Frothy Folly-Fallen Harpy

Shakespearean insults you gotta love them. It's the poor joy of verbal expression. One day when somebody was swearing and my oldest daughter was still very small, I remarked to her that this swear word was rather dull and we set on inventing new ones. We spent a wonderful hour doing this. Here is the Shakespearean Insult Kit:

Two of my favourites: fawning flap-mouthed flax-wench, vain hell-hated maggot-pie

You Take What Is Yours And I Take Mine

To please a friend I gave Peter Sloterdijk's speech on Stress and Freedom a try though I knew from the outset that Sloterdijk as always would piss me off because I always get the feeling that he is a mere apologist of the status quo.

At about the same time Arvo Pärt entered my life. Since the thing about Sloterdijk's text that turned me off the most was his concept of freedom I told my friend that my idea of freedom was rather expressed or better encompassed by Arvo Pärt's Magnificat and that it was a kind of freedom that Sloterdijk would never grasp.



Later I realised that this friend of mine was arranging a salon in Berlin with Sloterdijk as a guest, he even invited me, but Berlin is further away than Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam or London ;).

 "The remuneration of the just is included in the effort itself, her/his remuneration can be found in the participation in the divine order, a remuneration of virtue by virtue itself, and, vice versa, to work because of a calling, to work like an artist." - Emmanuel Levinas, Judaism and Revolution

Takes One To Know One

There are a lot of instances where one recognises oneself in other people. It's also hilarious - or rather not - that other people who do not share the same trait misinterpret what they are witnessing. For example for a shy person it's therefore gratifying to meet somebody who instantly on meeting one for the first time perceives this shyness and poses a wonderful and positive paraphrase for what this is, as happened to my daughter. Then learning in the same instance that the person who said this knows because he is, too. In fact before I only had experienced people referring to it as something utterly negative like when I was still a small child and my parents wanted me to talk to somebody I did not know ending with the remark: "You aren't shy, are you?!"

Nothing

"...You'd have asked a manufacturer about the conditions of his factory; but nobody seems to consider the conditions under which poetry is manufactured. It's done by doing nothing." - Father Brown in The Mirror of the Magistrate by Chesterton



On a different note, there is no depiction of Father Brown whether on film or in TV that even comes close to the books. Most of them seem to settle for the quirky outward appearance of Father Brown but seem to miss that if anything he is a sort of profiler, though not exactly for he admits that he solves the crimes by committing them himself. The other topos that he is constantly in trouble with his superiors is also something that can not be found in the books, instead he states once that solving crimes or rather sins was suggested as a clerical or spiritual exersise to him.

Inbrunst - Full of Inner Fire

This is a wonderful exercise to get your spirit flying. Just sing along with the Eh Eh Eh Oh Oh Oh Ah Ah Ah Eh Eh Eh.

Home Sweet Home

Just a few kilometres down the river Rur or Roer in Dutch (different spelling the same pronunciation), the Dutch village of St Odilienberg, a view so beautiful that everytime we pass it I have to watch it realising that the beauty is so unreal, almost otherworldly

.

Paradox

I've never heard anything coming even close to it, yet Mr Pond seems to know:

"He knew enough about men to know that a man must have a friend, if possible a female friend, to talk to till all is blue."

And yet shortly before Mr Pond had declared in some length that women are notoriously bad listeners, meaning from a speech they will extract what they want to hear and forget about the rest. The one quality this friend to whom one talks to till all is blue should possess is being a good listener though - and especially in Captain Gahagan's case.

G K Chesterton 'The Paradoxes of Mr Pond' - 'The Crime of Captain Gahagan' - which turns out to be a pretty romantic one by the way.

Baroque

A source of irrepressable images - Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone

"Finally she reached the coast, where with a rod of waves the sea was whipping the cliffs because they would not answer the questions it was posing them."

Picasso

 is mentioned, yet the whole video rather screams René Magritte - Ceci n'est pas une pipe.




