’s 32 sonatas, and it’s kind of hard to explain why it isn’t one of the most famous of them all: all the movements feature attractive melodies, and it brims with good humour from the subtle to the ironically crass. You’ve got the first movement, where the hands can’t play together and the development is built almost entirely around an apparently inconsequential motif, the second, which is a joyfully overlong and increasingly absurd parody of (bad) Italian opera, and the third, full of wily chromatic movement and wry counterpoint.
HAPPY 250TH ANNIVERSARY
REVOLT – Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry
I would shake off the lethargy of this our time,
and give
For shadows—shapes of power
For dreams—men.
“It is better to dream than do”?
Aye! and, No!
Aye! if we dream great deeds, strong men,
Hearts hot, thoughts mighty.
No! if we dream pale flowers,
Slow-moving pageantry of hours that languidly
Drop as o’er-ripened fruit from sallow trees.
If so we live and die not life but dreams,
Great God, grant life in dreams,
Not dalliance, but life!
Let us be men that dream,
Not cowards, dabblers, waiters
For dead Time to reawaken and grant balm
For ills unnamed.
Great God, if we be damn’d to be not men but only dreams,
Then let us be such dreams the world shall tremble at
And know we be its rulers though but dreams!
Then let us be such shadows as the world shall tremble at
And know we be its masters though but shadow!
Great God, if men are grown but pale sick phantoms
That must live only in these mists and tempered lights
And tremble for dim hours that knock o’er loud
Or tread too violent in passing them;
Great God, if these thy sons are grown such thin ephemera,
I bid thee grapple chaos and beget
Some new titanic spawn to pile the hills and stir
This earth again.
EZRA POUND (from Poems and Translations
I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal to the bellows
Of Experience (Mina Loy)
… as I continue to search for my fugitive director …
WALES – POPULATION 3.2 MILLION COVID19 DEATHS 1,543
Hold My Beer@holdmyale·1hHold my beer while I do a flip. https://pic.twitter.com/A6eeXtOyBr
(AS I CONTINUE TO FOLLOW MY FUGITIVE STAG)
The Annotated “Songs to Joannes,” by Mina Loy (1917)
XIII
Come to me There is something
I have got to tell you and I can’t tell
Something taking shape
Something that has a new name
A new dimension
A new use
A new illusion
It is ambient And it is in your eyes
Something shiny Something only for you
Something that I must not see
It is in my ears Something very resonant
Something that you must not hear
Something only for me
Let us be very jealous
Very suspicious
Very conservative
Very cruel
Or we might make an end of the jostling of aspirations
Disorb inviolate egos
Where two or three are welded together
They shall become god
— — — — — — — —
Oh that’s right
Keep away from me Please give me a push
Don’t let me understand you Don’t realise me
Or we might tumble together
Depersonalized
Identical
Into the terrific Nirvana
Me you — you — me
Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away; for TRUTH HAS STUMBLED IN THE PUBLIC SQUARES, and uprightness cannot enter.” Isaiah 59:14
WE MUST NOT LET THE LIARS WIN …
From H.D.’s poem ‘Ancient Wisdom speaks to the Mountain’ (III)
Her cloak is very old
yet blue as the blue-poppy,
blue as the flax in flower:
and not an hour passed
in our torment
but she thought of us:
she did not change,
the mountain changed from gold to violet,
as the sun rose and set:
she knew our fear,
and yet she did not falter
nor cast herself in anguish by the river:
but she stood,
the sun on her hair
or the snow on her blue hood:
winter and summer,
summer and winter
. . . again . . . again . . .
never forgetting
but remembering
our peculiar desolation:
I will stand here, she said to the mountain,
that even you must start awake, aware
that beauty can endure:
her cloak is very, very old
and blue . . .
H. D. (1943)
Maybe another theme to close my ruminations for today? Different ways in which I am ‘expecting ‘… and maybe an unknown collective to which I belong?
I wonder what he would paint if he were alive in the Summer of 2020?
Die Erwartung or ‘The Expectation’ is his most important and famous work. It depicts a group of people staring into an empty landscape with their backs to the observer. It is regarded by many to be a fundamental picture in the history of painting – although, one of the men is looking towards us …
Carolyn Burke comments on Expectation‘s ominous mood: “it is impossible not to see in the work the years of its composition, 1935-1936, and in the mute backs of its Magritte-like subjects bourgeois refugees already on their way to the death camps.”
The Fugitive Stag 