not a snoopy

"A Johnson honors his obligations. His word is good and he is a good man to do business with. A Johnson minds his own business. He is not a snoopy, self-righteous, trouble-making person. A Johnson will give help when help is needed. He will not stand by while someone is drowning or trapped under a burning car."

From:  The Place of Dead Roads, William Burroughs


pic: here

my mobile's gone

more uses for dead books

Tower

From: here

drowns out the noise

“A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence.

I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.” 

from A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood

existential avoidance

Economics for evolved humans:


"Above the happiness threshold, the building and maintenance of per-capita economic infrastructure is pathological. It means that people keep generating more income and wealth -- eventually in the form of constant "growth" -- while their search for existential fullness stagnates. This is the pinnacle of absurdity. It illustrates a simple but extremely important fact: Once per capita economic infrastructure has exceeded the happiness threshold, an economic science that takes as its objective the continuation of that "growth" for any individual is a science of existential avoidance. Therefore, the threshold is more aptly termed the "existential-absurdity threshold." "


from: here

cosmic gag reel

The god of fundamentalists and easily-pleased atheists,
co-dependent in their efforts to keep him alive:

consider the dust

"I suddenly wake up in a trance in the church with my knees aching and a sudden realization that I've been listening to a profound buzz in my ears and head and throughout the universe, the intrinsic silence of Purity (which is Divine). I sit in the pew quietly, rubbing my knees, the silence is roaring."


"For when you realize that God is Everything you know that you've got to love everything no matter how bad it is, in the ultimate sense it was neither good nor bad (consider the dust), it was just what was, that is, what was made to appear. - Some kind of drama to teach something to someone, some 'despised substance of the divinest show'."


from Lonesome Taveler, Jack Kerouac
pic: here

difficult white space

Don't just do something, sit there:

"it's become clear that daydreaming is actually an important element of the creative process, allowing the brain to remix ideas, explore counterfactuals and turn the spotlight of attention inwards. (That's why increased daydreaming correlates with measures of creativity.) Virginia Woolf, in her novel To The Lighthouse, eloquently describes this mental process as it unfolds inside the mind of a character named Lily:

"Certainly she was losing consciousness of the outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things, her mind kept throwing things up from its depths, scenes and names, sayings, memories and ideas, life a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space.""

from: here

spring god dionysus

Lost reviews:
Germaine Greer goes mad for Zep
"For 10 years, rock and roll had been working towards something that would combine the extraordinary capacities of electronic instruments with the anarchic energy of youth, and there in the Albert Hall on January 9, 1970, I found it. The spring god Dionysus had arisen and was shaking his streaming red-gold mane on stage."
from: here
pic: here

i'd probably wither too

Tony Romano exposed the left plant only to Bob Dylan music for a few weeks, and the right to Neil Young. Hey, I’d probably wither too if I could only listen to Neil Young for weeks.

from: here

what to do with dead books

Wallpaper

from: here and here

smoke-billowing spins

"By any reasonable reckoning, in judging a great singer - as opposed to a technically great voice - we must factor in the ability to interpret a lyric. And alas, though it would be apt - and mean the world a more beautiful place - her version of I Will Always Love You is not frequently listed in the Top Ten Songs By Which To Exit Divorce Courts. Instead, with all the appropriateness of coffins taking their curtain call to Walking on Sunshine, newly married couples walk down the aisle to it every week. Somewhere, in all the showboating of vowel stretching time, the essence of the song has been so utterly lost that down means up and left means right. Which makes Whitney Houston the very definition of style over substance.

Extraordinary style, granted, that uniquely spectacular voice an instrument of peerless range and precision; no doubt, she could - should - have been one of the greatest singers of all time; could have imbued that belt, Etta style, with real feeling; could have cut out all the vocal histrionics by sitting down with a producer who’d play Olivier to her Dustin Hoffman - “Why don’t you just sing, dear girl?” - and really test herself. Instead, to return to the motoring analogy, she was like an F1 car eschewing being pushed to the limit on the track in favour of the cheap applause that comes from issuing smoke-billowing spins in closed-off city centres."

from: here
pic: Mario Anzuoni , Reuters