At the René Magritte retrospection in Düsseldorf there was a documentary about his life. The most shocking thing was learning that one night while he was still young his mother kissed him and his brothers and then drowned herself  in the local river. A traumatising experience for him because he witnessed her dead body with her nightgown wrapped around her head.
 Apart from this documentary there were also René Magritte's home movies were shown. Interesting to see Magritte and his entourage experiment with the possibilities of the medium film. There's a slight subversive humour in some of them.

Pantagruelism

If observed correctly and with the right self-assurance, it would enable one to smile - and it is this free, wonderful one from deep within - at a lot of things, especially oneself. Thinking about it maybe it even is likely to give one exactly this self-assurance so much needed in the face of adversity.

Head In the Clouds

Pantagruelism - " a certain gaiety of mind pickled in the scorn of fortuitous things" - François Rabelais

A serene attitude to life hardly found any more, yet one that would become these times so very much.

Topsy-Turvy

Not quite sure, but a different perspective is always interesting.

Greatness In Defeat

Still angry that thanks to my English teacher I did not get to see this live performed, while he did in Eindhoven in October 1988. At least we caught the performance of Richard III though. Michael Pennington as Richard II in prison finds true greatness in defeat.

Humour

"Precisely because his crime is tragic, his punishment is comic; the old popular paradoxon has returned." - The Humour of Herod, Chesterton

Rather Quick To Hell Than Slow To Heaven

or driving Flemish style

Once I had to follow a Flemish mason by car. He was going at one and a half times of the speed limit and along the way we passed several car crashes that very obviously happened because of high speed. I mean, if there is a straight road , no other car seems to have been involved and the car is lying in the ditch, this is my conclusion. The worst thing though was that we passed Leopoldsburg on the way and because it is a garrison town there were tanks riding around in the street. On the other hand there were also some wonderful landscapes, a forest and one of these wonderful Dutch drawbridges, something that would make me stop or drive slow to be able to take in the beauty, but like in a wild chase it was all flying by. At our destination when our guide got out of his car, he commented that because of us he had been driving rather slow, while I was happy that we got there in one piece.

"Liever snel naar de hell dan traag naar de hemel/ Rather quick to hell than slow to heaven" ;)

Angelhead

A song to make me go ahead. The decision whether to follow a truly nice invitation to come to Paris from an unknown friend or not, was a really hard one. Thankfully this song was on the radio and I finally made up my mind to go.



and Madstone as encore

Ex Abundantia Enim Cordis Os Loquitur

Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.

A Catholic Aesthetic Experience

Hearing this for the first time while driving my car, at first really thinking about nothing, maybe I like the beat, but then when this line comes: "The sky, it blows the clouds away", looking into this rather flat landscape with its great sky and it feels exactly like it. It almost made me stop my car, but then the beat was pushing me. This is Roland McBeth aka Roland Van Campenhout.

Mördergrube - Killers' Den

Aus seinem Herzen keine Mördergrube machen, literally to make no killers' den of one's heart, meaning 'to speak frankly', even explicitly.
Especially sensitive people are likely to be explicitly outspoken or take actions to that effect when angry. After the Second World War Anton Walbrook returned to Germany because he had been offered to star in a movie. Something he did not know was that Lida Baarova was to be his co-star. Yet as soon as he found out he got back to England and ended his involvment, the movie was never shot. I guess there were too many dead people, people that have been important to Anton, even some whose child he had been able to save, between them. Lida had her own skeleton in the closet. Yet the German media would take Baarova's side blaming Walbrook because he was unforgiving.

Because it is so beautiful: Allegedly Emeric Pressburger's favourite scene of all of his movies and also allegedly Anton's speech was not written by Pressburger but by Anton himself:

Archeology

Not so much hunting for treasures but excavating a culture hunting for lost and precious valuables,  rather mindsets like for example serenity.

Maybe

the only work by Gerhard Richter that actually gripped me by its presence - the Atlas.

Immaculate

I'm sorry Tom Barman, but of all the members of dEUS past and present Stef Kamil Carlens is the most interesting musician. While your performances are immaculate and sound exactly like the version on the album, Zita Swoon's live performances make something happen and that's what I enjoy most about them - interaction.

