Who Dares

to wave the flag of topsyturvydom?!

Damned (Funny)

This (Germanic) fondness for the darkly murmuring - Nobody loves me!
King Solomon's advice would be swift: 'Love' (cf. Boccaccio's Decamerone)

Prophet

"You don't know me from the wind." - The Future, Leonard Cohen

The Future

Celebrating the 500th anniversary of the release of Thomas More's Utopia, Stijn Vranken was asked to look into the future. This is what he saw last Tuesday afternoon.



First the far future:

Dystopia

This parade of always us, us, us, again, by our
desire joined bodies, nonchalantly draped
around the genes, will this untameable circus
ever hold

As if it were half a heartbeat

To move this far too many headed forward, organ
against organ, skull against skull, palate against
palate, fishing for the bad tasting root
of this joke

One shouldn't even try

Just for once not embracing ourselves,
one second of supernatural doubt, to tangibly know
that we are elusive, unforeseeably wild, and
will but do one thing: always more precisely not escape

Yet this far future is contrasted with the near one, which could be saved by the following:

Monday: Love me (5x)
Tuesday: Love to see me (5x)
Wednesday: Be fond of me (5x)
Thursday: Believe me to be smashing (5x)
Friday: Cherish me (5x)
Saturday: Just leave me alone, do something nice, go shopping, buy all my books, but (important) miss me (5x)
Sunday: Coddle me (5x)

Divided by a Common Language

This little bit



reminded me of this movie.



Apart from lingual differences it also features Batman and Robin - sort of.

Utter

bare nakedness

Prophets of Doom

Always keeping up a certain degree of excitement.



But there are other ways to deal with real problems.

Pure Evil

Once a boy trod down a grashopper and when I asked him why he did it. He replied: Because it was stupid.

On Second Sight

On the one hand the 'opium of the people', on the other the threat of a judgment day.

Some Moral

"Distrust those malevolent spirits who speak flatteringly to you. They are not benevolent, if they were, they would be more likely to beat you about the head." - Chesterton

Crossing the Echo Chamber

Turning around in the central nave there suddenly appear the pipes of a gigantic organ but crossing them - even more powerful - are rays of light in the incense-impregnated air.

Is It Possible

 Probably a concept that might be called 'unalienated'.

Kevelaer

Some people do embrace different and colourful cultures, like the local priest in Kevelaer the Catholic and Hindu Tamil pilgrims.



Today it's our turn to go there.

Manipulation

- 'a handful' from Latin 'manus/ hand' and 'plere/to fill'

Chutzpah

Abraham haggling with the Lord about Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18;16-33. What a funny scene, at least I had to smile when I listened to it being related.

"Sh*t, dat was mijn halte/ Sh*t, that was my station."

Today is Car Free Day in Belgium and Studio Brussel treats people with live music on the public transport.

Two years ago Intergalactic Lovers played on a train and the above is the final audible sentence.



Love the landscape, it feels like home.

From Bad to Worse ;)

He simply wanted to paint a comet ;).



And instead of 'Het spijt me veel/I'm very sorry.' his message reads 'Het spuit mij vol/ It bespatters me.'

Cause I Believe in You

...in people and community.

There is a lot I like about this song. It was this song that had somebody singing so impressively about home. And Renaud does things with his violin that I'd call unusual.

And yet Tom Lanoye's speech about 'Nu Nog/ Yet Encore' is the climax on top of a song that already offers a climax - in fact so hard that its final beats in Genk hit me in my stomach at the time.

I Have To Make It Up Some

After stealing/ quoting from Michael Pennington's play on Anton Checkhov, I feel compelled to make it up to him.

So I highly recommend his latest effort as an author: King Lear in Brooklyn, and from the same publisher there's also Are You There, Crocodile?, which apart from the entire text of his one-man-show as Anton Checkhov also contains some insights in the origins of his play.



I'd love to see him in some blockbuster again ;)!

Reason

"The peasant and his wife have decorated their walls with sweet wrappers and vodka labels, and someone's painted a tree on the door growing out of a vase, and some red flowers that look more like fish. The demand for art is here, but the good Lord has sent no artists. How can a peasant think of art? For nine months of the year he can't even take off his mittens and straighten his fingers, and when the summer comes his back aches with labour.
...
- ... Now, your Honour, what I want to make plain to you is this. Here in Siberia people have darkened minds. They can't make anything, they can't even fish. It's a crying shame, because a Siberian's a good man. He's soft-hearted and honest and he doesn't drink - he's a treasure, not a man, but his life is wasting, like a mosquito, or a fly. What's he living for, your Honour?

