luka
Well-known member
read this
Athens on the wall and the fall in Rome on the routes straight through Byzantium and crumbling cakes in Papal States.
But good faces evoke good artists - and conversely a decline of portraiture usually means a decline of the face, a theory which can now be illustrated by photographs in the daily papers.
Or, the force of something abject like worship.
The portal to the soul or the shivering, snivelling, snide shit hiding inside, the heretic and the hermit, the hoarder, also one not fooled by the trials and lies of heroism, which is paradoxically heroic, in open refutation of the remnants of courtly love and law. No, that's wrong, there's nothing left to refute, language slips into slang, jargon and profanity, meshwork, crossdialect, we'll say anything in front of anyone, break a sentence, start a paragraph at any point, say the worst, and then, what's worse, there is no sex, no violence, no symbol, simile or metaphor, there is just the block of code, and aimless contempt, or lack of thought, or the filtered remains, flaccid and multifunctional.
I don't want to have to break out of code to explain what I'm trying to say or, more to the point, I don't want to have to decode to make things clear, or if we are going to be clear, let's be crystal clear. Or: let us not be as clear as glass, unless you mean cut-glass or frosted glass.
Back into my cave, with my lovely tail, to learn to breath fire, to burn the sand, blacken my boring walls, condemn the elements, and scale the skies.
All damage, image and desire, wrecks and burnouts clung to, a burning beauty, incandescent, admired behind a double-glaze of glass, a dire detachment. As you lean towards this fused bulb, a blood-struck grey moth, you learn that love is illegitimate, the eminence of idols a fraud. You're not its victim: but the Object, it has lost control.
Barbara kept her cocaine in a golden casket on the grand piano; her opium was the finest grade Benares blend...She boasted of never wasting more than two hours on sleep a night - she had "better things to do." She did, indeed, have lovers by the dozens - "like roses" she said...The film titles of "Too Beautiful" Barbara read like a litany: Souls for Sale, Strangers of the Night, The White Moth. Her last incarnation as a femme fatale was in The Heart of a Siren. Her own heart was stopped soon after by a suicidal OD. The studio blamed her death on "too rigorous dieting".
Faith is usually flawed, but fear can be divine. Belief is a kind of brute force, certainty consolidated like a castle wall. But doubt is tender, understands the temporal, follows the seasons and climes, embarks on the nomadic quest, the search for rhythm in constant change. Both lay claim to instinct: one petrifies the most prominent instinct whatever the cost; the other teases apart and intertwines every instinct that arises, whether they compliment or contradict. The fickle fan knows more than the devout worshiper.
Early Hollywood studio stars, they're terrified little animals. Given everything including the knowledge that it's more delicate, even, than their own egos. And that they are on the receiving end of mass, inhuman adulation that can only remove them from the world, isolate them further inside or amongst themselves, on the Californian hills or in San Fran bolt-holes. Between each glittering party, each orgy or drug binge inside the splendor of black marble, black leather and tigerskin rooms, immersed in opulence and extravagance unrivaled (not unprecedented), between the high-profile trysts, beyond the wardrobe bill, the Kissel Convertible and canary-yellow Pierce Arrow, the vast yacht and the vintage cruiser, beyond this there is
there is always a failure, a suicide. Maybe as perfect as any film role. Certainly the New World aristocracy can never forget them. Like Gwili Andre, whose noble, sculpted beauty failed to launch a legend, public and critical indifference cut so deep that she burned herself to death on a pyre of her own press clippings. Or Peg Entwistle, diving to doom from the D of the Hollywood sign. These stars and starlets played the best roles in their real lives, in courtrooms, or on death beds. Someone escapes a former family life with all its duties and constraints, swaps identity, becomes a famous director, also lothario, and is then murdered. A silent movie actress does not survive the double disaster of talkies and the depression, ends her life in total obscurity, driving New York cabs.
Athens on the wall and the fall in Rome on the routes straight through Byzantium and crumbling cakes in Papal States.
But good faces evoke good artists - and conversely a decline of portraiture usually means a decline of the face, a theory which can now be illustrated by photographs in the daily papers.
Or, the force of something abject like worship.
The portal to the soul or the shivering, snivelling, snide shit hiding inside, the heretic and the hermit, the hoarder, also one not fooled by the trials and lies of heroism, which is paradoxically heroic, in open refutation of the remnants of courtly love and law. No, that's wrong, there's nothing left to refute, language slips into slang, jargon and profanity, meshwork, crossdialect, we'll say anything in front of anyone, break a sentence, start a paragraph at any point, say the worst, and then, what's worse, there is no sex, no violence, no symbol, simile or metaphor, there is just the block of code, and aimless contempt, or lack of thought, or the filtered remains, flaccid and multifunctional.
I don't want to have to break out of code to explain what I'm trying to say or, more to the point, I don't want to have to decode to make things clear, or if we are going to be clear, let's be crystal clear. Or: let us not be as clear as glass, unless you mean cut-glass or frosted glass.
Back into my cave, with my lovely tail, to learn to breath fire, to burn the sand, blacken my boring walls, condemn the elements, and scale the skies.
All damage, image and desire, wrecks and burnouts clung to, a burning beauty, incandescent, admired behind a double-glaze of glass, a dire detachment. As you lean towards this fused bulb, a blood-struck grey moth, you learn that love is illegitimate, the eminence of idols a fraud. You're not its victim: but the Object, it has lost control.
Barbara kept her cocaine in a golden casket on the grand piano; her opium was the finest grade Benares blend...She boasted of never wasting more than two hours on sleep a night - she had "better things to do." She did, indeed, have lovers by the dozens - "like roses" she said...The film titles of "Too Beautiful" Barbara read like a litany: Souls for Sale, Strangers of the Night, The White Moth. Her last incarnation as a femme fatale was in The Heart of a Siren. Her own heart was stopped soon after by a suicidal OD. The studio blamed her death on "too rigorous dieting".
Faith is usually flawed, but fear can be divine. Belief is a kind of brute force, certainty consolidated like a castle wall. But doubt is tender, understands the temporal, follows the seasons and climes, embarks on the nomadic quest, the search for rhythm in constant change. Both lay claim to instinct: one petrifies the most prominent instinct whatever the cost; the other teases apart and intertwines every instinct that arises, whether they compliment or contradict. The fickle fan knows more than the devout worshiper.
Early Hollywood studio stars, they're terrified little animals. Given everything including the knowledge that it's more delicate, even, than their own egos. And that they are on the receiving end of mass, inhuman adulation that can only remove them from the world, isolate them further inside or amongst themselves, on the Californian hills or in San Fran bolt-holes. Between each glittering party, each orgy or drug binge inside the splendor of black marble, black leather and tigerskin rooms, immersed in opulence and extravagance unrivaled (not unprecedented), between the high-profile trysts, beyond the wardrobe bill, the Kissel Convertible and canary-yellow Pierce Arrow, the vast yacht and the vintage cruiser, beyond this there is
there is always a failure, a suicide. Maybe as perfect as any film role. Certainly the New World aristocracy can never forget them. Like Gwili Andre, whose noble, sculpted beauty failed to launch a legend, public and critical indifference cut so deep that she burned herself to death on a pyre of her own press clippings. Or Peg Entwistle, diving to doom from the D of the Hollywood sign. These stars and starlets played the best roles in their real lives, in courtrooms, or on death beds. Someone escapes a former family life with all its duties and constraints, swaps identity, becomes a famous director, also lothario, and is then murdered. A silent movie actress does not survive the double disaster of talkies and the depression, ends her life in total obscurity, driving New York cabs.
