Picnic

In khaki, 
late Autumn.

Billy Budd on Friday

He was enjoying what he was doing.

The look was one of pure rapture.

..

I still remember his look.

Frank Bidart

Adolescence

Desire

FS&G, 1997©

We really have to blame the aviator on Jean Renoir

Well, to be sure: there was Lindbergh, there was Earhart. But when you think of it - as you do, every time - the first thing to cross your mind as the unfathomable, frequently reflective allure of a gaze fastens on you from a pair of these things is, rather, of an impromptu, imponderable height which the wearer occupies in your regard. And why should this be, but for the panache of the aviator in two (can you stand it) two of the greatest motion pictures of all time? 

But, rest easy. Where else is it possible to repair, to any discussion of La Grande Illusion (1937) or La Règle du Jeu (1939), without enduring some recital of the latest critical fetish, replete with the sort of slovenly neologisms Orwell deplored in Politics and the English Language? Not for that did you head for this relais, I hope. 

  

Here, now, sip a flute of Billecart, and we'll hear nothing more of the curious cultural history of cinema. These are movies for people who like movies, in the way people who like flying think of it as sport. A gallant pastime, albeit somewhat less attractive down below.

Ah, sport. That weirdly fungible allusion to anything pleasant involving adrenalin and perspiration. Selection, contact, engagement, contest, release, reflection. Ancient cycle. Still goes on, I'm told. We may all think we are discussing, say, tennis, when various percentiles of us are transposing the narrative into the discus, the javelin, or cat burglary, already anticipating getting together later for a second flute. 

And this, too, was central to both films. They pointedly do not hammer one with an insistence upon What this Thing is About, any more than it would be polite to remark on the Champagne as other than pleasant. They exude, moreover, a serenity that Champagne, itself, is not in peril from the Other Side. 

We get the drift, civilisation assimilates the text in its way - so much of La Règle familiar, already, from a play by Beaumarchais which launched the slide of the Bourbons; and of l'Illusion, from pesky Geneva Conventions which don't apply to the Stars and Stripes, much less to any drug-financed goon squad we outsource our morals to, instead - and we reflect on our elevated appreciation of aviators, in this progressive and discerning age of drones. 

Thanksgiving

You should blog for yourself.

AIP to Laurent

25 xi 10

Reading Homer with Nicholas Ray

TPF


Headlock. Body slam. Hands that do not reach back. Low dust.
Stormed by Chylabborak, driven-in by Abassee
The light above his circle hatched with spears
Odysseus to Sheepgrove:


"Get lord Idomeneo from the ridge."


Then prays:

"Brainchild Athena, Holy Girl,
As one you made
As calm and cool as water in a well.
I know that you have cares enough Other than those of me and mine.
Yet, Daughter of God, without your help
We cannot last."









Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly


Emptying her blood-red mouth set in her ice-white face


Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked:


  "Kill! Kill for me!
  Better to die than to live
  without killing!" 

Who says prayer does no good?

Christopher Logue

All Day Permanent Red:

  The First Battle Scenes

  of Homer's Iliad, Rewritten

FS&G, 2003©

Hedi Slimane, Taner & Anna

Nicholas Ray

Rebel Without a Cause

Warner Bros, 1955©

The Flaming Lips

Fight Test

Warner Bros, 2002©

The drug war, the fear wars, to say nothing of the war on equity

have taken Bermuda, 
Cozumel and St Croix 
out of quick commute
for Thanksgiving.


The rational mind
objects to this
wasting of blonds.


The aesthete swoons,
but is too chaste to
bring it up.

Tresses tarnish

now, untumbled

by the tides. 

Maybe we can get
Fox News to fret
the fall in rentals.

Just a thought.
Worth a try.

Stay out super-late tonight
picking apples, making pies

put a little something in our lemonade 

  and take it with us

we’re half-awake in a fake empire

we're half-awake in a fake empire

   

Bruce Weber, i
Hedi Slimane, iii & vi


The National
Fake Empire
Boxer
Beggars Banquet, 2007©

Ireland again

Some things, one doesn't even want to think about; a self-inflicted catastrophe for Ireland seems to've happened enough.

The best thing I've seen discussed on this crisis is by one of Ireland's true lights, Fintan O'Toole, whose A Traitor's Kiss on Richard Brinsley Sheridan is a beautiful book on a glorious man. 

Ian Jack's review of his Ship of Fools in The New York Review of Books promises that it is brilliant and dreadful. It seems that it has to be read.

Benjamin Britten

Chant, Variations on 
  a Theme by Frank Bridge

Herbert von Karajan

Philharmonia Orchestra

EMI, 1954©

"I only know what I know"

profound apologies to Chet Baker

hedge-pig. A young hedgehog.


Such is the exuberance of signification, which many words have obtained, that it was scarcely possible to collect all their senses; sometimes the meaning of derivatives must be sought in the mother term, and sometimes deficient explanations of the primitive may be supplied in the train of derivation.


Do you love them?




Samuel Johnson
The Dictionary, 1755
1st Modern Library Edition, 1965