Gottesbeweise - Proofs of God's Existence

"Wenn Sport der Bruder der Arbeit ist, dann ist Kunst die Cousine der Arbeitslosigkeit./ If sport is the brother of labour, then art is the cousin of unemployment." - Thomas Kapielski in 'Davor kommt noch - Gottesbeweise IX-XIII'



Solo by Thomas Kapielski, the instruments they are playing are nose flutes.

What I like about Kapielski is his often revealing description of certain phenomena. For example when he called the German suffix '-In', that is used in words like StudentIn to indicate a gender neutrality because the suffix '-in' indicates the female gender, 'phallischer Binnenmajuskel/ phallic majuscule within'.

Once I Was Mistaken For a Different Fool

"I lost my lust for life and now I'm slowly losing faith in you..."

"The Lord says, Listen, boy. Come check those lines on my faces. You're thinking I'm too old to see what is going on, but I know your story."

Rebellion

White shirts pulled out of the trousers were a symbol of insurgency and deliberate provocation - Schwabing Riots June 21st - 25th 1962

The Schwabing Riots started because of the violent arrest of five street musicians on Leopoldstraße, who had been driven out the englischer Garten by the police before.

Indulgence

My English teacher gave those ones from us, who wanted to study English, a short list of books we ought to read. When it came to James Joyce his advice was to read "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" rather than "Ulysses", because it was shorter and because it is essentially what Joyce is all about.

What really stayed in my mind was the sermons of the priests how they indulged in imagining the tortures that are awaiting the sinners in hell. I was very much amused by their obsessions because they felt so alien and almost in an odd way erotic. Yet I can imagine that to some people they must have been horrifying.

Sweet Dreams Are Made of This

Vivisection

"I'm a monolith, I'm science.
I'm a big man of fifty years.
Today I cut a mouse in two
and stitched it up again.
Sometimes from the corners something is staring at me
from the shadow of the cathedral.
Everything is a riddle and I do not yet know
in which shape or in which language." - Smalfilm - Spinvis

An Important Challenge

"How do you kill and not be corrupted yourself by the killing?" - Peter Brook directing Hamlet



"The time is out of joint; oh curs'd spite that ever I was born to set it right!"

Progress

The Three-Penny-Opera I've always loved, though I usually do not like musical theater. The music by Kurt Weill and the lyrics by Bert Brecht are so pretty straightforward and catchy. Only later I realized that the lyrics of some of the songs are much older than from the 1920s, though they  seem to perfectly reflect the time. In fact they are almost verbatim taken from François Villon and date back to the 15th century.

Light In the Head

You're A Lot Like Me

This goes out to my husband and son, who especially my son had the time of their life at Graspop yesterday. For my son certainly an incentive to return next year.



There is still hope for this planet. Especially when a Syrian refugee walks up to my son, points at his t-shirt and comments: "Heavy Metal." And as a confirmation points back himself.

"You're a lot like me." So put a wetsuit on!

Strawberry Fields Forever

One day at the regretfully no longer existing local wholefood shop I noticed strawberries on sale though it was certainly not the season. So I turned enquiring to the shop owner, why she had bought them. Especially since some time before she was not offering cuccumber because at a retail price of about three Euros she deemed them too expensive. "Well", she said, "in fact I had to order strawberries on behalf of the Maharishi, and I ordered some more for the shop to see if they would sell." I said:"Oh, the Maharishi is buying here." "Yes, they order on a weekly basis, mainly because they like their pastry seasoned with honey instead of sugar and my baker puts the honey in after baking, which they prefer."

Short Term Investment

Once I was sitting in this café on the rim of a frozen lake with a wonderful Alpine panorama in the background. There were all these elegant people, who were so pretty aware of how they moved, what they wore, what they ordered, all of them the perfect epitomy of all they represented, but nobody was looking at the other, all were gazing outside. So all this was also perfectly wasted and I still wonder if they perceived what they were seeing outside or rather not, for they were so self-contained.

