Let everything that’s been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.
from the film Stalker by
Andrei Tarkovsky
4 April 2012
spinningbirdkick:
Giampaolo Sgura / Interview Russia March 2012 .
30 March 2012 • 28 notes
comicbookcovers:
DC Comics Presents #59, July 1983, cover by Keith Giffen and Mike Decarlo
30 March 2012 • 85 notes
To the Throne of Chaos Where The Thin Flutes Pipe Mindlessly (Destroy All Monsters: 1974/77)
by Mike Kelley
Some thoughts on the period of transition from progressive rock to punk rock, in the form of liner notes for a three CD box set.
PART 1
Music is eternal; it is ahistorical. So says the polliwog. Music in time is Muzak: floating strains, the meaningless pap that provides the background soundtrack for other peoples lives. It lies behind those that have history, who are old. Like embarrassing cartoon music, this mush shows its age and, in an amusing way, provokes disgusted looks on the enfeebled listeners who are familiar with it, who once thought that it was impervious to cooption. How pathetic … to hear these once “hot” sounds demoted to punctuation for children’s entertainments, to be made present again … but only for the pre-adolescent. This is what happened to Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse” when applied to Bugs Bunny, when Cab Calloway crooned along with Betty Boop, and even now when Jimi Hendrix, in his death, supplies the soundtrack for today’s “adult toy” car commercial. It is said that the old always return to their original childlike state, unless they are lucky enough to die first; they sink back to the square-one level of powerlessness. This deflation in caused by the realization that one is in time. Then the potent fuck beats of your prime become limply infantile. I am speaking now from the vantage- point of the old frog. And I tell you, once you have a music history these observations are painful and obvious facts. To the young soul these are incomprehensible notions. To these naives, music is of the moment. There is evolution, but in a constant present … always in a state of becoming. Changing reactions to music, and conscious improvements in taste, are not made in reference to a time before but are simply realizations that something could, not … be different, but better. New music is an outgrowth - a living thing emerging from a vibrant parent body and not a sickly response to that which has passed away. These sad observations are provided as an around-about way to introduce the genesis of a band, a band that never was - Destroy All Monsters, and to reveal some of the problematics of that attempt.
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25 March 2012
