Albinoni or Giazotto?

Tomaso Albinoni, Adagio in G minor, ~1708

John Brack, The Bar, 1954

John Brack, Collins St., 5 pm, 1955

End of Summer by Stanley Kunitz

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
 
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
 
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
 
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.

Hand with Reflecting Sphere

Left version (original) by M. C. Escher, right version by Katsuhiro Otomo

Shohei Otomo

"I love you more when you're angry with me, because you're so boring when you're nice."

Slaves, White Knuckle Ride

Written when he was only 16.

I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men. – For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul – which was rich to begin with – more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!

Arthur Rimbaud, Letter of the Seer, 15 May 1871

RIP John Donne

Christopher Wren & Nicholas Stone, Monument to John Donne, St Paul's Cathedral

Terrifying. Reality is often scarier than fiction.

Ed Yong: Suicidal wasps, zombie roaches and other parasite tales

The For Carnation, Emp. Man's Blues

Camille Saint-Saëns, Danse Macabre, 1875

And Death Shall Have No Dominion by Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon; 
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot; 
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; 
Though lovers be lost love shall not; 
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily; 
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break; 
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through; 
Split all ends up they shan't crack; 
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores; 
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain; 
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; 
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion. 

RIP you old bastard. 20 years in the grave.

Source

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Up Above My Head, early 1960s

"Both English and Russian titles refer to the nautical tradition that waves grow larger and larger in a series up to the largest wave, the ninth (or tenth) wave, at which point the series starts again."

Ivan Aivazovsky, The Ninth Wave, 1859

Amazing Bike Riding Robot!

John Murry, Little Colored Balloons, 2013