oh and also also i saw la grazia last week. the consequences of love is one of my favourite films. il divo is pretty damn good, l’amico di famiglia pretty damn good too.
but what is going on with his horrendous sentimentality? it drowns a politician ffs in ill-deserved honey. this is a weird, fantastical counterblast to the right-wing, populist conjuncture.
but he knows how to make a film, perhaps over relies on Tony Servillo’s admittedly amazing face. and it’s fun!
main enjoyment was having a conversation and a drink with my good friend colonel alphie after to discuss it.
cannelloni was very successful! and the asparagus is making an appearance in the market. green barley risotto with peas and asparagus was the consequence. no other photos of an actual life lived ofc.
oh and an extremely successful pommes boulangères – the best thing I’ve eaten this year I think?
a reflection so forceful at the centre of oneself that it feels sententious
The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy.
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hilltop by the finger-post;
The smoke of the traveller’s-joy is puffed
Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.
I read the sign. Which way shall I go?
A voice says: You would not have doubted so
At twenty. Another voice gentle with scorn
Says: At twenty you wished you had never been born
Edward Thomas – The Signpost
Ah well, I remember walking in the dark up the incline by the mill and thinking aged 17 ‘if it all stopped now I would be ok with that.’ A nonsense. But a nonsense I still feel.
Reading Robert Southwell’s Humble Supplication and its language is surgically applicable to our days:
Yet when they see your Soueraigne stile soe abused to th’authorizing of Fictions, that the Magistrates of your whole Realme, must generally soothe* things soe directly disproved by common sence, and contrary to their own and all mens knowledg, it cannot but be a torment to their Christian mynds…
*_soothe_. ‘To maintain or put forward a lie as being true’
Braudel from his Grammaires des Civilisations describes significant elements comprising the heavily used notion of ‘civilisation’:
La notion de civilisation, en effet, et au moins double. Elle désigne, à la fois, des valeurs morales et des valeurs matérielles.
And perhaps it is true that these go together. That is after all the argument of capitalism. In a discussion with a Marxist recently – fwiw I consider myself a part-time Marxist, the universally and correctly despised Laodicean in other words – that good Marxist said that people did not know what was good for them and needed instructing, a sentiment that increasingly I despise – telling people what they actually want is a disgusting habit, like telling people what they should like or enjoy. still, activities need to be co-ordinated to be able to live together.
Listening? Saw Avalon Emerson who was fantastic actually:
Johnny Blue Skies and the Dark Clouds is an immensely entertaining album:
he’s right to channel that ’70s sex-funk country style to tackle the current conjuncture, the US problem seems intensely psychosexual actually Matty Y
Something people don’t talk about so much these days is that in post-WW2 America, people took Freudian psychoanalysis very seriously for some reason.
