"Diogenes made a virtue of poverty. He begged for a living and slept in a large stone jar in the marketplace. He became notorious for his philosophical stunts such as carrying a lamp in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man. He embarrassed Plato, disputed his interpretation of Socrates and sabotaged his lectures. Diogenes was also responsible for publicly mocking Alexander the Great."

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Diogenes, 1860

Michelangelo, Pietà, 1499

There Is Pleasure In The Pathless Woods (from Childe Harold) by Lord Byron

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, 
There is a rapture on the lonely shore, 
There is society, where none intrudes, 
By the deep sea, and music in its roar: 
I love not man the less, but Nature more, 
From these our interviews, in which I steal 
From all I may be, or have been before, 
To mingle with the Universe, and feel 
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

There are no happy endings.

"The Erinyes [called the Furies in Ancient Rome] were the punishers of sinners, called 'those who walk in darkness.' Weeping tears of blood and hissing with hair of vipers, they would descend like a storm. As long as there was sin in the world, they could not be banished." ~ Aeschylus

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Remorse of Orestes, 1862

Mosaic, ~30 B.C., Pompeii

I'm starting to measure my life by the decennial anniversaries of my favourite albums.

Joseph Cornell, Soap Bubble Set, 1949-50

The Curse by John Berryman

Cedars and the westward sun.
The darkening sky. A man alone
Watches beside the fallen wall
The evening multitudes of sin
Crowd in upon us all.
For when the light fails they begin
Nocturnal sabotage among
The outcast and the loose of tongue,
The lax in walk, the murderers:
Our twilight universal curse.

Children are faultless in the wood,
Untouched. If they are later made
Scandal and index to their time,
It is that twilight brings for bread
The faculty of crime.
Only the idiot and the dead
Stand by, while who were young before
Wage insolent and guilty war
By night within that ancient house,
Immense, black, damned, anonymous.

I re-watched The Grifters for the first time in a decade this weekend. What a film. Frears, Scorsese, Thompson & Westlake combine together to form a perfect creative storm in this excellent crime thriller. Time well spent.

Richard Hawley, Open up your door

Scott Walker, The Seventh Seal

Lori Nix, At Sea, 2004

"The Euthanasia Coaster is an art concept for a steel roller coaster designed to kill its passengers. In 2010, it was designed and made into a scale model by Julijonas Urbonas, a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. Urbonas, who has worked at an amusement park, stated that the goal of his concept roller coaster is to take lives 'with elegance and euphoria'".