- Well, I suppose he works and eats and clothes himself. What more does a man want?

- Your Honour. A human being is not a horse."

Anton Chekhov

The Whole Picture

If requested the Flemisch parts could be translated.

Advocatus Diaboli II

"There's enough for everybody's need, but not enough for everybody's greed."

Coming to think of the fact that there is a whole industry that is but creating 'needs'. So I definitely wonder if all of these can be met.

Balance

conflicting emotions  - sometimes they inspire

Advocatus Diaboli

these deep, dark feelings

"There's enough for everybody's need, but not enough for everybody's greed."

Be careful there are some sounds that could make your ears hurt, but quite to the point.

The Barefoot Diva

Lie Down and Listen

The Merits of Subversiveness

This marks the first time that Jacques Tati as Monsieur Hulot made me laugh very, very hard - and it is an image/movement/technique that remained in my mind.



Why do we try so hard?!

A Good Eye

for the absurdity of modern life paired with a deep love for humanity, probably life in all its strange, funny, amiable ways and not least some melancholy for the old-fashioned way of life - the wonderful and brilliant Jacques Tati

I Tend to Slightly Disagree

 ...about the draughtsman.


Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans from Royal Academy of Arts on Vimeo.

To me James Ensor is foremostly a Colourist painter. His paintings are simply magnificent, especially when it comes to colour. No wonder - he admired William Turner a lot. I sincerely hope that "Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889" is on display, but then the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, wouldn't let go of it for the retrospective at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels in 1999.

Miserable Or Rather Bored

Or better yet - miserable because bored.

Experiencing a wonderful feast in Italy, where all the rich people present only felt bored at the beauty that was surrounding them, the band called themselves 'The Miserable Rich'.

In the 1920s working at a privately owned theatre in Frankfurt, Max Ophüls tried hard to entertain the millionaires who were sitting in lounge chairs judging his interpretation of a play in the light of a production of the same play they've attented the week before in New York.

Learning

"Laughter is as divine as tears." - Chesterton

Even more so if it teaches us the facts.


HIV: The Musical from Joseph Patrick on Vimeo.

And Tim Bunn and Joseph Patrick are some great filmmakers - I just wished, O powers that be, they had some more opportunity.

"You probably

...won't be able to make a living, but you make a life." - Wayne Thiebaud

The Rhythm of Life II

Or is it?


gonzales - working together from mike sabounchi on Vimeo.

Good Riddance

Comparing "America" by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan with "I am Europe" by Canadian musician Chilly Gonzales, I prefer the art that needs less to create.

Just For the Fun of It

Balance

"Thou, O king, sawst, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible.
This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and arms of silver, his belly and thighs of brass,
His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay." Daniel 2; 31-33

The Latest Fad

Always looking for the latest sensation to capture maybe that emotion one had on discovering the world anew. There is something childish and outworn hiding in this attitude.
Conversely one could try to be more childlike, like actually discovering everything anew on any given day. See how fresh and ancient the world can be.



This is to my namesake Daan, who also happens to be one day my junior.

The Rhythm of Life

"Der Rhythmus wo ich immer mit muß/ The rhythm I need to join in."

Eyes

If you look into somebody else's eyes, you may perceive his or her soul and yet at the same time these eyes will be perceiving you too.


DAAN - Brenner from Luc De Brouwer on Vimeo.

There is an awful lot of non-verbal communication going on.

Give me miraculous eyes to see my eyes,
Those rolling mirrors made alive in me,
Terrible crystal more incredible
Than all the things they see.*

* excerpt from THE SWORD OF SURPRISE by  G. K. Chesterton

Zukunftsangst - Anxiety About the Future

for lack of a horizon


DAAN - Brenner from Luc De Brouwer on Vimeo.

This Just

...made my day ;)!

Horizon

In how far do the choices we take depend on the horizon we perceive, if we perceive one at all?!

"There's a Lesson

...that I teach: tien keer sneller met de fiets (ten times faster by bike)."

Dedication Devotion

in a loving rage that pleases the soul

Grant Pause

Photograph From September 11th by Wislawa Szymborska

They jumped from the burning floors
One, two, a few more,
higher, lower.

The photograph halted them in life
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.

Each still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden

There's enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.

They're still within the air's reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened

I can only do two things for them -
describe this flight
and not add a last line.

Absurd

"I'm already as good as dead. My life has been forfeited, somehow. Yes, I've killed somebody and as far as I've read this results in my life being forfeited."
"When I do not come to terms with all of this I couldn't live on. One limits people's possibilities and at the same time one wants people to change for the better. Therein lies the absurdity of prisons."