An Agreeable Sentiment

That rings so true at the moment. Shortly after Allen Ginsberg's death, there was a vernissage of an exhibition of photographs by Ginsberg in Düsseldorf. An exhibition that was planned with Ginsberg himself, so his last secretary, whose name escapes me, spoke at this vernissage. There were several stories he told. For example when a woman came to Ginsberg saying that she liked his poetry, but he sounded so much like a sissy, and he retorted: "That's because I am."
Yet one in particular stayed in my mind: It was shortly after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and Allen Ginsberg noticing that the cab driver was Muslim wanted to discuss this with him asking the driver for his opinion. Apparently the driver's English was not good enough. Nevertheless Ginsberg came up with this marvellous answer, an image that at least triggered my imagination: "If there was a god like this, I would climb on his head and shit on it." The secretary, who apparently was present at the time, ended by saying that he was relieved that the driver had not understood this reply.

Sensation

In the 1990s I've been to Innsbruck and we traveled there by train. In and around the main station I had the strangest sensation of a hostile coldness, something that made me want to get away from there as fast as possible. There was also a Trachtengruppe, a local costume group, running around and this added to my feeling of unease.
Some years ago I delved into the biography of Anton Walbrook and I also came across Carl Zuckmayer. In his memoirs 'Als wär's ein Stück von mir. Horen der Freundschaft' (there is an English translation entitled 'A Part of Myself. Portrait of an Epoch') he describes how he flees Austria shortly after the Anschluss by train. Innsbruck was the last stop before Switzerland and the atmosphere of despair surrounding this last stop before the safe haven was very much what I had sensed when I was there.
A Part of Myself. Portrait of an Epoch is highly recommended btw. It's a well written account of a very adventurous life, from the roaring 1920s, where Zuckmayer engaged in some pretty desperate businesses and ended up in a situation, from which a good-hearted prostitute saves him, to his time as a renowned playwright, first in Germany, then in Austria. How his flight took him to America - even a short stint as screenwriter in Hollywood is included -, where he finally settled down as farmer in Vermont. 'Horen der Freundschaft' would rather translate into 'The Horae - a monthly literary journal edited by Friedrich Schiller - of Friendship' and Zuckmayer gives a lot of attention to his friends or friendship as well. And since his lifetime was a time of great commotion, there are some really true friends and others he was deeply disappointed by. There are wonderful and most horrible stories in there. There is one friend for example who has survived a concentration camp and who refuses to have anything published about this experience. For as he states it would attract the wrong people, for in such horrible stories there lies also a fascination he would not like to evoke.

More Belgian Erotic

How could I ever forget Triggerfinger ;)?!



Ruben Block who is such a man and Whose voice reaches such heights that he is able to cover Rihanna.



Great cover and great mash up with Kashmir. They are clashing with De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig (The Youth of Today), a Dutch hip hop group, btw.

Honi Soit or This Little Devil Inside

...makes me wonder why 'Happy' was so much more globally embraced than 'Freedom', which I believed much better still because of the piano. The piano, which with its rhythm of something ticking away at once illustrates the idea of endurance and expresses - and this really pressing - the essential need for freedom now.



This is close to home at Pinkpop in Landgraaf  and Pharell Williams got laughed at because at one point he thought he was in Amsterdam, which is about 200 kilometres away.

Tourist Invasions

"Tourist invasions of tragedy stations,
Long distance callers are warning the nation.
Fisherman won't you tell me a story
Why ain't that you on the picture of glory?
Don't go down on boats that are broken.
Don't go saying that song is a token."

Funny Saint

Jacques Fesch, certainly one of the stranger people considered for beatification, but then what better saint of redemption there could be, that is if is conversion proves true. Jean-Marie Lustiger started the cause for the beatification and his German surname translates into 'funnier' or 'funny man'.

Just Let Go

Here ready to be catapulted, just release then it will be revealed if it will fly or die down.

It sounds quite easy  but then it is a chunk of yourself.

