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From Keith Richards to Kurt Cobain, fans tend to buy into a mythologising of addiction and illness, either enamoured by the image of musician as outlaw, or some vague notion that capable art should be underwritten by human suffering. Behind this preposterously romantic, transgressive image lurks personal horror and tragedy.
Alex Petridis on Ian Winwood's book Bodies: Life and Death in Music (Faber, 2022).
#alex petridis#music#keith richards#kurt cobain#addiction#mental illness#rock music#pop music#art#tragedy
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Insincerity is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
Oscar Wilde. I would like to add 'insecurity' to that, ie insecure people who adopt many personalities to hide the one they were given and lack confidence in.
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Where there is no vision, the people perish.
Proverbs 29:18-19 King James Version
I have lifted this from the Bible because it adds gravitas to something I believe: that without creativity, imagination and independent, visionary thinkers – a society will stagnate. This is quite different to the Biblical meaning of this text, which is that if one does not know God's purpose, he goes off the path of God's laws. When people lack godly instruction, "the people run wild."
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Do you think there isn't a whore, or, for that matter, a lady in this great city of sin, who hasn't been raped or abused, whether by a man she trusted, or loathed, or was married to? The real question is, how do you survive such an onslaught? Do you let it destroy you, send you to Bedlam? Believe me, I've seen some go that way. Or are you wise like Hope? She would tell you it is a hazard of the job. You, Tully, is wise.
Queenie speaking to Tully Truegood in Wray Delaney’s An Almond For A Parrot (2016, Harper Collins)
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Competition for mates, Darwin claimed, was largely the domain of males, almost all of which "have stronger passions" than females. With the rarest exceptions, he wrote in 1871, the female "is less eager than the male ... she generally requires to be courted; she is coy."
The main problem with this neat binary classification, writes Lucy Cooke in her book Bitch (Doubleday, 2022), is that it is wrong. Female animals are just as promiscuous, competitive, aggressive, dominant and dynamic as males. Decades of research, much of it conducted by female scientists, refutes the Darwinian dichotomy that dominated the thinking of (mainly male) evolutionary biologists for so long.
We beginning to see the female experience in nature for what it is: variable, highly plastic, and refusing to conform to archaic classifications.
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Surely the artists who die in misery, flat broke, reveal the truth of creativity's sinister contract.
Olivia Laing, in her review of Bold Ventures by Charlotte Van den Broeck (Chatto & Windus, 2022). Exposing the true cost of the single-minded pursuit of creativity.
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Nobody activates the kettle. It's fine just to put it on.
Alex Clark's response to the writing of Martin Amis.
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I have seen too many idealistic young growers break their backs, dreams, and occasionally families trying to make small-scale farming pay.
Wisdom from Guy Watson, Riverford Organic Farmers, UK
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We limp to wisdom over the hot coals of our mistakes. Bind your feet, now, and keep walking.
Kathryn Mannix, from her book Listen (HarperCollins, 2021)
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Drugs give you the feeling of freedom while actually diminishing the space left for freedom, and that drugs reveal our 'porousness to nonhuman people'.
While not a direct quote, this is the jist of one of Maggie Nelson's arguments in her book On Freedom (Jonathan Cape, 2021). The point is that many people take drugs in order to 'feel free', but they can actually have the opposite effect, not only imprisoning us but also making us vulnerable to society's monsters.
Depending on how cynical you are, you could also replace the word 'drugs' for 'love' (perhaps more accurately 'obsessive love') or maybe even 'eating' (if you have that kind of disorder) – things that makes us feel good at the time but in the long run can be ruinous.
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Daily Mail, Fox News, right-wing media in general.....
To paint with a broad brush, it seems the editorial policy of these businesses is to agitate and to generate fear, and to promote a sense of hatred of 'the other' – the unfamiliar or unknown. And they do it because they know the public lap it up, and the money from advertisers comes rolling in.
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If you're convinced the planet is flat, nowadays (thank God!) you don't have to stand on street corners with a sign, shouting at passersby.
Instead, you have access to an online community of tens of thousands of individuals producing content that not only tells you are right, but also builds a web of pseudo-knowledge you can draw on anytime you feel your beliefs are being challenged.
from Eliot Higgins' essay, How to Win The Fight Against Disinformation (The Guardian, April 2022)
#disinformation#fake news#flat earth#eliot higgins#marginalizedcommunities#social media#online community#the guardian
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Once, briefly, she had had as a lover a man of elegance and charm, but she had felt uncomfortable when he said he loved her, felt it meant something she did not understand, and indeed, it meant, she discovered, that he loved her as long as the socks were folded and she was at his disposal on demand; when the food was exquisite and she was not menstruating; when the wine had not loosened her tongue, when the olive oil and not produced a crease in her belly.
When he left her for someone smaller and neater and more energetic and subservient to his demands, she had thrown stones at their windows, written obscenities with chalk on the side of their building, obsessed herself with imagining the neatness of his young girl's cunt (he made Lou have an abortion), dwelt on her name (though she never saw her until years later and discovered her to be quite, quite plain), carved anagrams of her rival's name on her arm, in short surprised herself with the depths of her passionate chagrin at losing a man who was at heart petty and demanding.
from Bear by Marian Engel (Athenaeum, 1976)
#bear#marian engel#love#lovers#relationships#love on demand#jilted#dumped#men#men and women#jealousy#obsession
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This.
In one hand, this boy holds an incredible, finely assembled, intricate and infinitely complex entity. In the other, he holds a mobile phone, to which he is giving his undivided attention.
[The French village of Seine-Port has banned the use of mobile phones in public, 54% of voters supported the ban.]
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"If it weren't for Venetian blinds, it would be curtains for all of us."
Eric Morecambe explains the pivotal role of Venetian blinds on mankind.
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From 1970, Michael Leonard began moving from illustration to become a professional painter. His work reflects his sexuality in the beautiful and affectionate way that his portrays people at work and play – mostly men, but women also. He was asked to paint Queen Elizabeth II in 1985, and he illustrated Edmund White's groundbreaking book The Joy of Gay Sex in 1977. Michael died in October 2023 – please check him out at https://thespaces.com/michael-leonard/
also: https://michaelleonardartist.co.uk/works/paintings/exhibited-painting/afternoon-kites
The image above is titled: Scaffolders (1978)
The image below is titled: Afternoon of the Kite (1972)
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This is an aerial photo of Loch Striven in the Firth of Clyde, just west of Glasgow, Scotland. The arrow points to the NATO jetty there, a major refuelling point for Nato fleets operating in the North Atlantic.
The Google pin shows the Knockdow Estate, which surrounds the jetty and its huge oil tanks on all three landward sides. The big grey ships that take oil from this jetty, come and go from a small rectangle of Ministry of Defence land that sits inside 250 acres bought in 2017 by the Russian citizen Evgeny Strzhalkovsky for approx £4m, from funds that may well have been supplied by his father, who is said to be worth at least one hundred times that - after a short post-KGB career as the CEO of Norilsk Nickel – ie, a true Russian oligarch.
We may wonder quite how the UK government allowed this strategic purchase of land, and how it will come to affect the UK"s national security and the capability of NATO's warships to operate in the area.
#Evgeny Strzhalkovsky#knockdow estate#nato#scotland#national security#loch striven#ministry of defence#oligarchy#politics
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