Here is an interesting discussion about wether evil is male in German. On the one side there is a scholar, on the other somebody who is a prison physician and part-time actor. The practitioner has at least in my view the better arguments.

Caught Off Guard

...when I heard this song playing on the radio, it reminded me that it's World Suicide Prevention Day today.

When Our Laughs Were Genuine

The laugh at the end is so infectious and it rings so true, after just having recited some Latin in the ruins of Leptis Magna. This despite the fact that Rudi Vranckx is a war correspondend and that he is reporting about the fight against ISIS in Lybia at that moment and shortly before he and his team had attended the funeral of a young man, who had fought against ISIS.

No Hesitation

lest it is intrinsic.

And that is about the hardest part: "..., but the words have never been said or thought by any actor before."

The Comfort of Strangers

...can be supportive some times. First I had to comfort him a little bit for I had bought a video from him via amazon's marketplace and amazon had been threatening him since he did not respond immediately to their emails. I told him that he would get a five star feedback if my purchase arrived in a reasonable amount of time, which could be up to two or three weeks. Then I was really glad to have somebody with whom I could communicate for a while, somebody who would tell me things about his life as a gardener in Oxford and me being able to discuss some of my wilder thoughts and ideas with him - an accidental penpalship.

The strangest request I ever got though, was when it still was possible on ebay to contact other members directly: A woman wondered if I was interested in a photograph of Anton Walbrook's grave since she had noticed that I was interested in him. I replied by sending her a photograph of the grave featuring a friend of mine and taken by Kevin Brownlow. In the end this resulted for both of us in a quite extensive collection of Walbrook's movies on DVD.

Strange

Why is it that when some muscles at my rear are aching when I make certain moves and the pain emenates even down to my leg, this makes me strangely happy, forcing me to smile kind of insanely, like maybe the slight pain reminding one that one is still gloriously alive.

Sehnsucht

- "die Krankheit des schmerzlichen Verlangens/ the disease of painfully longing"

And there is nothing as painful as longing for your home, where there are the people you care for and the people who care for you. And more painful yet to sit on the wrong side, the right one, of the river Rhine and watching across, being so close that only the water seperates one from the land of dreams and knowing at the same time that one has to return to Westphalia again.

Appearance and Demeanour

doesn' depend on what you are wearing, at least not in the more interesting people.

Insolence

the creative process

The Frenchman and The Heart of the Matter

described by Graham Greene in Brighton Rock is Charles Péguy.

"The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity. No one is more competent to understand Christianity - no one, except the saint." Charles Péguy

Wonderful and Appalling

strange and beautiful

"'There was a man, a Frenchman, you wouldn't know about him, my child, who had the same idea as you. He was a good man, a holy man, and he lived in sin all through his life, because he couldn't bear the idea that any soul  could suffer damnation... This man decided that if any soul was going to be damned, he would be damned too. He never took the sacrament, he never married his wife in church. I don't know, my child, but some people think he was - well, a saint. I think he died in what we are told is mortal sin - I'm not sure: it was in the war: perhaps...You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the...appalling...strangeness of the mercy of God.... It was a case of greater love hath no man than this that he lay down his soul for his friend...The church does not demand that we believe that any soul is cut from mercy.'" - Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

Identity III

What if the things we can truly call ourselves is just our mistakes, our flaws?!



the most beautiful thought of them all - adorable

Identity II

Another aspect: "That picture you've been painting doesn't look a thing like you. I'll agree that it's a nice try, but, when your paint is dry, we're all just little icons, super you and super I."



The man in black, who is just another icon, doesn't leave us with this pessimistic view, because there is this solution he offers and one that more than suits me. There is hopefully this 'pretty angel', the person who loves us for ourselves.

Identity I

Identity - since it is also related to authenticity, which is a great topic in art, it is certainly something of interest.

in the traumatic event

Problem

"I think the oddest thing about advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly a notion of what a real problem is." - Chesterton

Yesterday sitting in a restaurant in Aachen suddenly ambulances, the police and several fire engines were rushing outside and stopped at the house opposite. The street was blocked, a fire ladder was extended, yet nothing seemed to have happened, but us having wonderful food and some entertainment - Thank God!

Koning Liefde

"You simply hope that your music reaches people. That they like it and then giving something back in this way, that's simply fantastic.

Give me time to reflect, le bilan, I was glad that I had a place in life, doubting and asking questions and still learning, righting mistakes and trying to change the tide. I can only give what I have to offer. I can only tell the little I know. I've been bargaining - opportunist, but you do not negotiate with love." - Tourist LeMC