Comments closedStretching his eyes so wide that they shot out sparks into the abyss, forming seven new solar systems in the process, he glared at the doomed earth below.
Category: quotes
The barricades are a dangerous place for an artist. They’re a trap. They ruin your vision, narrow your pupils, drain the world of its true colours. On the barricades, everything is black and white. You can’t see individuals, all you see are black dots: targets.
SECOND HAND TIME, Svetlana Alexievich
Comments closedThe priests did as they liked – Moctezuma had given them too much power – and now they could scarcely put two and two together, afflicted with the shakes from excess consumption of leg of sacrificial victim, and high as kites from stuffing themselves with mushrooms, cacti and magic tomatoes.
YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES (UK) (US+)
Comments closedComments closed…we can simply wait for the end of the world, the universe, the whole, the Something, and we shall perish, but there is no need to wait for apocalypse, for we must understand—Florian wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin—that apocalypse is the natural state of life, the world, the universe, and of the Something, the apocalypse is now, Mrs. Chancellor, this is what we have been living in for billions of years and in comparison to the Beginning it is nothing…
Comments closed…the term ‘studio’ derives from a verb as well as a noun. Studiolo denoted the scholar’s study or cabinet, but there was also studiare, linked to a certain kind of diligent or pleasurable work, which could take place anywhere. The word ‘studio’ was not used to describe the workplace of an artist until the late 17th century in Italy, and in Britain only from the 19th century, by which time the studio was already breaking out of its familiar four walls and beginning to move (quite literally, if we think of Charles-François Daubigny’s floating workspace on the river). Some studios, like Moreau’s, sloughed off any pretence of domesticity and achieved cavernous proportions. At the 1937 Paris World Fair, where the European dictatorships faced off against one another in monumental combat, Nazi Germany’s pavilion was guarded by a trio of bronze beefcakes (one female) sculpted by Josef Thorak. At once camp and creepy, and standing 22 feet tall, Comradeship was produced in Thorak’s atelier near Munich, designed by Albert Speer. The world’s largest studio, it could accommodate a Zeppelin.
Comments closedArt in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.
RICHARD HUELSENBECK (1892–1974) was a Dada drummer, famous for loud, invented African chants ending in ‘Umba! Umba!’, and in later life a New York psychoanalyst, trading under the name of Dr Charles R. Hulbeck.
New word!
Comments closedThéōsis, “becoming divine”: a path followed as much by certain pagans as by certain Christians.
In 1415, the practice of artificially “multiplying” precious metals was illegal in England and Wales. The prohibition did not prevent one alchemist from setting up his furnace at the priory of Hatfield, near the town of Chelmsford in Essex, a subordinate priory of the great Benedictine abbey of St. Albans. The alchemist, William Morton, was not a member of the religious community, but a “wooleman” from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who had established a collaborative relationship with the former prior. Morton and his business partners, who included both religious and laymen, used the priory not only as a site for alchemical practice, but also as a platform for more ambitious bids for patronage. Their goal was to make two alchemical powders, or elixirs: one for transmuting “red” metals, such as copper and brass, into gold; the other for turning “white” metals, including lead and tin, into silver.
Just up the road from me there was once a working alchemist. Closer by, there was once a cunning man.
Comments closedComments closedThe cost of bullshit has dropped exponentially. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) – marketed as “artificial intelligence” – has created a sort of bullshit singularity: infinite bullshit at zero-cost.