Emil Nolde, The Sea B, 1930

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Seated Dancer in Pink Tights, 1890

TV on the Radio, Wolf Like Me

Born this day

Earth from a million miles away by Deep Space Climate Observatory (Dscovr)

On this day in 1969 Neil Armstrong was the first human to walk on the moon.

Photo of Buzz Aldrin by Neil Armstrong, 21 July 1969

September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return. 

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Born this day

Edgar Degas, Dancer, 1877

ISS Expedition 44

This Soyuz-FG rocket, with 26 million horsepower, is scheduled to launch Soyuz TMA-17M into space on 22 July 2015.

David Hockney, Pearblossom Hwy., 11 - 18th April 1986, #2, 1986

Charon taken by New Horizons on 14 July 2015

Pluto taken by New Horizons on 13 July 2015

Pablo Picasso & Gjon Mili, Light Drawings, 1949

How Is Your Heart? by Bukowski

during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
whores
I always had this certain
contentment-
I wouldn't call it
happiness-
it was more of an inner
balance 
that settled for
whatever was occuring
and it helped in the
factories
and when relationships 
went wrong
with the 
girls. 
it helped 
through the
wars and the
hangovers
the backalley fights
the 
hospitals. 
to awaken in a cheap room
in a strange city and
pull up the shade-
this was the craziest kind of
contentment

and to walk across the floor
to an old dresser with a 
cracked mirror- 
see myself, ugly,
grinning at it all. 
what matters most is
how well you 
walk through the
fire.

Royal Academy of Arts: Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei, Study of Perspective - Tiananmen, Bejing, China, 1993-2005

"Jacqueline Roque (24 February 1927 – 15 October 1986) is best known as the muse and second wife of Pablo Picasso. Their marriage lasted 11 years until his death, during which time he created over 400 portraits of her, more than any of Picasso's other loves." ~ Wikipedia

Pablo Picasso, Femme assise (Jacqueline), 1962

Werner Knaupp, Westmännerinseln, 2011

Konstantin Kalynovych, Museum of Clouds, 2000

Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust

Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Tilly Losch), 1935 - 1938

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Into My Arms

Born this day

"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." ~ Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka, The Thinker, 1913