The Hermit by Robert Bly Darkness is falling through darkness Falling from ledge To ledge. There is a man whose body is perfectly whole. He stands the storm behind him And the grass blades are leaping in the wind. Darkness is gathered in folds About his feet. He is no one. When we see Him we grow calm And sail on into the tunnels of joyful death.
"All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." ~ Pablo Picasso
"A genius is the one most like himself." ~ Thelonious Sphere Monk
Jenny Holzer, SLIPPING INTO MADNESS IS GOOD FOR THE SAKE OF COMPARISON, 2008
In Back of the Real by Allen Ginsberg railroad yard in San Jose I wandered desolate in front of a tank factory and sat on a bench near the switchman's shack. A flower lay on the hay on the asphalt highway --the dread hay flower I thought--It had a brittle black stem and corolla of yellowish dirty spikes like Jesus' inchlong crown, and a soiled dry center cotton tuft like a used shaving brush that's been lying under the garage for a year. Yellow, yellow flower, and flower of industry, tough spiky ugly flower, flower nonetheless, with the form of the great yellow Rose in your brain! This is the flower of the World.
plea to a passing maid by Charles Bukowski girl in shorts, biting your nails, revolving your ass, the boys are looking at you -- you hold more, it seems, than Gauguin or Brahma or Balzac, more, at least, than the skulls that swim at our feet, your swagger breaks the Eiffel tower, turns the heads of old newsboys long ago gone sexually to pot; your caged malarkey, your idiot's dance, mugging it, delightful -- don't ever wash stained under- wear or chase your acts of love through neighborhood alleys -- don't spoil it for us, putting on weight and weariness, settling for TV and a namby-pamby husband; don't give up that absurd dispossessed wiggle to water a Saturday's front lawn -- don't send us back to Balzac or introspection or Paris or wine, don't send us back to the incubation of our doubts or the memory of death-wiggle, bitch, madden us with love and hunger, keep the sharks, the bloody sharks, from the heart.
The Current by Raymond Carver These fish have no eyes these silver fish that come to me in dreams, scattering their roe and milt in the pockets of my brain. But there's one that comes-- heavy, scarred, silent like the rest, that simply holds against the current, closing its dark mouth against the current, closing and opening as it holds to the current.
Richard Hamilton, The Citizen, The State & The Subject, 1980s-1990s
I readily desire this film poster for Jodorowsky's El Topo done by Martin Ansin. Also worth checking out his other work.
Currently reading J. G. Ballard's first novel The Wind From Nowhere. He disowned the novel and it's currently out of print but it seems a heavy handed decision as, from what I have read so far, there was nothing to be embarrassed about. The book's cover design was done by legendary Penguin Art Director David Pelham. Some of his other famous covers are below.
Design by Robert Frost I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth— Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth— A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?-- If design govern in a thing so small.