Some people liken their works of art to their children and there is some truth in it.

I Am a Fan

Sometimes fans do a lot to support the admired person or group of people:


Absynthe Minded in de afrekening! from Nathalie Dilewyns on Vimeo.

But it's only fair because of this:



But Kevin Brownlow nailed it in an interview: "If you admire somebody tremendously, there's something unsaid in the way you talk to them." - He was referring to Jackie Coogan or rather would have.

Dance With The Devils

"Are you a devil?" -

"I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely;

"and therefore have all devils in my heart." - Chesterton

Tonight Dance With The Devils

La Belgique - The Red Devils
best supporters' song so far


Also very popular with Belgian supporters:



"Its emergence as a popular sporting anthem started when, on October 22nd, 2003 supporters of Club Brugge KV overheard the song being played in a bar in Milan, while preparing to attend a UEFA Champions League group match against AC Milan and began to sing along. After a 0-1 upset win, the fans brought the song with them to Belgium, where Brugge began playing it in Jan Breydel Stadium during matches." - source wikipedia

Inevitability

When I fully realised that being happily pregnant  I inevitably had to give birth. It can be quite shocking.

Years later while visiting a professor in hospital I couldn't help remembering. I could tell that he was in a pretty bad state and shape.
"Do you know there was an experience I had, which was at once the best and the worst I ever had?" He laughed and replied doubtingly:"The best and the worst at once?!" "Yes", I grinned back, "It was giving birth to my daughter. It was horrible and at the same time I was so happy I could have died." We had another good laugh at it.

Mirror, Mirror

"...Even in that lonely hour when most it feels,
And, to itself, all, all that self reveals -
...Things light or lovely in their acted time,
But now to stern reflection each a crime,
The withering sense of evil unreveal'd
Not cankering less because the more conceal'd
...till Pride awake,
To snatch the mirror from the soul..."
The Corsair, Lord Byron

All or Nothing

All you continentals of Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, indifferent of place
All you on the numberless islands of the archipelagoes of the sea
And you of centuries hence, when you listen to me
And you, each and everywhere, whom I specify not, but include just the same
Health to you! Good will to you all - from me and America sent
For we acknowledge you all and each
Each of us inevitable
Each of us limitless - each of us with his or her right upon the earth
Each of us allowed the eternal purport of the earth
Each of us as divinely as any is here

Walt Whitman Salut au Monde

Odd Choices

At the moment there is the local Schützenfest going on and my husband and me were invited to the festive ball at the marquee yesterday. The first waltz is reserved to the Schützenkönig, the king of marksmen, and his wife. Instantly I recognised the melody and I was struck by the odd choice, for of course I imagined pictures and moods from the movie - very beautiful and decadently melancholic at the same time.



But they did not dwell long on this emotion, for the next waltz was this ;).

This Is the Story I Never Told Before

Love the way the piano is laughing at the end. There is something in it that is at the same time light and wicked. "But now you're hooked and I don't mind."

Pure Evil

This is pure evil and Ralph Fiennes manages to nail it. Wow! The way Richard almost cries when he thinks of his torments and sufferings. Great, great art!

Skip The Rope

 "As I write , the beauty and commotion of the last few days and nights flow through my body like an intoxication. For, althogh it is still in the preliminary stages of construction, I declared the new Museum van Heedendaagse Kunst (Museum for Contemporary Art) in Ghent open for the first time for an exhibition of forty artists and a retrospective of Marina Abramovic. Perhaps it might sound unusual - opening the back door when the front door isn't ready yet. But it gives me a nice feeling knowing that the museum never really has to be finished, as it were. In other words, that it should never be dead, never be a tomb for art or a nicely paved passageway only for the elite connoisseurs and collectors of art." _ Jan Hoet, A Yardstick or a Step in Flemish and Dutch Painting - From Van Gogh, Ensor, Magritte and Modrian to contemporary artists

 The Museum van Heedendaagse Kunst was later renamed S.M.A.K.!


SKIP THE ROPE das pop from caviar brussels on Vimeo.